Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

When Covenants Hurt

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 18th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 18 March, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Acts 7:51 – 60, Isaiah 40:1-8, Jeremiah 31:27-34

ast week we talked about something unique in the nature of the God that we meet in the Bible. The people of Israel, unlike their neighbours around them, came to understand that their God was a God who made covenants. He entered into a relationship with his people where he required certain things of them and promised, in return, that he would remain faithful to them by continually s howing them steadfast lovingkindness.

And that kind of covenant relationship is a good and beautiful thing. To be in a covenant relationship – any kind of covenant relationship – is a great blessing. I know that many of you have been blessed by such a relationship in your life, as have I. A good marriage, where each party in the marriage promises to support the other and to remain faithful and loving in the good times and in the bad, when everything is easy and when it hard, is such a covenant relationship. Many people are also deeply blessed by a similar dynamic in other relationships – enduring friendships and family ties, certain working situations and so on. Being in that kind of a relationship does more to form us, give us confidence and hope and help us to be our very best than just about anything else in life.

But there is a potential downside to being in a covenant relationship. Anytime you enter into something with that level of commitment, there is a danger. When you only trust someone a little and they let you down, it may hurt a bit, but you will probably be alright. But when you are in a covenant relationship and somebody lets somebody down, it can be absolutely devastating and can bring some real long-term effects. And the thing is that disappointment and betrayal are almost inescapable in some ways. None of us are going to be perfect covenant partners. We will all likely fall short in some way or another sooner or later. And when we do, and when it is a serious betrayal, that hurts and wounds us in ways that often stay with us for the rest of our lives.

That is what makes this idea that the God of Israel is a God who makes covenants so surprising. It means that, by choosing frail humans like us as covenant partners, God is exposing Godself to disappointment, pain and heartbreak that we can hardly even fathom. If God makes a covenant with people, they will let him down. That is about the only thing that can be guaranteed.

And that is indeed the history of the covenant that God made with the people of Israel. There are countless examples of how the people of Israel disappointed God in the Bible. Even as Moses was standing in the presence of God and receiving the terms of the covenant on top of Mount Sinai, we are told that the people at the foot of the mountain were busy casting their own alternate god out of gold. Think of it – a people flagrantly violating the terms of their covenant with their God even while the covenant is being set up. That would be comparable to a bride or a groom cheating with somebody else even while the wedding ceremony is going on! Can you even fathom the feeling of betrayal that God, as a covenant partner, would feel at that moment!

And that is, of course, not the only instance. As you read through the scriptures, the story is repeated again and again as the children of Israel repeatedly turn away from the God who has chosen them, forget the ways in which he has asked them to live and run after other gods and strange practices. Again and again in the Bible, God is portrayed as a jilted lover, a cuckold. Sometimes he speaks of his anger at the betrayal, sometimes he is just so indescribably sad, but the theme of God’s disappointment is a theme that runs through the whole Bible.

But despite it all, God doesn’t give up and doesn’t forget the promises that he made. No matter what, God reminds them, they will be his people and he will be their God. God responds to the people in various ways. He gives them the law through Moses – not as a way of making their lives miserable by piling on rules and regulations, but in order to offer them some real and helpful guidance on how they should live out their lives. More than anything, and especially if you read the Book of Deuteronomy, the law seems to be about helping them to create a just and fair society where everyone is given the resources they need to live a decent life.

But law seems to fail to accomplish its true intention. Rather than live up to the spirit of the law, the leaders prefer to put the emphasis on the form of the law with festivals, sacrifices and rituals becoming the focus. So God sends in the prophets to correct and challenge the people – especially the leaders. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” the prophets say on God’s behalf. “Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever–flowing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24)

So God attempts to call the people back to the keeping of the covenant through the prophets but the prophets are rejected, persecuted and even killed. They are too much of a threat to the established order and the people who are in charge and so, despite their enduring, beautiful and poetic words, the work of the prophets cannot persuade the people to keep to their side of the covenant.

But still God does not give up, does not walk away from what only looks like a bad deal from his side. Ultimately, the Book of Deuteronomy and the Books of the Kings conclude, God decides that he must send the people out of the land altogether. They are invaded and taken away to captivity by the Babylonians so that the land itself might have a chance to rest and recover from the lack of justice. But even there, God does not forget his promises. After a generation has passed, he relents and allows his people to return from their exile and start over again in the land that he had given to their ancestors.

And that is the story, if you want to put it in a nutshell, of the entire Old Testament. God is the faithful covenant partner who is disappointed again and again by the partners that he has chosen. Like a longsuffering wife who just refuses to give up on her violent or abusive husband, he just keeps coming back for more. That is how it is portrayed.

And how do you fix a relationship like that? I mean that sincerely – how do you fix it? Because Lord knows that we have all seen more than our share of relationships like that. Some partners are abusive, some neglectful, some more than a bit cruel. Don’t get me wrong, there are all kinds of wonderful relationships out there where you see a couple constantly building each other up and offering encouragement, but what about the other kind where they only seem to manage to tear each other down?

Sometimes, of course, the sad reality is that a relationship becomes so destructive that the best possible way forward is to separate and go on and build your lives apart from each other. The only alternative is that there be real substantial change, but how do you go about doing that? Sometimes people will try making vows and promises – “I promise you, baby, this time it is going to be different, this time it is going to be better” – but in my experience those kinds of promises, often made in desperation are bound to fail sooner or later. That was what God found with the people of Israel and sometimes finds with us. We make promises and vows but too often our resolve is simply not enough to keep us faithful.

Sometimes, in an effort to save the relationship, people will try setting up rules and boundaries. This is what God did through the Law of Moses. But, as we have seen in that case, rules can quickly lose their meaning, in any relationship, what you really need is not outward obedience to rules but inward and genuine devotion and commitment. Sometimes an outside voice is found to help the participants in the relationship to learn to see the relationship in new ways. I guess you could say that prophets coming in to speak for God carried out this function in the Old Testament.

So basically, in the Bible, God tries the very things that we try to repair a wounded relationship. There is repentance and forgiveness and ups and downs, but everything seems to fall short at one point or another. What is a deity to do when he just doesn’t want to give up – when God absolutely refuses to walk away from the covenant he has made? God is desperate to make this work. What would you do?

Well, what God does is opt for one dramatic act that is intended to change the entire dynamic of the relationship. His plan is to make a dramatic demonstration of just how much he cares for his people hoping that this will finally convince them of his love. You will see something like that, sometimes, in ailing relationship. I’ve heard of a person, for example, who walked away from a high paying but super high pressure job that had been slowly been killing him as well as his relationship with his family. It was a radical choice that left the whole family much poorer off financially but so much more healthy in other ways. It was a hard thing to do, but it totally changed the dynamics of a once-failing relationship. That was the kind of dramatic move God needed.

God made that move, we believe, in the person of Jesus. God chose to enter into the fullness of all that it means to be us in Jesus Christ. That changes the dynamic of the covenant so dramatically because it means that, for the first time, God can understand the struggles of the covenant from our point of view – can understand the weaknesses we struggle with, the temptations that we face. In understanding the limitations that we face, God can deal with us with a new and powerful compassion.

But, more than that, in Christ, God gives us the supreme demonstration of what God’s love looks like and it looks like Christ who is willing to put up with all of the pain and rejection and shame of the cross for our sake. It looks like a man who is innocent and has done nothing but stand up for what is true and right being struck down for it in all injustice. It looks like a friend who is willing to give up his life for the sake of his friends. And you could talk about the love of God and how deep it is and how wide it is forever and you will never be able to equal what was shown to us when Jesus was nailed up on that wood.

That is what God does for us in Christ Jesus. That is the story that we will be rehearsing yet again over the next couple of weeks. And I know that none of that makes all of our problems go away. We are still weak. We still fall short of our best intentions. We still do not live up to everything that God expects of us. But the relationship has changed because of Christ. The covenant has moved beyond the mere matter of obedience to an affair of the heart.

It has moved towards what Jeremiah was promising when he said, “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

God took it there for us in Christ and in our hearts we will live out that covenant with hope and power. That is what is different because of Jesus.

Sermon Video:

A God who makes covenants

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 11th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 11 March, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 9:8-17, Hebrews 8:6-11, Psalm 136:1-16

he ancient Babylonians had a myth about a great universal flood sent by their gods to destroy the life of all the humans on the face of the earth that they had made. Only one man and his family made it through – survived by building a great ship and riding it out. And if that story sounds a bit familiar it should. It is a basic plot that I am sure all of us would recognize if we know anything about the Bible.

The ancient Babylonian story was not exactly the same, of course. The hero of the story was named Utnapishtim instead of Noah – a fact that I share with you mostly because I just like to say “Utnapishtim.” And, of course, the deity involved in the Babylonian story was not the God of Israel but rather a collection of ancient Babylonian gods. But the story corresponds so closely that most scholars would say that the biblical story is dependant on the much older Utnapishtim story.

This is, in itself, not all that surprising. The ancient Hebrews were a part of the ancient world in which they lived and they knew the stories of their neighbours. They quite naturally developed their own versions of those stories which they told for various reasons. Some of these stories they told to work out their understanding of ancient events – and there may well be ancient events behind this one – the memories of some ancient flood that was likely not universal but that devastated an entire region. But these stories weren’t just about things that had happened a long time ago. They were mostly told as a way to process the things that they were coming to know about the God that they worshipped.

