Forgiven-ness is the starting-block, not the finish line

 Reading:  Jeremiah 31:31-34

Jeremiah was a member of a priestly family who lived just a short distance north of Jerusalem around the time of Israel’s final collapse as a kingdom.  From his perspective as a priest he sees how the people fail to live as God intends, and he warns of what is to come – the military defeat of the kingdom, loss of their land to their enemies, and heart-breaking departure to generations of forced exile in Babylon.

But Jeremiah also has good news.  Beyond the coming losses and pain, he speaks of spiritual renewal and the start of a new kind of relationship with God.  Instead of having to study and obey a law written down on stone –never a very hopeful thing, the people will feel God’s law beating in their hearts, and they will live out what God wants as easily and naturally as breathing.

Her name was Helen Morgan.

Not the more famous Helen Morgan with a hundred links that come up when you google the  name – an American jazz and blues singer and actress who was known in the Twenties for heart-breaking torch songs, who died at age 41 in 1941.

The less famous Helen Morgan – the one who died in 1996 at age 70 in Wilmington, North Carolina as an active member of the Wilmington Methodist Church – a woman who helped in the church’s programs to feed the poor and the hungry, also took care of her grandchildren, and late in life went to college, took some classes and got the degree she never got when she was young.

And who before that was the Helen Morgan who at the age of 46 shot and killed her 33-year-old common-law husband Lee – a brilliant but broken jazz musician whom Helen, herself a member of the seedy Manhattan nightclub scene, was helping to come back to life until she shot him point blank in a Manhattan night club called Slug’s (how ironic!) where he was playing.

Her conviction for murder was easy because there was a whole nightclub of witnesses.  She went to prison, was paroled six years later, and shortly after that moved back to Wilmington, North Carolina where she became a member of Wilmington Methodist Church.

And I wonder how that happened.  How that membership interview went.  What they asked, and what she said.  And what the good members of Wilmington Methodist felt about her becoming one of them?

Most churches, like ours, have ways of communicating to whoever comes through the door the Gospel message of “Let the love of God enfold you.”  But most churches also have ways of looking for evidence of some kind of goodness and morality in the lives of those who come in, and some way of testing whether they really fit in with those already inside.

So I wonder.  Did they know anything about Helen’s past?

Did her punishment and rehab in prison maybe change her enough from what she was, to be able to fit in with the members of Wilmington Methodist?  Was she now enough like them to be one of them?

Or did the good folks of Wilmington Methodist also maybe see in her something that was there precisely because of her past?  Because of her inescapable knowledge of the evil she was capable of, and had done?  Because of how aware she was of her weakness, her capacity for sin, and the specifics of the ways she had hurt and could hurt others around her?

Did she seem, perhaps, especially able to understand and talk about forgiveness and love?  Was she maybe more open to it than many, as a gift she needed herself in her life?  Did they maybe notice that God’s love somehow flowed especially easily and naturally to others around her, especially to the most broken, unaccepted and unloved? 

Jerome Ellison has written,

"The relief of being accepted by God as a sinner can never be known by one who never thought himself unaccepted or sinful.  And yet today one is always hearing of “good Christians."

"There were no good Christians in the first church, only sinners.  Peter never let himself or his hearers forget his betrayal in the hour of the cockcrow.  James, stung by the memory of his years of stubborn resistance, warned the church members: “Confess your faults to one another.”

"Today the last place where one can be candid about one’s faults is in church.  In a bar, yes; in a church, no.  I know; I’ve tried both places."

And Jeremiah – a priest as well as a prophet, says that the new covenant between God and God’s people – the covenant in which the people just know God’s law in their hearts and intuitively live out God’s love for all things in a way that’s as natural as breathing, is based not on their keeping the law but on their knowing how forgiven they are for breaking it – how forgiven we all are for the ways we fail to live up to it.

Her name is Maria.  Raised German Catholic, in high school she attended a weekend youth retreat and when she came back she was ecstatic.  Asked what was so great about the weekend, her answer was simple and joyful:  “I had such a good confession!”

I’ve no idea what she confessed, or even had to confess.  She was a good person.  But over the course of the weekend she found herself able to penetrate at least some of the layers of her life and relationships, and see particular actions and larger patterns of behaviour that she could only confess as sin.  And breaking herself open in that way to her priest and to God, the grace she received was a deeper experience of God’s love for her and for all the world around her than she had known before in all her goodness.

