Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

500 years later, what does God want nailed on your church door?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 30th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 29 October, 2017 © Scott McAndless Reformation, Baptism

Matthew 19:13-15, Ephesians 2:1-10, Psalm 13:1-6

lmost exactly five hundred years ago, on the last day of October in 1517, a young monk and doctor of theology took a piece of paper upon which had been printed 95 theses and he nailed it to the door of a church in Wittenberg. It was not, I want to be clear, an act of vandalism. Though Luther was angry about a few things that day, he was not taking out his anger on that door with a hammer.

It was actually quite an ordinary thing for a professor in his position to do. He had written down these 95 little ideas on one sheet of paper because he thought that they were provocative ideas. He didn’t necessarily think that people would agree with them – not all of them anyway – but he wanted people to discuss them together so that, out of the discussion, they might come to a better understanding of where the truth lay. Nailing the theses to door was simply the normal way of posting them in public. The church door was basically the sixteenth century version of Facebook.

But the banging of the hammer that nailed that document to the church’s door was loud – so loud that it has echoed down through the last five centuries. For the posting of that list of ideas did not lead to the civil discussion that Luther was looking for. It was the spark that ignited protestant reformations that would transform the spiritual landscape.

Today is actually a big deal in church history. It is the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And, in Protestant churches across the country and around the world, churches are celebrating, in particular, the unique contributions of Protestant Christianity. And there is no question that there is much that is worth celebrating. The Protestant reformers, starting with Luther, really did open up new possibilities for how we could think about and relate to God.

The reformers did that by declaring what are often called the Five Solas. (Sola is a Latin word that means alone – like when someone sings alone and we call it a solo.) By declaring these solas, the reformers were saying that we only really needed these five things in order to work out our salvation and our relationship with God. The five solas are: Sola Fide (by faith alone), Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone), Solus Christus (through Christ alone), Sola Gratia (by grace alone) and Soli Deo Gloria (which means glory to God alone).

These were wonderful and powerful ideas in their time especially because, in Luther’s day, the institution of the church as it existed then had been trying to control every aspect of the human relationship with God. The church had been teaching people that it’s traditions and authority were sufficient to fix our relationship with God and that you could even purchase the forgiveness of your sins with gifts of money. That was the thing that had made Luther particularly mad when he nailed up those 95 theses.

So the reformers came along and said no, you didn’t need to be dependent on the church and its traditions and officials; you really only needed five things. You could work out your relationship with faith alone, with scripture alone, through Christ alone, by grace alone and so that God alone should be glorified. That was a beautiful and liberating message and, as I said, it transformed the world.

I happen to believe that the message of grace was by far the most important part of that. They realized that it is pointless to try to please God with your good works or by being more righteous than anyone else. Nothing you could ever do could impress God after all. All you can do is receive God’s gracious gift of salvation, forgiveness and whatever you need most. You can never pay for it.

But I have a question. What is the best way to honour what those reformers did? Should we just take their lessons and wisdom and set them in stone? Should we just say that they figured it all out once and for all and we don’t have to think about any of it anymore? That can easily become the temptation on this 500^th anniversary of the Reformation – to get frozen in what happened 500 years ago. But does that really honour Luther’s courage and the courage of the other reformers?

The Christian church is now about 2000 years old. And someone recently pointed out to me that in those 2000 years, the church has gone through three major shifts. The church began, after the time of Jesus, as a small movement that was at odds with the power structures of this world, especially the Roman Empire, but by about the year 500, it completed its first great transformation to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. That changed everything. Then, 500 hundred years after that, the church was shaken by a second great transformation as it split for the first time into two great churches, the Roman Catholic in the West and the Orthodox in the East. From there the two churches took two very different courses. In particular the western church gave ever more power to its hierarchy which led to a number of abuses which led, five hundred years after that, to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Every five hundred years the Christian Church has gone through a major upheaval – a series of events that changed everything. It is consistent enough to make me think that there is a design to it all – to make me think that perhaps it is part of God’s plan. But, of course, you have realized the other question that such a history raises: what if, five hundred years after the Reformation, we are due? Is it possible that God is going to do something new in the church today? This is not to suggest for a moment that God is leading us to question or reject the wisdom that comes to us from the Reformation, but maybe we have gone somehow astray in how we have been living them out and God is getting ready to call on us to live out the gospel more authentically given the new challenges of the twenty first century.

I tend to think that that might be just the case. I see many indications that we are in a time of transition. For example, one of the developments that drove the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago was the invention of a new communication technology. You may have heard of it; it was called the printing press. It allowed for the ideas of the reformers to spread about at an unprecedented speed – so fast that the people who were invested in just maintaining things the same as they had always been could do nothing to stop it. Well, we are living in an age when new developments in communications are coming at us so quickly that almost nobody can keep up. Things are moving so quickly that the authorities – including church authorities – cannot manage the change.