For example, one of the big differences between the Babylonian story and the biblical story is the reason for the flood in the first place. In the older story, the Babylonian gods basically decide to wipe out the humans because they are too noisy. Like grouchy neighbours on the upper floor of an apartment building, the gods are upset about all the noise downstairs and the flood is just their way of turning on all the taps until they overflow to “persuade” the noisy neighbours to move out. And, for the Babylonian gods, the only regret that they have for doing this is that when the human race is wiped out, there is nobody left to feed them with burnt offerings and so they do come to regret it, but for rather selfish reasons.

The ancient Hebrews heard that story and they knew that it didn’t sound quite right. At least it didn’t seem to be how the God that they were coming to know – the God who had made the people of Israel his own people – would behave. So the story they told mostly differed in how it reflected the relationship between God and the people of the earth. So, for example, instead of being annoyed that the humans are too noisy, God, in the biblical story has a legitimate beef with the people of the earth. They are evil, given to violence and murder, and God decides he is not going to stand for it any more. So there is the first difference from the gods of Babylon. The God of Israel is motivated by justice.

The second difference in the biblical story is God’s response after the disaster. God, like the Babylonian gods, does regret the slaughter of the flood. But the God of the Bible doesn’t merely miss the sacrifices of the people. Yes, it does say in Genesis that “the Lord smelled the pleasing odour” of Noah’s sacrifice after the flood, but rather than inspiring God’s hunger, the Bible says that the sacrifice reminds God of his love for the people he created. He realizes that to seek to destroy them was wrong, that it didn’t really solve anything but only made things worse. So here is the second wonder about the God of the Noah story – he is able to learn and grow.

It is a bit surprising, perhaps, if you have always believed that God never changes, to read that God changed his mind after the flood. But I honestly believe that that passage is more about the changing and growing realization of the people who were telling this story as they learned more about the God that they worshiped than it is about Godself changing. The more they came to know this God who they were exploring by telling these stories, the more they discovered, especially about God’s devotion to justice and what was right.

But there is another aspect to the story of the flood that sets it apart from so many other similar stories that come to us from the ancient world. God doesn't just repent of what he has done, he makes a covenant. And here is the most amazing thing of all in this story about what the ancient people of Israel learned about the God that they worshipped. He was a God who made covenants. From what we can tell from the history of the ancient Near East, this was something that was unique. No other ancient peoples had a covenant making God. This was probably the first thing that set the Hebrews apart from their neighbours.

Now covenant is not necessarily an everyday word for most of us, so I do want to make sure we all understand exactly what one is. A covenant is an ancient word for what we might call today a contract or a deal or an agreement. In ancient times covenants were originally made between larger groups of people like tribes or nations, so you might also say that a good word for it might be treaty.

When ancient people made a covenant, they would come together and decide on the terms of their accord – what each party owed the other. There was usually some kind of document that laid out all of the blessings that the participants in the covenant would receive if they kept the terms and (since you can’t have the one without the other) there would also be a list of the curses that would be visited upon them if they broke the covenant. In addition, there would be some sort of monument set up that would remind the parties of the commitment that they had made so they would not break the terms of the covenant.

These covenants were extremely important in the ancient world. They created peace and prosperity for those tribes and nations that entered into them. But, generally speaking, in the ancient Near East, covenants were only agreements made between tribes and nations or between individuals. But the ancient people of Israel came to understand something quite different – that they had a God who made covenants.

We see that covenant-making God being introduced, in a sense, in our story this morning from Genesis. He, unlike that ancient gods of Babylon who are only interested in greedily eating up the meat of the sacrifices after the devastation of a flood, instead God wants to make a covenant with the people who have just come off of the ark and all of his creatures. God asks very little of them but he makes a huge promise in return. “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God even sets up a monument for this covenant. “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” He is speaking, of course, of the rainbow that often appears in the sky when there is rain. But the symbolism of it is very significant. God speaks of laying down God’s bow – that is to say his war bow, his weapon of war. It is a clear demonstration of his commitment to no longer use violence against this world.

What’s more, he states that the reason why the bow will appear is not to remind us but God to keep the terms of this covenant. “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds,I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” This reminder of the covenant is so important that you probably noticed that it is repeated three times in the text.

And so, in the Noah story, we are introduced to this radical idea of a God who makes covenants – who voluntarily puts himself and his integrity on the line for the sake of his covenant partners. And this one unique trait that is revealed about the God of Israel drives much of the rest of the scriptures. When we next encounter God, we find him choosing to make a covenant with one particular righteous man and wife pair: Abraham and Sarah, and to make a nation out of them that will bring a blessing to the whole world.

Later, because of that covenant and because God remembers his covenant promises, he saves the descendants of Abraham and Sarah from slavery in Egypt and creates them as a nation. He also sends Moses to teach them, through the Law, how to live up to their end of the covenant. And throughout the Old Testament we are told the ups and downs of that covenant relationship and how Israel sometimes disobeys and goes astray, things go wrong but God never forgets his covenant promises.

Even the Psalm that we read this morning was all about the covenant between God and his people. Though you may not have noticed that, you probably noticed that it was a little bit repetitive with the same phrase being repeated over and over again: “for his steadfast love endures forever.” Well, there is a reason why that phrase was considered so important that they needed to keep saying it over and over again in that psalm. “Steadfast love” was a key technical term in the forming of ancient covenants. It was the quality in a person (or group of people) that made them committed to keeping the covenant. If God had steadfast lovingkindness, the Israelites were saying, they they could be sure that God would never desert them or abandon the promises he had made to them. God’s steadfast love – his covenant commitment – was the driving force behind everything that he had done for them.

And, of course, covenant isn’t just an Old Testament idea, it is also the foundation of the New Testament. Christians proclaimed that Jesus had come to create a new covenant with his disciples – a covenant not based on laws and rules, but a covenant of faith that we celebrate and renew every time we perform a baptism and every time we gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

This concept of a covenant making God revolutionized everything about the relations of God with his people. It gave people hope and security to know that they had a God who would not forget them or his promises to them.

What does it mean today to know that our God is a covenant making God? It should continue to be a source of encouragement to us. Every time you are tempted to think of God as a God who is out to get you, to punish you for the slightest mistakes or to make you suffer for the decisions you made earlier in your life, you must remind yourself. Look for some monument that will remind you of God’s steadfast love – a rainbow in the sky, a baptismal font, a loaf of bread, the glory and beauty of nature. These things are placed there as a continual reminder to you that God is a God who makes promises to you and will never fail in them. These things will remind you that God has already given you his steadfast love and that his steadfast love endures forever.

Knowing such things, reminding yourself of such things truly has enormous power to change your perspective, change how you see God and how you see everything. So know this one thing about the God that you worship – that God is a God who makes covenants.

Sermon Video:

Sinner!

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 4th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 4 March, 2018 © Scott McAndless – Communion

John 8:2-11, Romans 7:15 - 8:1, Psalm 51:1-17

hey had grasped her by the arms and by the legs and then dragged her through the streets little caring that her clothes were being ripped and torn away from her. Frankly a number of them took advantage of the situation by ogling the exposed portions of her body that would normally never be seen in public. A few of them were even so bold as to take advantage of her vulnerability by reaching out to touch what should have been off limits.

It was fine. They were sure that it was fine because they were on a holy mission. They had taken her in a flagrant act of sin. They were protecting the community from her filth. Surely, if they took advantage just a little bit, it was only in a good cause.

They were looking for the popular preacher who had been seen around town recently – gathering large crowds and preaching all sorts of nonsense. He had been getting certain people in the community all worked up – treating them like they mattered or something and it had been causing trouble. They had decided to take the man’s popularity down a peg or two by forcing him to take a position on this clear matter of sin.

A cry went up from the men at the front of the mob. They had spotted the preacher. They soon had him cornered and forced the woman to stand on her feet in front of him. Their leader, a big ruffian, spoke for the group. “Teacher,” he said, “this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

Now I think it is probably helpful to pause for a moment and try to understand what that mob was actually asking. They were accusing that woman of sin – the specific sin being, of course, adultery. And you may think that you know what they meant by that accusation, but it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing for us as it did for them. For us, adultery refers to some sort of marital infidelity, usually of a sexual nature. It is what we accuse someone of if they break their marriage vows.

It didn’t mean exactly that to them, which is kind of obvious when you think about it. For us, there are always two (or maybe more) people involved in adultery. It takes two to tango, as they say. But these men have brought only one “sinner” to be judged in this case. A lot of modern people react to this story by asking, “If she was taken in adultery, why did this gang just bring her for judgement to Jesus. Where is the guy? Why didn’t he get brought along too?

But the fact of the matter is that adultery wasn’t just a matter of infidelity between two persons to them. Marriage, for them, was not just something between two people. Marriage was about the larger family and, to a certain extent, the entire community. It was also very much about property with marriage being the prime method of transferring property between families. For that matter, the woman in a marriage was herself considered to be a piece of property.

You are all familiar, I imagine with the commandment that goes, “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” Well, you realize that that commandment is all about not trying to take your neighbour’s property away from him. And note that, in this context, a neighbour can only be a “him” because your neighbour’s wife is not your neighbour but obviously a piece of property that belongs to your neighbour. So a marriage, for them, was a property deal with the wife being just another piece of property.

And if that is the case, then adultery, for them, was as much a crime of theft as it was a matter of the breaking of any marriage vows. And what’s more, anything that a woman did to devalue herself as a piece of property could have been seen as an act of adultery.

What do I mean by that? Well, for example, before she became a piece of her husband’s property a woman was considered to be a piece of her father’s property and so he could give her, in marriage to whomever he chose. But what if she didn’t like her father’s choice? What if she rejected his choice and, horror of horrors, pledged herself in some way (and, yes, perhaps in some carnal way) to someone else. Well, that would have been to devalue herself as a piece of her father’s property. And it would have been to break the sanctity of the marriage vow because she, as a woman, was not considered competent to make any marriage vows by herself. So actually it was not all that uncommon for a woman to be accused of committing adultery all by herself.

