We at St. Andrew’s, like everyone else, have had
considerable difficulties navigating the ever evolving COVID-19 crisis. If we
were simply to rely on the directives that are being given to us, we would go
on with our service more or less as usual. The Presbyterian Church in Canada
has called on congregations to continue with Sunday services unless the local
health authorities indicate otherwise. And, since the local authorities are
only asking for gatherings of more than 250 to be cancelled, we are clear to
proceed.
Nevertheless, official directives do not seem to be quite sufficient at the moment. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution and care for our people, let me state that there will not be a regular morning worship service tomorrow, March 15th, but here is what will happen.
I will go to the church on Sunday morning for 10 am. I will be there and lead in worship and there will be a few people to assist me. There will be no Sunday School this week.There will be prayers and other elements of worship and I will preach a sermon. All of this will be videotaped and posted here on the webpage by 2:00 pm at the latest. I encourage you all to participate in worship by watching. While our worship and especially our prayers will touch on the present crisis, I will, in the sermon, encourage us to lift our eyes beyond the crisis to look at where God may be calling on us to go as a church in our ministry to the community. The sermon title is: When there is no water on the journey.
During this time on Sunday morning, the church will be open.
If you are not sick and have no symptoms, you may come in and join us in the
sanctuary. However, we will require that
everyone who enters must lovingly practice social distance. We will remain two
meters apart from each other (unless we come from the same household).
Finally, please remember the church in your prayers and in
practical ways. Even if many of our activities are shut down for a while, the
financial needs of the congregation will actually not lessen. We appreciate all
those who have made their commitment to the church through Pre-Authorized
giving. We probably could not weather this without your commitment. If you are
able to help us, please consider online giving. There are links on the web
page.
We will be assessing the situation throughout this week and
the next. Please know that St. Andrew’s is still in operation and will respond
to your needs even if we may have to limit face-to-face interactions. For now,
Bible study will continue, and the Food Bank is expected to still take place on
Thursday. I will begin to post daily prayers and meditations for you on the web
page. Please continue to check in.
Be in prayer for the people in the front lines battling the
virus and treating its victims. Respond to the needs of your brothers and
sisters here at St. Andrew’s, as well as those of your family, friends and
neighbourhood. Be loving and full of care as you treat all people with respect
even if (in these strange times) you may need to keep at a physical distance.
Together we will rise above these unprecedented times. (please pass this
message along to people whom you know are not online)
“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for
I am your God. I will strengthen you and
help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” -- Isaiah 41:10
I have written a lot of Annual
Reports over many years of ministry. They are not as easy to write as you may
think. How do you sum up an entire year of ministry on one sheet of paper,
after all? You can’t say everything, of course, but what can you do that will
at least give a flavour of what the year was like? I’m always open to finding a
fresh approach.
So, here is what I’m going to
do this year. You know those lists of questions that sometimes circulate on social
media – questions that you are supposed to post on your page and answer while
you challenge your friends to answer as well. Well, I borrowed one of those
lists and adapted it to make it:
20 Questions about Scott’s 2019
(Do
this without fibbing.)
1. Where are you answering these questions?
I am typing this as I sit in the car riding home (I’m not driving!) from a
quick visit and a supper with our daughter at college in London.
2. What is your favourite church picture you took during the year?
Session selfie!
3. Where was that picture taken?
At our Session retreat at Duff’s Presbyterian Church (February 2, 2019)
4. What was the hardest thing you had to do during the year?
Visit one of our church members in hospital. He was in a great deal of
pain, confusion and so weak and there was so little I could do for him.
5. What was the greatest privilege?
Visit that same church member in the hospital and be able to be a part of
that awful and yet meaningful and ultimately hopeful moment.
6. What moment in the year will you always cherish?
It was a moment that I cannot share with you. It was a moment of personal
counselling that I cannot tell, but the grace of God was a powerful and healing
presence. I will never forget it.
7. Best musical memory?
Most every time I got to sing with Joyful Sound!
8. What went terribly wrong and yet God turned it into something
wonderful?
On Sunday, February 3, 2019, I was awakened to the news that the furnaces
in the sanctuary were not working and it was cold in there, really cold! Oh no!
What will we do?! What we did was set up and hold worship downstairs in the Fellowship
Hall and we all had a great time and it gave us the impetus to start thinking
differently about what we really required to be a church together.
9. What was the latest you stayed up on a Saturday night getting
ready for a Sunday?
About 11:30 pm. I’ve gotten to the point that I’m really no good for much
of anything after that. I have also gotten to the point, however, when I just wake
up at 5:30 am Sunday morning and start getting ready.
10. Coolest surprise?
Carol Johnston knit Rudolph mittens for all the kids on the Santa Claus
Parade float. (Somehow, I ended up with a pair, too.)
11. Best New Development?
Our youth grew in number and decided to organize themselves and elect
their own leadership.
12. Best sign of hope?
We have a very meaningful moment when our session came together to create
a covenant with the help of Rev. Greg Smith..
13. People you couldn’t have made it though the year without?
Our amazing staff. Joni is constantly challenging me (in a really good way)
to be my best and bring out the best in others. Paula is so supportive and
uplifting. Corey consistently blows me away with her talent and her leadership
abilities. I feel I can always count on Glen to get it done. Karen is an
amazingly caring presence, pulls people together and makes a meaningful
community ministry possible.
14. Best church meal?
There were so many and they were so good but I’m going to have to go with
the Thursday Night Supper and Social Christmas feast!
15. Your earliest workday?
December 9, I got to work at 5:20 a.m. It was to open up the church and
turn off the alarm for a film crew.
16. Does pineapple belong on pizza?
Umm, maybe, under certain circumstances. Who am I kidding – it’s pizza. Of
course, I’ll eat it!
17. Most fun at a new event?
Open Mic. What an incredible cavalcade of the talents of this
congregation.
18. Who do you think will read this report?
Everyone, of course! They will pour over it like it’s a newly discovered
gospel.
19. Who will comment to you on the silliness of that previous answer?
Joni, Paula, Dominique, Ray and Allison.
20. Who will be upset that you mentioned their name in the previous
answer?
Now the Lord said to Ashurbanipal, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that 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 Ashurbanipal went, “What, are you crazy, Lord? You want me to leave behind
everything that is familiar and comfortable, the land that I’m supposed to
inherit from my father and all of the family supports that are supposed to
protect me from all the unpredictability of life. That’s okay, Lord, you can keep your blessing.
But the Lord
was not discouraged and he went and said to Utnapishtim, “Utnapishtim, same
command. Leave your country and everything and you can have all these
blessings.” But Utnapishtim said, “Lord,
I am very flattered and everything, but I am totally swamped this month, can I
get back to you later on your plan.”
So, the Lord
went on to others – to Nahshon, Ammishaddai and Zuriel – but nowhere could he
find someone to take on the challenge of what he commanded them – until he
found Abram. And Abram, to everyone’s surprise, he just got up and went.
That is the kind of amazing thing about the story of the
call of Abram in the Bible, isn’t it? There really was nothing special about
Abram before that. He hadn’t done anything, hadn’t proven his value in
any way. When we first meet him in the Book of Genesis, there is only one thing
that sets him apart, one thing that indicates that he is different: when God
says go, he goes. He doesn’t talk back. He doesn’t ask questions or hesitate.
He goes.
That is what made me wonder how we’re supposed to read
this story. Was Abram the only one that God spoke to, or where others given the
same offer? Do we not hear about those others – are they entirely lost to
history – simply because they turned God down?
And if the only thing that Abram did to set himself
apart, at least at first, was respond to this command, what is the significance
of that? What did Abram do right? You might think that it was his instant
obedience that impressed God, which would mean that God is really only
interested in what you might call “yes men” (for lack of a more inclusive
term). What God wants more than anything else is someone who, when God says
jump, only says, “How high sir?”
But no, that cannot be it. If God were looking for
nothing more and nothing less than unquestioning obedience, he could have
chosen to adopt unthinking beasts instead of a human family. No, what set Abram
apart was not the instant obedience itself but the thing that made him react
that way, and that thing was faith.
In our reading this morning from his letter to the
Romans, the Apostle Paul is referring to a later event in Abram’s life when he
writes, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” but what
he says there certainly applies to this earlier event. What set Abram apart
right from the very beginning was his willingness to believe the promises that
God made to him. Paul goes on from there to explain what belief in God means in
that kind of situation, “But to one who without works trusts him who
justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Paul says
that the faith that God is looking for is a willingness to trust God.
