The Light and Legacy of Jean Vanier: Sept 10, 1928 - May 7, 2019 (sermon from Sun, Sept 29, 2019)

Reading:  I John 4:6-7, 12-13, 18 

The early Christian church lived and carried out its mission in a culture as religiously diverse as ours.  The Roman Empire brought together all kinds of religious traditions, philosophies and spiritual cults.

In this setting, the Christians did not argue with others about doctrine, ideas, or articles of belief.  They focused instead on what they called “the way” – the way Jesus showed them of living God’s love into the world, and which they saw as the highest calling of every person.  God was not an abstract idea to discus, nor a distant being to study and describe.  Rather, God was a living, present spirit of love that they could open themselves to, and whose way of love could be their way of life by way of well.

Jean Vanier was born into privilege – on Sept 10, 1928, the 4^th of 5 children to Canadian Major-General George Vanier, who 30 years later was appointed Governor-General of Canada, and his wife Pauline while George was serving a diplomatic post in Switzerland.  Jean was educated in France and England, from the age of 13 trained for a career as a naval officer, and in World War 2 served with both the Royal and the Royal Canadian Navy. 

In 1945 while his father was Canadian ambassador to Paris, he and his mother went to assist survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and he never forgot the experience.  He went back to his naval career, but with a deep spiritual restlessness to do “something else.”  So he resigned his commission, and began studies in Paris towards a Ph.D. in philosophy and ethics which he got in 1966.

In 1964, though, through friendship with a local priest he became aware of the plight of thousands of people institutionalized with developmental disabilities.  He felt led to invite two men he came to know – Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, both severely disabled, to come live with him in an old house he bought in Trosly-Breuil, that he nicknamed l’Arche (the ark).  And that was the beginning of the rest of his life – living with and being a servant to developmentally challenged adults.

And in what he learned and how he was changed, through what he became and wrote and inspired others to see and to feel themselves, he became the founder of the worldwide network of l’Arche houses, the author of over 30 books about learning to be human together in this life, and a voice of wisdom that still reaches around the world.

With little bits like this:

YOU TUBE VIDEO:  “What it means to be fully human” (4:25)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWrru31ZPzo 

If we were to list the major problems the world faces today, we might list things like hate, oppression, violence, injustice, greed, self-centredness, pollution and the destruction of creation. 

I wonder if Jean Vanier might say these are not the real problem – that they are critical issues we need to understand and address well and quickly if we or our grandchildren are to have a world left to live in, but that these are more symptoms and consequences of the realest and deepest problem, which is lack of love. 

Because without love – real, deep love for ourselves, for others, and for the world we will never really find the right answers to any of these issues. 

And without love – without knowing that I am loved, that I am important and that I count, which is something we all need and long to know all our, without being assured of this in deep ways within ourselves, in our resulting need to prove ourselves we simply continue to cause and create more of the trouble we already have.

So, how do we get to where we need to be?  All Jean Vanier can do is tell us how he got there in his life.

YOUTUBE VIDEO:  “Seeing God in others” (3:43) 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_xDRTXb-_o 

So how do we get there in our lives?  And find our way into the covenant of life, and for life?

After Jean Vanier’s death Tina Bovermann, executive director of l’Arche USA was interviewed and was asked how we might find our way in to the legacy of Jean Vanier.

She said, of course, that some might choose to connect and engage with a local l’Arche community.  And there is one in Hamilton.

But, she goes on to say, “It’s not just about l’Arche.  It’s about reaching out to the person you don’t know, to the person who is ‘other.’

“Any of us can wake up in the morning and say today, at some point during the day, in the grocery store, in the bus, in some line where I’m waiting I’m going to engage with someone who is different, with someone who looks different from me, who speaks differently than I.  And we can try to have an encounter with that person.

“And to some extent that is Jean Vanier’s legacy.  And the ripple effect of these little acts in our daily living might be just as big as the ripple effects of his life.”

The last word goes to Jean Vanier. 