All of this goes to illustrate, I hope, that questions of sin did not mean exactly the same to them as they do to us. For them, how you dealt with sin had much more to do with protecting the whole of society than with the concerns of the individual. That is why, of course, the response to sin that is proposed in this case – stoning someone to death – is a communal punishment. It is something that the entire community has to participate in because what she has done is seen as a threat to the entire community. She has threatened the very foundations of that community.

And so I have lots of problems with how this woman is being treated and judged in this passage. Basically she is being offered up as a kind of scapegoat for all of the problems, lacks and failures of her entire society. All of the failures of marriages in her society, all of the misery that powerless women are put through in their relationships, all of the men who act out their anger at their lot in life against weaker people than them (like women) – all of these failures and miseries produced by the society, these are being laid upon this woman. She must die to save the community because she has dared to challenge the rules of her society in some way. It is not right and I, like you, like all “civilized” modern people, bristle at what is being described in this passage.

Jesus, I am glad to say, bristles at it too. He agrees with you and me that this is not right. But you shouldn’t assume that his objection comes because he is looking at this issue as you would. Jesus, whatever else he was (and he was a whole lot else) was a man of his time.

You see, we, as modern people, would likely suggest a very modern resolution to this situation. We would likely say that this woman’s offence (if we saw it as an offense at all) was a personal matter – something to be worked out between her and her husband or whoever else she might have offended. We would likely not see any role for anyone else except, perhaps, some sort of mediator. We would certainly not see the rocks and stones of the entire community as a necessary remedy.

Jesus would agree that the stones are not going to solve anything, but his reasoning is quite different from what ours would be. Jesus does recognize that her sin is not just her own personal matter. It is something that affects and is a part of the community. In that he agrees with the people of his own time and with the overall view of the Bible regarding sin. But his response is that the traditional solution, which is collective punishment of the perceived offender, is not going to work. Why? Because we all participate in the sin.

That is what Jesus is referring to when he confronts the men in the mob by saying, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He is not accusing them of any particular sin here. He is not saying that they have committed any particular offense much less the specific sin of adultery. Some of them may have, of course, and may feel some shame on a personal level, but Jesus is not seeking to shame them in that way. He is saying something significantly different. He is taking sin seriously and is not denying that it is a threat to the community, but he is rejecting the traditional response to sin which has been to say that we can just find someone to shame and punish to expiate the sin and be done with it. Jesus challenges us to look at the problem differently, to see how we are all participants in it.

How should we deal with the issue of sin in the church today? There are some Christians, I know, who are just like the mob in this gospel story. They want to be seen as tough on sin and they love to pick out particular types of sinners in order to shame them. Ironically, just like the men in the story, they never seem to pick those whose sin is greed or pride or the use of power to subjugate others. No, they prefer to ignore those sins (which are heartily denounced in the Bible) in order to find some sinner who can be accused of something else, something that seems worse to them because it is sexual in nature. They then focus on shaming that person or group of people as a way of making themselves feel that they are righteous. That is an approach to sin that I see Jesus roundly rejecting in this passage.

There is another approach that some Christians take that may lead to them to being accused of being soft on sin. Some Christians even desire to be seen that way. I don’t think that is the approach that Jesus takes in this story either. He takes the sin seriously, but he is not willing to use shame – especially not on the the individual – the woman. He knows how ineffective shaming is and that it often twists and even destroys those it is deployed against.

But even more important than that, he understands that it is never as simple as blaming one person. The choices made by individuals are never taken in isolation. They are often forced or constrained by others – by the flaws in the society itself that deprives people of income or forces them into unhealthy relationships. Jesus asks us all, as he asks the men in this story, to examine the ways in which we participate in the flawed society that has a penchant for creating ever more victims.

And we do. We participate in the capitalistic system – a good system in many ways, maybe even the best possible economic system, but one that nevertheless continues to create more losers than winners. We participate in activities that accelerate the destruction of the environment. We participate in a society that has a way of turning a blind eye to too much injustice, inequality and open racism and hatred.

I do not say this to shame anyone. I know that, in many ways, these things are just part of how the world works and that the world is flawed. You really don’t have much choice but to participate in these systems and that does affect each and everyone of us. But we all do participate and that is part of the problem. Our obsession with shaming others doesn’t help to make any of us any better.

Instead of shame, Jesus is looking for repentance – for change. Instead of finding a victim to blame, he is asking for an honest look at the things that we allow to go wrong in society. This is what Jesus is disturbed about and so should we be.

How seriously should we take sin? Very! How much should we invest in piling on those who are easy to blame for what goes wrong in society? We should give no energy or legitimacy to that. We should be gracious. We must look to ourselves first. Let the ones who do not participate in systems of injustice and unrighteousness be the first to cast a stone.

Sermon Video:

God’s providence and the problem of evil

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 25th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 25 February, 2018 © Scott McAndless – Annual Meeting

Mark 8:31-33, Romans 8:18-30, Psalm 10:1-18

leven days ago, a young man walked into a school in Florida with an AR-15 rifle near the end of the school day. He pulled a fire alarm and started firing on students and teachers indiscriminately for about six minutes. By the time he dropped hi s pack and gun and left, 17 people were dead and 15 more wounded. It was an afternoon of bravery and terrible suffering on the school grounds with one teacher even putting his own body in front of his students. It was an afternoon of a million tears. And yet we as Christians proclaim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” I have to ask: what kind of king stands by and watches something like that?

At the end of last September the tenth most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean finally sputtered out. When that hurricane, named Maria, was near the peak of its strength, it had slammed into the island of Puerto Rico with unprecedented destructive power. The island, already destroyed by decades of economic neglect had seen almost all of its infrastructure destroyed including power, water and housing. In the immediate aftermath over sixty people died, but in the time since, the number has grown to well over a thousand. The legacy of Maria in Puerto Rico may well be an entire lost generation of potential. And yet we proclaim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” What kind of king permits that to happen to his people?

A man shot a young aboriginal man at point blank range in the back of his head at a moment when neither he nor his family were in danger of violence and yet was found guilty of no crime. Yet we claim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” Is not a king responsible to see that justice is done?

The list goes on and on. We could cite so many disasters and crimes and injustices that have happened over the last few months. They are all, in their own way, horrible and awful. And each one of them raises a challenge to us as people of faith. They are a challenge because we proclaim a God of providence – that is to say, a God who cares about this world and who seeks the good of the people who inhabit it. This is something that we affirm every time we say, “Thank God,” when something good happens or something bad is avoided. In fact, we are inclined to give God the credit for all sorts of great things.

But here is the problem: if God gets the credit for all the stuff that goes right, doesn’t he also have to take the blame for all of the stuff that goes wrong? I mean, how many times have you heard of someone who got into an accident – who was afraid that they might get killed or injured and just managed to come through it – and came through the other side full of praise and thanksgiving for the God who saved them. But if you are going to thank God for saving you through an accident, how can you possibly object if I were to blame God for the accident even happening in the first place, not to mention all of the other people who didn’t get saved or helped or healed in the midst of the accident or disaster.

With all of this in mind, I am glad to see the three questions that we have from A Catechism for Today today. The Catechism rightly speaks about God’s providence – about how God truly cares about the needs of his creatures and responds to them – and then goes on to consider God’s sovereignty – the recognition that God is in charge in this world which is actually something that makes God’s providence possible. But, most important of all, it recognizes that you cannot have those first two things – God’s providence and God’s sovereignty – without it raising very serious questions about the evil that exists in this world under God’s supposed benevolent watch.

So, the question is, why is there so much evil in this world? I appreciate the response to this question in the Catechism because it acknowledges right away that there are no simple or easy answers to that question. “Evil and suffering are a mystery and fill us with anguish.” Now, calling evil a mystery might seem like a cop-out, but compared to a lot of the other “answers” to the question of evil I have heard, it is actually not a bad answer at all.

Because, if you ask people – especially people of faith – that question, some of the answers you get are not as helpful as they seem at first. One of the answers you might get, for example, when you ask “Why do bad things happen,” is that some people will say, “Everything happens for a purpose.” That sounds good, of course, because it is always nice to think, even in a tragedy, that at least there is some purpose to it all. But the problem is that the purposes that people come up with often lead us to twist our view of God.

If we say that God permits evil as a way or testing us, for example, it turns God into some kind of mad scientist who is running these experiments on us – making us live through horrific experiences – simply as a way of discovering things about us. We require human scientists to design their experiments in humane ways, why wouldn’t we expect the same from God?

Sometimes people will try to justify God by saying that God allows the bad things to happen because he has plans to bring greater good out of them. But that argument tends to lead us into some kind of gruesome calculous – trying to outweigh history’s greatest evils with even greater good. Who would dare to go to the family of 17 people gunned down in a high school eleven days ago and suggest that anything – anything no matter how good – that happens as a result of that crime could possibly make up for what they have lost? (It is especially discouraging when you begin to fear that nothing at all will really change.)

Now, I realize that some might argue that our reading this morning from the Letter to the Romans is making the argument that God allows evil to bring about greater good. Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.” He seems to be comparing the evil and trouble in this world to the pain that a woman goes through when she is delivering a child, pain that I cannot personally attest to but that certainly seems to be overwhelming in most cases.

He seems to be saying that, just as a woman will find the pain that she went through to be worthwhile once she holds her healthy child in her arms, we too will find that the evil of this world will have been worthwhile when we see what God is bringing into being.