As I thought about the season of Lent this year, I
noticed that there was a certain theme that kept coming up in our readings for
Sunday mornings – a theme that is most clear in this Genesis reading this
morning. The readings are full of stories of people who step out and embrace
new things, new concepts and ideas, who leave things behind because they feel called
to something new. We see that theme, for example, in our gospel reading from
this morning. We see it as Nicodemus engages with Jesus of Nazareth who pushes
him to rethink just about every aspect of the Judaism that he has held onto as
a teacher of Israel. If Nicodemus is going to embrace what Jesus is saying to
him (which apparently according to this gospel he eventually does) he is going
to have to let go of many of the ideas and ways of thinking that have told him
who he has been up until this point in his life.
So, looking at that, my question was why are these the
stories that seem to be coming up during Lent? Lent has always been a very
important season in the life of the church. It is a time of reflection, of
repentance and of rededication. In the early church, it was also a time for focusing
on the basics of the faith. Throughout the season new members of the churches
would be taught what it meant to be followers of Jesus in preparation to be
baptized on Easter Sunday. So I think that we should also think of it as a
season when we focus on the absolute essentials of what makes us followers of
Christ.
With all of that in mind, how should we think of this theme
that seems to be introduced by this decision of Abram to just get up and go,
leaving everything that is familiar, just because God says so? I believe that
this is meant to teach us something absolutely essential about faith and what
it means for us as followers of Jesus Christ in the world today.
Let me ask you, how is faith generally perceived in our
society today? I would suggest that a very big stereotype of people of faith is
that they are people who cling to the past. That perception is not always true
about Christians, of course, but it is persistent, and it is not based on
nothing. There are many Christians today, for example, who cling to beliefs and
ways of seeing the world that are outmoded and largely discredited – those who
insist, for example, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the
world was all created about 6,000 years ago, and that it was all created in a
span of six 24-hour days. There are those who would claim that believing that,
in the face of all that contrary evidence, is a perfect example of what faith
is.
But it’s not just in matters of what people believe that
Christians can be particularly stuck to the past. It is also in matters of
practice and ways of doing things. We cling to old songs and old forms of
prayers and old traditions. Have you ever heard that favourite old hymn that
goes, “give me that old time religion, it was good enough for my father; it’s
good enough for me.”
And I am not saying that that is a horrible thing in and
of itself. Just because something is old doesn’t mean that it can’t be good. Old
traditions can obviously still be meaningful and comforting. Old truths can
still be true, and we should never abandon the truth. There is no problem if we
simply value these things and hold on to them appropriately. The problem comes
when we confuse blindly clinging to these things with faith; the problem comes
when we start to see stubbornness in itself as a virtue. And I’m afraid that we
often think in exactly that way.
If faith really were what we often assume it is, then
Abram would not be the ideal example of faith. He would be a negative example.
If faith was just about stubbornly clinging to the familiar and comfortable, then
the example that we would be celebrating today on this second Sunday of Lent
would be Ashurbanipal or Utnapishtim or whoever else turned God down flat
before Abram said yes. But there is a good reason why nobody knows who they
were.
The season of Lent is often compared to a journey. We
talk about how it is the path we have to travel in order to arrive at the sad
but beautiful truth of what happened on Good Friday when God’s love for us was
demonstrated so powerfully. It is a journey towards the incredible victory of
Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. But every journey towards something is
also a journey away from something else; that is the truth that Abram
demonstrates to us so clearly. When he left on God’s orders, what he was
journeying towards was very nebulous. God hadn’t even actually told him where
he was going yet – had only promised to let him know when he got there.
But if Abram destination was unclear, what he was leaving
was anything but. He knew exactly what he was giving up and what it was costing
him. And that is often how it works and that is why change is hard, why it is
so much easier to cling to what you know than to embrace what you have not yet
seen.
And so, if we are going to think of our passage through
Lent this year as a journey, I’m going to propose that, instead of focussing
just on where we are going, we think about what God might be calling us to let
go of in order to get there. As you may know, it is a tradition in certain
churches to give up something during the season of Lent. People might make a vow
to stop eating chocolate or desserts or to stop doing some favourite activity
during the forty days of the season. That is may be close to what I’m talking
about here, but I think we may need to look for something a little bit more
serious than that.
I’m not talking about giving up something you like for
just a short period of time. I’m talking about giving up permanently the things
that are keeping you from grasping the full truth of what God did for you on
Easter and on Good Friday.
Let me ask you, what might you be clinging to, not
because it a good thing or a healthy thing, but simply because it is what is familiar
or comfortable. Perhaps it is an old grudge – something that you have been
holding against somebody for so long that you may have even forgotten why it
was that you were mad at them in the first place. Holding on to something like
that might make you feel good – there is a comfort to it – but it is not doing
anyone any good, least of all you. I would suggest to you that part of the
Lenten journey that God is calling you to is a journey away from that grudge.
Or maybe you’ve been resisting something – some change in
your personal life or something that you are involved in – even though you know
deep down inside that the change is inevitable. Change is hard and God
understands why we resist it, but your Lenten journey this year might well
involve you walking away from the resistance. That will mean that you will walk
into something new and unfamiliar and probably disturbing because of it, but
the walk forward is a walk of faith for you as much as it was for Abram.
I just think that you need to be reminded that, if your
faith is merely something that makes you hold onto what you’ve always known,
resist change and complain about any disturbance to what you are used to, it is
not the faith of Abram. It is not the faith that prompted God to bless Abram and
make him a nation that would bring blessing to the whole world. Walking away
from some of that will be hard, of course, but the same promise of blessing
that God gave Abram is the promise he is offering to you this Lenten season. So
let’s embark on the journey together.
When, six days later, Jesus came up to Peter, James and John and quietly said, “Hey, what do you say that the four of us take a hike and climb up to the top of that mountain over there?” did they have certain expectations about what he was saying and what might happen? There are all kinds of reasons to think that they did.
Ever since human beings (or maybe even their primitive
ancestors) first stood up on their hind legs and raised their eyes to the
distant horizon, those eyes were drawn to the hills and mountains that punctuated
that horizon. And from very early times, they seem to have come to see those
mountains as significant mostly because they were places where extraordinary
things happened.
In Southeastern Turkey, not far at all from the place
that the Bible seems to be talking about when it describes the location of Garden
of Eden, there is a mountain called, in the local language, Göbekli Tepe. In
recent years, archeologists have made some amazing discoveries at that
location. They are unearthing structures made of massive stones carefully
arranged in circles with even bigger t-shaped stones standing in the middle of
them.
The site was clearly built up over many centuries, but
the truly surprising thing about it is that there are absolutely no signs of inhabitation
– there are no remains of houses, of fire pits, or of the garbage heaps that
human beings seem to be so good at leaving wherever they go. Nobody actually
lived there, but large numbers of people built it and visited it over many many
generations. Even more astonishing, the site is over 11,000 years old.
Do you have any idea how old that is – 11,000 years? That
is older than the invention of agriculture. So it wasn’t built by farmers but by
people who are sometimes called “hunter-gatherers.” At some point, there were
primitive hunter-gatherer people who lived in that part of the Anatolian
Peninsula, what is today Southeastern Turkey, who one day looked up and saw, in
the distance, that mountain of Göbekli Tepe and said to one another, come, let
us go up that mountain and spend enormous amounts of time and energy
constructing massive circles of stone on that mountain, but let’s not live
there, let’s just visit from time to time.
Now, hunter-gatherers don’t necessarily
have a lot of extra resources to spare. They tend to live at pretty close to
subsistence levels. So, this was no minor decision they were making. It would
have cost them a whole lot. Why, then, did they do it? The only theory that the
archaeologists can come up with that makes sense is that they believed, in some
sense, that if they went to the top of that mountain and built those massive
structures, they would be able to encounter God, or maybe gods, there.
And that speaks to something that I suspect is built into
the human psyche. We seem to think of mountains as places for divine
encounters. This is something that cuts across all people and all cultures. The
ancient Celts spoke about the idea that there are places in this world, they
refer to them as “thin places,” places where the boundaries between this world
and some other reality that we can’t even imagine are easily penetrated. And
mountains seem to be particularly thin places for many peoples. Maybe this was
an idea that first occurred to people because they thought of their gods as
living in the heavens and mountains were as close as you could get to the
heavens while still remaining on earth. But I think that this is about more than
just geography.