In one of his books, Life’s Great Questions, he writes about the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Jesus has been approached by a lawyer who wants to follow God’s way by loving his neighbour, so he asks Jesus, maybe in all good conscience, “Who is my neighbour?” 

To which Jesus replies with the story of the Good Samaritan – a story about a person who proves to be a neighbour to someone who despises him.  Because what have Jews to do with Samaritans?  And therefore also, Samaritans with Jews?  

Which means, Vanier says, the point of Jesus' story is we do not get to choose our neighbours; rather, we choose only whether and how to love.  Our neighbour is whoever comes into our life, our world, our country, our community.  And the question, Jean Vanier says, is not, “who is our neighbour?” but rather, “how can we love?”

Come out, come out wherever you are

Reading:  Luke 15:1-10 (the lost coin and lost sheep) 

Who belongs in God’s kingdom?  Who will God gather together, to make the world the way it’s meant to be?  Who will be the members of God’s new chosen and blessed community?

These questions are important to the people around Jesus.  Because Jesus seems to be channeling so much of God’s power in the world, they want to know his answers.  And as usual with spiritual matters, some people like what he offers, and others don’t.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

that saved a wretch like me;

I once was lost, but now am found;

was blind, but now I see.

This was one of three songs we sang last Wednesday in the dining room of Orchard Terrace Care Centre just down the road.  It was the monthly morning-prayer service – every second Wednesday at 10:30.  I was gathered in a circle with twelve or fifteen residents – more than half of them in wheelchairs, the others with their walkers parked in front of the chairs they were sitting on.  Those of us who were awake and alert were chatting, reading Scripture, praying.  We were singing hymns to the accompaniment of a battered portable CD player in the corner of the room with the volume turned up as high as it would go in a vain attempt to cover the thinness and poverty of what we could offer.

“Amazing Grace,” though – the last hymn of the morning, transformed us.  Those who were dozing, woke up.  Those who were singing, sang clearly, loudly and happily.  Together we became a circle of visibly, tangibly, audibly and infectiously grateful people.

I once was lost, but now am found;

was blind, but now I see.

Do we all, I wonder, feel lost at times?  Or that something has been lost?  And is finding, or being found, one of our deepest longings, and greatest joys when it happens?  And how often and in so many ways in our life – if we’re blessed, does it happen?

I know the singing and the whole service on Wednesday was good for the residents who were there; it was good for me as well.  We chose to spend time together, to open up and reach out to one another across whatever separates us, to chat and pray about things that matter, unable – and this may be the most important, unable really to hide or disguise from one another our disabilities and weakness, and our troubles and sorrows. 

And in this we all felt found in some deep way.  We found ourselves to be found – gathered in and lifted up together in something that felt a lot like God’s love, like God’s saving embrace.

It was good, and it was worth whatever it cost us, whatever trouble we had to take to be there.

I think of the game Hide and Seek.  It’s the classic childhood game more than any other that our grandchildren some days want to play at our house.  More than tag, more than eye-spy, more even than spin-me-around or let-me-climb-on-you.

And what’s the point of it, really, if not to be found?

Yes, the action begins when all but one run off to hide themselves.  Because all of us do need private and personal places and time alone and apart.  Safe places where we can hide and not feel threatened or oppressed.  Where we can think our own thoughts and be with our own souls.

But at some point – and beyond which point the game becomes more anxious than fun, there really is a need to be found.  Because it’s in the finding – in the delighted recognition and sometimes surprising re-connection of one another that the fun is.  It’s in the being found that the deeper joy is.  It’s in the finding and the being found that God – at least the love of God is.

Now of course we don’t always know we’re lost.  Sometimes, especially as we grow up, we get so good at hiding that we forget what we’ve done and we confuse our hiding place with the whole of the home we could be living in, and we mistake our own company for the greater community we could be connected with.

When Aaron was three-and-a-half – almost four, one Easter Sunday morning he went missing.  One minute he was playing in the backyard.  The next, when his mother and I called him in for lunch, he was not there anymore. 