So this looks like a time when God might be doing a new thing. But what new thing could God be doing? I don’t claim to know that for sure, but I wonder if God might not have sent us a messenger today. We had the great privilige and honour today to welcome Clara into the life of the church through baptism. We have admitted her into all of the fullness of what it means to be a Christian. But we have done that, as you may have noticed, without her really understanding what it means to be a Christian. We asked her some questions but she really couldn’t answer them. Her parents had to answer for her, as did we as her church family.

I believe that God has sent Clara to us to teach us about being a Christian in this present age. We believe and confess, as we have read, that we are saved by grace. That means that we believe that we are brought into the very presence of God (both now and for all eternity) not because we have done anything to deserve it but because of God’s kindness and love shown to us (particularly through what Jesus Christ did for us).

That is an essential part of the teaching of this church – of all Protestant churches – and one of our key inheritances from the Reformation that began five hundred years ago. But I suggest to you that we don’t really believe it. We don’t believe in salvation by grace because we constantly give into the temptation of adding conditions. We say, for example, that what we have done for Clara is not quite complete – that some day, when she is able to have some intellectual understanding of some of the things that we have said to her, she will have to make her own personal decision about whether or not she believes it. We suggest that her faith is not yet complete because she lacks in understanding.

But I suggest to you that, while she certainly will have to work out what she believes about many things for herself someday, none of that needs to limit the gift that God gives her today. Remember what Jesus said to his disciples when they wanted to prevent the little children from coming to him. He said, not merely that they could come to the kingdom of God but that the kingdom actually already belonged to them. Jesus believed that little children were actually more capable of the faith that gave them the kingdom than his disciples were. Maybe the disciples understood more, but Jesus knew that faith isn’t really about what you believe or understand, it is about who you trust and trust comes much more naturally to children than it does to us.

Ah, but you see, we Protestant Christians have this tendency to want to set up barriers. We are like the disciples in the story who “spoke sternly to those who brought” the children to Jesus. There are days when I really feel like there is a lot of stern speaking going on in the church. Anyone who disturbs your notion of what the church is supposed to be – who likes the wrong kinds of music, who doesn’t read the Bible in the same way that you do, who has a different understanding of how relationships are supposed to work – you speak sternly to them. Anyone who does something in a way that you think it is not supposed to be done, who makes the wrong noise at the wrong time, who leaves a mess behind them, you speak sternly to them. I’m sorry to say that I see it and hear about it all the time in the church. We may say that we are welcoming and loving, outwardly we may speak that way, but it is so easy to speak sternly to those others and it turns them off. Whenever we do it, we are forgetting the message of God’s grace.

So, I don’t know exactly what Reformation God may be aiming to start in the coming years. I am no Martin Luther and I don’t want to be one, but I can think of a few theses – a few ideas that it might be worth opening a discussion about. I don’t necessarily know what the answers are to these ideas are, but I also don’t know what new avenues for change might be opened up if we did boldly tackle these issues. So, in closing, I would propose a few theses for the church door in 2017.

1. What if we actually took Jesus at his word and acted as if we believed that Clara and infants like her have a better grasp of what the kingdom of God is actually about than we do?

2. What if we didn’t speak sternly to children, or to anyone really, just because they had a different idea of what it means to live out their trust in Jesus than we do?

3. What if we believed in the grace of God so much that we actually treated everyone like a genuine sister or brother without regard to their ideas, their background, status, gender, sexual orientation or intellect.

4. What if we actually decided that the Good News about Jesus Christ and the people that that news is for were more important than keeping up the institutional traditions and trappings of the church?

I invite you to consider these four theses. (Nails the 4 Theses to the church door.)

Now, I don’t know if these are the right ideas to be debated. I don’t know if the debate will ever be held. But I do know this: sometime soon, God will take a few new ways at looking at questions similar to these and make a Reformation out of them. I also know that if you are more concerned for the state of an old church door than you are for the question to whom does the kingdom belong, your priorities might be out of whack.

Bright and Breach

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 15th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, October 15, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Matthew 1:1-3, Genesis 38:27-30, Psalm 78:1-7

oday is a very meaningful day for this congregation, for Sarah and Joelle ______ and for their family. But I would like to remind us that it is not just one day. I mean, if any family decided that they wanted to share the birth of their first child (or children) with us in a celebration of baptism, that would be a wonderful gift and a day of rejoicing. But Sarah and Joelle, though they are in worship with us for the first time today, are not really among us as strangers.

For one thing, their mother has been part of the life of this congregation for her whole life which means that some of the most important and formative moments in her life have happened in this place and with people from this congregation. We have been part of the person she has become in significant ways.

Even more important, when, four years ago, she and Andrew made the most important decision of their lives and decided that they would tie their destinies together, they came here to celebrate and to make their mutual vows. I had the privilege of presiding, on your behalf, on that very special day and I particularly remember it because I was kind of inspired by Andrew’s career. His job involves building things out of concrete that is reinforced by steel rebars, so I spent some time talking about the rebars that God wanted to use to reinforce their relationship – rebars like patience, kindness and God’s unfailing love. A little corny? Maybe. But I like to think that, amongst the many things they were thinking about that day, they did hold onto some of what I said because they seem to have indeed built a strong and enduring relationship that will stand the test of time.