The Bible records many divine
encounters on mountaintops. Most significantly, God invited Moses to the top of
a mountain to give him the law. And it just seemed to make sense to everybody
that such an important encounter had to happen in such a place. Such dynamic
revelations could only happen in elevated places. Later, it would make sense to
everyone that the only place to worship God was upon his holy mountain, as we
read in our Psalm this morning: “Extol the Lord
our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy.” The impulse to seek to encounter
God on a mountaintop is deeply ingrained into our human souls. Maybe it has
been ever since Göbekli Tepe
So yes, it seems quite likely that, when Jesus invites the
three to go up the mountain with him, they are expecting that they might
experience something divine. And indeed they do! They have an experience that
is very much a parallel to the story of Moses on that other mountain. There is
the same encompassing cloud, the same frightening light and Moses himself even
shows up for the party.
There has been a lot of talk down through the centuries
about what actually happened on that mountain and what it means. The story has
a certain otherworldly quality to it, as if it is not quite real. Jesus himself
refers to what happens on that mountain as a vision, which adds to that impression.
But, whatever it was, what they experienced there seems to have been a powerful
confirmation of what they had only begun to suspect about Jesus: that he was
not just an ordinary person and that God was uniquely present in him.
This was not something that was clear under ordinary
circumstances. Surely, as Jesus moved through the towns and villages of
Galilee, he appeared to be nothing more and nothing less that an average Jewish
male just like anybody else. But the unique setting of the mountaintop was a
place where the inner truth of who Jesus was could literally shine through.
God’s presence in Jesus became undeniable.
I think that we are all offered moments like that in our
lives – moments when God is present in powerful ways. They may not all be quite
as dramatic as this gospel story, but they are real. God does break through
into our reality at certain times and places. There is a universality to such experiences.
Not every individual has them, of course, but every society seems to have
individuals who experience such things. I think our hunter-gatherer ancestors
experienced such things on Göbekli Tepe. Maybe their understanding was limited
and they couldn’t interpret what they saw as clearly as Moses would on his
mountain or Peter, James and John would on theirs, but that doesn’t mean that
God wasn’t there for them on their hill.
I think we do have such experiences, but the real
question in this story is how are we going to respond to them. Peter’s first
impulse is significant. His idea is to make three dwellings, one for Jesus, one for Moses
and one for Elijah. There is something about that that seems very familiar to
me, something that has been there in the human spirit for at least 11,000
years. Just as the ancient hunter-gatherers encountered something divine on top
of Göbekli Tepe and said, “Guys, we have got to build something up here. I
don’t care if it takes us centuries and consumes all of the extra energy of our
primitive hunter-gatherer societies, we are going to build something on top of
this to contain and preserve this experience so that we never lose it.” Peter
is possessed by that very same spirit.
Why do we do that? Why do we build shrines and temples
and churches on those locations where we, or perhaps where our ancestors many
generations before, had those significant experiences with God? I believe it
stems from a desire to tame or control such powerful experiences. We want to
bind the experience within a structure or institution so that we can maybe come
back and visit it from time to time, but it doesn’t escape and begin to change
everything in our lives.
Remember how I said that the ancient people who built Göbekli
Tepe expended all of that time and effort building the shrine but that nobody
actually lived there on the mountain? That was all about keeping the experience
of God at a distance – letting God or the gods know that they don’t have a
place to speak to our daily lives but that we promise to visit them on special
occasions.
Well, things really haven’t changed in the many millennia
since. Peter is still reacting just like the hunter-gatherers who had come to
Göbekli Tepe. Though he calls what he wants to build “dwellings,” (some
translations have “tents” or “tabernacles”) it is clearly not because he wants
to live on the mountain. He wants Jesus and Moses and Elijah to stay on the
mountain so that he can go on with his life without Jesus, Moses and Elijah
interfering too much. He wants to keep the powerful experience of God safe and
remote on the mountaintop.
And again, all of this is quite understandable. It is, as
I say, what people have been doing to their powerful experiences of God for at
least 11,000 years! The really surprising thing about the story of the
transfiguration is not that they had that really extraordinary encounter with
God, the really surprising thing is that they learned that day to deal with the
experience in a new way.
God speaks. God steps into the story in a very powerful
way at this point as the voice of God thunders from the enveloping cloud, “This
is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” That is
a pretty impressive way of making sure that we pay very close attention to what
Jesus says next. Peter is given a warning that, if he ignores the next thing
that Jesus says, he will be doing so at his own peril. And with such a setup,
you might expect that Jesus will have a lot to say. He, like Moses was when he
was covered by the enveloping cloud, is in a perfect position to deliver an
entire law code and Peter, James and John would be bound to receive it as a new
law.
So, our anticipation builds; what is Jesus going to say?
What he does say, of course, doesn’t seem to live up to the hype. All he says
is, “Get up and do not be afraid,” and then he presumably says, “Let’s
go back down the mountain.” That is it: don’t be afraid and let’s go. But what
he says must be loaded with meaning because we have been warned to pay heed to
it.
And indeed it is. It marks a stunning new teaching,
undoing the thing that has been built into humanity since Göbekli Tepe. For
Jesus is announcing to us that, because he has come, the experience of God is
not something that we have to respond to in fear. We don’t have to keep the
presence of God locked up in some safe spot in a temple, dwelling or tabernacle
on some mountaintop. We do not need to live in fear of it because Jesus has
come and brought God near.
But old habits die hard, don’t they? I think that, in
many ways, we are still very much like those hunter-gatherers on the ancient
Anatolian Peninsula. We still want to keep God at a safe distance in some
special place. Sometimes we treat our holy places, like for example, this sanctuary
here, as if they were on some remote mountaintop far removed from our daily
lives. We visit here, but we don’t bring our whole selves here. We leave the
rest of our lives out there and we try not to let the one affect the other.
When Jesus said that he came to announce the arrival of the kingdom of heaven, which
was his way of saying that that separation was over, God’s reality was about to
spill over into the daily world.
This is not a place for you to merely visit from time to
time and reconnect with God, this place is where the revolution that the world
still needs is supposed to begin. God is not safe here, kept apart from the struggles
of the real world. The God you meet here in Jesus Christ is going with you and
before you out into the world and into daily life. If that sounds like
something that might change everything, you’re right it is. Jesus came to
change everything, especially about how we relate to God in our daily lives.
How would you recognize an immature Christian – someone who was just starting out in their walk of following in the way of Jesus Christ? I’ll bet if you surveyed your average group of Christians, you would probably find a great variety of answers. Say you went to a fairly normal congregation like this one and asked people, confidentially of course, who they felt were the most mature Christians among them, they might say something like, “Well, brother Bob over there has taken many courses in theology and Bible study and he probably understands more about God than just about anyone. He is a very mature Christian.” And then someone else might say, “But look at sister Susan over there, she has served as an elder for so many years she has chaired many committees and even headed up that big building project. Now there’s a mature Christian for you.” Or someone else might point out brother Phil, who can pray like nobody’s business, or maybe sister Catherine who has taught generations of students in that Sunday school room.
Those are the kinds of things that we look at. We look at
education, leadership, ability and service. We look at what people have
accomplished and sometimes just it how long they’ve been around to judge
whether or not they are mature in how they live out the Christian faith. And, I’ll
be honest, that is generally how I think about it too. And I will say that I
have certainly been blessed, down through the years, to have known many mature
Christians according to those criteria. That is why I was kind of shocked when
I realized what it was that the Apostle Paul was saying in our reading this
morning from his letter to the Corinthians.
Paul speaks to the Christians in Corinth and sadly tells
them that he can’t treat them as mature Christians. In fact, he says that they aren’t
just immature, they are babies. He has to feed them milk, he says, and not
solid food. Paul is speaking here as if he were a nursing mother with a little
baby. Nobody knows for sure how long mothers nursed their children in the
ancient world. There are some indications that they may have nursed them until
they were at least three or four years old! But they still must have introduced
solid foods well before that age. Perhaps they exclusively fed their children on
milk for about the same period of time that modern mothers are recommended to
do so by the experts today: about six months
So what Paul is implying to the Corinthians is not merely
that they are immature. He’s suggesting that they are little more than newborn infants.
He’s actually casting himself as a nursing mother with a baby who cannot even
handle pablum. But what is really surprising is how it is that Paul knows that
they are immature because he doesn’t look at any of the things that we would
look at. He doesn’t look at education or experience or service or ability or
any of that stuff. There is only one indication that matters to him. “For as long
as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human
inclinations?” The fact that they
are quarreling with each other is all Paul needs to look at to know that they
are spiritual infants.
What would it be like
if we in the church today had the same understanding of spiritual maturity as Paul?