In addition, Paul also writes a few verses later, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” This has also been taken to mean much the same thing on the level of the personal lives of believers, that yes, God might allow bad things to happen to you personally but that you shouldn’t worry because God has a plan to bring even greater good out of that evil.

So, what it says in these passages does somewhat resemble the popular idea that God allows evil in order to bring about a greater good, but I do not think that that is exactly what they are saying. I don’t think that Paul is saying that God causes bad things to happen in order to bring about a greater good as much as he is saying that God works to bring about some good even in the evil that does happen. That is an important distinction that I would make.

You see, the Bible doesn’t really solve for us the mystery of the evil that is found in this world, but it does affirm something that is very important. The Catechism puts it this way: “In such a world – a world filled with too much evil – only a God who has entered into our sufferings can help.”

And I believe that that is what Paul is affirming in this passage. He doesn’t necessarily promise God will solve everything for you, but he does say that, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” He is saying that, in very significant ways and even if we are feeling so lost that we don’t even know what to pray for, God will actually join us in our pain and anguish. God will not leave us alone and that makes all the difference.

Of course, for Christians, the moment when God most decisively entered into our suffering is the Jesus event. “As we ponder our Saviour upon the cross, we know that God is with us in our pain.” This is the central mystery of the Christian faith, that God would not stay safely at a distance and far removed from this world and its suffering and evil but would actually choose to enter into the muck and mire of this world. God didn’t need to, but God chose to experience everything that it means to be human by somehow becoming one of us in the person of Jesus Christ.

That is what the incarnation – the Christmas story and really the whole story of the life of Jesus is actually about. The wonder of it is not, as some suggest, that Jesus was somehow God. The true wonder is that God was somehow human – not just seeming human or pretend human but real human with everything that goes with that.

God does not promise that there will be no evil or suffering in this world. Neither does God offer to explain why the suffering and evil are even permitted. Maybe that is something that you will understand someday when you can look at this life from a completely different perspective, but, here and now, God doesn’t always answer the why question.

But God does promise one thing: he will not leave you alone in the suffering. He is with you in it – and not just in a handholding but insincere way (you know, like you sometimes get from people who listen to your tale of woe and say, “I know exactly how you feel,” when you know very well that they don’t). God is with you in it in the sense that he feels what you feel, knows the depths of your pain and loss. And that is only possible because of Jesus.

You know, it is ironic in some ways. We tend to look at the suffering of the innocent as the greatest evil that you can find in this world. A gunman walks into a school and guns down children who have never done anything to deserve such treatment. A hurricane strikes the countryside, destroying young and old, good and evil in its path. These things are taken by many people to be the greatest indication that God is not there or, if he is, God is not worth worshipping.

And, yes, those things are evils and great injustices. But, for Christians, the greatest proof that God exists and that God cares is in fact, a case of an innocent man who suffered unjustly. His name was Jesus, he didn’t deserve anything that happened to him. There was no redeeming good in the terrible violence that was committed against him on the Friday just before Passover. But there was love – the supreme demonstration of God’s love seen in God entering into our suffering and into the suffering of the innocent. And love changes things. Love brings hope and life and new beginnings.

I don’t have an explanation for why there is so much that is so wrong in this world. If I tried to offer you one, it would fall flat. It is a mystery. But so is hope, and love and life itself. And I will continue to worship a God who doesn’t answer all of the why questions but who isn’t afraid of entering into them with us either.

Sermon Video:

How do we live out the Great Commission today?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 18th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 18 February 2018 © Scott McAndless

Matthew 28:16-20, Romans 10:10-17, Psalm 2:1-12

month ago, as you will remember, I had Andy Cann tell me what to preach about. He was given that privilege because he had the top bid in the auction last fall when I put up the right to name a sermon topic. There was also a second highest bid in that same auction and Jean Godin agreed to match Andy’s bid and be able to name a topic for this month.

And I like Jean, I really do. In fact, I know many people who would only too happily attest to what a wonderful person she is. But I am going to confess to you that there were a few times as I prepared for this morning’s sermon when I wondered whether or not she liked me. (Just kidding, Jean.) The topic that Jean chose was this: How do we live out the Great Commission today? On the surface it is a wonderful question, of course, something that gets to the heart of what the church is supposed to be. It’s just that when you really take the question seriously (as we should all such questions) it seems to raise some issues that make many fine upstanding Presbyterians (and other Christians) uncomfortable.

The Great Commission is a popular name for the passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew – in particular, the part where Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” For generations, Christians have taken those words as the clearest statement of the task that Jesus gives us. It is our commission – our assignment. And the traditional understanding of this assignment is that that we are to announce the basic message of the Christian gospel to people in every nation of the world, convert them to our faith and baptize them into the church. Since this is such a big job, it is called the Great Commission.

And, not all that long ago, Christians would have probably felt quite fine with the idea that our main job as Christians was simply to go out there and preach the gospel to everyone in the whole world, make them Christians and bring them into the fold of the church. But many Christians are not quite so comfortable with that whole line of thinking these days. Part of the reason for that is that, in former times, Christians only had to deal with other Christians for the most part. Western Society, by and large, was Christian Society. Yes, there were a few Jews here and there, but that was about it. Non-Christians or pagans were usually people who lived in far-off countries on the other side of the world. So it was fairly easy to think that we had it all right and they were all wrong.

We live in a very different world today where followers of other religions or of no religions at all are not across the ocean, they are across the street. They are our neighbours and coworkers and friends and, what’s more, as we get to know them, we recognize that they are decent people who, like us, are mostly just trying to get by in this world and do the right things. So, while we still may hold to our scriptures and our doctrines, we have to recognize that it is not just people who believe exactly like us who are good people. To think otherwise is just to be petty and maybe racist.

So we find ourselves in this situation where it doesn’t seem right to tell people what they ought to believe – not in any forceful way. But that is only just part of the problem. Not only have we begun to suspect that non-Christians might be good people all on their own, we have also seen things that make us suspect that at least some of those who are enthusiastic for the task of sharing the gospel with everyone might not be the best people.

The group of people that today are most associated with the idea of preaching the gospel to the whole world are Christian evangelicals. Evangelicals have long worked hard at preaching the gospel to any who would hear it. But, in recent years, some of the choices that many representatives of this group have made have seemed a little bit suspect. They have entered into alliances with particular political groups, most significantly in the United States with the Republican Party. And some of the ways in which they have been acting in recent years have left people with the impression that they are far more interested in gaining power and influence for themselves and their policy goals than they are truly dedicated to living out the gospel.

One example stands out in the last couple of months. Recently the report came out that the American president had had an affair with a porn star and had paid her off to keep silent just before the election. And I don’t really know (or much care) if the accusation is true. That’s not why I bring it up. The disturbing thing about it is that some key evangelical leaders apparently assumed that it was true and they didn’t care at all. Take Tony Perkins, president of the very prominent evangelical activist group, the Family Research Council, for example. He apparently believed it but his response (and this is what he actually said) was that he figured that evangelicals should give the president “a mulligan.”

A mulligan? A consequence-free do over offered to a man who he accepted had probably had an affair just after his wife had given birth to his son? It seemed to be a prime indication that people who were supposed to be only interested in telling some good news were much more interested in power and influence and were willing to abandon some of their core convictions in order to get it from powerful people like presidents.

I realize it is very unfair to tar all evangelical Christians with the brush of a few leaders like Perkins or Jerry Falwell Jr, (who has also said similar things recently). Of course, not all Christians who are keen to preach the gospel are seduced by the lure of power – far from it! But fair or not, I am afraid that it has entered into the common perception that the people who push the Christian gospel message these days have not the purest motivations.

So, for all of these reasons, the very idea of evangelism – of sharing the Christian message with people who aren’t already Christians – has fallen into some disrepute these days even among Christians. All of this certainly makes Jean’s question a very timely one indeed. We do feel a certain discomfort with the very notion of living out the Great Commission. But, of course, none of this changes the fact that the Great Commission is there and if we have been commissioned to preach the gospel to everyone, then shouldn’t we just get over whatever we are feeling and get on with it?

Perhaps, but maybe, before we get too far, we should look closer at what Jesus actually says and what he really expects of us. First, let us look at the context of the Great Commission. It comes at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew and definitely picks up some up the major themes of the whole gospel. For example, the very last words that Jesus says are “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Does anyone remember how the Gospel of Matthew starts? We read it not too long ago at Christmastime. It starts with the story of the birth of Jesus and says that his birth is a fulfillment of the promise of Emmanuel which means “God with us.”

So actually, the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t end with a commission, it ends (as it began) with a promise and that promise is, “I am with you.” Remember, Jesus is speaking to his disciples here just after the resurrection. They haven’t really grasped what has happened here, they just know that everything has suddenly changed. Some are so bewildered, Matthew tells us, that they still doubt despite seeing the risen Jesus right there! So I think that, whatever we take from this passage, it is important that we take these words of Jesus as encouragement and hope, not as mere burden and duty.

Nevertheless, there is a commandment in what Jesus says, and we want to take that command seriously, so let us focus on that. Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Now, that is a long and somewhat complex sentence in the Greek original. There are four verbs: Go, make disciples, baptize and teach but actually only one of those verbs is in the form of a command and that is the verb that is translated as make disciples. So basically the order that Jesus is giving is make disciples and he is saying that the way to do that is by going, baptizing and teaching.

Now here again is something that picks up on the entire theme of the Gospel of Matthew which has been all about how Jesus chose these people that he is talking to and made them his disciples by teaching and training them. He is telling them to go and do for others what he has done for them.

And I think that is a key point that we must keep in mind as we consider what it means for us to follow the Great Commission in the world today. The goal, Jesus makes absolutely clear, is to make disciples. The goal is not to go out there and preach the gospel message at people everywhere. Yes, it is true that making disciples will likely include some preaching, but if you think that you could fulfil this commission just by preaching to everyone in every nation, you have another think coming.

