Towards Sunday, January 22, 2016

Reading: Matthew 4:12-23
(Jesus has gone to John to be baptized into the kingdom movement, and from there has been led by God into a time of wilderness testing.  Now, when John is arrested by the king, Jesus goes back north to Galilee, leaves his home town of Nazareth, and makes a new home even farther north and east in Capernaum on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where he begins preaching the coming of the kingdom of God, and gathering disciples into the movement.)

Why on earth Capernaum?  And why just then?

Second question first: isn't the time of falling darkness precisely when you light whatever candle you have?

And the first question?  The one about why there?  

Maybe the answer is why not.  Don't you light a candle where it will at least have a chance not to be blown out right away?  Maybe out on the edge away from the fiercest part of the storm?  Where it can start to make a real difference for people in the dark, and maybe be part of some greater light creeping into, and enlightening the world?

I wonder, as I prepare for Sunday's worship, what kind of candle we light these days in the world as a church?  And where?  

It is there.  It casts its little light into the dark of our time.  And it will be good for us to celebrate it.

Sermon from Sunday, January 15, 2017

Reading:  Isaiah 49:1-7 

One of the more destructive lies we sometimes tell ourselves as a church – or that we fall for when others tell it to us, is that we need to be successful, powerful and attractive in order to be able to do God’s work – or at least do it well, in the world.

One of the more liberating truths we discover – or get reminded of, is it’s not necessary to be any of these things, and that more often than not it is through the simple, the poor, the weak, the struggling and the broken servants that God's presence, power and grace are revealed to the world.

A few weeks ago Bob and Pat Disher emailed me a little story that they came across on the internet.  It stuck with me and a little research into its origin led to what may be its original telling by Rev. Howard Schade, pastor in the 1950’s of the First Reformed Church in Nyack, New York.

The story is about a poor, run-down church in Brooklyn, and a Christmas miracle that happened there.

The church was not always poor and run-down.  Once it had flourished.  Famous men had preached from its pulpit and prayed before its altar.  Rich and poor alike had worshipped there and built it beautifully.  But the good days had passed from the section of town where it stood, and the church was as poor and broken as the surrounding community.

The new pastor and his young wife believed in their run-down church, however.  With hammer, paint and faith they went to work.  They had arrived in early October, and their goal was to have things in shape for Christmas.

They worked hard repairing pews, plastering walls, fixing holes, painting, and on December 18 were just about finished.  Then on December 19 a severe storm whipped through the river valley and for two days the wind blew and the rain fell, and by the time it ended a huge chunk of rain-soaked plaster – about 15 feet by 8 feet, fell off of the inside wall of the sanctuary just behind the altar.

With great sadness the pastor and his wife swept away the mess but they couldn't hide the ragged hole.  The pastor looked at it and tried to remind himself, “Thy will be done!”  His wife just wept.  “Christmas is only two days away!” she said.

That afternoon the dispirited couple attended a benefit auction for a youth group.  The auctioneer opened a box and shook out of its folds a handsome gold and ivory lace tablecloth.  It was magnificent, nearly 15 feet long.  But it was so old and out-of-date.  Who, today, had any use for such a thing?

There were a few half-hearted bids.  Then the pastor was seized with a great idea.  He entered the bidding, and soon got the tablecloth for $6.50.  He carried it back to the church and tacked it up on the wall behind the altar.  It completely hid the hole!  And the extraordinary beauty of its shimmering handwork cast a fine, holiday glow over the chancel.  It was a great triumph.  Happily he went back to preparing his Christmas sermon.

Just before noon on Christmas Eve as the pastor was opening the church, he noticed a woman standing in the cold at the bus stop.  “The bus won't be here for 40 minutes!” he called, and invited her into the church to get warm.  She told him she had come from the city that morning to be interviewed for a job as governess to the children of one of the wealthy families in town but she had been turned down.  A war refugee, her English was imperfect.

The woman sat down in a pew to warm herself and rest.  She dropped her head and prayed.  She looked up as the pastor began to adjust the great gold and ivory cloth across the hole.  She rose suddenly and walked up the steps of the chancel.  She looked at the tablecloth.  