Because I’ll tell you that we don’t tend to think that way at all. We often go
to the other extreme. What do you do, for example, if you have a person in your
congregation who is, let’s say, really forceful when it comes to getting their
point of view across, who has this way of making sure that everybody goes along
with their plans? What do we do? Well, we usually let them do whatever they
want because we are scared of how they might react if we don’t. We also tend to
look at them and say, “Wow, there’s a leader for you; there’s somebody who
knows how to get things done.” And so we advance them into leadership or put
them in charge of some project.
And then, before too
long, you find yourself in a position where almost all of your leadership team
is made up of exactly that type of person and if you don’t watch out you soon
have them butting heads with one another because, I’ll tell you, none of them
are about to back down on anything. We behave as if these people are the
spiritually mature, responsible leaders and not the spiritual babies that Paul
would have seen. We act as if quarrelling and fighting are an essential part of
being the church and even reward the behaviour.
And I know that we
often excuse it. We say that people are not really fighting because it isn’t
physical. We call it being passionate or forceful and often even push the blame
onto those who complain or feel hurt by the process – tell them that it is their
fault because they are being too sensitive. You know, maybe we ought to check
with Jesus before we say things like that.
Jesus said, “You
have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’;
and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment,’” and we agree. We think,
that because people aren’t murdering each other everything’s fine. We’d go even
further and say that so long as nobody’s having fist fights in the parking lot or
keying people’s cars, we must be all good. But here’s the thing. Jesus said
that in order to reject it and say that it wasn’t good enough. He said it in
order to say, “but I say unto you…”
Jesus is giving us, in
this short passage from the Sermon on the Mount, some instructions on becoming the
kind of mature Christians that Paul was looking for but didn’t find in Corinth
– the kind of Christian who doesn’t give into quarrelling and fighting. And this
first instruction is key. He says that it’s not just about not murdering
each other. It’s not just about avoiding actual physical violence. We
need to look at deeper questions about how we treat each other, how we speak to
each other and how we behave. Words can hurt just as surely as blows can. Raised
voices and aggressive movement can frighten and even terrify.
And I know that some
people might find that to be too much to ask. How can we censor our every word
and movement all the time? It is a lot to ask and I know that it is
something that we will all fall short of at least from time to time. I fall short
often enough. But Jesus never said it was supposed to be easy. He demanded more
of his followers and it is the kind of maturity that we may sometimes fail to
achieve but that we must always aspire to.
But that is just one
part of the advice that Jesus gives to us as he encourages us to maturity. He
also teaches us to, “Come to terms quickly,” when we are faced with such
strife. That is (I suspect Paul would agree) what a mature Christian should do rather
than quarrel and fight. Now, coming to terms is something that takes some work,
it takes some communication and in some cases it might take some mediation. It
might even take some give-and-take or what you call negotiation. Sometimes it’s
really hard and sometimes it is nigh impossible, but coming to terms is
something that we can all work towards together.
But I’ll tell you
something that coming to terms isn’t; it isn’t what we often do. What do you
do, for example, when you find yourself in a situation, whether in the church
or someplace else in life, and somebody begins to act inappropriately with
someone else – insulting them, making fun of them or maybe speaking in
inappropriate racial or sexual ways? I know how people often react and I’ve
done it, sadly enough, myself. People withdraw, look down as if they had
suddenly become very interested in their shoes. And I understand why we do
that, we are afraid to speak up, afraid of the discomfort of it or that maybe
the person who is misbehaving will turn his or her attack on us. We hope that
maybe, if nobody says anything, it’ll just be over and we can pretend that it
never happened. And, indeed, that is exactly what we sometimes do afterwards as
well. But let me ask you, is that kind of response what Jesus was thinking of when
he said that we should “Come to terms?” No, he was not.
But, of course, that
is just one way that we deal with the discord that sometimes arises among us.
Sometimes, when somebody has hurt you in some way, maybe even without realizing
that they have done it, you might respond by withdrawing from that person, becoming
cold and even hostile in your reactions to them. I get that reaction. It can
really feel so good, you almost feel as if you are getting back at them by
doing it. But, let me ask you, do you think that that’s what Jesus was talking
about when he said “Come to terms”? No, it was not.
Okay then, how about, “agreeing
to disagree”? Is that what Jesus was talking about when he spoke about “coming
to terms”? Sometimes, I will admit, that is a position that we’re going to have
to take. The simple reality is very clearly that we are not always going to
agree about everything. There is no escaping that. But sometimes I feel as if we
can say that in a rather cynical way, as if we are grudgingly giving someone
permission to be wrong from our point of view and somehow I really don’t feel that
that’s what Jesus was getting at when he spoke of “coming to terms.” Surely
there are ways to say that and to truly respect and honour that person who
holds a different point of view, to be willing to learn from them even if, in
the end, you don’t agree. I think that could be close to what Jesus was talking
about when he said, “come to terms.”
But most of all, what
I think Jesus was saying was that we need to truly love one another. And if you
truly love one another and you run into one of those inevitable patches when you
see something differently or are hurt by something that somebody does either
intentionally or unintentionally, then you are going to put in the effort and
the time to actually communicate what you feel and what you need. You will put
in the time and effort you need to understand where somebody is coming from and
why they might be feeling the way they are (which, I have found, often has
little to do with the disagreement at hand but with something deeper that might
be going on in their life).
It also means you are
going to be willing to tell somebody the hard truth, like how they might have
hurt others with their behaviour. That is a hard thing for anyone to hear, but
when it comes from a place of love, it can be a transformative moment. I think
that that might just be a piece of what Jesus was getting at when he told us
that we should come to terms.
Is any of that easy?
Of course it isn’t. Is any of us going to be able to do that all the time? Of
course not. We will all fall short at least from time to time. But, as Paul
makes very clear, our failures to do this do not mean that we are not followers
of Christ or that we have no place in the kingdom of heaven. It means that we
are immature Christians who can’t quite handle solid food. But full maturity is
what we should all desire. It is what Christ has called us to. So let us all
put in the work to get there.
God, I don’t mean to complain, but I’ve got to ask, what is the problem here? I mean, we Presbyterians, we have got it all figured out, don’t we? We believe all the right things. We have to because we work so hard at getting it right. We believe in God the Father the creator of heaven and Earth. We believe in Jesus Christ his only son and all the right stuff about his life and his death and his resurrection. We believe correctly about the nature of Christ and the nature of the trinity even if (if I can be candid here for a moment) it doesn’t make a lot of logical sense to us.
We believe all the right things about the church and how
it should operate. In fact, we are so careful about that that every time we
even think of making any change in church policy we send it out to all the
committees and go over the wording with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that we’ve
got it just right before we adopt it. We don’t care if it takes us years, maybe
even decades, we will not make that change until we get it just right.
We are so careful and so correct, and yet what do we see
happening in our church? As our friend, John-Peter, shared with us a couple of
weeks ago, we find ourselves today in a denomination that is undergoing a steep
decline, a decline that has been fairly steady and straightforward ever since
1959. Day after day we seek you and delight to know your truth and be correct
in all of it, and yet this is what you let happen to us?
Why
do we work so hard to be right, but you do not see? Why convince ourselves that
we’ve got the answers, but you do not notice? Well, I guess the only thing we
can do is just try harder to be all the more right all the time. Surly you will
soon come around and give us what it is that we most desire.
I puzzled for a long time over our reading this morning
from the Book of Isaiah. In it, the people of Israel are clearly going through
a difficult time. They are feeling as if God is not giving them what they think
they need. Now, I could probably tell you what it was that they were struggling
with. Biblical scholars actually have some pretty good ideas about the enemies
that surrounded them, the hard economic times they were dealing with and things
like that. But I really think that the point of us reading it today has less to
do with the things that they were actually struggling with and more to do with
the things that we today sometimes struggle with.
The main point is that they were struggling just like we
sometimes struggle. But they were complaining to God specifically because they
figured that they were doing everything right and so God ought to be giving
them a better time. And, honestly, I think there are times when we also feel
like that. So this passage suddenly seemed very relevant to me.
But here was my problem: the thing that they figured they
were doing right was fasting. Now, fasting is something that does come up in
the modern world from time to time, usually in the form of a diet craze. For
example, these days everyone is talking about the 5:2 Diet where you eat
normally five days a week and then fast two. But they weren’t fasting for
health or because they were hoping to lose some weight. They were fasting
because they had this notion that, if they went without food and suffered
because of it, God should notice and give them what they really needed. And,
what’s more, they figured that they had this fasting thing just right, that not
only did they have the hunger pangs, but they were also bowing down and
humbling themselves just beautifully. It was a perfect fast. That is why they
thought that their complaint against God was so legitimate. They were doing
everything right, but God wasn’t holding up his part of the bargain.