He was lost, and we immediately began looking for him. Running up and down the streets near our house.  Asking people on the street if they’d seen a little boy in red sweat pants and black-and-white t-shirt.  A friend went down into the nearby ravine.  The police were called.  A local news van showed up. 

We were frantic.  Lost in panic.  Lost to the wildest imaginings of our minds, because he was lost to us.

Until the teen-aged son of a neighbour showed up on his bike, with Aaron perched happily on the handlebars.  “Is this who you’re looking for”?

Aaron, of course, had no idea he was lost.  He was merely off on an adventure.  The back yard was too confining.  He said he needed fresh air.  So he walked – probably ran off down the street, to where he knew there was a playground.  And beside the playground a baseball diamond.  Where some older boys were playing, and he sat down to watch them.  Until someone heard he was lost, and helped bring him home.

Sometimes we do get really good at living in our own little world.  A world of self-sufficiency, maybe.  Of busy-ness.  Of pride.  Or of fear and insecurity.  A world maybe where we know we won’t be hurt or threatened.  Where we’ll feel safe, or in control.  Where we hide our weaknesses, don’t talk about our troubles, don’t share our sorrows.  A world we all need at some point and to some degree, but beyond which degree and which point we get lost in our own hiding, and we become lost to being found and to knowing the love of God in community that really can lift us up and make us whole.

And then, of course, there’s also the other side of the equation.  Sometimes we just don’t want to be the seekers of others who are hidden, to be the finders of others who are lost.

The most recent time I came home to two grand-children who were visiting with their Jammie and decided to hide as I arrived so I could find them, I was tired.  I just wanted to come home and relax.  I wanted to recharge my batteries, not have to spend my energy on anyone else.  So – I hate to have to admit it, I just quietly, persistently chose not to play the game. 

I pretended I didn’t know they were hiding.  I closed my ears to their whispered voices urging me to find them.  I ignored the clues that would have led me to them.  I was a churl.  I was a grumpy old man.  An unresponsive Papa.

And don’t we all get like that at times?  Aren’t we like that sometimes as a church?  Just wanting to come in and sit down, and be comfortable.  Have a place of our own in the changed community around us and in the world that so often wears us out, where we can just rest and feel cared for. 

Not have to go seeking those who are hidden.  Not have to be finding those who are lost.  Not having to hear in the world and in the community around us the whispered voices urging someone to find them.  Ignoring the clues that would lead us into other people’s hiding places.

But who then really is hidden?  Who really is lost?  

For how do we know God if not in the game and the life and the choice of finding and being found?  Where and when and how else are we gathered in and lifted up in the love of God?  Where and how else do we, along with others, come to know and to share the love of God for all?

Family values? (sermon from Sunday, Sept 8, 2019)

Readings:  Jeremiah 18:1-11 and Luke 14:25-35

Jeremiah was a prophet to the people of Israel during a very hard time in their history.  The kingdom was falling apart.  Greed, affluence and corruption at the top; suffering, oppression and powerlessness at the bottom; and an ever-widening gap between the two, weakened the kingdom beyond repair.  Its overthrow by foreign powers was imminent and inevitable.

At first the people thought God would save them, no matter how bad they were.  When that didn’t happen they began to wonder if God had maybe decided just to bring an end to them, because of how bad they had become.  Saviour or Destroyer were the only roles they could imagine God having.  But Jeremiah sees God in another light, working in a different and more creative way than either of those roles allows. 

In the Gospel reading, Jesus is beginning to attract a lot of attention for his healing, his teaching, and for the new kind of community he is establishing wherever he goes.  His opponents are making more and more serious plans to stop him.  And more and more people are flocking to him, expressing a desire to follow him, and to have for themselves what he and his disciples are having. In this passage, Jesus invites them to understand what they are asking, and what following him will mean for them.

To the large crowds that are starting to follow him, Jesus turns and says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

What on earth does he mean by that?