But if you think that their marriage four years ago changed their life, that is nothing compared to what happened to them one year and one day ago when Sarah and Joelle showed up and began to rearrange absolutely everything – especially all of their priorities. It has got to be the most significant single event in their lives up until this point and yet today they have chosen to invite us into their relationship with their children. And not just today, but on into the future as they have said that it is their intention that this congregation should be a part of their children’s life as it has been a part of Laura’s.

As I thought about this very special day, my mind turned to the stories of births in the Bible and, for some strange reason, I particularly thought of the stories of the births of twins. There are only a few twins mentioned in the Bible. All of them happen to be boys. Some of them, like Jacob and Esau, have pretty well-known stories. But as I thought of Sarah and Joelle and what their coming among us means, I remembered another set of twins who seemed to have something important to say to us today: their names are Perez and Zerah.

But before we can talk about these two very important, but somewhat obscure twins, we need to understand that the Bible comes to us out of a world that looked on children in very particular ways. For one thing, the naming of a baby always holds deep significance and meaning in the Bible. They didn’t just give their babies names because they were popular that year or because they were naming their child after some popular television character. (And, yes, I am talking about all those parents out there who gave their daughters the name Khaleesi last year.)

It didn’t work like that in Ancient Israel. Back then, the custom was for the mother to chose the name of her child (it was one of the few things in that society that women were actually given control over) and she would choose the name based on her hopes and expectations for her child or on some circumstance surrounding the birth.

Another thing that you need to understand about the ancient people of the Bible: birth order mattered a lot. The difference between being the first born and the second born was like the difference between night and day. The firstborn male got everything (and, yes, this was all about the boys; girls were not valued in the same way, but that was really their problem and their mistake). The second son got nothing. This makes the stories about the birth of twins in the Bible particularly dramatic. The question of which one will be born a few seconds before the other one becomes a near life and death struggle.

So, with that in mind, let us take a look at the story of the Bible’s less famous twins, Perez and Zerah. Now, even though you have probably never heard their names before, they are actually very important and significant twins as far as the Bible is concerned – so important that they are named in the third verse of the New Testament – Matthew 1:3 – among the ancestors of Jesus Christ. The story of their mother, Tamar, and how she came to have them is also one of the strangest stories in the whole Bible but it never gets read in church (for reasons I’m just not going to explain to you) so you’ll just have to read it for yourselves later. (We preachers will resort to anything to get people to read the Bible for themselves.)

But the importance of these two children is something that we should pick up on here today because one of the reasons we are here is because we don’t just think that Sarah and Joelle are cute and beautiful (which they are, by the way) but also because we believe in their potential. They are only a year old. They have already started to form personalities and interests but we have no idea what they might grow up to do and to be. We don’t even have a clear idea of what the world will be like when they grow up. But we have baptized them today because we believe that God can use them and their uniqueness to bring about a better world – to establish some manifestation of the reality of the kingdom of God. That is ultimately what this is all about.

Now, as I said, birth order meant everything to the ancient people of the Bible – much more than it means to us today. And this story in Genesis plays with that ancient obsession because, of course, when you are talking about twins, that sort of obsession is exposed as ridiculousness. After all, why would you insist that a child’s destiny and inheritance must be limited by its place in the birth order when, in the case of twins, we’re only talking about a difference of a few minutes or even seconds?

But it is even more ridiculous in this case when one of the two children puts his hand out and the midwife marks him as firstborn by tying a thread around his wrist and then, in the end, it is the other one who is actually born first. By the end of it, even the author of Genesis seems confused, not really knowing which one is the eldest. (The confusion is actually even more clear in the original Hebrew text. The translators have clarified something that wasn’t very clear in the original.)

I believe that that confusion in the story is quite intentional. The Bible is reminding us – as it frequently does – that all of the systems of this world, the systems that we human beings like to set up in order to say that some people are just better or more valuable than others – are truly meaningless. We keep trying to divide people by birth order or race or wealth or status and God just seems to delight in overturning all of that. The birth of these twins is a graphic illustration of one of Jesus’ favourite sayings, “The first shall be last and that last shall be first” because God just loves turning things upside down.

That brings us, finally, to the names that are given to these Biblical twins, for their names are taken directly from the story of the contest between them to be born first. The twin who is born first (after the other twin puts out his hand and gets the bright red thread tied on it) is called Perez and Perez means breach. The meaning of this has nothing to do with what is called a breech birth which is what you call it when a child comes out of the womb feet first. This was a particularly dangerous kind of birth in the ancient world and could often be fatal for mother or child or birth. But that is not what breach means in this story. It is rather a reference to ancient warfare when a breach would be made in walls or defensive fortifications to allow an enemy army to win a battle or take a city.

The idea behind this name seems to be that Perez has made a breach in the normal ways of doing things. He has overturned the whole way that the world works by stealing the first place from his brother and maybe from all firstborns everywhere.