And I, honestly, have a bit of a rough time identifying
with that. I mean, I know that there are some Christians in the world today who
really get hung up over carrying out religious actions like prayers or fasting
or rituals and doing them just perfectly, but that’s not really how
Presbyterians or most Protestants think about these things. You would never
catch us suggesting that the only way to solve some problem we are having is by
finding a certain ritual and executing it perfectly. So, it really seemed like
there was no way for us to relate to the people that the prophet is addressing
in this passage.
But then I thought about matters of belief. Protestants,
you see, have this obsession about believing all the right things. I guess
that, when we understand that we access our salvation by faith, it does make a
certain amount of sense. If faith is so key, then surely what you believe
matters. What’s more, we all believe the truth matters and if truth matters,
well, then it matters that you believe true things.
That is all fair enough, but there is a dangerous leap
that we tend to make within that logic. We easily seem to fall into thinking
that faith is just a matter of believing the right things about God, about
Jesus, the Bible and a host of other things. And when we think that way, the
stakes are suddenly very high. Suddenly, if I believe one thing and you believe
something that’s maybe slightly different, that is not just a matter for
discussion, it becomes a matter of salvation! Suddenly questions of belief
become things to fight over, maybe even die over. We also begin to expect that
God should reward us and give us preferential treatment because we happen to
believe all the right things.
But just as the prophet came to the people of Judah in
our Old Testament reading this morning and said, “Do you really believe that
God is going to give you all of these things that you think that you need
simply because you do the right kind of fast?” so would God come to us today
and say, “Why should I grant to you, as a church, all of these blessings and victories
and growth because you think that you figured out all the right stuff to
believe?” Just as they were focussing on the wrong thing by trying to get their
fasts right, I believe we might be doing the same thing in our focus on belief
and doctrine.
Again, this is not because these things don’t matter. Of
course, they matter. They are of ultimate importance. But there is a great
danger when we put all of our energy into working out these things that we miss
the bigger aspects of our calling. What happens when, for example, we
substitute “right belief” for fasting in the prophet’s diatribe?
“Look,” he might say, “you may get your beliefs all
right, but you only seem to be serving your own interests as you do so. Sure,
you do an admirable job in figuring out the right things to believe, but you
seem to only do it in order to quarrel and fight with each other. Such good
doctrine will not make your voice heard on high. Is this the right belief that
I choose, creating perfect statements of doctrine and theology? Is this belief
that is acceptable to the Lord?”
Now, to be perfectly clear, the prophet was not trying to
suggest to the people of Judah that fasting and other similar religious
observances and practices were bad things. On the contrary, he believed that
fasting was a good thing. In the same way, the prophet would not chastise us
for our quest to work out a belief system that is most perfectly aligned with
the truth about God, the universe and everything. His caution was that the
pursuit of that good thing was preventing them from seeking the better thing.
Even worse, he was accusing them of substituting the good thing for that better
thing that was absolutely needed from God’s point of view.
And what is that better thing? That better thing is
justice. That better thing is the pursuit of a world and a situation where all
are treated fairly, where outcasts and marginalized people are welcomed in and
where those who are enslaved in any way are granted freedom. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to
loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the
oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?Is it not to share your
bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you
see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
I
can only imagine how that was a problem with the ancient Judeans – how they
were so obsessed with pleasing God with their perfect fasts, piously going
without food and feeling so holy for it, that they totally failed to notice the
people next door or homeless in the streets who were going without food for anything
but pious reasons. I can only imagine how it was for them, but I know exactly
how it is a problem for us. When we get caught up in believing the right
things, it can be so easy for us to reject certain people because they do not
fit our idea of what a Christian is supposed to be or of what righteousness is
and, even if we may not intend it that way, the result is often rejection and
deep wounding.
Jesus
understood and believed in the importance of right belief. “Truly
I tell you,” he said, “until heaven and earth pass away,
not one letter,not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law
until all is accomplished.” But he taught that compassion and care,
especially for the outsiders, the rejected, the sinners and the forgotten, always
trumped the importance of right belief. For what was the point of having the
light of the knowledge of the truth if it did not shine before others. “No
one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the
lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your
light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory
to your Father in heaven.”
Our
Old Testament prophet is very clear about how that could happen. It was only
when you learned to prioritize justice, when you reached out to those living in
the margins and when you shared what you could with those who did not have enough,
that this promise was activated: “Then your light shall break forth like the
dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator go before you, the
glory of the Lord shall
be your rear guard… If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the
finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy
the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your
gloom be like the noonday.”
Jesus
understood that and agreed. It was what he was talking about when he spoke of
the lamp set up on the lampstand and the city built up on the hilltop. It is still
the only way for us to be what Jesus envisioned. So, by all means, do think
about and joyfully discuss the things that you believe. They matter and it
matters that you get them as right as you can (for none of us, I believe, will
ever understand it all), but know that, far more than that you believe the
right things, Jesus requires of you that you live out the faith in practical
terms, that you act with compassion, love and understanding, because Jesus really
does want your light to shine forth.
My friends, my brothers and sisters, I have some dire news for you this morning. The Christian faith, the Christian church and everything associated with the name of Jesus Christ is under attack. What is worse, the forces that are attacking it are likely to succeed in destroying it because they are unlike any other foe that we have ever faced.
So, what is this enemy? What is this foe unlike any
other? I know that some of you think that you know what I am going to say. You
think that I might be warning of the dangers of secularism. You may be thinking
that the greatest danger facing us has to do with the rising tide of people who
are pleased to orient everything in their lives without any reference to God,
without any reference to divine authority or writ. You may be thinking of the
tendency of society itself to make every decision without giving any
consideration at all to questions about God or religion.
Now, I will grant you that there are certain difficulties
that the general secularization of society has created for the church in our
times. Things were definitely easier for the church when the society deferred to
it and when it reserved certain days of the week for the almost exclusive use
of the church, for example. Things were easier when society and government
listened when the church spoke simply because it was the church speaking. It
was easier when being a Christian, in name at least, was the natural default
for just about everyone. Oh yes it was easier! But surely the lack of ease is
not possibly something that could bring about the destruction and end of
Christianity. If it were as fragile as all that, Christianity would have passed
away long ago. So, no, I do not think but the forces of secularization could
possibly be the thing that is bringing about the demise of Christianity.
Ah, but some of you might say that the real threat that
is destroying the faith today is the reality of pluralism. Pluralism is the
name we give to the phenomenon of what we find ourselves in today: a society in
which there is a plurality of religions and faiths. Where once, in North
America, there was only Christianity in its various forms and almost nobody who
belonged to another faith. I mean, there were a few Jews here and there but
that’s about it. But today, it seems, it is far more likely that your new neighbours
will turn out to be Sikhs or Muslims or Hindus than that they turn out to be
Baptists or Catholics or Presbyterians. The mere fact that people who are
followers of non-Christian faiths (or even no faith at all) are all over the
place in our society means that Christianity no longer has that first place and
the privileges that go with it.
So, is that the foe that will destroy our Christian
faith? Is pluralism going to be what brings us down? No, that is not the danger
I am talking about. I realize that the loss of privilege and a first place
within society is hard. Sometimes it even feels like persecution. But actually,
the simple fact that Christianity has to deal with some competition in the
spiritual marketplace today should not worry us. Surely the Christian faith is
strong enough that it can endure in the face of a bit of competition for the
hearts and minds of people.
So, if it’s not secularism or pluralism, what is it? The true threat does not come from atheism or science or even from changes in societal morality. No, the true threats, the ones that are attacking the faith head-on, are Christians. And it’s not even that they are bad Christians – at least I don’t think most of them are – they are just frightened Christians. You see, they feel as if Christianity is under attack from all of those things that I’ve mentioned – the secularism, pluralism and other various trends that we see in the world. They feel as if they must fight against these things, must engage in what is called cultural warfare. The ironic thing is that by doing that, they are attacking the very essence of the Christian faith itself.
Let me show you what I mean. Just recently, Liberty
University, probably the most important Evangelical Christian Education Institution
in the United States created a new thinktank called the Falkirk Center for
Faith and Liberty. It is a way to bring together Christian intellectuals to set
the theoretical basis for the church’s interaction with the outside world.
Here is a part of Falkirk’s mission statement: “Bemoaning the
rise of leftism is no longer enough and turning the other cheek in our personal
relationships with our neighbors as Jesus taught while abdicating our
responsibilities on the cultural battlefield is no longer sufficient. There is
too much at stake in the battle for the soul of our nation.” Now think, for a moment, about what it is they are saying there. They are
saying that in order to defend the faith against the things that are attacking it,
things that they collectively call “leftism” (which I think is a very unhelpful
term) but which includes things like secularism and pluralism – that, because
these things are attacking Christianity in their view, we basically have to
abandon the very teachings of Christ in order to fight back.