The pastor smiled and started to tell her about the storm damage but she didn't seem to listen.  She took up a fold of the cloth and rubbed it between her fingers. “It is mine!” she said. “My banquet cloth!”  She lifted up a corner and showed the pastor the initials monogrammed on it.  “My husband had the cloth made especially for me in Brussels!  There cannot be another like it.”

For the next few minutes the woman and the pastor talked.  She explained she was Viennese and that she and her husband had opposed the Nazis and decided to leave the country.  They were advised to go separately, so her husband put her on a train for Switzerland.  He would join her as soon as he could arrange to ship their household goods across the border, but she never saw him again.  Later she heard he had died in a concentration camp.   “I have always felt it was my fault — to leave without him,” she said.  “These years of wandering have been my punishment!”  

The pastor tried to comfort her and urged her to take the cloth with her.  She refused.  Then she went away.

As the church began to fill on Christmas Eve, the cloth was a great success.  It looked its best by candlelight. 

After the service, the pastor stood at the doorway.  Many people told him the church looked beautiful.  One gentle-faced middle-aged man — the local clock-and-watch repairman — looked puzzled.  “It is strange,” he said in his soft accent.   “Many years ago my wife — God rest her — and I owned such a cloth.  In our home in Vienna, my wife put it on the table” — and here he smiled — “only when the bishop came to dinner.”

The pastor excitedly told the jeweler about the woman who had been in church earlier that day.  The jeweler clutched the pastor's arm.  “Can it be? Does she live?”

Together the two got in touch with the family who had interviewed her.  Then they started for the city in the pastor's car.  As Christmas Day dawned, this man and his wife who had been separated through so many saddened Yule tides were reunited.

_______

In the reading this morning, the people of Israel are struggling with a sense of failure and inadequacy as God’s servant people in the world.  They were a kingdom; now they are not.  They had a great temple and a royal city; now these are destroyed.  They used to be strong and other people wanted to be like them; now they are nothing – a laughingstock in the eyes of the world. 

They wonder: are we still God’s people?  Will God restore us, rebuild us, make us strong again, to be able to do God’s work?

To which the prophet says, why do we think we need to be strong, powerful or successful to be servants of God?  There will be rebuilding, the prophet says; there will be restoration and renewal for us.  But is that what it’s about?  Is that the promise, and what we are living for?  Is that even what we need, to be faithful and fruitful servants of God’s love and God’s good will in the world? 

Their time in exile was a rich but hard time for the people of Israel – a time when their faith and life and their understanding of themselves as servants of God were tested, deepened and enlarged beyond anything they had imagined before.

_______

And is it that way for the church today?  Are we too in a time of great growth in our faith?  And our experience of faithfulness?  And our understanding of being servants of God?

Like the church in Brooklyn, does it matter, really, whether we are flourishing or seem to be floundering?  Like the pastor and his wife as they simply did what they could think of to be faithful, does it matter whether we’re in a high time or a low time of life’s cycles?  Like the people who found their way in to the church, does it matter whether we are successful or broken?  Does it matter if what we have to try cover over the big hole at the front is something old, used-up and unwanted?

What is it that makes any story, a story of redemption?  What makes the church a place of healing and reconciliation?  How do any of us – rich or poor, strong or broken, find a place in the story of God’s intended healing of all the Earth?

Towards Sunday, January 15, 2016

Reading:  Isaiah 49:1-7
(Israel saw -- or at least, had seen itself as God's chosen people, created and called by God to live in intentionally just and peaceful ways in the world, as a light or a model kingdom to other peoples.  But now they are defeated and are living in exile, and to their mind they have failed.  Into this severe self-judgement, the prophet brings good news: that it's not their power and glory -- not their greatness as a kingdom, but their faithfulness in trusting God and in living out God's ways of justice and peace, regardless of apparent success or failure, that makes them a light to others and fulfills their calling as God's servants in the healing of all the world.)

One of the fundamental evils to which Donald Trump's spirit falls easy prey is the quick, intentional and even malicious division of the world into winners and losers, and the pathological need to be a winner -- even more, to be seen as a winner, in order to justify and feel good about himself and his country.