Wouldn’t you agree, Laura and Andrew, that breach or Perez does make a good name for a twin because I am pretty sure that you have experienced exactly that. The arrival of these two children, especially when they both have come at once, has turned everything upside down for you. They have breached every single habit, every assumption every limit you thought that you had set. They have changed everything including your living arrangements and your relationships with your families and with almost everyone else. They have changed your priorities and your anxieties. But that is what children do and they do it all the more powerfully when they come two at a time.

The other child is given the name Zerah. This is the one who first put his hand out of the womb and the midwife tied a red thread around it. The name Zerah sounds like the Hebrew word that means bright so the idea seems to be that this child is named for the bright colour of the thread.

But, wherever the name comes from, the promise that the arrival of this child brings a new brightness into the world is one that can celebrate here today. Laura and Andrew, I know that you have named your children Sarah and Joelle, but there is no question that they have brought a new brightness into your lives and into the world even as they have breached and disrupted everything. You now know a new meaning to your lives and a new purpose to your being. You now find laughter and joy in places where you never found them before – even in dirty diapers, sleepless nights and just being together. This is a precious gift and we pray that you get full enjoyment of it. And thank you today for sharing that gift of brightness with all of us.

These children, Sarah and Joelle, are among us all as a gift from God today – a gift to their family first but also a gift to all of us. They come to disrupt us because the reality is that the church needs to have its comfortable assumptions of what its priorities are breached and disrupted. They are here as a reminder that the church needs be open to change and to breach if it is going to provide for these children and for others like them a place where they can grow up and take their own proper place in the kingdom of God.

They are also here as a gift of brightness – of new life and new beginnings. They are a sign of the hope that God is with us and will continue to renew us. Andrew and Laura, thank you for sharing these gifts of breach and bright with us today!

Sermon Video:

Thanksgiving after Harvey, Irma, Maria, Las Vegas, the Cariboo Fires, the Mexico Earthquakes, Charlottesville, the Quebec Mosque, the South Asia floods, First Nations boil water advisories, the Battle of Aleppo, Freetown Mudslide, etc. etc. etc.

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 8th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 8 October, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Thanksgiving

Isaiah 25:1-8, Luke 7:31-35, Psalm 138:1-8

t is Thanksgiving Sunday and many people who live in the Cariboo Region of British Columbia are having a hard time knowing what to be thankful for. They have spent most of the last three months on the run. The forest fires and wildfires in that whole region have been record-breaking this year. People have had to leave behind homes and livelihoods and many have heard the word that what they left behind has been completely destroyed. They don’t have their good dishes with them. Some of their closest family members have taken shelter in communities hundreds of kilometers away. I think that it is worth asking, when they gather around the table later today, what will they find to be thankful for?

And they are not the only ones. In Northern Alberta, an extended family will likely gather this weekend, but probably not for Thanksgiving. I think they’ll be gathered for the funeral of a young mother of four who went down to Las Vegas to see a concert last week and didn’t come back.

A family gathers in Houston, Texas. Their home has been flooded and toxic mold has taken over everything. The wood is rotten, the foundation is crumbling and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for anything. Even if they could rebuild, they are not sure that would want to. What would be the point of rebuilding on a floodplain after all? They would just get their lives back together in time to get flooded out again. So what have they to be thankful for? And, yes, I know that this weekend is not their Thanksgiving; that it is more than a month away, but do you really think that their situation will have changed significantly by then? So when will their Thanksgiving truly be?

And there are others – so many others it seems – who struggle with the same reality. The scores of Canadian First Nations communities that have been under boil water advisories for years. They are saying that it could take 30 years for Puerto Rico to recover from Hurricane Maria! Mexico is recovering from three earthquakes and counting. Huge swaths of Southeast Asia and Africa have seen unprecedented flooding and there are the other human-made disasters that are Syria, North Korea, and American race relations. The world seems a mess these days, doesn’t it? So much so that when I was trying to come up with a title for this Sunday’s sermon and I wanted to describe the setting for Canadian Thanksgiving 2017, I ended up with a bit of a run-on title.

But the question is obvious, isn’t it? How are we supposed to be thankful at such a time as this – when so much seems to be going so wrong for so many. What is there to be thankful for? Some people might suggest one answer. It is an answer that I hear a lot from the people that I visit. I often have the privilege of being there with someone who has been through a rough time. They will tell me the story of the trials that they have gone through and the long road to recovery that lies in front of them. And some of those roads are hard and it is hard to find the words that will encourage them to persevere. But then, what will they do? They will finish off the story of their struggles by saying, “But, you know, Rev. Scott, there are a lot of people out there who have it a whole lot worse than I do and I can be thankful that I don’t have to deal with what they do.”

So that is one possible answer to how we can be thankful on this particular Thanksgiving day. When, later on today, we all gather with our families around tables overloaded with bounty, we could all bow our heads and sincerely pray, “Dear Lord, thank you so much that today we are not in Houston… or Florida or Puerto Rico or Northern British Columbia or Mexico City or Syria or Liberia (where thousands recently died in mudslides) or any number of other equally horrible places right now.”