His name is Gord.  A man of middle age, he’s been an evangelical minister for a while, spending his life telling others about God’s forgiving love.  A few years ago he attended a week-long spiritual-growth workshop.  Midway through the week in his personal prayer time he found himself reading the opening verses of Isaiah 40: 

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem

and cry to her that she has served her term,

that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

double for all her sins.

How many times had he read this passage?  Studied it?  Preached it?  Recommended it to others in need of spiritual comfort and peace from guilt?

And this time it hit him like it never had before.  Like a ton of bricks.  Like a tidal wave of light.  For years he had carried guilt and regret about things he had done in the past, hurt he had caused and could never undo.  And he had learned simply to live with it as a private, hidden burden.

But now all of a sudden, he heard heaven’s voice saying, “Enough!  You have made yourseld suffer enough and more than enough!  Let it go.  All is in my hands.  And all whom you care about are in my hands.  You can let it go.”

The light and the lightness he felt was something he had never known in all his years of being a Christian and of being a minister of the Gospel for others.  And it changed him – changed his heart, his sense of himself, his experience of God, his ways of seeing and treating others around him.

The days are coming, Jeremiah says, when the people of God will have God’s law of love and of right and restored relations written on their hearts.  They will know it from inside.  Their own hearts will beat with the beat of God’s love for all things, and God’s love will flow out of them and be as natural in their living, as breathing.

And it will come not when they are good at keeping God’s law, but as they come to live in God’s forgiveness for the all the ways that they break it, and fail to live up it.

And the promise is there – it can be realized at all ages and stages of life.  No one is excluded from it.  And no one is exempt from the way it is fulfilled.

So when was the last time you were really aware not only of your sin and weakness, but also of God’s forgiveness of it?  Of you?  When was the last time you really and overwhelmingly knew the love of God for you in your brokenness?

Or maybe the question is also … when will be the next time we – either us as a church, or any of us individually , will offer that kind of forgiveness and love to someone else?

Taking time for time at Sinai (sermon from Sunday, March 4, 2018)

Reading:  Exodus 20:1-20


The people of Israel were freed from slavery to the Egyptians, and led to a Promised Land, so they would be able to live in the world as people of God – a witness to all the world of how human life is to be lived.  But all they knew was slavery and the power of oppression and domination; how would they not just replicate that kind of society themselves when they reached the Promised Land and took charge of it?  So along the way, from the fearsome heights of Mt. Sinai, through Moses God instructs them in a different way of being in the world – a way that we know as the Ten Commandments. 

(The liturgy for this Sunday included the baptism of a son born to one of our member families.)

When Jacqueline, Ed and I first met to talk about today’s baptism of Callaghan – what it’s about and when it might happen, we wondered about whether celebrating a baptism is the kind of thing to be doing in Lent. 

Lent is a time of confession, renunciation and purification of our souls.  It’s a forty-day journey of self-examination on our way to sharing in the death of Jesus to be able to share in his resurrection.  Not exactly conducive to celebrating new life, giving thanks for another bouncing baby boy born into the hubbub of the household, and throwing a party to get all the family together to toast the new arrival.

But then, babies aren’t always a piece of cake, are they?  And family is not always happy and joyful – not always an easy thing to celebrate, is it?

Family, like Lent, can test and try our souls.  And sometimes it’s exactly the disciplines of confession, renunciation and purification – things that can feel like death at times, that are needed for us to find the new life we look for at the end of the day.

In many ways, being family day after day and year after year is not unlike the forty-year journey of the people of Israel through the wilderness.

Just like the people of Israel on their journey from Egypt, there are things we try to escape and hope to leave far behind us – things we often feel enslaved to, that rob us of the kind of life we long for in our family, and doom us to unhappiness and emptiness in our life together. 

Some of the threats come from inside us – individual traits, inherited patterns of behaviour, our own particular clusters of unresolved fear and anxiety, a need for control, mistrust, pride, or difficulty in sharing feelings and being vulnerable that over and over undermine the kind of family life we really want together.  Like the people of Israel on their way from Egypt none of us all there yet; we too are all a bit of a work in progress, needing to be willing to grow and be changed.