Last week I received a batch of cartoons by email from Cam Cocks, and one of them seems to say something like this.

It’s a picture of Noah and his wife and two of a bunch of different animals on the deck of an ark.  Rain is starting to fall.  Mrs. Noah is inside the little hut built for her and her husband on deck, p0king her head out the window to remind her husband, “Noah, keep an eye out for mother!  She’s coming with us.”  And what we see behind her is Mr. Noah calmly and firmly kicking a ladder away from the side of the boat, with her mother – his mother-in-law, still standing on it just a few rungs from the top, her eyes wide open in shocked and mute surprise as, holding her suitcase in one hand and gripping the ladder with the other, she begins to fall backward away from the ark and into the rain.

What a vibrant image of life on earth as it’s lived out among us a lot of the time.  We look for, or we build an ark to get us through the deluge and save us.  And we draw lines between who is and who is not allowed on board, is and is not included in the family vessel.

We’re pretty sure, though, this is not what Jesus means when he says what he does.

For one thing – and it’s a pretty big thing, God in God-self gave up this way of doing things after the Flood.  In fact, that’s the point of the story the way it’s told in the Bible – that after the Flood, once it was over, and because of the Flood and how near it came to wiping out absolutely everything that God made, God repented of acting that way and vowed never to do that again.  Put away that kind of weapon forever – hung it up for all to see, promising that from that point on both God and the world would live together under the rainbow covenant of continuing, connected life.  Never again would God bring that kind of destruction; never again try to solve the problem of evil that way again.  Because that way of trying to solve the problem of evil was a greater threat to the life of the whole world than the evil within the world ever was.

So God gives up being the bringer of rain – the master of shock and awe, and God decides to become, among other more creative things, a potter. 

Like the potter imaged by Jeremiah the prophet.  In Jeremiah’s time the people are afraid.  Things are falling apart. The goodness of Israelite society is suspect.  Corruption and greed are rampant among the rich.  Suffering and powerlessness are the plight of the poor.  The kingdom they all want to love is coming apart at the seams and collapsing, and the people fear this must be the end.  The apocalypse.  The deluge.  They are now among those who are falling back into chaos, to be lost forever.

To which Jeremiah says, “No.  That’s not what God does anymore.  What God is right now, is a potter needing to remake what has been made.  The vessel we were, that God was shaping and turning to some good and beautiful end, took a bad turn.  Somewhere along the way we got tragically mis-shapen.  So what God is doing is breaking us down, returning us to a starting-point again, and reworking us, turning us, re-forming us into some new good thing, some new good shape and way of being.  Because that’s how God works.  God works with what is, and works patiently, lovingly, creatively, redemptively with all of what is.”

To which Jeremiah says, “No.  That’s not what God does anymore.  What God is right now, is a potter needing to remake what has been made.  The vessel we were, that God was shaping and turning to some good and beautiful end, took a bad turn.  Somewhere along the way we got tragically mis-shapen.  So what God is doing is breaking us down, returning us to a starting-point again, and reworking us, turning us, re-forming us into some new good thing, some new good shape and way of being.  Because that’s how God works.  God works with what is, and works patiently, lovingly, creatively, redemptively with all of what is.”

It’s hard for us to grasp this, and even harder for us to live this.  Because for a lot of our history and even now, the whole of what is – even just the whole of what we know, is often too big and too scary for us to feel secure in.  And that’s where home comes in, and your own little corner of the world and your own ark come in.  That’s where family comes in, and tribe, and the line between family-and-tribe and the rest of the world.

In Jesus’ time, and for most of human history, family was everything.  People had no existence apart from their family.  Family was their identity, their way of being known and of having a place in the world.  Family was their security, their way of being safe and cared for.  Family was their fate, their place on the social ladder, their rung and their role passed on and accepted from father to son and mother to daughter in the hierarchy of their society.  Family was also their politics and their world, with anyone who threatened any one in the family becoming the enemy of all in the family, and if ever a family or a tribe came to hate another family or tribe, that hatred was passed down and persisted a long, long time.