Jesus taught us to
turn the other cheek; they’re saying that that’s foolishness and we ain’t going
to do that. So, what is the real threat here? Is it the forces of
secularization or “liberalism” if you prefer, or is it the people who are
abandoning the very teachings of Christ and teaching people that they must abandon
them because they feel threatened by these things?
The Apostle Paul predicted
that this would happen, as he wrote to the church in Corinth: “For the
message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us
who are being saved it is the power of God.” The simple truth is that the
message of Jesus Christ is seen to be ultimate foolishness as far as the world
is concerned. The message of the world is that the only way to defeat what is
evil in the world is through strength, power and violence. It is the oldest
story ever told but it is also the story that we keep telling all the time.
It is the plot of
about half of the movies that are made. When there is something wrong, some
evil that is being done, somebody is called upon to make it right. And whether
that hero is James Bond or Iron Man or the Mandalorian, how do they make
everything right again? Generally, they come in with guns blazing and start
blasting away until all of the enemies have been destroyed. That is the wisdom
of this world: only violence can answer violence, only power defeats the power
of evil and the only way to win is by fighting back.
And, you know what, if
that is how you see the world then, I’m sorry, but the message of Jesus is
complete and utter foolishness. I’m not surprised that Christians who feel that
they’re on some sort of battlefield have decided that they need to abandon
everything he stood for.
But that is the very thing that threatens the foundation
of the Christian faith, not only because it is a denial of everything that
Jesus stood for, but even more because it robs us of the true power and wisdom
that should be ours. For the kingdom of God will never be realized until we
learn to live up to what Jesus called us to be.
We read one of the most famous passages in the Gospel of
Matthew this morning: the beatitudes of Jesus, part of the Sermon on the Mount.
The ideal of the kingdom of heaven that Jesus presents here is another example
of the approach to the faith that some Christians are rejecting because they
feel that they cannot afford it because the faith is under attack. But it is
also more than that. What we have in this passage is the antidote to the line
of thinking that led us into this problem in the first place. In many ways, the
beatitudes represent the height of foolishness.
The key word, “blessed,” is a translation of the Greek
word Maka,rioi. It is a word that indicates a
state not only of blessedness but also of happiness and good fortune. Many
years ago, when the Good News translation of the Bible first came out, they
actually translated the beatitudes like this: “How happy are the poor in
spirit...” People reacted to that translation at the time and said that
they didn’t like it. I was just a kid at the time, but I still remember someone
reacting to that translation and saying, “That doesn’t make any sense; being ‘poor
in spirit’ means that you are unhappy! How can you be happy to be unhappy!”
But since that time, I grew up and studied Greek and biblical
translation and I can absolutely tell you that “How happy are the poor in
spirit” is actually a pretty good translation. It is what Jesus
meant to say. He was congratulating these people. And he also meant for people
to react in exactly the same way that that man from my church did; he wanted
them to say, “this doesn’t make any sense.” That was the point of all of these
teachings; none of it made sense according to the philosophy of the world.
But, by telling people
to be happy because they were poor and meek and hungry and thirsty and
despised, what Jesus was doing was redefining victory; he was redefining
winning. You see, the mistake that defenders of the faith are making today is
that they are defining the success of the Christian faith in the way that the
world defines it. They are defining it in terms of power, in terms of dominance
and in terms of influence. Jesus taught the opposite. He taught that the
victory that mattered would come through service, through submission and
through vulnerable weakness. When he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they
will inherit the earth.” What else could he have meant?
That is also what the
Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human
wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” But think
about what that means, it means that every time we think of the church getting
ahead in terms of exercising power and influence within society and the world,
we are actually self-defeating. Every time we try to win in the way that the
world works, we move farther away from the success that God actually wants us
to have. And the reason why this is so hard for us is because for something
like the last sixteen centuries, that has been exactly what the church has been
doing in Western society.
And, what’s more, the
church was pretty successful at it as far as the world was concerned. We had
the power and we had the influence and it was great! We even actually did do
some good with all of that power and influence. The church created some of the
best education systems, health systems, some of the most beautiful music and
art the world has ever seen, just to name a few things. We should not be overly
critical of that legacy, but that was never how Jesus defined success for his church.
Today it seems as if
that has all changed and the church struggles with that loss of power and
prestige. Of course, it does create some hardships, but it also creates a great
promise. For the first time in over a thousand years it would seem as if the
church has an opportunity to seek the kind of victory and strength that Jesus
had in mind all along.
There are places in
the world where Christians are under attack or facing persecution. Of course,
we should do what we can to support them and help them and pray for them. But,
generally speaking, North America is not one of those places where the faith is
being threatened. It is not under attack except by those who would betray who
Jesus was and what he stood for because they feel threatened by some of the
ways in which the world has changed. The church is and always been in the hands
of its only King and head, Jesus who is God’s anointed one. To suggest that
Jesus cannot preserve his church despite some changes that may be occurring is
the failure of faith on our part. And if we renounce the message of Jesus
because of our fear and failure of faith, that will be the greatest failure of
all.
Zebedee was getting old. He’d been at this fishing trade for a long time – maybe too long. His hearing wasn’t what it once was and that was probably why he didn’t hear when the man came walking down the shores of the Sea of Galilee and spoke to his sons who were sitting at the other end of the boat. He didn’t even look up from the rather difficult knot that he was struggling to get out of the net.
Besides, he was busy talking – something that he seemed
to do all day every day – something that his two sons, James and
John, were so accustomed to listening to that they generally responded with nothing
but nods and the odd grunt.
“Have you heard about what happened up Capernaum way the
other day,” he had been saying to them. “You know Peter and Andrew, the two
brothers who have a boat up there? Well, they were out casting their nets just
a little off from shore when that new young man – you know, the one that just
moved down from the hills in Nazareth – came along. He apparently called out to
them across the water and he told them – get this – he told them that they
should stop fishing for fish and start fishing for people instead.
“But that’s not the really crazy part, oh no! The really
crazy part is that they actually listened to him. They jumped off their boat,
leaving behind a pretty decent catch of fish in the process, and swam to him
and then started following him. Can you believe that?
“They left everything behind. I mean, I realize that
there’s not a lot of good money in fishing these days. I know better than
anybody how hard it is to get by, but these are men who have people depending
on them. Peter’s got a wife and a couple of kids. Andrew is taking care of his
mother and his sisters. I mean, it’s just not fair that they should leave those
people behind and go off after somebody just because he’s got these crazy ideas
that maybe mean something to them. It’s just not fair that Jesus would even ask
them to do something like that.
“Well, at least I know that something like that is not
going to happen to me. I know that I can count on my boys to be there for me and
to keep this old fishing boat going when I get too old to go out there on the
water day after day. You boys know that it wouldn’t be fair for you to leave me
and… boys? Jimmy, Johnny? You guys are being pretty quiet back there in the
stern. You wouldn’t be playing a joke on your old man now would you? Boys,
boys?”
Now, obviously I don’t know if it went down like that.
The Gospel of Matthew tells the story very briefly with little detail. Maybe
James and John did have a good talk with their father before they got up and
left and the old man was in agreement. But I certainly don’t get that
impression from reading the gospel story. The point of the story seems to be
that they just got up and left. And I can’t help but think about what that
meant for their father – how he must have thought it was all unfair.
Last fall in the auction, I put a sermon up for the
bidding. I said that I would give the person who bid the most the opportunity
to tell me what to preach about one Sunday in January: this Sunday. The winner
was Andy Cann. And after, I am sure, that Andy flirted with the thought of
making me preach something that would probably end my career, he finally
suggested to me the title of this morning’s sermon: “It ain’t fair.” Which,
frankly, could still end my career if I don’t watch out.
Now, Andy was thinking about some particular things that
happen in the church when he suggested that topic. He spoke about some of the ways
in which the burden of the work of the church tends to fall unfairly on certain
people. He spoke, for example, about particular case (that I won’t spell out
because I don’t have permission from everyone involved), but it was a case where
a small group of people were supporting an important mission of the church –
something that we are all supposed to be part of – mostly out of their own
pockets. That, Andy pointed out rightly enough, that ain’t right.
I don’t really need to get into specific cases in order
to explore what Andy was getting at because this is actually something that
happens in the church all the time. I don’t know how many times over the years
I have had somebody come up to me talking about some very similar situation – a
situation where somebody feels as if they (or somebody else) are unfairly
loaded with some burden, cost or duty in the church. I don’t know how many
times I have heard people complain that others aren’t pitching in and doing
their part. And of course, there generally is a lot of truth to what is being said
because it is almost never true that the burden of being the church is evenly
distributed among all the people.
