Saved not from, but through and by ... (sermon from Nov 25, 2018)

Reading:  Matthew 6:7-13

When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; 

for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.   

Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.   

Pray then in this way: 

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.   

Your kingdom come.   

Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  

 Give us this day our daily bread.  

 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.   

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”

“And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.”  Or as we know it from the old King James, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

I wonder about the first half of this request.  Everyone faces temptation, whether God leads us to it or not.  Every day, all through the day we face choices between good-but-demanding and bad-but-well-practiced ways of acting, between healthy and unhealthy ways of being.  And they are times of trial and testing because the choices we make and the ways we act make clear who we are – what kind of person we have become, with what kind of character. 

It can be something as simple as driving through Hamilton and having to respond to drivers who cut you off, who weave in and out of heavy traffic, who feel entitled to extend the privilege of advance left-turn lights and make their turn in front of you well past the time when their light turns yellow or disappears altogether.  What words do you utter?  With what tone of voice?  What thoughts form in your mind?  What do you do with your hands, with the fingers God gave you?

Or you’re standing in the check-out line at the grocery store.  You’re in a hurry and the customer ahead of you is having a little extra chat with the cashier about something or other, or she’s fumbling trying to count out change from her wallet, or he’s having a hard time getting his PIN entered correctly on the debit machine.  What’s the expression on your God-given face?  What’s the posture of your body?  What kind of community and fellow-feeling do you quietly create with the person standing behind you, also waiting – either more or less patiently and understandingly than you?

And sometimes it’s something major – a moral choice we have to make that is singularly life-changing and life-defining.

A number of years ago I participated as a member of a clearness circle for a colleague in ministry.  He was seeking a new church to work in, had an interview coming up in a week or so, and didn’t know whether or not to inform the interview committee he’d be meeting that was alcoholic but was in recovery and sober for a number of years.  He tried sorting out the pros and cons of disclosing his addiction, all the risks and benefits either way, and he realized he needed help in discerning a moral answer and a best way of proceeding. 

So five or six of us were invited to serve as a clearness circle for him, which meant listening to his story – as much as he chose to tell us, and then just simply and honestly asking questions.  Questions without judgement, agenda, or implied answers.  Questions that we had no sense of an answer to.  Questions meant only to help him look at his own story that he had told us, look more deeply into his own heart beneath the layers of self-defense, pride, anxiety, illusion and habit that we all build up, to discover for himself what the Spirit of God that was uniquely alive within him was leading him to say and to do.

A few years ago I entered a program at Five Oaks called the Jubilee Program, a two-year program of exploration and training to become a spiritual director.  It was something I had thought of doing for years because it appealed to me for all kinds of reasons – not all of them, I realize now, healthy.  But for all the good and bad reasons, I enrolled.

And part way through the first year, the spiritual exploration we were doing within the program helped make me so aware of some of my personal dysfunctions and disorders that I withdrew from the program and instead ended up taking a five-month disability leave to get help in starting to work through what I had come to see more clearly about myself. 

It makes me wonder why on earth I would ever pray “lead me not to the time of trial?”  If that’s what a time of trial can mean, it seems a good thing.  And maybe the more important and helpful part of this line of the prayer is the second part that says, “but deliver us from evil, or from the evil one.”

In Isaiah 43 God speaks a word of hope to the people of Israel precisely in a difficult time of testing and fearsome trial in their life:

[But] Now thus says the Lord,

he who created you, O troubled one,

he who formed you, O struggling ones.

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire you shall  not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.

For I am the Lord, your God,

the Holy One of Israel, your Saviour. 

You are precious in my sight,

and honoured, and I love you.

It’s assumed that in life there are deep waters to pass through, fearsome rivers to cross, and even fire to be suffered.  And the hope, the promise of new life lies not in being saved from these times, but in being saved through them and by them.   Walking with God does not save us from trials; it may even be that being God’s people actually increases our awareness of life itself as a test.

The promise is that when we stay open to God and God’s presence, we will not drown as we make our way through the deep water.  As we journey for the other side, we will not be swept away and lost.  Even though all we have might perish, our true self, the gold of who we really are, will not be burned up, but only purified and made all the more true.

