One brick at a time -- sermon from 2nd Sunday of Advent (Dec 9, 2018)

Reading:  Luke 3:1-6

In the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke, two cousins are born – John and Jesus.  In chapter three the story jumps ahead thirty years.  John has grown up and is in the wilderness on the far side of the Jordan preaching about the coming of God’s salvation.  He quotes from the prophet Isaiah, who 500 years before had preached about the return of the people from their captivity to Babylon.  The story of that unexpected liberation is deep within the memory of the people, and now they begin to look for a new liberation in their day for a new way of living and a new world, better for all than what they currently know.

The Rev. Dr. Janet Hunt is a Lutheran pastor in northern Illinois.  She writes a blog called “Dancing With the Word” and a few years ago offered this reflection on the Gospel reading about John the Baptist out beyond the edge of civil society proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God, and calling people to prepare the road for it to come on.

They finished laying the brick work on what was once a through street outside my office window a few weeks ago.  The city's decision to expand the public library resulted in them closing our street permanently in order to accommodate the addition.  They removed the bricks for a season and stored them away in a warehouse.  Then they hauled them out again and laid them one by one, end to end, to finish the cul-de-sac which now provides access to our building's main entrance.  Yes, most of the streets in our city are ordinary pavement.  A few, however, reflect a time long past before asphalt replaced the quaint bricks which lined our paths.

One brick at a time, they were arranged, as you can see in the picture.

As I hear John the Baptist today harkening back to the promises of Isaiah to a people in exile, I am reminded that preparing a way through the wilderness was more similar to this than what we in this century [or at least in this country] are normally accustomed to.  Yet, I am reminded of a passing image of a young man with a shovel working to even out a road in Tanzania when I traveled there some years ago now.  For most of time, making roads and pathways has been slow, hard work: one foot, one yard, one brick at a time.

So I wonder if this is maybe a way to think about our Advent journey.  I get so captured by big, seemingly insurmountable problems too much of the time.  I worry and I fret over the implications of racism, the experience of the working poor, the imminence of war, [the escalation of climate change].  Each and all of these problems and so many more require large scale solutions and sometimes they are called for in short order – far quicker than the time it would take to lay bricks one at a time in the wilderness.   But still, seldom does a big solution come without the back-breaking, soul-stretching work of doing it one step at a time.

I wonder if all of us these days are overwhelmed by the sheer size and magnitude of the issues we face.  If all of us at times find ourselves not only captured, but consumed by problems, questions and crises far beyond our ability to do anything about directly.

How many times have I sat in The Second Cup in Westdale, one of my favoured sermon-writing spaces, at my favoured table up against the front window, a little removed and at right angles to the majority of the other tables farther inside the shop, and overheard conversation after conversation between two people or among groups of four or six or even nine, always animated and usually indignant about Trump, the migrant caravan, and the Mueller investigation; about the UN report on climate change, and the slowness of governments, big industry and humanity to take responsible action; and about Facebook, social media, the new populism, and Russian and Chinese domination of world politics?

And it’s not just in coffee shops, where conversations of unrest have happened at least since the days of the French Revolution.  It’s also in grocery store meetings of friends, at dinner parties and probably also at kids’ hockey games.  It’s even in hospital wards.  For the past few days Japhia’s room-mate has had regular visits from her husband and daughters and assorted friends, and the group conversations around the bedside have been a lot more about Trump than about anything else, including the woman’s recovery from a heart incident.

We are anxious about how the world is going.  We worry and talk incessantly about the bad news.  We are hungry for answers and a better way forward than we have found and we have chosen so far.

I wonder if the answer might be much the same as it was two millennia ago outside the bounds of Jerusalem and around the river Jordan, and if it might sound something like this:

In the 18^th year of the 21^st century of the Common Era,

          when Donald Trump was president of the United States

                   and could not be ignored,

when Elizabeth II was queen of the Commonwealth.

Justin Trudeau was prime minister of the dominion of

 Canada,

Doug Ford was premier of the province of Ontario,

and Fred Eisenberger was mayor of the City of Hamilton,

when Richard Bott was moderator

of the United Church of Canada

at the time when the Church was beginning

its time of restructuring,

the word of God came to Fifty United Church

on the border between

the city of Hamilton and the region of Niagara.

And that church went into the city and the region they bordered, proclaiming and practicing a new way of seeing and doing things, to make all things new, as it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one church crying out in the wilderness:  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

One of the messages of the Gospel – and of Christmas, is that when it’s time to change the world and open a pathway for a new way of being – God’s way of being to be born among us, it’s not the rich and mighty, not the celebrities and the powerful and important ones that God turns to.  Not the caesars and princes and tetrarchs, not even the high priests and pharisaic leaders of the people.  These people are too tied in to the system that is, too much the beneficiaries of the injustices that have been, too beholden to vested interests, and quite simply too dependent on old notions of power to be free to share in a new way of doing things differently, no matter what they say otherwise.

Which is why when the good news comes, it comes to and through someone like John the Baptizer who has left the city and its political, civil and religious institutions behind, let himself live in the wilderness, and is actually free for a new thing.  And why when, as we will hear next week when the Sunday school offers their Christmas pageant and as we will remember Christmas Eve, when the Christ child is born and the seed of God’s kingdom is sown into the life of the world, it happens in the territory of the smallest and weakest of the tribes of Israel and even there out back in a stable, and it’s rough, unclean shepherds and alien scholars of forbidden astrological arts who are called by the angels and by the cosmos to come and see, and then let others know what is starting to happen.