And part of me wants to use Andy’s question to stir
people up, to get them to all step up and pitch in – to make sure that we all
collectively own and support the good work that the church does. And, of course,
that is a noble goal. But I do generally find that, before we ask people to act
differently – to share the load differently – we need to ask why it is that
people behave the way that they do now. If you don’t understand that, chances
are you will not be successful at bringing about the changes that you would
like to see.
The first question, I think, is whether or not fairness
is actually what we should be striving for. The answer to that question might
be no. When Jesus came along and stole Zebedee’s two sons away from him, the
two sons that he had been depending on to take over the family business, do you
think that Jesus was aware of the hardship that he might be causing for the old
man? I think that he was. I think that he was aware that, to a certain extent,
it was unfair of him to deprive Zebedee of the family supports that he had been
counting on.
But why was Jesus there? He was there to proclaim a
message, and that message was, Matthew tells us, “Repent, for the kingdom of
heaven has come near.” Jesus was announcing that something so big had
arrived that it had changed everything. What’s more, he declared that the
arrival of the kingdom demanded a particular response: repentance. The word
that Jesus uses there – the word that is translated as repent – is a
Greek word that actually means to change one’s mind and one’s heart. Jesus was
saying that, because God had turned up on the scene to do something grand, that
it was time for everyone to start thinking about life and just about everything
else in completely different ways. Apparently, that included thinking
differently about things like the expectations that society placed upon you.
What James and John did, getting up and walking away from
their lives, may have broken all of the expectations that society had placed upon
them, but it was actually the perfect response to the new reality that Jesus
had brought into being. All of that is a way of saying that our human notions of
fairness, that idea that everyone else should live up to the expectations we
have of them, may have been superseded by something greater, something more
important, by the kingdom of heaven which blasts everyone’s expectations out of
the water – apparently literally in the case of Peter and Andrew.
Now, does that mean that there should be no expectation
of fairness in the life of the church? Of course not. But it does mean that we
are supposed to look at the bigger picture and not just the fairness of a
particular circumstance.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by our reading this
morning from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Addressing the church, he says, “Bear
one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
But then, only a couple of lines later he says, “for all must carry their
own loads.” Now just wait a minute here, Paul, which is it? Do we carry other
people’s burdens or just our own? Surely you cannot have it both ways.
But, of course, Paul knew exactly what he was doing when
he put those two contradictory sentences so close together. He was trying to
get our attention. He was actually trying to show us that, when we focus on what
other people are doing or contributing, we will go astray. That is why, in
between those two contradictory statements, he slips in this little gem: “All
must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work,
will become a cause for pride.”
You see, if we only focus on what other people are doing
(or failing to do), the church can never become what it needs to be. Focussing
on what other people do, Paul warns us, is the cause of pride. Pride is a
difficult concept for us to understand sometimes. Pride can sometimes be a good
thing like, for example, when someone takes pride in doing a job well. When you
set out to do something and you put everything you can into it and get the
results you are trying for, of course you should be able to feel good about
what you have accomplished.
Paul is not here warning about that kind of pride because
it is a pride that that is related to testing your own work, focussing on what you can do.
The problem comes when you try to feel good about yourself by focussing on
other people – by putting someone else down so that you look better or by
criticizing somebody else’s best efforts. That, Paul is saying, is what is very
destructive for the church and in many other areas of life. And I will say
that, yes, that is something that I have seen often enough in the life of the
church.
Sometimes, for example, the very people who carry the
heavy loads at the church, and occasionally righteously complain about it, are
trapped precisely because they have this problem. They might well say, for
example, that they want somebody else to take on their burden, but what happens
when somebody actually steps up to do so? Well, they don’t do it right, do they?
They don’t do it in the way that it has always been done, so they can’t take
over. And so the person who tries to take on their burden gives up in
frustration and they end up still carrying that burden and (even better)
still being able to complain about how unfair it is. That is all about a
dangerous kind of pride, all about feeling better about yourself by criticizing
others and it has no place in the logic of the kingdom of heaven.
Paul suggests that the only way for you to avoid this
kind of pitfall is to focus on what you can do, how you can contribute by
bearing the burdens of others rather than on who ought to be bearing your
burdens and who ought to be doing what and how and so falling into the pride
that puts others down. The result of all of that is not always going to be fair
in the sense that the burdens will always be equally distributed. But the
kingdom was always about more than what feels fair in the moment, it is about changing
the way that we look at everything because God has suddenly shown up on the
scene.
I feel for poor Zebedee left alone in his boat. The aftermath
of all of that cannot have been easy for him. But he also had his role to play
and a burden to bear in the great thing that God was doing. I have to believe
that he came to realize that, even if it took some time. We all have our roles
to play and our burdens to carry. As we all focus on what we can do to carry
the loads of others, we will come to find the true strength of the message that
Jesus brought.
I believe that Jesus Christ is the Messiah. I believe that he is the Son of God and the one who has revealed God to us in a uniquely powerful way. But holding such belief can be a challenge sometimes. Being a believer doesn’t mean that you never have doubts or questions. Being a believer is not the same thing as being certain. And so I have thought, as I’m sure you have also thought at times, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to know rather than simply to believe? Wouldn’t it be nice to be presented with the evidence right there before your eyes and be put in the position that left you with no room to doubt?
Wouldn’t it have been nice, for example, to have been
there for that episode we read about in the Gospel of Matthew this morning? There
doesn’t seem to be any room for doubt in that scene. John the Baptist is so
certain that Jesus is the one that he’s been looking for, that he even protests
that it would be inappropriate for him to baptize Jesus because that would
imply that, in some sense, Jesus was less important than John! But even the certainty
of John is blown out of the water by what happens immediately following the
baptism: “just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were
opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting
on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I
am well pleased.’”
Now, wouldn’t it have been something to witness that – to see the Spirit
of God descending just like a dove flies down from the sky, to hear that voice
speaking so clearly? I mean, surely that’s about as close to proof and evidence
as you can get. And there clearly must have been a lot of people who were
there. The gospel writers speak of large crowds going out to see John the
Baptist despite his remote location. So hundreds, if not thousands, could have
witnessed the incredible event. The result of such an experience must have been
that huge numbers of Judeans and Galileans left that day in the certain and
secure knowledge of exactly who Jesus was and what he had come to do.
Except, well, if you
continue to read through the gospels from this point in the story, that’s not
quite what seems to have happened, is it? Oh, there is no question that people
are very interested in what Jesus does in his ministry. He is able to gather
huge crowds most everywhere he goes. But, as interested as the people are in
Jesus, they hardly seem very certain about what he represents. In fact, I seem
to recall an episode later in the gospel, when the disciples report back to
Jesus about what the people have been saying about who he is and there are all
these crazy ideas floating around – “Some say John the Baptist, but others
Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” (Matthew 16:14) So
apparently there were a lot of people speculating about who Jesus was, but,
with all of that talk, no one seemed to be saying anything about the words that
reverberated from heaven in front of all those witnesses. It wasn’t being
rumoured all over the place that he might be the Son of God.
And, what’s more, we are told that even John – even the Baptist
who Matthew tells us was so certain when Jesus was standing in front of him – was
soon racked with doubts on that very subject. We’re told that, later, when he
was in prison and waiting for his own execution, he became so discouraged that
he sent word to Jesus asking him outright whether or not he was the one. Is
that the kind of thing that you would ask after hearing the voice of God
booming directly from heaven telling you exactly who Jesus was? I mean, if you
have heard the voice, you have no need to second guess what you see Jesus doing
afterwards, do you?
So, the story of the baptism of Jesus with its very public
confirmation of who Jesus was, leaves us with a big question mark. If it all
went down like that, why wasn’t everyone completely certain about who Jesus was
throughout his ministry? I can think of two possible answers and I suspect that
both are correct to a certain extent.
The first answer is that proof is not the fix for all our faith
issues that we think it is. Just because, at some moment in your life, you are confronted
with something that absolutely convinces you that God is real and that God is
present in some powerful way, that doesn’t mean that you will never again doubt
such realities. It is simply not true that, the more proof you have of
something, the less doubt you will have about it.
Doubt is something that is simply in our human nature. And it is
actually a gift and a very good thing. Doubt is what makes the researcher not
just accept the established results of previous science, and instead push on and
keep asking questions until a new theory and better answer is found. If
humanity had never struggled with doubt, we would have struggled with far more
ignorance as we settled for insufficient answers.