It might be this that led Japhia and I to pray what we did when we went back to the ER Thursday morning after she was discharged from St Joe’s Sunday, and back to the ER for a few hours again Tuesday.  It was a discouraging time.  A scary time too, because of how consistently sick she was feeling over those days.  A time when it was tempting just to give up.

So we prayed – not for an end either of life nor of the disorder.  Either one of those prayers, I think, would have been succumbing to the temptation of an easy, quick answer that our culture of immediate gratification and our own fearful heart teaches us to value and expect. 

But we prayed for a new beginning – for a beginning of whatever new way of being God might be wanting to bring out of where we are, what we were feeling, and what complex of disorders and problems we were beginning to face more directly and honestly than before.  We prayed that the time in the hospital might be as time in a womb – a time for gestation and new formation, a time of faithful reflection and examination, a time from which Japhia and I could emerge in a new way, and for a new way of being. 

And what will come of it – the prayer and the hospital time itself, we don’t know.  It’s open-ended.  As yet to be revealed. 

Like the end of the Lord’s Prayer itself. 

We’re used to the happy ending that’s been added on to the prayer – those final lines that say “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.”  But those lines and that quick happy-ever-after ending, are not in the Bible. 

As far as we can tell, those lines were added later by one of the early Christian communities and they just kind of stuck and became traditional – were even inserted into the Bible later on, maybe because they meet a human longing for closure, and because they echo the beginning of the prayer closely enough to seem okay as an ending to it as well.

But the Bible as it was first written ends the Lord’s Prayer with just that final request, “Lord, in the time of trial when we are tempted to choose a way that is not your way, deliver us from evil and rescue us from the evil one.”

And all we can do then is live in the ambiguity of our lives with that request in our minds and our mouths each day and each step of the way.  All we can do is remain prayerfully open to wherever and however God is and may be calling us to follow.  The best we can do is trust the promise that God hears us, remembers us by name, loves us, and answers as God will when we pray as Jesus taught us.

To sin is human, to forgive is ... also human? (Nov 18/18 sermon)

Matthew 6:7-15

In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus is portrayed as a new Moses calling people out of the lifestyle and culture of the world around them, to live in a new way – in God’s way, within the world.  And how better to grow into that way of living than through daily prayer that opens us up step by step all through our life to the spirit of God within us and the way of God before us?

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

A number of years ago, before we came to Fifty, Japhia and I attended a Christmas Eve service at what was then one of Hamilton’s leading shopping-mall-style megachurches.  There were choirs, a band, carols and candlelight. 

Near the end was communion.  Things got a little quieter, more meditative and reflective.  The focus shifted from the stable to the table.  And to draw us in to the gift of broken body and poured-out life, the minister led us in a communion prayer of thanksgiving.

“Oh, Lord” he said.  “For this season and all it represents, and for this sacrament and all it means we give you our thanks.  We are grateful for your gracious love for all the world, and if any of us have sinned, may you forgive us and …”

And at that point all I could hear was the voice in my own head, saying, “What do you mean IF?  Isn’t it ‘when’?  Or even ‘because’?  IF we have sinned?”

I didn’t stand up and say any of that.  I whispered it to Japhia, though.  And I’ve not since forgotten that moment, nor since been back to that church.

When I was in theology school at Emmanuel College, Dr. Heinz Guenther was the Professor of New Testament.  I remember him saying one day in class that the Christian church, and Christian worship in particular is one place in the world and in our life where the truth is spoken.  Where we speak the truth, and hear the truth.

And by that he didn’t mean the sermon.  He didn’t mean the hymns.  Nor even the reading of the Bible.  What he was talking about was the prayer of confession that traditionally is part of every Christian liturgy.  Like the prayer we shared this morning:  “We confess to God Almighty, and in the presence of all God’s people, that we have sinned in thought, word and deed, and we pray God Almighty to have mercy on us.” 

That prayer was in our liturgy this morning precisely because of our Scripture and our theme:  “forgive us ... as we forgive.”  But we don’t always include a prayer of confession in our worship.