And there isn’t really anything wrong with that kind of thankfulness. It is true that we are so much better off today than so many others in the world and realizing how true that is can certainly help to keep us from falling into self-centred or self-pitying attitudes when things do not entirely go our way. But the reality is that it is not quite as simple as that. It may be true that we haven’t yet seen the kind of disasters that they have, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t. Even more important than that, I believe that thankfulness should be about more than just getting beyond our own self-centredness and self-pitying. I believe that thanksgiving is one of the forces that God wants to use to transform the world. So what kind of Thanksgiving is called for in 2017?

As I thought about that question, my mind turned to the Prophet Isaiah because that is how the mind of a preacher works. I thought of Isaiah because, of all the Biblical characters, he’s the one who lived through a time most like what we’ve been seeing over the last couple of months. Isaiah didn’t live through any major hurricanes that I know of (hurricanes don’t really make it to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea) but he did get caught in a major earthquake in Jerusalem. But worse and more destructive were the wars and invasions that Isaiah had to live through and witness. First the terribly destructive war against Samaria-Damascus and then the completely devastating Assyrian invasion.

Now the specific history of these events doesn’t necessarily matter. All you really need to know for the moment is that these events were horrible and that, in particular, they left in their wake a multitude of cities that were reduced to rubble and decimated populations of citizens. So Isaiah and his contemporaries were very familiar with the very disturbing images that we can see today of devastated cities like San Juan, Mexico City, Houston, Texas, Freeport, Liberia and the list goes on and on.

So how did Isaiah call on the people to respond to the terrible things going on in the world in his day? Well, interestingly enough, he looks at the big mess that is the world and he says this to God: “For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt.” I’m not sure which particular city he is looking at when he says this and it probably doesn’t matter. What is remarkable is who Isaiah apparently starts out blaming for all this mess. He says to God, you have done this. In fact, he even seems to be listing these ruined cities among the “wonderful things” that God has done.

I have heard this kind of talk lately as people have seen the disasters taking place in our world. There are some people who are only too happy to name God as the cause of them. Some do it because they are angry with God and really think that God (who is supposed to be all powerful after all) ought to do something to prevent these sorts of disasters. Others do it as a way of blaming the victims of these disasters for their own misery, saying that God has brought it upon them as a judgement for their wickedness and evil (whatever that might be). The worst example of that, in my mind has been the inclination to blame Puerto Rico’s present state on its heavy debt load and even on the implied laziness of its inhabitants.

So it is not too surprising that Isaiah would flirt with laying the credit for all the disasters he is seeing on God. But I believe that he turns away from that idea because something else immediately catches his attention. “Strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you,” he says to God. But why will they glorify God – that is the surprising part: “For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.” You see, Isaiah has been surprised as he watches these disasters unfold. He has been surprised to see God, but not where he expected to find God. He has not found God in the rubble, mud and destruction. He has instead found God in the acts of compassion that have been done – especially those done for the poor and for the needy.

I think I know what Isaiah is talking about. If you are like me you have probably been overwhelmed as you have watched all of these back-to-back disasters taking place. Feelings of powerlessness and despair pile up. Sometimes it is so much that we begin to suffer from compassion-fatigue. You start to feel like you just can’t care anymore.

But then God has a way of showing you another part of the story that it is easy to miss in the midst of the misery: the acts of courage and kindness – the Mayor of San Juan running around the city in hip waders actually rescuing people who are about to drown, the stranger who stays for hours by the severely wounded man lying on the ground in Las Vegas, the hordes of people moved by compassion who donate far beyond what they can really afford. And the more you look, the more of these amazing stories you can find and, if you are paying real attention, you can discover that God is very much and very powerfully present in the midst of that disaster, just not in the ways that you thought at first.

It is as Isaiah learned: God is most present in the amazing acts of selflessness and service to the poorest and weakest. This is not something that you can prove or logically demonstrate to someone else. It is a truth that comes to you through a kind of mysticism. But once you have seen it, you know that it is true and that God is miraculously present in these selfless acts. They can bring healing and hope far beyond the mere content of the gesture itself and if there is one thing for us to see and to be thankful for in this strange world where we find ourselves on this Thanksgiving Sunday 2017, I believe it is that.

But Isaiah’s vision doesn’t end there. He goes on to describe a feast. Why do we feast on Thanksgiving? We do it because we instinctively understand that one of the best ways to show how grateful we are is to actually enjoy the bounty that we have been given together with the people that we love and who mean the most to us.

But, maybe especially this year, we might ask if it is appropriate and seemly that we should enjoy this abundance of food when there are so many in the world who have so little – when people in San Juan are literally starving for example. I am sure that Isaiah asked himself that question too. But he came back with an overwhelming answer that, yes, it was a time for feasting.

“On this mountain,” he declared, “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” What Isaiah was doing, in the wake of so much devastation and destruction, was calling people together – all people of God will no matter who they were and what their faith and nationality was. A feast was necessary because it would create a new alliance of people who could change the world.