I think one reason his openness to this particular evil bothers me so much is that I also fall prey to it in my own littler ways, and I have come to know how destructive it can be of self, of others, and of life -- how impossible it makes any kind of right relationship.  Because how compassionate, just, loving or even peaceful can I be, when I need to win, be first, and be the great one?

It's exactly the opposite of how God has created and called us to be -- both within ourselves and with others.  

But how often does this pathology of being Number One, to be great, and to be admired infect even the way we understand our calling to be God's people?

Israel saw itself as created and chosen by God to be a light to the world -- to live in the world in such a way that they would lead other people to know and follow God's ways.  At some point they came to imagine they could do this best (maybe even only) if they were a great kingdom among (and even above) above other kingdoms, and had sufficient power and glory to attract other people to them and make other people want to be like them.

What a blow to their faith when their kingdom was defeated -- and not only defeated, but completely destroyed and cast down, with the people themselves dispersed and scattered into exile. 

But also what a painfully graced time to be able to grow beyond their addiction to power, greatness and superiority, towards a deeper, more healthy and more life-enhancing way of being a light to all nations -- by living in intentionally right relationships regardless of (and maybe even especially because of) their weakness, brokenness and unattractiveness as a people.  

The painful but deeply wonderful lesson Israel learns is that it's the persistent rightness of their relationships, and not their victory and superiority as a kingdom that will lead others to know and follow God's ways and make them a special people on the face of the earth.  

So what's the question as I -- as we, journey towards worship of God on Sunday?

I don't know exactly. 

And it surprises me a bit to be able to say that.  

I know the desire to be the one to identify the best question for us all to consider.  And maybe the point of growth is that I recognize I can't -- and that I don't have to.

Sermon from Sunday, January 8, 2016 (Epiphany Sunday)

Reading:  Matthew 2:1-23

It would be nice if we could say it was an honest mistake.  It might let them off the hook.  Maybe us too.

But it's a mistake we have made for too long.  And too often.

It's a mistake that usually has tragic consequences that we as a species don’t seem to have learned from yet.

Why did the magi go to Herod to find God's newborn king?  Why did they assume the king of God’s people would be in a courtly palace of an empire?  The magi were wise, but sadly not wise enough yet really to grasp the way of God and God’s kingdom in the world.  And because of it they very nearly ruined everything – as Bruce Cockburn puts it in the song “Cry of a Tiny Baby”, the magi who “come to pay their respects to the fragile little king, get pretty close to wrecking everything.”

The magi are the height of human evolution so far.  They are smart, rational, far-seeing, imaginative and scientific.  They are able to see great signs, amass and integrate great knowledge, and travel far distances to be able to put their own mark on anything new and momentous taking place in the world.

They then and we today are a lot alike – in control, powerful, analytical, able to cover the face of the Earth with relative ease, able to bend and move the world – and other people, to our desires, master of the food chain, lord of the jungle. 

We have come a long way.  But by and large we still lack that one more essential step – that one further necessary stage of evolution and transformation that will help us become fully human as God intends us to be, to be human finally in the image of God – that one essential step not farther up, but down – down from power and privilege to powerlessness and vulnerability, down from control to service, down from relationship-against and relationship-over that have got us where we are, to relationship-with and relationship-for that will get us where we are meant, and where we need to be.

God tries to lead us there.  God’s journey has been in that direction all along – down rather than up, and God has called us over and again to follow.

Like Good King Wenceslas calling us to notice a poor peasant in a far-off corner in need, then leading the way himself down from the tower and out from the castle, into “the rude wind’s wild lament/ and the bitter weather.”  The king himself leads the way through the snow and the storm, and as we begin to falter and fail in the cold of the night, he turns and says:

“Mark my footsteps, good my page
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shall find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.”

It’s all through the Bible and in other world religions as well – the journey downward into humility, into honest and open mutuality with others – especially the poor and powerless, into groundedness in the Earth, away from control, self-protection and domination, towards compassion, openness and commitment to the common and shared good of all life on Earth.

But we resist in so many ways, little and big.  We obsess about power and fear powerlessness.  We worship success and punish failure.  We idolize celebrity and cannot imagine letting go of privilege.  We seek control.  We are in love with being on top, and do all we can not to fall or have to let go.

And we suffer the consequences.  Others do too.  And sometimes we let others – even make others, suffer the consequences for us.

I blame Herod, not God, for the massacre. 

It was God’s intention to be born in Bethlehem among and as one of the poor of the day, maybe even God’s plan to be born in a stable.  But it was not God’s intention for Herod to go and kill every child under the age of two to try to protect himself against God’s reversal of the order of the day.  There are some things done in God’s world for which we have to accept responsibility.

I blame the magi, too, for not knowing better than to look for God's new king in the palaces of the old way, instead of following the star all the way to a stable and a humble house among the poor.  Even with all they knew, they were still bound in critical ways to the old ways of doing kingdom.

But there is hope – some light, some good news.

Jesus survives the massacre.  This is good news – although it doesn’t start to undo the horror of the massacre that took so many others, does it?  It doesn’t begin to touch the suffering of those who do not escape – whose children are killed by soldiers of their own kingdom at the order of their own king.

Another piece of good news is that Herod dies soon after.  There is hope in the knowledge that every tyrant at some point falls, and every unjust kingdom and government at some point comes undone.  And yet – we also know there will then be another just as unjust, also to be feared, also to be avoided if at all possible.

I wonder if the greatest good news and the real light in the story are in the ability and willingness of the magi to be changed?  Once the magi leave the palace of Herod and once again follow the star God has given, and they find Jesus and God’s kingdom in vulnerability, poverty and powerlessness, they are changed.  Seeing what God is really like in the world, hearing God as Bruce Cockburn says “in the cry of a tiny baby,” they awake from the nightmare of power in which they have been living, to a dream of a different way of being and of being themselves in the world. 

They don't go back to Herod.  They travel home “by a different road.” 

Like Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol, we sometimes fear – or use the excuse that we’re too old to change, that it’s too late to change either ourselves or the world around us.  But Ebenezer, once his heart is truly touched, and once he sees how truly poor and empty and broken and hurt his own life has been, he also learns that in God’s time it’s never too late to change – that we’re never too old or too far gone to take a step in a different direction and start going home on a different road.

When Scrooge’s Christmas finally comes – Christmas morning in his apartments, waking up to bells, feeling giddy as a schoolboy, knowing now that all along he’s not yet known anything … Christmas day sending a goose to the Cratchits and sending himself all gussied up to his nephew’s Christmas party … and the day after back at work suddenly seeing and knowing the joy of using what he has to make the world a better place for others … when Scrooge’s Christmas finally comes, it never fails to make me cry. 

Because isn’t that what we’re really looking for in Christmas – in the birth of the baby in  Bethlehem and in our coming to pay him honour, aren’t we really looking for a chance and a way to be reborn to living in a different direction ourselves?

Towards Sunday, January 8, 2016 (Epiphany Sunday)

Reading: Matthew 2:1-18
(When Jesus is born in Herod's kingdom -- or, rather, the kingdom that Herod precariously manages for the newly centralized Roman Empire, magi come from another country to pay homage to Jesus as newborn king of God's people, and they come to Herod to ask where the new king is.  A new king to rouse and rally the people is the last thing Herod needs right now, so he shares the prophecies of the king's emergence with the magi and tells them when they find the little king to let him know where he is.  The magi find Jesus, pay him due homage, and at the urging of an angel they avoid Herod on their way home.  Knowing he has been tricked, and still wanting to be rid of the new king, Herod orders a massacre of all boys under the age of two in the general area in which Jesus was to be born.  Fortunately, an angel also nudges Joseph to take Mary and Jesus to a safe place in Egypt before Herod's soldiers arrive.)

Massacre of the Innocents by Leon Cogniet (French painter, 1794-1880)

And some people think the Bible is boring.  And out of touch with reality.

Maybe it's because we usually we stop the reading at verse 12. We let the magi visit Herod's court to get directions, find Jesus in Bethlehem where they pay him homage and give him their gifts, and then "having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road."  

Except that's not the end of the story.  That's only the Disney version.  The nightly-news and morning-paper version goes on to report that what follows is a top-down-directed massacre by government troops of all boys under two years of age in and around Bethlehem, to do away with any threat to Herod as king and to the way he and Rome define law and order.