What Jesus is looking for is not converts or church members, he is looking for disciples – for people who are willing to do what he had done and put their lives on the line for the sake of what is right. It is not about making people believe certain things or join an organization, it is about changing people’s lives for the better.

And I don’t necessarily see that there is a huge problem with that. Think of it this way: what if each one of us here made a decision over the next couple of years to invest ourselves into someone’s life – someone, maybe, in need of finding a better path. What if you decided to do the kinds of things that Jesus did for his disciples, if you shared your time and wisdom with that person and showed you really cared for them. Can you see how something like that could transform a person’s life? What if you really built that person up? And in the process, shared your own beliefs and priorities with them – not as a way of saying, “here, this is what you have to believe,” but more by saying, “This is what has worked for me, maybe it will help you too.”

If you could do that, you would be responding to Jesus’ commandment because you would be making disciples or at least giving someone the chance to be best disciple that they can be. That is what the Great Commission is about. It is not about preaching a specific message to people everywhere, though it could include some of that. It is certainly not about building up the power and influence of particular institutions. It is also not about making everyone believe exactly the same things. It is about being involved in people’s lives for transformation – just like Jesus was involved in his disciple’s lives.

I think that if the church could put its energy into that – and not into protecting its own interest and complaining about the power that it has lost, the idea of being a church that takes the Great Commission seriously would not be something to be embarrassed about. It is not about an obsession with numbers; it is about finding the time to build up those who do come along so that they can change the world.

Creator

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, February 12th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, February 11, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 1:1-8, John 1:1-14, Psalm 148:1-14

am sure that many of you are familiar with Dan Brown, author of bestselling books such as The DaVinci Code. His books and the movies that have been made of them have been incredibly popular in recent years. In an interview that took place to promote one of his books someone asked Brown the question, “Are you religious?” this is what Brown said:

“I was raised Episcopalian, and I was very religious as a kid. Then, in eighth or ninth grade, I studied astronomy, cosmology and the origins of the universe. I remember saying to a minister, ‘I don’t get it. I read a book that said there was an explosion known as the Big Bang, but here it says God created heaven and earth and the animals in seven days. Which is right?’ Unfortunately the response I got was, ‘Nice boys don’t ask that question.’ A light went off, and I said, ‘The Bible doesn’t make sense. Science makes much more sense to me.’ And I just gravitated away from religion.”

And I must say that I find it rather appalling that Dan Brown, a man who is clearly smart and very interested in spiritual and religious matters (many of his books explore deeply spiritual and religious questions even if some of the history is not overly accurate) – that Dan Brown should have been turned off from the church like that.

Christians do proclaim and praise God as the Creator. It is an essential part of our belief system but it is not, I think it is important to say, just an explanation. This isn’t something that believers came up with simply because they didn’t have a better explanation for how everything came to be. The idea that this God, who we have come to know through Jesus, is the author of everything that exists is absolutely central to our relationship with this God and to the hope that we find in knowing him.

I think that that was the first mistake that that Episcopalian minister made when talking to that intelligent young Dan Brown. To him, there was something scary about Brown’s question. The young man came in with an understanding of how the world and all that is in it came into being, a powerful story backed up by science and evidence and supported by a consistent theory. And that poor minister knew that, while he also had a good story of creation, his story did not have those kinds of theoretical or practical supports behind it. He felt that he had to defend his story but he knew that he didn’t really have the ammunition to put up any sort of reasonable defence. So he resorted to what the Christian faith has resorted to far too often down through the years: he shut down the questioner.

Even worse he suggested that there was something wrong with Brown simply because he had asked the question – insinuating that he wasn’t “nice.” I don’t blame Brown for being turned off, but I am afraid that, in overt and subtle ways, we continue to turn all sorts of people off who bring in their questions and their reasoning to challenge our idea of a creator God.

But that minister didn’t need to be intimidated by that question. The mere fact that other people – physicists, cosmologists, biologists – can find excellent ways to explain how everything came to be, is not a direct challenge to our concept of a divine Creator. That is because the Creator we meet in the Bible is not about the how of creation, the Biblical Creator is about the why.

That is why, for one thing, there is not just one account of creation in the Bible. There are several stories that give very different spins on what happened and especially how it happened. There is the best-known story from Genesis 1 that we read from this morning – the famous seven-day story. That story is about the who of Creation – identifying over and over the Creator as Elohim, the God of Israel. We miss that, of course, because the name Elohim is translated throughout simply as God. But the naming of the creator in this saga would have been deeply significant to the people who first heard it because what this story was teaching them was that the God, Elohim, that they had come to know through their worship and in their prayers was the same God who had called the universe into being.

This story is also about the why of creation. It was saying – and this also is something that it repeats over and over again – that God created the world because it was good and that there was a goodness in how God had organized the whole thing – separating light from darkness, water from water and organizing everything from times and seasons to the various groups of animals according to their kind.

The why of the story was also about teaching the people of Israel about their own time – specifically that they were to organize their time into groups of seven days and that every seven days they were to observe a Sabbath just as God had done by resting after six days of labour in creation. That is why the creation story all takes place in six days – it wasn’t really about how long it took for God to create the world, it was about how the people were to live out their lives in the world in weeklong cycles.

What this creation story is not particularly concerned about is how it all came about, at least not as we would see it from a modern scientific point of view. We should hardly expect it to because that was not a concern of the people for whom this story was written. That is a modern, post-enlightenment way of answering the question of why everything exists. This story was concerned, from the point of view of the people it was written for, with much more important matters.

One thing that makes this very clear is the fact that the Bible didn’t limit itself to one account of creation. After the first story – the seven-day story – there is another story of creation that is told in the second chapter of Genesis – a story of a man named Adam and woman named Eve in a garden. This is no less a creation story than the first one. This is sometimes smoothed over in translation, but the original text very clearly recounts the creation of the world and the plants, animals and people all over again.

This, again, didn’t really bother the people for whom it was written. They understood that the story was being told in different terms because it was finding a different meaning in the creation and in the Creator. Here the focus was on relationship – the relationship of the humans to the natural world, the relationships between men and women and above all the relationship between God and humans. So, once again, it wasn’t about the mechanism of creation so much as about the meaning of creation.

So, unlike that Episcopalian minister who spoke to that young Dan Brown, I don’t see any need to be fearful or defensive about the apparent contradictions between scientific explanations of how the universe came to be and how the Bible talks about the topic. I feel that all of these accounts are valuable if you understand what they were written to convey and use them accordingly.

But there is another Biblical creation account that I would like to focus on for a few minutes – one that might help us to bridge the divide between Biblical and modern approaches to understanding the existence of everything. When the Gospel of John was written (and most scholars think that it likely wasn’t written until maybe a century after the death of Jesus) the author probably thought long and hard about how he would begin his account of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Other gospel writers (Matthew and Luke) had started with stories of Jesus’ birth. Mark had started with Jesus getting baptised. But the writer of John felt that he needed to go much farther back to get to the real start of his story. He started with a new account of creation.

This new creation story starts out with a nod towards one of the old ones. The first words, “In the beginning,” are lifted directly from Genesis 1:1. But from there it takes a strange turn. Instead of “In the beginning God,” we get, “In the beginning was the Word.” Now even there we can see a connection with the Genesis story because, of course, in Genesis God creates by means of the spoken word, by saying things like, “Let there be light” and “Let there be a dome.”

But the gospel writer is saying more than just that God created by speaking – a whole lot more. The word that he uses there – the word that is translated word is a Greek word: logos. And logos is not just another Greek word that means word. It is a word that takes us to the heart of the ways in which Greek thinkers at that time thought and understood their world. For the Greek philosophers, the logos was the organizing principle for everything that existed. If you grasped the logos, you could understand and explain everything. That is why, to this very day, many of the words that we use to talk about how we think and understand the world – words like logic, biology, archaeology and cosmology all contain within them the root logos.

Now, this whole Greek mode of thinking and understanding by analysing and defining the world was very new and strange to the people that had produced the Bible up until that point. I am sure that many would have said that these Greek modes of thinking were standing in direct opposition to everything that the Bible had said about God and the world that God had created up until that point, just as today there are some who say that the way that science understands the universe is an affront to the Biblical truths that the church has always proclaimed.

But what I find very interesting is that the writer of the Gospel of John did not say that. Instead of holding up the Biblical story of creation in opposition to the Greek ways of thinking and understanding in order to say, “We’re right and you’re wrong,” he told a new creation story where he embraced the Greek concepts and language. He told a story of how God used the logos, the organizing principle of Greek philosophy, to bring all things into existence: “"He [the logos] was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”

But the gospel writer does something even more astounding than that with his brief creation story. He is actually able to identify this Greek concept of logos, which he sees at work in the very act of creation, with the Christ that he has come to know and about whom he is writing this Gospel: Jesus of Nazareth. “And the logos became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

Now, some might accuse John of stealing concepts from Greek thinkers and using them to slip some Christian gospel message to Greek thinkers, but I don’t think that that is what he is doing. I believe, instead, that he has genuinely listened to these Greek thinkers and has discovered that their different way of looking at the universe and how it can be understood has led him to a deeper understanding of the Christ that he calls Lord.

And maybe the best thing we can do is to follow John’s example. When we, as modern Christians are faced with new ways of understanding the cosmos and its origins – ways that were not necessarily anticipated in our original sacred texts – we have no need to react with defensiveness or fear. People of faith have been running into this issue for quite some time. And some of them, who were writing down the Bible, did not hesitate to rethink and retell the creation stories that they had received so that they might better take into account the new priorities and ways of thinking that they had encountered. This was not a denial of what they had known before but an enhancement and a new richness.