“And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations;” Isaiah continues, “he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.” Isaiah is here talking specifically about wiping away the scourge of death that has been brought on by war in the land. And that makes this promise amazing. God is promising to use gatherings of people of good will to change the conversation – to turn the world away from violence to hope.

If we could claim this promise this Thanksgiving, wouldn’t that be amazing? If, when you gather today or tomorrow with your loved ones to eat “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear,” what if you all used the opportunity not just to enjoy good food and company but to rededicate yourselves to working together for a world of changed priorities – a world where we actually take care of the broken-hearted, where we actively strategize for peace instead of ginning up divisions and enmity as seems to be happening so much lately. Isaiah’s promise is that such feasts can change the world, so let me ask you: what will you do this weekend to make your Thanksgiving feast that kind of feast?

#140CharacterSermon How to #thanksgiving in wake of many disasters? Hold a feast like in Isaiah 25. Dedicate selves to making a new approach

Announcing the Launch of my New Podcast on October 11, 2017

Posted by Scott McAndless on Saturday, October 7th, 2017 in Minister

On Wednesday, October 11, 2017, my newest personal project will go online. It will be a Podcast called "Retelling the Bible."

I really love the Bible and it is a book that I take very seriously. But I also understand that the Bible is not a history book – at least not in the modern sense of that word. It contains many stories based on historical events and set within historical settings, but the goal of the authors was not merely to recount exactly what happened because they believed that they had a far more important job to do. Their job was to convey the truth about God, the world or themselves that they had experienced. And, as any good storyteller knows, you can never let mere facts get in the way of speaking the truth.

I created this Podcast to help people to hear the Biblical stories in new ways -- hopefully in ways that are closer to what the authors originally intended for people to hear. On a weekly basis, I will tell a Bible story in a way that will help you to hear it differently.

For the first season, which will run from October 11 to December 20, I will be retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:26-2:20). There will be a total of eleven episodes -- a rather in-depth retelling -- but that will be what is necessary to bring out all of the references to the Old Testament and the historical context in which the birth is set that we usually miss in the story.

Another problem that we have long had with Luke story of the nativity is that we have twisted it so much to make it fit with the other Biblical story of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew that we have lost sight of the amazing story that Luke originally told. I want to honour Luke for the gifted storyteller that he was by letting his story speak for itself without distorting it in a misguided attempt to harmonize divergent Biblical stories.

I mostly recorded this podcast on my own by setting up a little studio in my bedroom closet but I also asked my very talented daughter, Gabrielle, to help out by lending her voice for the female characters.

I hope that you can join us in this little adventure that will be the first season of "Retelling the Bible." The Podcast will be hosted at retellingthebible.podbean.com/. Once the episodes are up, you should be able to find them on iTunes or wherever else you find your podcasts. If you can't find the series on your favourite app, please let me know and I'll do my best to make sure it can happen.

If you like what you hear, please make sure you share this podcast with your friends and whoever might be interested in listening. Thank you!

Who’s my neighbour?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 1st, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, October 1, 2017 © Scott McAndless – World Communion

Luke 10:25-36, Psalm 36:1-12, Isaiah 2:1-5

t wasn’t like you probably think. It was not like he thought that he was better than everyone else. It was that he actually tried to do his best. He was earnest. He wanted to live without displeasing God or anybody else. He recycled and separated his compost from his garbage religiously. He always brought his bags with him when he went grocery shopping. Even more important, he tried to respect people and accept them as they were. He was a lawyer and he tried to use his profession to make up for the injustices of the world.

And he was not stuck up about it either; he never boasted about any of his own good deeds. It really bothered him that other people never even seemed to try to be good, but he was still patient with them. He was just a good person. There wasn’t a soul who would say otherwise.

So what was he expecting when he came to the teacher and asked him what he needed to do to inherit eternal life? Was he just thinking that he’d be given a nice pat on the back and sent on his way with the assurance that eternal life was his? Maybe. In any case, I don’t think he was expecting a quiz on why, exactly, he conducted his life in the way that he did: “What is written in the law?” he was asked, “What do you read there?” But even there he was ready with an answer: he lived the way he did because he wanted to do his best to love God and love his neighbour.

But that did raise a question, didn’t it? Who was his neighbour anyways? Who did he have the obligation to look out for, to help, to take care of? There were so many needs out there in the world – so much he could do to make things better – but where should he start? Who did he really need to take care of? So he asked.

In response, I am sure, Jesus raised his eyes to the heavens and heaved a deep sigh. Would these people never understand? And he told a story. And in my mind, Jesus was probably about the best storyteller who has ever lived. Others may have told longer stories with more well-developed characters, but Jesus clearly had a way of getting people really engaged in what he was telling. So I don’t think that the man heard that story so much as he lived it.