And other threats come from outside.  For Israel, it was Egypt and other empires they would come into contact with, who would force on them ways of being and thinking that would not really serve them well or help either them or the rest of the world around them to be the way they were created to be. 

And for us?  Our culture’s values and expectations of what we need to have, what we need to do, what we need to sacrifice to be counted as good or successful, are not always what’s best for us and for the world, and not always the way to be truly happy and most deeply fulfilled.

Ahead of us – as for the people of Israel, is a vision of a land flowing with milk and honey – a land where some people already are, where they and their families are happy and fulfilled, at peace and living full, purposeful and meaningful lives.  And we long to be there too – to be like them.

But how do we get there? 

I think I used to think it was just a matter of time – of just putting in the forty years, of hanging in there no matter what, so that in the end you would just somehow be where you want to be. 

But as I look at families I admire, and at what I am slowly learning to build into my own home life – even this far on, I see the importance of something else along the way.  The importance of taking time to stop a while together at the foot of Mt Sinai.

You know, to get from Egypt to the Promised Land, the people of Israel didn’t need to go past Mt Sinai.  If you look at a map and the most direct route that people of the time would have taken, Mt Sinai is not on the way at all.  Most people did not go there.  It was too difficult, time-consuming and risky.

But for the people of Israel to make the journey well, and really to be able to enter the Promised Land as they wanted to, the detour to Mt Sinai was absolutely necessary. 

Because that’s where together at the foot of Mt Sinai’s terrible height, they got to know God as ultimate authority and highest power in all the world and in all things.  That’s where things got put into perspective for them, and they were able to detach and get some distance from the power of the cultures around them.  That’s where they learned to see what’s really important, face up to their own shortcomings and dysfunctions, and find a way beyond the things that hurt their life together. 

That’s where they learned to be free of what enslaved them, so they could live together and with other people in healthy and holy ways.  That’s where they found their way into the kind of open and honest, meaningful and purposeful, mutually respectful and supportive life that life in the promised land is all about.  That’s where they really became not just another family on the face of the Earth getting from A to B, but a family of God learning to live the kind of life we all long to know and enjoy.

If we really want to get from where we are to where we want to be, time at Mt Sinai is important – to get off the well-worn path that the world knows so well, to take the time and trouble to remember God, to commit to God’s ways, to learn to trust in God’s good will to take care of us, to confront our own shortcomings and dysfunctions, and in that openness and honesty to find the freedom to live in more healthy relation with one another and with others around us.

And just what that means – just how you make time for Mt Sinai in your journey as a family, I don’t know.  How each of us day after day and year after year makes time for Mt Sinai in our homes and our families, who am I to say? 

That’s something all of us need to work out, and work at for ourselves.

Except, I’m sure there are ways we can help one another with it … if we only take the time and trouble … and the risk, to talk about it together.

Oh, what a family (we are called and empowered to be) -- sermon from Sunday, February 25, 2018

Reading

 (The illustration is from the illuminated Sauvigny Bible, 12th-century France, titled "Abraham Holding in His Lap His Descendants: Jews, Christians and Muslims")

Jews, Christians and Muslims are all descended from Abraham and Sarah, the old and childless couple whom God chooses in the Book of Genesis to be father and mother to a great people who, in communion with God, will bless all people and all life on Earth.  What kind of people are they?  And are their children at all like them?

Selected and abbreviated verses from Genesis

Now Terah was the father of Abram and two other sons, and they lived in the great city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf.  Abram was married to Sarai, who was barren.  They had no children.

Terah took Abram and Sarai, as well as Lot, the son of a brother of Abram who had died, and left the city of Ur and the kingdom of the Chaldeans, to travel to the land of Canaan.  But when the family – such as it was, came to Haran – only half-way to where they planned to be, they settled down.  Some years later, Terah died there.

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your father’s house to the land I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went as the Lord told him, and journeyed by stages as the Lord showed him.  (Gen. 11:27 – 12:1-3)

And along the way, at a number of points in Abram’s and Sarai’s long and continuing journey, God repeated this promise to them and to the family that eventually was born to them:

"Look toward the heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.  So shall your descendants be.”  (Gen. 15:5)

"You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.”  (Gen. 17:4-5)

“I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.  And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the Earth be blessed and gain blessing for themselves, because you obey my voice.”  (Gen. 22:17-18)

Sermon

According to the commercials, ancestry.ca is a powerful tool for bringing people together and creating vibrant, inclusive community by helping people recognize and celebrate their common ancestry.  In one commercial, a man watches a new family move in next door – clearly different in lifestyle, culture, family patterns, behaviour and language.  The new family is deeply Irish, and it’s hard for the man who’s been there for years to imagine ever really connecting with these strangers next door.