And the writer of the Gospel of John even found that this exercise took him deeper into the mystery of the Christ that he worshipped. So why wouldn’t we, by rethinking our understanding of the origins of all things in the light of the stories that science gives us, be drawn into a deeper understanding of God our Creator and sustainer. That is what a good creation story is supposed to be there for, isn’t it?

Sermon Video:

Father God

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 4th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 4 February, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Matthew 5:43-48, Galatians 4:1-7, Psalm 27:4-14

hen we pray to God and call God, “Our Father,” you all get that that is a metaphor, right? I mean, we all understand that we don’t mean that literally. We’re not saying that God is our literal or biological or even foster father, but that, in some meaningful ways, God is like a good human father. It’s a metaphor. And it is, in many ways, a good metaphor – a metaphor that genuinely helps lots of people to see God in a helpful way. But we also understand that, like most metaphors, you cannot push it too far. You should not take that metaphor as an indication that God is human or male or likes to smoke a pipe and read the Sport’s Section even if every father you have ever known has been human, male, a pipe-smoker and a sports fan.

What’s more, I think we can all recognize that it is a metaphor that doesn’t work as well for some people as it does for others. Some people, frankly, don’t really have the best experience with human fathers. Some children don’t grow up even knowing a father or have been abandoned by him at a very early age. You can well imagine that, for such a person, calling God Father doesn’t necessarily help them to engender the warmest feelings for God. You could hardly blame such a person if their image of a Father God is someone distant or absent. And, of course, I hardly need to say that if someone had an abuser, an addict or a criminal as a father they would naturally have a very warped view of any God they called Father. That is the thing with metaphors. They are very powerful, but they are sometimes too powerful – so powerful that that they lead people down false paths instead of towards the truth.

But here is something that you may not have thought of before: when we call God Father, we have all kinds of ideas and images that we associate with that metaphor, some of them helpful and some of them not so helpful. But what if I were to tell you that the ideas that we associate with that metaphor are not exactly the same ones that Jesus, his disciples and the people who wrote the Bible had? I mean, we all realize that on some level that the Bible was written in a very different world from the one where we find ourselves. But one thing that means is that words didn’t mean exactly the same thing back then as they do now.

The Bible was written in a patriarchal society. And I know that we often use that word “patriarchy” today to refer to the power that men hold in society in general. But the word actually means something much more specific than that. The word literally means “father-rule” and it means that the most basic and fundamental organising principle of that kind of society is the father. It means that everyone in the entire society belongs, in some sense, to a family and that each family is under the control of one powerful male individual. Fathers rule in the sense that absolutely everyone in society must answer to a father somewhere.

And, as you have probably already imagined, there can be a downside to that sort of a structure in society, at least for those who don’t get to be the fathers. Fathers are given near absolute power. They can tell any member of their family what to do, who to marry, control most every aspect of their lives and even have the power of life or death with few limitations. The father, in such a society is an absolute dictator and you can easily imagine that many fathers could and did abuse that kind of power.

But there was also a bright side to this structure – after all, how could it endure so long if people didn’t see some benefits. There was also a clear understanding that this amazing amount of power and authority given to a father could only be used to one purpose: to ensure that every member of the household had what they needed to survive and to thrive. The system wasn’t there in order to serve the fathers, at least not in theory. It was there to protect, support and bless the entire family.

And that family could include an awful lot of people. It wasn’t just what we call a family today – the basic family unit of parents and offspring living together under one roof. It was an extended family that might include multiple generations and various degrees of relation. A family also included slaves, servants and hired workers on the farm and it even included livestock and working animals. The father was responsible for all of those people and not merely responsible to keep them alive and fed, but responsible to see that each and every one of them had what they needed to meet their highest potential.

Now, if that sounds like way too heavy a burden for any individual to bear, it absolutely is. How could one person know enough about every individual in his household to know exactly what each one needs to thrive? And how could he find the means and resources to make that happen?

The evidence seems to indicate that fathers suffered a great deal in order to meet such impossible expectations. They had a terrible life expectancy; they worked themselves to death. And the stress of the job manifested in many other ways. I am sure that many of the men that Jesus healed in his ministry – the so-called demon possessed, the paralytics, the hysterically blind – were men who had been overwhelmed by all the expectations that were put upon them and upset at their failure to meet those expectations in the midst of an economic crises that had been caused by Roman greed. The stresses on them were so extreme that they had started to manifest in physical ailments; their bodies literally began to shut down.

But there didn’t seem to be any escaping it; it was just the way that the world worked. Fathers were given an extraordinary amount of power, but not really enough power if they were going to live up to everything that was expected of them.

But then, we’re told, Jesus came along. And Jesus spoke about a different way of doing things – of a kingdom that belonged to God rather than to any human power or authority – including fathers. (Jesus even once explicitly said that there should be no “fathers” in his entire movement.) And perhaps the greatest indication of the radical newness of this kingdom that Jesus spoke of was the way that he talked about God. Jesus, you see, called God his father and he taught his disciples to pray and do likewise.

Now, Jesus wasn’t the first person to ever think of calling God a father. That is indeed a very ancient idea – that, just like a father ruled over a family, maybe God ruled over the whole world. In other words, they took their understanding of how the world worked below (where fathers ruled with iron hands) and mapped that onto heaven.

What is unique about Jesus isn’t just the fact that he called God father, it is the way that he did it and what he meant when he said it. The passage we read from the Sermon on the Mount this morning is perfect example of how he used the word. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

The image of a father that Jesus is using there is the common image of a father in his society. It is that father overlooking a large household that includes many people from every level of society. The only difference is that the household is so large that it actually encompasses the whole earth. That alone, is not unusual. People had spoken of God in those terms before but that image had always been about how God’s authority extended over the world like a father’s authority was exercised over his whole family. It was a God-as-absolute-tyrant image.

But you can tell from the way that Jesus uses that image, that that is not what he has in mind. Instead of authority, Jesus puts his emphasis on that huge burden of care that a father bore for every person in his household. Jesus says that God, as father, takes very seriously that need to make sure that every member of his household, which encompasses the whole world, has what they need not merely to survive but to thrive. And, as father, God does not have the luxury of playing favourites. He must pour out his blessing – his rain and his sunshine – on those that the world sees as good, and those who the world sees as evil. These gifts must be for the righteous and the unrighteous alike. He must take all of them as they are and do what is best for each person to meet his or her potential.

And that was indeed a revolutionary idea. It opened the door to so much of where the Christian faith went from there. If God was that kind of father and if the household that he was looking after was as wide as the whole world, then many of the old notions that people had about how God related to the people he had created had to be broken down. No more could hope and salvation just be restricted to one ethnic group, the Jews. Surely a loving father would not want to exclude any member of his family from salvation; and so the barrier between Jew and Gentile was broken down.

In the same way, if God, like that ideal ancient father, was really committed to giving the best opportunities for all his children no matter who they were, then surely God’s concern for them wouldn’t be limited by social status. Rich or poor, slave or free, noble or peasant, God would seek the best for all and so the barriers between slave and free would be demolished. Nor would God care all that much about things like gender, so the barrier between male and female would fall. These were all radical ideas for the times, and yet they were reached for in the early Christian church, as we see in the writings of the New Testament. These radical ideas had their origins in the unique way in which Jesus spoke of God. The metaphor is that powerful.

I hope that many of you were blessed, as I have been, with a good father who was involved in your life, who tried to give his very best for his family. When you have someone like that in your life, it helps you to grow up with a strong sense of who you are and of security – that everything is going to be alright. If you got that from someone who is or was a father in your life, then, when you imagine God and speak to God as a Heavenly Father, you will automatically make all of those associations with God in your own mind. It will help you to approach all of life with a strong sense of yourself and of security – a great foundation for a good life.

Of course, if you didn’t have that kind of presence in your life, you may not get very much from the imagery of a Father God – you may even get very negative associations. That is alright. There isn’t anything wrong with you because the metaphor doesn’t help you to better know God. And if meditating on the image of a Heavenly Father doesn’t help you to grow closer to God, it is okay to find other imagery that does that for you. There is nothing wrong with speaking to God as mother, as caregiver, as friend if those images do help you towards a deeper and more positive understanding of the God who cares about you.

So don’t underestimate the power of a metaphor. The way that Jesus could talk about God as his father actually changed the world. It offered peace and hope to people who were struggling to find their way in a very difficult time. We don’t necessarily need to be wedded to particular metaphors, but I would hope that we, like Jesus and the early church, could find the courage to speak about the God that we have come to know through Jesus and say what that God is like. Such talk still has the power to change the world.

Sermon Video:

Doubt & Faith

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, January 28th, 2018 in Minister

Luke 17:5-6, James 2:14-26, Psalm 26:1-12

hen I spoke to him about his role in the church, asking if he might like to increase his participation in some way, he became very quiet – uncharacteristically quiet – and his face visibly dropped. “I don’t think so,” he said in a small voice “I’m not a very good Christian.”

Not a good Christian? How could he possibly think something like that? He was about the kindest and most thoughtful man I had met in many years. He was a committed father and husband who always tried to do his very best for his family. He was generous, sometimes t o a fault. Most of all he was thoughtful and engaging when it came to questions about God, the world and his place in it. I loved to discuss with him as he sometimes pushed against my thoughts in provocative ways.