But we are sometimes tormented by doubt too. Even when you have
been convinced of something that is really important to you – when you have
been given ample proof, for example, that somebody loves you – you can still be
racked with doubts about their love. Why? Simply because the answer to the
question, “do they love me?” is so very important to you. Well, the things you
believe about Jesus fall into much the same category. They are the kinds of beliefs
that people build their lives around. And, because of that, it may not matter
how much Jesus proves to you that he’s there and committed to you, you may still
doubt it just because it matters that much.
So actually, I do not find it impossible that John and the others
gathered at the Jordan River really did hear a voice booming down from heaven
that identified exactly who Jesus was and yet could have still walked away from
such an experience doubting what their eyes had seen and their ears had heard.
But that is all based on the assumption that everything that
happened by the Jordan was plain for everyone to see, but as I look closer at
what the passage actually says, maybe we ought not to be assuming that. Matthew
is actually rather careful in how he describes the events of that day and the
more I read it, the less certain I am about who saw and heard what.
In fact, you can kind of get lost when you delve into the grammar
of Matthew’s description. “The heavens were opened to him,” it says, “and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a
dove and alighting on him.” But who is he in that sentence? And
is the he who saw it the same him upon whom the Spirit alighted?
I suspect that Matthew quite intentionally kept all of that rather vague.
Matthew doesn’t actually tell us who saw what.
Even more strange, he also doesn’t actually tell us who heard
what either. All he writes is, “And a voice from heaven
said…” You’ve all heard the classic philosophical
question, “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does
it make a sound?” Well, Matthew kind of leaves us with a similar philosophical query.
What does it matter what a voice from heaven says if we don’t know who heard it?
But an even better question is what does the voice of the Lord resounding from heaven sound like,
and how would you recognize it? There are, of course, many stories in the Bible
of people hearing God’s voice. The Old Testament prophets, for example, are always
talking about how God told them this or God told them that. And I always used
to imagine that just like any other conversation except that you couldn’t see
God when God was speaking, only hear. But the more I study the prophets, the
less convinced I am that it worked like that.
As you look at how they operated, you realize that, most often,
when they speak of what the Lord
said to them, they are reflecting on the events happening around them or in the
larger political sphere and are detecting some message from God in those
things. It would seem that hearing God’s voice is a little bit different from most
every conversation you have ever had.
We read a psalm together this morning, the beautiful 29th
psalm, which is all about hearing the voice of the Lord. “The voice of the Lord is over the waters;” it
declares. “the God of glory thunders, the Lord,
over mighty waters. The voice of the Lord
is powerful; the voice of the Lord
is full of majesty.” But, as you continue to read, you start to wonder what
exactly the voice of the Lord is
as it does things like break cedars trees, make forests and mountain skip, flash with
fire, shake the wilderness and make oak trees whirl. Soon it becomes clear enough,
what the palmist is actually describing is a powerful thunderstorm and the
effects it has on the countryside.
What the psalmist is saying is that, at least sometimes, the voice
of the Lord can appear in the form
of a powerful storm. But think of what that means for a moment. If God can
speak through a powerful storm, then it is quite possible for one person to
witness that storm and think, “Wow, that is a powerful storm,” and somebody
else might see that same thing and respond, “Yes, Lord, I have heard what you
are saying.”
The voice of the Lord is always and has always been open to
interpretation. I have thought about that a lot recently as I have reflected on
what has been happening in the world. Speaking of storms and God speaking
through storms, how about the firestorms that have swept through Australia over
the past few weeks. They have been huge and unprecedented. As of last week, an
area of that country as large of all of Southern Ontario – from Windsor in the
west to Tobermory in the north to Peterborough in the east – all of it has been
destroyed by fire. That is huge – some would say apocalyptic – in scale.
There is no question that something significant has happened in
Australia, but whether or not there is a message in it is a matter of
interpretation. One person (such as, apparently the Australian Prime Minister) might
look at the devastation and say, “Wow, that is terrible and horrible and everything,
but we don’t really have to change anything about how we live.” And somebody
else looks at the same thing and may hear the voice of the Lord saying, “Maybe
it is time for everyone to make some serious changes.”
Now, one way of seeing this might be right, and the other might be
wrong. Presumably either God is speaking or God isn’t. And I certainly have my
thoughts about which interpretation is right. But, because everyone has a stake
in what the interpretation is, there is no answer that is unmistakable, by
which I mean people always seem to find ways to make mistakes when it comes to
the voice of the Lord.
So, if you are looking for certainty about God, about Christ and
who he is, the answer seems to be that it doesn’t quite work like that. If you
were there on the day when John baptized Jesus (an event that I certainly
believe really happened) I’m not sure what you would have seen. Maybe you would
have seen a dove fly from a nearby branch, maybe the clouds formed some unusual
formation. Maybe you might have even heard thunder or some other unusual sound
rumbling from the sky. Somebody who was there saw all of that and heard the
voice of the Lord in it, but would you have? And if you did, would you have
believed? Maybe. I hope so, but still that would be different from being
absolutely certain about who Jesus was.
I understand why you would like to be certain. It is natural. But
clearly that is not how God works. And there is a good reason why. I actually don’t
think that people operate all that well from a position of certainty. When
people are completely certain about their position, that is when they turn into
tyrants. That is when, even sometimes with the best of intentions, they can
easily become persecutors or oppressors of those who disagree with them.
There is a humility that comes from struggling with doubt (at
least when you’re honest with yourself about it) and so God doesn’t give us
certainty. God invites us to faith and though it may be harder, I do believe
that it is better.
There is actually a whole lot to be said for doing everything in the way that it has always been done. Take a Sunday morning worship service for example. When I am planning a worship service that follows the normal weekly pattern, it is always a lot less work. I can just copy and paste what we’ve done before and then make some changes as needed. I know where to go to find hymns and prayers and other elements of the service. Even more importantly, there is a psychological comfort and ease in working according to pre-established patterns and forms.
But just try planning an unusual or innovative worship service. You find yourself basically reinventing the wheel. You have to go back and rethink the function of a prayer or a litany at a certain point in the service and then write the thing according to that purpose. That is a lot more work. And that is just when you’re preparing for the thing. The actual worship service itself takes even more concentration because it’s just a lot easier to lose track of what’s next and how it is supposed to go.
And if that’s true about a worship service, it is doubly true about any new or innovative project or event that you might consider in the church. The first time you do something, you have to invent or create just about every aspect of what you do. There is also much more potential for something to go wrong in some unanticipated way. After you’ve done a program a few times it can be so much easier and a lot less work.
For example, as you will see as you continue to read through this newsletter, we are about to embark on a bold new endeavour in the coming weeks; we’re calling it Hespeler Arts Palooza. Though this is something that builds upon some past successful events, the scope of what we are attempting is quite new and rather daunting. It hasn’t even started yet and we are already feeling the stress of it as we work on schedules and finding innovative ways to get the word out to the people we are trying to engage.
So, given that new is hard, you have to ask the question: why even try it? Why not just keep doing things the way that they have always been done? Of course, there’s also the added benefit that church people often take a great deal of comfort from what they are used to and what they have experienced before and are more likely to criticize or even complain when dealing with the unfamiliar. So why even bother trying anything new?
The reasons are many, but I would like to share a few with you from my perspective.
Just because something worked in the past, doesn’t mean that it is the best or only way to do it moving forward. In fact, since the church finds itself within a rapidly changing society – a rapidly changing world! – we find ourselves in a situation where what worked in the past might be increasingly irrelevant to society. But, if we never try anything new, we will never be able to compare what worked in the past with what works today.
Yes, there is a comfort to be found in doing what we are used to, but we must ask, is comfort what we are called to as followers of Christ? No. We are called to lives of faith and trust in God and stepping out and taking a risk by trying something new is indeed an excellent way to exercise our faith muscles.
While there is indeed comfort and ease in routine, there is an excitement that comes with trying something new. We cannot constantly be in such an excited state, of course, because it can wear us down, but seasons of excitement are needed to keep us engaged and interested.
New initiatives mean new ways to connect with people. Think of it in a travelling metaphor. When you are travelling over familiar territory with people that you know, the group tends to behave in very self-sufficient ways. There is no need to stop and ask anyone else for directions. You all know where and how to get the supplies that you need. But when you are travelling over unfamiliar territory, you are often forced to deal with other people and you have to deal with them in a place where you are not the expert. There is a humility and a mutuality that is found in unfamiliar territory, attitudes that would serve the world well in the coming in this young century.
But, of course, the most important reason for trying something new is that we are emulating our God who says:
