Sermon: Are we leaven, or leavened?
The story we tell ourselves about the spirit of our time is sometimes pretty negative.
We worry
about the shrinkage of the church – both big- and small-scale. We fear for our society and culture; it seems
in decline and deterioration, and we all have stories and signs of it happening. We lament the loss of Christian trappings and
rituals in our public life – “Happy Holidays” replacing “Merry Christmas” on
the mountain brow at the Claremont Access, the end of the Lord’s Prayer and
Bible readings in school, the absence of prayer and openness to God at public
gatherings and civic assemblies.
We wonder
at, and maybe envy the Binbrook and Rockton Fairs that have a community-wide inter-church
worship service right on the fair grounds as part of their Sunday schedule. It seems a throw-back to an earlier day when
we were a Christian society. Our culture
by and large is not dominated anymore by Christian symbols and stories. We are multi-faith – maybe no-faith, secular
and sometimes even anti-religious. We
may even be pagan – given over to the vicious gods of economic prosperity, tribal
well-being and consumption – today’s version of the ancient god, Baal, whose
only morality is tribal well-being and family gain.
We may
well be at an end of what we used to be.
What we used to know as Christian society and culture may be no more.
But what
does it mean? Is God lost to us, and is
good gone? Was our society and culture so
uniquely godly or Christian that what we are now is not? Was the old as Christian as we remember? Or does it depend on who does the
remembering?
I remember
some of my parents’ stories. My dad was
an immigrant from Germany in 1929 and my mom a Canadian-born German, and I
imagine their experiences of exclusion and of fear for their safety through the
Depression and the war years were not uncommon.
A few
years ago, I did a funeral for an elderly Japanese woman who as a child in World
War Two suffered the forced removal of her family from a fishing business and
relative affluence on the West Coast, the theft of everything they had there, their
internment in camps in Ontario, and then the separation of the family to lives
of literal servitude in different cities and towns throughout the province.
We are
learning now too of our relations with the First Nations of Canada – the emptiness
of the treaties, the systematic destruction of their spirituality and culture, the
abuse in residential schools, the apologies we need to make, the difficulty we
have in living them out.
We worry
we are no longer a Christian society.
But was the society we were in as much communion with Christ as it
seemed to be to some? And is what we are
becoming now, really less so?
Jesus
talks about the kingdom of heaven on Earth as being like a woman who takes
yeast and mixes it in with three measures of flour, until the whole of it is
leavened.
I
wonder. Is any whole loaf in this life ever
completely leavened? Or are even those
societies and cultures that claim and even seem to be Christian, always at best
a mix of leavened and unleavened life, of redeemed and unredeemed attitudes, of
clearly godly and just as clearly ungodly actions?
And if
so, how does the godliness get to be in there at all? How is any culture or society leavened with something
that helps it rise at least a little more than otherwise?
Yesterday
here at the church we said goodbye to Edith Furry – a life-long member of this
congregation and one of the people who made this church and the community around
it as good as they were – and one of the images that seemed to resonate as we
celebrated her life was that of yeast – of Edith leavening the life of the
community around her with the yeast of God’s word and spirit – or maybe, more
accurately, of God leavening its life through what Edith offered.
There
was so much she did in such simple ways.
For years she was an Akela in the local Cub pack. For more years than that she organized the
spring and fall sales at the church, personally and by herself receiving,
sorting, cleaning, mending, arranging and pricing everything for the sale. Through her life she knitted booties and hats
for preemies. And there was so much more
she did – all without an official position, without a title or role or official
standing, without pay or even recognition sometimes, just out of the openness
of her heart, the readiness of her love, and the Christ-likeness of her spirit.
It was
stuff anyone could do, and many of us do.
And the point is that through it, Edith was like leaven. She helped – and through her, God helped
Winona to rise to the best of whatever it could be at that time.
When I
wonder how she came to be that way, and have that effect in what she did, I
wonder if one thing that made a difference is the way she let herself be
leavened as well by others – the way she let herself be opened up, and
affected, and enlarged.
She
came to Winona as a teenager with her parents and brothers from Toronto, and
instead of pining for where she had been and what she had lost, she accepted
and threw herself into the life of the place where she was. Over the years, she was open and let herself
be opened to needs that she saw and how she could meet them.
David,
her son, mentioned that when she saw someone facing some problem, she would
quietly ponder for a while, look off in the distance, and then come up with a
solution for how she could help them.
Even with the church sales, for her it was not so much just a
fund-raiser for the church as it was a way to offer people in the community a
chance to buy good things that they needed at a price that took almost nothing
of the little money they had.
And her
grandchildren’s sleep-overs: was the way she enjoyed letting them tear apart
her house, really just one more instance of her radical openness to others’
needs and interests, her welcome of their gifts and energies, and her desire
that everyone have a place that was good for them even when it meant upsetting and
giving up her place in the process?
I
wonder what Edith might say to us today?
What she might do?
Would
she lament the loss of the good old days?
The passing of what and how we used to be?
Or,
after pursing her lips a bit and giving a little shake of her head at some of
what she sees going on, would she just get down to work getting to know her
neighbours and what they might need, seeing what little job in the community
she could help out with, and finding out who might just be overlooked and not
taken care of down the road?
And in
so doing, without really caring about whether the culture around her is
Christian or multi-faith or Muslim or secular, would she just go about mixing
into its life whatever leaven is hers to offer, in whatever way others around
her will welcome?
The
story we tell ourselves about the spirit of our time is sometimes pretty
negative. Maybe we just need better
stories.
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