Maybe we’ve heard too many prayers of confession that are overly negative and formulaic.  Like the classic phrase in Psalm 22, “I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.”  (Psalm 22:6)  Or the prayer of Psalm 51: “Have mercy on me, O God … according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions … For my sin is ever before me … I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.”

Or the prayers offer a bad idea of God, making God a great score-keeper in the sky, looking for all our errors and making eternal notes of them all, judging and punishing every mistake, condemner rather than redeemer of what is broken and weak.

But that's not what confession really is about, is it? 

In the bulletin this morning I included these words of M. Scott Peck, that real human community “requires the confession of brokenness… [but] in our culture [we imagine] brokenness must be “confessed.”  We think of confession as an act that should be carried out in secret, in the darkness of the confessional, with the guarantee of professional priestly or psychiatric confidentiality.  Yet the reality is that every human being is broken and vulnerable.  How strange we feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded!”

Did you notice that the prayer Jesus teaches us just simply assumes we all are sinners in need of forgiveness?  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.  Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

It's just the way life is, that we all make mistakes, we all cross boundaries, we all owe a huge debt to others’ gracious acceptance and forbearance of us, we all stand in need of forgiveness.  And that it’s especially when we know the grace of God in our own lives, that we offer this same grace to others.  Just as when we are able to practice forgiveness of others, we are better able to believe and to accept both others’ and God’s forgiveness of us.

And did you notice that all Jesus says about sin in this prayer is forgiveness?  Not judgement, condemnation or shame.  Not being bound to it or indelibly identified by it, but set free from it.  

Blaise Pascal writes, "knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride, knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair, but knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness" in a way that is life-renewing and affirming.  Because it's a wonderful circle of healing of sin and reconciliation against brokenness that Jesus envisions between ourselves, others and God.  And it doesn’t matter where we enter the circle.  Enter at any point you find yourself at in the circle, whether it’s giving forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, or receiving forgiveness, and in time you find yourself drawn into the whole of it. 

There are, of course, all sorts of questions we have about forgiveness – about how it really works, is everyone and everything forgiveable, is forgiveness just a personal thing or is it also a political concept and a political action, does the other need to admit their wrong before they can be forgiven?

Big questions.  Good questions for us to work through.  It was suggested maybe I’d want to spend two or three weeks on this one line about forgiveness of sin.  We could probably spend two or three months.  Because forgiveness, as hard as it is sometimes to understand and to practice, is one thing above all that our life, our gospel and our whole community is about.  In fact, in the whole of the Lord’s Prayer it’s the one and only thing that is ours to do.  Like it’s our one part of the bargain in exchange for everything else we pray to God about.

For today, though, perhaps it is enough for us to take with us just two little things.

One, from Brene Brown, who has literally written the book on the gift of imperfection, who says that research suggests that the happiest and best adjusted people on Earth are those who begin with the assumption that other people – no matter who they are, are doing the best they can at the time.

And the second, a little longer thought from Elizabeth Lesser and a little essay in her book Broken Open – an essay she titles “Bozos on the Bus”:

We are all half-baked experiments – mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world.  None of us are models of perfect behavior.  We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we’ve been known to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money, kids or terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines.  In other words, we’re all bozos on the bus.

This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration.  If we’re all bozos, then for goodness sake [or God’s sake, she says] we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos.  We can approach the problems that visit bozo-types without the usual embarrassment and resistance, [without the shame and fear we often feel about our mistakes and shortcomings].  And it’s so much more effective to work on our rough edges together with a light and forgiving heart …not to deny our defects but as a way of welcoming them as part of the standard human operating system.

[Sometimes, she says, it seems there is another bus, one where the passengers] are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed, well-adjusted and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that don’t bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things [and] we long to be on that bus with the other normal people.

… But that sleek bus with the cool people … is also filled with bozos: bozos in drag, bozos with secrets.  And when we see that every single human being … shares the same foibles and fallenness, a strange thing happens.  We begin to cheer up, to loosen up, and we become as buoyant as those people we imagined on the other bus.  As we rumble along the potholed road, lost as ever, through the valleys and over the hills, [we are connected in new ways to our fellow human beings; suddenly we belong,] we find ourselves among friends.  We sit back, and enjoy the ride.