But there, it seems, was the nub of the problem. He explained that, while he did love talking about Jesus and enjoyed thinking about various stories and passages in the Bible, he wasn’t entirely sure if he believed all of that stuff. “Oh, I love the stories about the virgin birth, the time when Jesus was walking on the water, the whole transfiguration show, I just can’t be sure that it all really happened like that. How can I be a good Christian if I have doubts?”

That is a conversation that I must have had dozens of times, in various forms, in my career. I have been told by people of every shape, size, age and gender that they cannot be good Christians because they have doubts. Of course, I have also had at least as many with people who come at me from completely the opposite end of the spectrum, who have proudly told me that they have never entertained any doubts whatsoever – that they read something in the Bible or hear a good sermon and just believe it all without question or hesitation.

I don’t personally have a problem with either type of person. They are both beloved of the Lord. But that is not how it is generally seen in the church. Somehow we tend to see the Christian who never has any questions or struggles with any doubts as the stronger, better and more mature one, while the one who admits some doubts is seen as weak at best and sometimes accused of not being a Christian at all.

That’s right, even if someone is absolutely arrogant about what they believe – even if they use their beliefs to mock or abuse people that they don’t like for some reason – that is to say if they show anything but the fruits of the spirit, anything but “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” – they are seen to be excellent Christians because they are so certain about what they believe. Somebody else, who may have all of the fruit, can be looked down upon because they lack certainty.

But I guess we can’t do much about that, can we? We are taught that the one thing that is most essential to Christianity is faith. We are told over and over again in the scriptures and in the teachings of the church that is it not about what you do, certainly not about your religious practices, it is about faith. And faith is all about being certain, isn’t it, I mean especially about being certain of impossible or unlikely things?

That’s what I always thought that Jesus meant when he said, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” I remember when I was younger I would read that passage and I would go out and find a mulberry tree somewhere. Well, actually not a mulberry tree because I honestly don’t know what they look like or even if they grow anywhere around here. But I would find something – a blade of grass, a bit of fluff, a small stick and I would stare at it because I thought that Jesus had said that I just had to believe that I could do it – that if I could just screw my brain up into the right attitude without even the slightest trace of doubt anywhere inside me – it would move.

It never did – not even a millimeter – but that didn’t really matter, didn’t negate what Jesus had said, because surely all it meant was that I must have doubted just a little, that it was my fault that the mulberry tree didn’t move.

I didn’t question it then, but I have since wondered whether I might just have misunderstood what Jesus was really saying there. Was Jesus really saying that faith was about being completely certain and banishing all doubt? And was he really suggesting that the thing that I needed to have faith in was my ability to make the mulberry tree move? I have since begun to think that maybe I did misunderstand Jesus’ meaning.

The first thing I note is that the image that Jesus uses to talk about faith is kind of interesting. He says you need faith “the size of a mustard seed.” He goes out of his way to find an image of something that is really small – kind of ridiculously small. In fact, in another parable, Jesus even called the mustard seed the smallest of all seeds on the face of the earth (though that is, of course, a bit of an exaggeration). That tells me that, whatever Jesus meant by what he was saying, he didn’t mean that you had to have a large amount of faith to move mulberry trees. On the contrary, maybe he was even saying that the less you had the better.

How could that be? It seemed to go against everything I thought I knew about faith. How could Jesus possibly be giving encouragement to people who had little faith? And how could such a small quantity of faith (potentially all mixed in with doubt) possibly make the mulberry tree move? It didn’t make sense. But perhaps faith didn’t mean what I always had thought that it meant.

I credit the passage we read from the Letter of James this morning with helping me to better understand what Jesus may have meant. In this letter, the author goes on at length on the subject of faith and he doesn’t seem to be overly impressed by the faith that he has observed in some people – particularly with those who profess to believe important things but it doesn’t really show up in their actions. “But someone will say,” James complains “‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” What he is saying here is that he is not overly impressed by what people believe, especially when they don’t do anything with it. In fact, he makes that quite clear when he goes on to say sarcastically, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe – and shudder.”

I don’t think that he could really put it clearer. You can believe all kinds of true things about God – that God exists, that God is one. You can even believe all kinds of dubious things about God: that God is made of green cheese, that God is a forty-five year-old truck driver. James doesn’t care what you believe about God. James cares what you do about what you believe and it will be in how you live out your faith that you will show James that you have faith, not by how certain you are about the things that you believe.

When I put together the words of James with the illustration of Jesus it becomes clear to me that I had misunderstood the nature of faith. Faith really has nothing to do with how certain you are about what you believe and thus about the size of your belief. Faith can be small – as small as a mustard seed – because it is not about how much of it you have.

The catechism defines the true nature of faith as it is understood in the New Testament quite well: “Belief or faith is a wholehearted trust in God.” It is about trust, not just about believing a bunch of things about God or being certain about those things. It is the same kind of trust that you might put in another person – someone that you felt that you could have confidence in because you knew that they would never let you down.

Because it is defined as trust, we realize that the object of faith matters a great deal more than the quantity of faith. You have to put your trust in someone or something that is reliable. Say, for example, you need to take a flight to go somewhere. When you get on the plane you are placing your trust in the airplane, in the mechanics who maintain it and the pilot who flies it. If that trust is well placed – if the plane is well-built, well-maintained and well flown – how much faith do you need to have for it to get you to your destination? Not much. All you need is enough faith to get yourself on the plane because, if you have zero trust, I tell you that nothing is going to get you on that plane. But if you have enough to get on the plane (you know, small like a grain of mustard) and even if you are trembling with fear and full of doubts, your fear and your doubts won’t affect the flight of that plane, will they? That’s all up to the plane, the mechanics and the pilot. Your part in flying someplace (apart from paying for your ticket) is to chose wisely in which airline you are going to put however much or however little faith you have.

But let ask you this: who is more likely to choose wisely when selecting an airline – those who just decide to be certain that the first one they see will be fine, or those who have enough doubts and questions that they are willing to do some research and ask some questions first? Yes, the latter group may take longer to decide and they may never get all of their questions answered or all their doubts calmed, but whose advise would you really rather take?

That’s why I think it is time to lay aside this notion that the elites of the Christian faith are those who are always certain about what they believe and don’t have doubts or questions. It is certainly time to put aside the notion that those who do doubt are inferior in their faith. It doesn’t matter how much you believe, it matters who you trust. And that trust can be mixed with as much or as little doubt as is appropriate to you.

Are you someone who has naturally gravitated to the Christian faith – who always just knew that it was true? Have you heard the stories of the Bible that seem impossible and your reaction has always just been, “Wow, that’s amazing! Just think that it happened just like that!”? I have known many Christians just like that and, you know, I have known them to be wonderful people. There is a beauty and purity to their worship and praise and I know that God loves them.

Are you someone who, on the other hand, continually struggles with questions and doubts? Do you hear some of the fantastical stories of the Bible and your first reaction is to say, “I don’t know how that could have been”? Well if you can learn to trust Jesus even if you have doubts and even if your questions might never be completely answered, you are no less of a Christian and no less beloved of God than those in that first group. In fact, you are probably a fascinating person to discuss God with and I somehow think that God really likes that about you.

Both sorts exist; both sorts are beloved of God and, most of all, both sorts are needed as well as every sort of person in between. That is because it doesn’t matter how much you believe or how little you doubt. It matters who you trust. That’s all that matters even if that trust is mixed with doubts and questions. That’s what Jesus was saying. It’s what James was saying too. It’s time we started to accept it. And it is especially time for us to treat every individual’s approach to the faith with respect.

Sermon Video:

School of Hard Knox; They never taught me this!

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, January 22nd, 2018 in Minister

Galatians 1:10, Isaiah 43:16-19, Psalm 91:1-16

ack in October, as you will remember, we held a dream auction here at St. Andrew’s and we asked everyone to consider putting something up for auction – especially something that represented your own talents or hobbies. And so I decided to put up a sermon for auction. I, foolishly thinking that I could write a sermon about anything, said that the highest bidder would be able to order a sermon on the topic or with the title of their choice. I am here to tell you now that the winning bidder was Andy Cann and the day is today – which is my way of saying that, while you can absolutely blame me if you don’t like the content of today’s sermon, if you object to the topic, you can speak to Andy. (By the way, there was also a second place bid and Jean Godin has already named a topic for next month.)

So this is the title that Andy gave me for today’s sermon: “School of Hard Knox; They never taught me this!” Now, when I heard that title, I knew exactly what Andy was asking for, but it might not be quite so obvious to some of you so I’ll explain. The Presbyterian Church in Canada has three colleges in which they prepare people for the Ministry of Word and Sacrament. There is one in Vancouver called the Vancouver School of Theology, one in Montreal called Presbyterian College and one in Toronto called Knox College. But Knox College in Toronto is the largest and the best known of the three so by asking about the school of “Hard Knox,” Andy was asking me to comment on how well or how poorly I feel the education I received prepared me for the reality of working as a minister that I have faced.

It is a very good question, one that many people have been asking in recent years as we have seen the problems being faced by our clergy – problems that make people wonder if they have been adequately prepared. We are in a situation today, for example, where we are seeing high proportions of those who enter into the ministry drop out of it within a few years. Those who stay, often suffer from burnout, depression and other problems. It is well worth asking whether the preparation that they were given has let those clergy down.

Also we have the issue of the pressure that the church in general is under – especially when we see a general decline in church attendance and membership across the board – even if there are some notable exceptions in particular churches. We surely cannot blame all of that exclusively on the clergy, but it doesn’t seem out of line to ask how the failures in educating clergy might have contributed to that.

So I do welcome the opportunity to reflect on the education that I received, how it helps me and how it may have failed me. I will raise just one quibble with Andy’s title however. I didn’t go to Knox College. I studied at Presbyterian College in Montreal. But I get that “School of Hard Presbyterian College” really wouldn’t have worked, so we will just go with Andy’s title.