It was him. It was late one night, well after dark, and for some reason he was down in North Galt walking along Ainslie St. when all of a sudden the motorcycle came out of nowhere. It just clipped him as it went by. It’s possible that the driver didn’t even know that it happened (though I doubt it). But whether he did or not, the result was the same. The lawyer ended up at the side of the road, bleeding rather too much from his head and slipping in and out of consciousness. It was probably while he was in one of those unconscious states that his wallet, identification and cell phone mysteriously disappeared.

He was, to put it simply, not in good shape. And he really didn’t have any way to pull himself together or sort himself out either. He needed help or he simply was not going to get out of this situation.

You see, that is what we often don’t get about the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is natural, when you hear a good story, to find some character that you identify with. And you hear this story and figure that there are only three people that you could identify with: you either see yourself as the priest, as the Levite or as the Samaritan. These are the three actors in the story the ones who are deciding whether or not they will act like a neighbour to the man who is in need. And, of course, since the other two get it wrong, you are likely to at least want to see yourself as the Good Samaritan.

But I am not so sure that that is how Jesus intended for us to hear this story. I believe that, if Jesus really invited that lawyer into that story, he was more likely to invite him into it like this:

The lawyer lay in the muck and in the filth at the side of the road. He had lost a fair bit of blood and had a bigger headache than he ever imagined anybody could have. He had no phone, no papers, certainly no money and when he just tried to sit up a little bit, the pain that hit him was so bad that it threatened to suck him back down into unconsciousness again.

“Who is my neighbour,” he muttered to himself. Surely there is someone who is passing by who will take pity on me. Heaven knows I have taken pity on many others.

Before long, he heard some footsteps approaching. Just from the sound of them, he could tell that he was hearing some well-heeled feet – someone was wearing quality shoes and had a step that was full of confidence. Surely, he thought to himself, this will be someone who has the ability to help me. Here is someone who probably has a lot to spare and it won’t even hurt them a little bit to help somebody out. And so, as the footsteps came nearer, he strained his eyes to see who it might be, his saviour in the night. And, to his delight, as the shadowy figure came into his sight, he realized that he recognized the person. It was an old friend and ally with whom he had worked on some charitable campaigns. He smiled as he waited for him to draw near and then tried to call out his name.

But his voice wasn’t working; all that came out was a croak which only serve to startle the approaching man. He recoiled. What he saw seemed appalling to him. For all he knew, the heap of humanity that he saw in the gutter was all that was left of an addict who had gone too far, who had maybe even overdosed on something awful like Fentanyl. That kind of thing had been happening more and more in the city and he had heard horror stories about how the drug could become airborne and if someone just came too close they could overdose too. He quickly crossed to the other side of the street and proceeded to pretend that he hadn’t seen anything at all.

That was the first disappointment that the lawyer in the gutter suffered. It was not the last. Others passed by: fine upstanding citizens, community leaders, even old friends who obviously could not recognize him in his deplorable state. Every one of them allowed their fear of his state or their distaste or judgement for what they thought they saw to overcome any human compassion they might feel. They all passed by on the other side of the road.

It was only when he had completely given up hope – when he had actually decided that he was going to die there in that gutter – that he heard one final set of footprints. He looked up with a momentary flutter of hope and then his head dropped as he gave a mighty moan. This was definitely not someone who would help him. It was a young woman, an immigrant probably. She was all wrapped up in a hijab. In his eyes, at that moment, she was a victim. He didn’t understand how women are treated in Islamic cultures. He certainly didn’t understand how it is that they accept the lower positions to which they seem to be relegated. On another day, perhaps, he would have pitied her and tried to help her. But today – right now – he had no pity left for anybody but himself. He sank down in despair and finally just gave up completely.

That was when he felt the hand on his cheek. He opened his eyes to see that it was the young woman and that she knelt beside him. Her touch was cool and soothing. Her gentle voice calmed him and lifted his spirit though he didn’t understand her language. He suddenly knew that he was going to be alright. So in the end it was she who called for a cab and went with him to the hospital. It was she who managed to understand, from his ramblings, what his name was and figured out how to get in touch with his family. It was she who saved him.

The people who first heard this parable would have never identified with a Samaritan. They hated Samaritans, despised them, perhaps pitied them for their failure to be Jews. If they heard a story about a Samaritan, they would have expected the character to be the villain or the victim, never the hero.

And Jesus understood that. He understood that they’d never put themselves in the place of the Samaritan. He expected them to put themselves in the place of the man who lay at the side of the road.

This was a parable about what it means to be a neighbour and Jesus knew that it is one thing to be a neighbour when you are in a position of strength – when everything has gone your way and you can use the blessings you have received to help those who are less fortunate. It is quite another thing to be a neighbour when you are at your weakest point – when you are the one who needs a hand.

This is especially true, I think, when you have the same kind of situation in our communities today as existed in the Galilee of Jesus’ time. We live (as was also true in Jesus’ Galilee) in an incredibly diverse society where people come from all over the world to live next to each other – live with different customs, faiths and practices. In some ways it is easy for us to be neighbours to such people when we are the ones who are letting them in, welcoming them or helping them because that is what we are used to. We are used to being the majority – to being the ones who are in control and who, out of the goodness of our own hearts, let others in and allow them to be our neighbours.