It’s the little people and ordinary folk, and the outsiders to the circles of privilege and power who are God’s movers and shakers, the ones who prepare the way and build the road for the kingdom to come into the world one brick at a time.

Just think of the disciples Jesus called, and still calls.  And how the story of the Gospels is told one healing, one challenge, one teaching, one meal, one story at a time.  And from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

It makes me think of what I see sometimes in The Hamilton Spectator.  Last Monday the headline across the whole of the front page was “Trump poised to kill old NAFTA Deal” – confirming our sense that he just never goes away and that while he is here all is unsettled.  The story just below it and filling the rest of the left side was “$6.8 Million Bill to ‘Waterproof’ Waterfront Trail?” – a local reminder of the steadily increasing costs worldwide of climate change.  And the rest of the front section was similar kinds of news. 

Except there was also a story buried a few pages in headlined “The sheriff of King William turns in his badge,” about Doug Crowder, a 75-year-old man who at the age of three was hit by a car, was unconscious for 21 days and lost the sight in his left eye.  As a boy he attended Greensville school but also pumped gas on the side and before he could write the Grade 8 final exams he went up north to paint cottages for the gas station owner.  The principal said it was okay because he wasn’t going to pass the exams anyway.  Not much was expected of him.

After that he had a checkered journey of a variety of unskilled jobs, relationships with a number of women along the way, and thirteen years ago enough money to buy a little house in the city’s core on King William just west of Wentworth.  The neighbourhood was rougher than he expected, with bigger problems than he counted on and felt prepared to face.

He thought about selling and moving out, finding a more comfortable and safer place to be.  He also considered just hunkering in and protecting himself in his own little private space. 

But instead he set about getting to know his neighbours, sharing things with them, and doing odd jobs for them all around the neighbourhood, one after the other until that became his life, and part of what made life good for him and his neighbours together on that little stretch of King William.

Doug is now 75 and living with cancer, most likely from having smoked all his life.  In fact, a day after he was interviewed for the story in The Spec he was admitted to St Peter’s.  But as he got sicker over the past few years neighbours started taking care of him, bringing him carrot cake, homemade bread, pyjamas. 

And isn’t that how it’s done?  How a pathway is opened and a roadway is built for the kingdom of God to be born and to grow among us – how we help the world work a little more like the way God desires it to be?

One brick, one foot, one step, one yard, one relationship, one choice for someone else’s good, one act for the good of the world at a time?

The first day of Advent - enticed to hope

Dawn?

How much light is needed for it to be dawn?  How clear does the new day need to be, for it to be really dawning?

There was as yet no sign of the sun, no reddening of the horizon, no glory heralding the arrival of the new day.  Just a mere lightening of the sky, the slightest unraveling of the black blanket of night to something more like a thick grey veil.

6:30 AM.  Give or take.

At the back kitchen table I reviewed the liturgy and Powerpoint slides for worship.  I also checked email, venturing to open up to the world by reading the daily posts from several on-line daily-meditation sites.

First Sunday of Advent.  Sunday of Hope.

I think of my wife in the hospital.  Think too of the daughter of our music director facing surgery in just over a week for cancer, of one of the beloved saints of our congregation being moved tomorrow into a nursing home after a long period of dedicated home care by his wife, of different members struggling with illness and anxiety, and of another member who suffered the loss of his younger brother – 87 years old, just ten days ago in P.E.I.

Mostly, though, I think about my wife.  In hospital this time for ten days already and hoping for only three of four more after surgery tomorrow that we hope will bring relief from steady malnutrition and a promise of better health even with a chronic disorder. 

We hope. 

Although she says she dares not hope.  She tries to tell her brain that this, at least, is the plan and it may or may not work.  She doesn’t want to be disappointed.  Doesn’t think she could handle a let-down that big.

I have read others’ experience of hope – that hope is not the expectation of a particular outcome, but faith that out of the darkest night and most traumatic time and regardless even of outcome, God will bring something new, good and unexpected to be.  Will cause, enable, allow, or oversee – whatever verb your theology suggests, some new, good and unexpected thing to emerge from whatever rubble and ashes we suffer and lament.  Something not imagined.  Something we could never have thought of, nor ever thought to pray for.

As I continued to read the meditations about Advent hope, I heard bird song outside.  It sounded like spring.  And still just a little under three weeks before the longest night of the year.

I rose from the table, walked to the door and opened it, and from the doorway looked out over the back deck towards the escarpment behind our house.  Still no sunrise.  But light enough in the pre-dawn grey to see the dense fog that shrouded the tree tops on the top of the ridge just a few hundred feet away.

There was a strange comfort in how closely the fog closed in my vision.  Unable to see far, unexpected to see the whole picture, I was happy for what I could see of the immediate, of the world just close at hand.  It was enough.  Maybe because as I stood at the opened door looking out at the mist-enclosed world of our back yard, the bird song continued.

He, or she, knew a dawn – dawn of a new day, was on its way.

I listened for a minute more.  Listened until the song stopped.

Then I stepped back inside, gently closed the door and offered a brief, heartfelt prayer of thanks.  And of hope.

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.