But when he learns through ancestry.ca that his background includes Irish ancestry and blood, he calls his new neighbour over to the fence between their back yards, pulls up the evidence of common blood on his Smartphone, and the two of them suddenly have a connection that over the last ten seconds of the commercial turns into a growing life-long friendship between their two families with the fence between them torn down to make two backyards into one!

Can you imagine if there were a spiritualancestry.ca available to us?  If all people on Earth somehow were able to see in black and white pie-chart evidence on their Smartphone app, our common connection with one another as descendants of Adam, and children of God? 

Or if all Jews, Christians and Muslims at least, were able to remember over our backyard fences of our shared ancestry in Abraham and Sarah, long-ago chosen servants of God?  That in spite of our differences and our sibling rivalries and conflicts, we really are brothers and sisters?  That the fences can come down, or at least have a few more gates put in, so we can work at a single backyard for the good of all the world around us?

Together, we are the stars of the heaven – God’s lights beyond number twinkling with hope in the darkness of our time.  We are like the sand of the seashore – grains of holy grit beyond number that individually, in small handsful and in large accumulations are able to be good for the world in so many ways.

If only we could get our act together.  Work out the details of a family re-union.  Really address and heal our family’s dysfunctions – the dysfunctions that separate our different streams, as well as the dysfunctions we suffer within our own traditions, and even in our own little faith communities.

Because think what kind of family this is in the world.  The family of God under Abraham and Sarah is not a blue-blood, royal house like the Tudors or Windsors, somehow high and lifted-up, separate from the rest of us ordinary people.  It’s not a family like the Kennedys or Bushes, or the Molsons, Irvings, Trudeaus or now the Mulroneys – an establishment-power family somehow feeling entitled to rule or at least have the power to sway others who do.  Nor are we the Cosa Nostra or some Mafia family with closed doors, secret handshakes and a need always to win out over rivals and come out on top.

We are the family of Abraham and Sarah, and it’s worth remembering what this means for how we see ourselves, and how we go about our business in the world. 

Does it mean anything, for instance, that at different times instead of settling down and comfortably in to wherever they were, they are willing whenever God calls, to pack and go, and accept whatever journey God has for them now to take?  Even when it means leaving a home they have grown to love, leaving a place of influence they’ve come to have, leaving behind and never seeing again the final resting place of Abraham’s father.

And does it mean anything that even though God promises them a land, they seem to be in no rush to get there?  That even when they get there – unlike some of their later children, later generations of their children, instead of treating what God gives them, as their possession that they need to protect with force of arms, they hold it quite lightly and even let it go from time to time to become poor wanderers again when God and life seem to demand it?

In their time, whether by choice or circumstance, they are marginal people.  Not marginal on Earth; they are quite at home on Earth because they know all of Earth is in God’s hands.  Bugt marginal to any culture of their time that sees any part of Earth as their exclusive domain.  They are outsiders to the dominant culture of the day.  They are powerless and vulnerable. 

And they’re okay with this, because they trust in God.  They let God and not something less, be the answer to their fear and anxiety.  In their acceptance of vulnerability they learn to be open to others along the way.  They learn the meaning and necessity of compassion, generosity, tolerance, love and justice – not just for themselves, but for all the world.  They show the world a new way of being – different in spirit and in purpose than what any other family and culture more naturally encourages.

I wonder if Abraham and Sarah were the only people God called.  Or if maybe God also called others – tried enlisting others in God’s way of being, but they were just the ones who heard and answered God’s call.  And let it shape their whole life.

Whatever the reason behind their becoming people of God, thank God for them.  And thank God for the chance we have to be part of their family – one little constellation of stars among so many others in the vastness of our time’s night sky – one little bit of beach made up of our little grains of sand gathered together like others are elsewhere for the good of the world, on the seashore of the ocean of God’s great good will for all the Earth.