And with stories of Bosnia and Rwanda in our recent memory, and of Aleppo and other places of massacre, terrorism and genocide in our daily news, how can we not tell the whole of the story as Matthew tells it?  2016 alone was such a dark and fearful year -- a year of such division, rancour, conflict and despair throughout the world, that to ignore the darkness into which Jesus was born seems somehow disingenuous.  It would suggest that perhaps we can find light and hope -- good news of God's kingdom, only by ignoring the darker realities of the world and leaving them out of the story that we tell.

If ever there was a time to face and enter in to the darkness in our quest to find God and God's kingdom, this is it.

But how do we do that, and what do we find?  

Is it enough to be able to say that one desperate couple was able to save their son by fleeing to another country?  Is this sign enough of God's kingdom in the world?

Does it mean something to be able to point to the death of Herod, and the eventual undoing of the evil of his kingdom, and of all tyrants' reigns?  Does this reassure, and give us hope and strength in the struggle?

Can we maybe say with confident hope that God always is a God of death and resurrection, that with God there is no final end, and that from the ashes of 2016 like from the graves of Bethlehem, God brings life from death and good even from evil -- in some way turns disaster and tragedy to some good end, somehow redeems all things even if only through great suffering and death?

Do any of these "answers" appeal to you?  Or is there some other hopeful way yet of looking at things that fits with your faith in God and experience of the world?

One thing for sure, though.  In these times we are not unlike the magis in this painting below that will be part of our worship this Sunday. 

Adoration of the Magi by Abraham Bloemart (Dutch painter, 1564-1651)

 

 

There we are -- coming to see Jesus and pay him homage as our Lord, with dark and ominous clouds overhead, soldiers perhaps in sight in the background, shadows engulfing some of us, and some of us feeling a need to be looking over our shoulder and behind us at the threats that are out there.  And still, at the heart of it all, the little child vulnerable and open -- reaching out to us, and a star to call us and show us the way no matter what darkness comes.

Sermon from Sunday, December 18, 2016

Reading:  Matthew 1:18-25
 

The Gospel of Matthew tells a story about Joseph, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus.  Joseph and Mary are engaged, meaning they are actually legally married and bound to one another by a marriage contract (the “kettubah”) signed by Joseph and Mary’s father.  Joseph is slowly paying off a dowry to Mary’s father, and when the dowry is fully paid and Mary is finally of age, Joseph and Mary will finally consummate their relationship, the families will publicly celebrate the occasion, and the happy couple will begin to live together ever after.  But as often happens in life, things fall apart, and Joseph faces a big decision.  

(Warning: if you read the previous entry, "Towards Sunday, Dec 18" you may notice that this sermon is not the one that I planned to follow that entry.  That sermon was actually written ... but then this one got written when I woke up Sunday morning.)

There is a difference between the ideal and the holy, and even sometimes between what’s good and what’s of God.

Have you ever heard yourself saying things like

·         “in an ideal world, such and such would not be …” or

·         “in a perfect world, such and such would happen…” 

What we mean, of course, that what is, what we have to deal with, what others are, what we are, what the world is, is not really what we’d like, not what we think should be, just a compromise, and something we put up with and settle for with some unhappiness.

And life and reality being what they are, that unhappiness becomes a habit, a practice, a way of life that gets expressed in phrases and judgements like

·         “if only he or she were … different in some way (you fill in the blank)”

·         “if only the world weren’t so … (what do you usually end that sentence stem with?)”

·         “if only I weren’t so …(what?)” or

·         “I’m just too … something, to be good or good enough or worthwhile (and I’m sure we all have many ways of filling that one in)”

These judgements form a deep sadness or unhappiness within us – a criticalness about ourselves and others and a lack of love for what is, that settles like a shadow on our heart and around our view of life, that keeps us from really embracing, accepting and loving what is.

Because we think that a fundamental difference and distance we have to deal with in life is between the ideal and the real, between what should be and what actually is.

But we’re wrong – like Joseph was wrong before he learned and was made to see that the real difference in life is between the ideal and the holy, between what we think should be and what is really of God.