I did learn many things in my studies that I valued and continue to value. I appreciate the fact that I wasn’t just trained to be a minister; I was educated. I wasn’t just told what to do or say in various situations or how to carry out ministerial tasks. I was given the tools I needed to think for myself. Rather than being told what a certain Bible passage meant, for example, I was challenged to discover the meaning for myself. I believe that this was the only way to do it.

People often suggest today that our ministers should be trained for particular tasks – how to plant a church, how to run a project, fund raise for particular goals or whatever it might be. But I really feel that such training would have been almost useless to me in the long run. After all, the methods I would have been taught back then, 28 years ago, would not have included using the internet, social media, PowerPoint projection and all kinds of other technologies that didn’t exist or were priced out of reach for churches back then. The world in which we live has changed at a breakneck pace over the last quarter century that I have been a minister and the role of a minister has changed along with it far more than we realize. I have gone from using the mail and telephone to initiate most contacts to email and am now in a post-email social-media contact mode for most of the time. That is but one key way in which things have changed.

So, it was much better to give me the ability to think out how I would make use of any tools that became available and any changes in culture that arose than it was to simply tell me what to think, say and do. I hope that we never forget that the task in preparing a minister is to educate her or him, not merely to train.

So I do feel that I left school with a good basis that would help me to learn how to approach the Bible, think through various theological questions, preach and teach. But Andy’s question is about what I didn’t learn so let me turn to that question.

When the Apostle Paul speaks to the church in Galatia – a church that he founded and to which he gave extraordinary leadership – he says a few words that always convict me when I think about my ministry over the last quarter century? “Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

Seeking human approval – trying to please people – is natural. It is something that we all do. And you know why we all do it: because we all want people to like us. We always feel better and safer when we are part of the group and so when we get the sense that people don’t like us we often feel that inner compulsion to do whatever we possibly can to regain that sense of being liked.

And I, like most people, grew up with that desire to have people like me. And when I began my studies at Presbyterian College and began to work as a student minister (I had, for most of the time that I was studying, a student placement as the effective minister for a small United Church in Laval, Quebec) I would say that I set out with the expectation that all of the people in all of the churches that I served would always like me. How would I accomplish that? Well, I certainly wouldn’t preach things that people might disagree with. That was almost guaranteed to get someone mad at me. I would only choose music that everyone always loved (good luck with that by the way), I wouldn’t mess with any longstanding traditions and wouldn’t rock the boat by suggesting things that someone (even just one person) might have a problem with. Oh, I had all kinds of subconscious strategies that I thought would guarantee that everyone would like me.

But the Apostle Paul seems to make it very clear that pleasing people is not the goal of Christian ministry and that seeking human approval often comes at the expense of seeking God’s approval. This natural tendency that I had to want to please people looked likely to be a problem.

Now what is Paul really trying to say here? Is he saying that a good minister should intentionally set out to antagonize the people in her or his congregation? Is he saying that I should make the church a place where people are never happy and nothing ever happens that they like? Clearly not!

But anyone who has put some time into ministry knows exactly what Paul is trying to get at here. You can preach things that people like to hear, of course, but if you are never dare to say anything that someone might disagree with, there will definitely be times when you are not preaching the word of God and that is your job as a minister.

But it’s not just about preaching; it is even more about leadership. If you try anything new in a church the simple reality is that somebody (at least one) won’t like it because change makes people uncomfortable. So, if you are people pleasing, you will always pull back from doing that new thing even if it is the right thing to do, even if it is what God is calling you to do and even if, ultimately it will prove to be something so good that everyone feels a deep sense of satisfaction that they are doing a worthwhile thing. That’s right, you can be so focussed on pleasing people that you pull back from doing the very thing that would make them feel the most pleased. That is messed up! But I know that ministers do exactly that all the time.

So I think that Paul has a point here. Leaders in the church who are primarily motived to please people and draw their sense of worth from doing so, will not be the kinds of leaders that they need to be. And I must confess that many of us church leaders are still stuck in the people-pleasing zone and our education did not necessarily help us to break out of it. That is one good reason why burnout, dropout and things like depression hits the clergy so hard. It is simply impossible to please all of the people all of the time in ministry – perhaps more impossible than in many other professions because we are dealing with things that people take very seriously – and if you base your self-image and worth on how people see you, your self-image will take a hit.

Even more important, we need to remember that the church itself doesn’t exist in order to please people. Yes, we certainly hope that people will enjoy much of what they experience in the church and, even more important, that they find a deep sense of satisfaction as they fulfill what they were called to be by knowing, serving and loving God and others. But that happiness is not the purpose of the church, it is a secondary effect of the church’s fulfilment of its mission. We are not here to please, we are here to serve, to love and to live out the word of God. If we spend all of our energy on pleasing people and keeping them happy, we will never get around to our true mission.

But the problem is that it is so hard to let go of that people-pleasing impulse. It is part of one of our deepest drives – that desire to be loved and accepted. The antidote, I feel sure that Paul would say, is to find our sense of self-worth in God rather than in people. “Am I now seeking human approval, or God’s approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I would not be a servant of Christ.” But how do you do that? The approval of people seems so real and tangible (even though it is, in fact, quite fickle and changeable) while the approval of God seems less real.

What you need to do, of course, is to cultivate a correct view of God and particularly a correct understanding of God’s opinion of you. Meditate on passages like the one we read from the Psalms this morning: “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’” When you let go of the notion that God is just out to get you – dead set on punishing you for all your wrongs – and accept that God really is on your side and delights in all that you are, you can begin to be less reliant on the approval and the pleasing of other people to tell you who you are.

But it is a long journey. I would say that, in many ways I have spent the last 25 years since I was ordained, learning how to please God before I please people and I am hardly done. If I had learned more in my Presbyterian College days about all the ways in which I seek to please people and how I deal with it (wrongly) when I fail to please others, maybe I could have accelerated my advancement; I don’t know.

Ironically, I suppose, I would have to say in response to Andy’s question, the things that I failed to learn at school that matter most are not the external things – theologies, scriptural interpretation, philosophy and so on. The things that I failed to learn that matter most were the things about myself – how I am motivated, what are my triggers and fears. To know yourself and what drives you is the beginning of true leadership because it is only then that you can understand what drives others.

I’m not saying that the college could have laid all of that out for me. But just as they gave me the tools to understand the Bible, theology and preaching that I have been able to build on in years since, maybe they could have given me some tools to understand myself. In any case, I am thankful for all that I have received. Ministry in the church is hard – far harder than I think any of my fellow students realized at the time – but I am very thankful to have been given the privilege of being part of it.

What I am learning from preaching the Catechism

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, January 16th, 2018 in Minister

In 2004 the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada commended a document prepared by the Church Doctrine Committee for use in churches. The document was called "A Catechism for Today," and it was an updated version of a kind of teaching tool, in the format of a series of questions with supplied answers, that has been used in churches since the time of the reformation.

You can download and read the Catechism for yourself by clicking here.

This year at St. Andrew's Hespeler, we were looking for a way to reconnect with some of the basic teachings of Christianity and of our tradition. Unfortunately, we increasingly find ourselves in a world where people, including practising Christians, are not familiar with some of the basic ideas that have been so important to the faith down through the centuries. So we decided that we would make use of "A Catechism for Today." throughout the year. The document is conveniently broken up into 52 readings so we are placing one of those readings each week in the bulletin and I am using them to inspire my sermons as often as possible.

I just thought that it would be a good thing if, from time to time, I would blog about the experience. I am coming to the end of the first month using the document; here are a few things that I am noticing.

It is a good thing to be using something that disciplines me to focus on some of the most basic questions that people really have. People do really wonder about their purpose. They worry about the relationship between faith and science and they wonder about faith and doubt (all topics that I have tackled so far). I have always been driven in my preaching (as I think that I should be!) by what the Scripture text is saying to me and to us. It is important to step away from that, at least sometimes, to directly tackle the real questions that people have. Yes, sometimes the scripture does lead us to do that, but I feel that using the Catechism is going to be a helpful discipline.
One big surprise, however, is to see how hard it is sometimes to draw a line between what the scripture says and what the traditional doctrinal positions of the church have been. The document very helpfully includes a series of scripture passages to support a particular answer that is given and to inspire further thought and discussion based on those scriptures. I must say, however, that I am finding that the connection with the supplied passages is sometimes tenuous and sometimes even contradictory. My favourite example so far is the answer to the first question which states, "We have been made for joy: joy in knowing, loving and serving God, joy in knowing, loving and serving one another, joy in the wonder of all God’s works." A terrific answer, certainly, but not many of the scriptures that follow it really say much about what our purpose is. One of them, Job 22:26, is actually a quote from Eliphas the Temanite, one of the antagonists of Job, whose words, I would say, are ultimately rejected by the book.
All of this has made me begin to wonder to what degree our doctrines are really driven by scripture and to what degree we have decided what we believed and then sought to support them with scripture -- a question that I suspect I will continue to ponder as I continue this experiment.
Just one more observation on the difference between the answers supplied to question 4 and question 10. To the question "Is the pursuit of science incompatible with faith in God?" the catechism answers a clear "No!" That clarity is very much needed; it is something that is important to affirm. But the question, "Does faith exclude all doubt?" does not get the same clear answer. That troubles me because I know many people who feel so very inadequate because of their doubts. I feel a great need to affirm not only that doubt is okay but that it valuable and hardly disqualifies someone from expressing faith. I just wish there had been a clearer answer.

Please understand I am not trying to complain about the document or question it. I do find it to be quite excellent. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts and may continue to do so through the year.

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