And even today, don’t we bemoan the way the world seems to be falling back – just when we began to think that maybe we’d got beyond it, falling back into tribalism, becoming a new real-life, high-stakes, all-or-nothing survival show version of “Family Feud?” 

Many people have pointed out that “Make America Great Again” is at least in part about making America great again for entitled white males, who in the way things were going felt a loss of privilege, maybe felt demoted from being captain of the ark and gatekeeper of the ladder.  And here in Canada in different places and ways across the country we have our own version of tribal politics and worldview.  Just this week Hamilton City Council had to decide whether or not to give a public platform in the Council chambers to Paul Fromm who proudly calls himself “a white nationalist” committed to ensuring the “founding peoples” of Canada are not washed away by “waves of mass immigration.”

And that kind of keep-them-off-the-ark theology and politics is so easy to fall into.  Like the new law in Quebec making it illegal for persons in public service to wear religious symbols, which was okay as long as it was symbols of white-European Catholicism, but all of a sudden not when it came to include hijabs and turbans. 

Or like all those little posts that get shared around on Facebook lamenting what seems to be over-generous social support for immigrants and refugees and less-than-adequate support for veterans, as though one is the cause of the other, and we need to choose between the two. 

Or like most of our election campaigns, where all the major parties appeal to whatever class-based tribal identification their polls tell them is the winning demographic, and then tell us how they will help us especially prosper, and the ones forgotten, not appealed to, still on the ladder as it’s kicked out sight, are usually the really poor, the perpetually powerless, and the voiceless – their real needs still not really addressed. 

The family, the tribe can be pretty brutal when they feel afraid, or threatened.  It can be hard to speak up against that.  If you do, it can open you up to all kinds of things.  It can make you feel vulnerable and alone.  Open you up to the suspicion of being somehow against the family and the tribe.

But Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry the cross – the cross of detachment from these things, the cross maybe of suspicion of being a betrayer of one’s own tribe, the cross of standing up at times against and outside one’s own circle for the sake of something bigger – whoever does not carry the cross that is theirs, and follow me, cannot be my disciple.”

You see, Jesus is gathering community and inviting hope and building a world on a different basis than family and tribe.  Like a good builder or a good commander, he looks realistically at what is needed to get the job done that needs to be done, and he knows the ways of family and tribe won’t do it.  Won’t be sufficient.  Will fall short at some critical point.

He understands the way of God the potter, and like his father he is committed to working with what is, and with all of what is.  No longer building arks to save a select few and let the rest drown.  Rather, sitting down at a wheel with the whole lump of creation turning before him, being shaped and reshaped all together in his hands, being broken down and given a new shape when needed and when the old shape no longer works.  Working and turning, turning and re-shaping, re-shaping and re-forming and re-integrating all that is, towards some constantly evolving and emerging and re-emerging good thing.

So I wonder if what he’s saying, when he tells the crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, and so on … cannot be my disciple” is maybe two things.

One is an invitation to join him in building the world together on something more than, bigger than, better than just family and tribe – letting us know there are better, more appropriate and more helpful ways of resolving the problem of evil in the world than just building an ark and kicking the ladder away when we think it’s time.

And the other is an encouragement; not a judgement that if we don’t live and think his way we are lost, but instead a gentle reminder that when we honestly don’t, honestly can’t yet follow him and live fully into his way of making the world work, can't at some point act and speak and live fully as a disciple, we are not therefore thrown off the boat and thrown out of the lump of humanity that’s being worked with.  Rather, we’re still on the wheel, still part of the whole, still being worked on, shaped and re-shaped by life, by others, by God.  Still in process of potting and being potted.  Definitely still, along with everyone else, part of whatever God is making of us all.

Because God no longer sends floods and tells us to build arks to save just a few from the deluge.  Rather, God sits down at the wheel and works with the whole mess that’s called into being here together.  Patiently, creatively, redemptively shaping, re-shaping and re-shaping again what we need to be, to be good all together.