Joseph was a good man.  That much is made clear in the story.  In a way he represents all  that was good about his people, and all that was worthy of admiration and respect in his tradition.

The story says Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph, but they were not yet living together.  This means they were, in one very big and real sense, already married and already legally bound to one another for the rest of their lives.  They were in the first of three stages – the c0ntract stage, of full and legal marriage.

There was this thing called a kettubah.  It was a marriage contract.  It was negotiated between, and signed by Mary’s father and Joseph.  It set out the terms of the marriage – things like the kind and amount of dowry Joseph would pay to Mary’s father before he could take her from his house and have her live in his, like the list of what Mary would bring with her from her father’s house to add to Joseph’s household and estate, and like what penalty either party would pay the other if they broke the contract.

And the contract was registered with the elders of the town.  It was legal and binding.  It was the first stage of the covenant of marriage.

The second stage, still to come, would be the consummation – the actual beginning of sexual marital relations.  This would come in due course.  There are records of it being as long as seven years from contract to consummation, because consummation was not allowed until the groom had finished paying the bride’s father the whole of the agreed-upon dowry – and this could take some time depending on the groom’s situation in life.  And consummation was also not allowed until the bride was of age, and the lengthy of time this was depended of course on her age at the time the contract was signed; it could be a while, too.

But when the time came for the consummation – what Joseph and Mary were still waiting for, the groom with his family and friends would come in procession to the bride’s father’s house.  They would be happily received.  The bride and groom would retire to a bridal chamber to consummate their relationship, while everyone waited happily outside.  Then after the deed, the bed sheets would be examined, the blood would be reported as proof of the bride’s virginity (one of the terms of the contract).

And then would come the third stage – the journey of everyone to the groom’s house, for a wild and public celebration of the marriage, and the beginning of life together ever after for the happy bride and groom.

So, when Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant before they have got to stage two, while they are still in the contract stage, waiting and paying and living towards consummation and celebration, this is suddenly less than ideal.  It is not as it should be.  It as – as far as Joseph can see, an unholy mess – a shadowed and imperfect situation, a problem in need of a solution – just like so much else in life that we have to put up with, that’s messy and imperfect, not as good as we would like, not ideal.

Joseph, to his credit, tries to do the right thing – a good thing, the best thing he can imagine.  He knows that if he and Mary’s father and Mary go ahead in the marriage, and live out the contract to its end, when he and Mary come together and consummate their relationship in the bridal bed and the bed-sheet is then examined for the proof of blood, there may not be the sign that people would be expecting to see.  For Mary, it seems to him, is no longer a virgin, but is pregnant. 

And she will be disgraced.  She may be run out of town.  She might even be stoned.

So to make the best of a bad situation, because he’s a good man, Joseph decides to be the one to break the contract, to walk out, to divorce Mary quietly, and stop the relationship and the marriage where it is.  

He won’t get his dowry back; that’s gone.  He’ll forfeit whatever Mary was going to bring into his household and his estate with her.  He’ll also have everyone in town thinking he was the unfaithful one, the unreliable and irresponsible one.

And he’s willing to do this because he is good and kind, and because he thinks that the basic difference we have to deal with in life is between what’s ideal and what’s good, between what we think should be and what we have to put up with.

But then the dream comes.  The angel speaks to him.  And his mind and heart and whole life are opened to a different way of seeing things, of being with things, of loving and embracing what is.  Because the message from heaven to earth is what is, is of God; that which seems to you messy and imperfect, is exactly what God wants to be and is working with; and that which seems less than ideal, less than what you think it should be, is what God is using, and causing to be, and happy to be filling with good purpose, and delighted with.

Because through it – through that very thing, which is a common thing of earth, through what is less than ideal, God is bringing to be what most needs to be, what is and what will be good, holy, and truly life-giving, even life-saving in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

And the question is: is this still true?

This is the message and point of the story – that what’s real is holy, that the way the world is is where God’s kingdom is and will always be unfolding, that the way we and others are – as imperfect as that is, is exactly what God loves, embraces, and is always in the process of turning to some good and perfect end.

I wonder … is that a dream you need to have in your life at least some time?  Is that an angel’s good news you need to hear at least some time?

I know it’s one I need more often than I ever know.