That has often been our attitude but it has not always been the most helpful attitude as it can make us patronizing and paternalistic to others. I don’t really think that that is the kind of neighbouring that Jesus is calling on us to practice. He is calling us to embrace our weakness and vulnerability. He is calling us to learn to be a neighbour from the ditch at the side of the road too.

As many of you will know, we here at St. Andrew’s are about to get some new neighbours – that a group of Hindu worshippers have purchased the Lutheran Church building across the street and are planning to move in soon. I don’t know about you, but I am kind of excited about that. I hope that we can be good neighbours to them – to make them feel welcome and assist them as we can. I’ve already begun to think of ways that we can do that and I know that others have as well. But what if Jesus is calling us to experience being a different kind of neighbour to them – calling us to learn to need them, to allow them to help us, to learn from them? Now wouldn’t that be an adventure?

The Bible teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves and Jesus told a story that seems to indicate that such love might just include learning from and growing with those neighbours wherever they might have come from. Maybe he was teaching that being a neighbour means actually needing the people who are different from you, who have different ways of thinking and different priorities. Maybe he was showing us how much we really need all our neighbours.

#140CharacterSermon Who does Jesus want you to identify with in parable of #GoodSamaritan? What if it's the guy in the ditch? #Neighbours

Sermon Video:

I hope you’ll support me as I “Race to Erase”

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, September 26th, 2017 in Minister

On Saturday, October 14, 2017, I will be participating in the Cambridge Race to Erase.

The Race to Erase is an annual fundraiser where teams compete in fun-filled challenges throughout their community, all in support of local charities. The Race challenges are designed to be not only entertaining, but to raise awareness and exposure to local businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Teams compete for fundraising prizes (and the top fundraising team is chauffeured in-style in a limo on Race day!) and a trophy is handed out to the team that finishes the race with the fastest time.

I will be on one of three teams that are racing to support "Hope Clothing." Hope Clothing, a ministry housed at St. Andrew's Hespeler Presbyterian Church, assists anyone in our community who needs some extra help clothing themselves and their family. We provide new or gently used clothing, footwear and accessories to anyone needing some help stretching their budgets. Small personal
items are often in stock, too. We help out dozens of families or singles, men, women and children every week. If we don’t have something that is needed we will do our best to find it.

Our team name for the Race to Erase will be The Clothes Horses. According to the Urban Dictionary, a clothes horse is

"A person who is passionate about new clothes. A big shopper and consequently, a big spender."

The most stylish person ever?

Okay, that is not exactly who I am. I may not be the most stylish person ever, but I am passionate about making sure that people who live in my community can get the clothes they need to live, work and support their families as best they can. I am passionate about used clothes distributed through Hope Clothing.

Hope Clothing is run by the generous donations from the community. The monetary costs associated with running this program rely completely on donations from St.
Andrew’s Hespeler Presbyterian Church, their members and our community. Clothing is given away free of charge. We are truly grateful for any and all donations that we receive because that means we can help
more people.

So, would you like to support me and the Clothes Horses as we support Hope Clothing? Any donations to our team are greatly appreciated. One way of doing that, if you will see me before the race, is to pass on your donation directly to me.

But there is an easier way and you can do it right now! Just follow this link:

cambridge2017.racetoerase.com

Click on "Donate" and then search for my name or the team name. It takes less than a minute and you are done! And the best part is that all administrative fees and credit card fees are taken care of by the YMCA and so 100% of your donation will go directly to Hope Clothing. It so easy you can do it right now. So why don't you go ahead and donate? I'll wait....

All done? Great! Didn't I tell you it was easy? Thank you and God Bless.

Scott

The little kingdom that grow: The noxious weed

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, September 24th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 24 September 2017, © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:30-32, Isaiah 55:8-13, Psalm 92:1-15

esus’ Parable of the Mustard Seed is one that that gets brought up a lot these days in certain discussions. If you ever get into an argument with people – either on the internet or anywhere else – about whether or not the Bible is true and trustworthy or not, chances are somebody will bring up the Parable of the Mustard Seed.

The argument will go something like this: “If you really believe the Bible,” someone will say, “then what about what Jesus says about the mustard seed because Jesus says that the mustard seed ‘is the smallest of all the seeds on earth’ but that is actually not true. The smallest seed is actually a certain variety of orchid that is found growing in the tropical rainforest of Bora Bora or something like that.”

“ So Jesus got it wrong and the Bible got it wrong. The mustard seed is not the smallest seed. And if the Bible is true and inspired, doesn’t it always have to be correct? If we can find even one small error (like if it says that something is the smallest when it isn’t) then the Bible isn’t trustworthy. It invalidates the entire book because if you can’t trust what the Bible has to say about seeds, you can’t trust what it has to say about anything.”

Now, I am not necessarily one who is overly concerned about arguments like that because I don’t necessarily need for the Bible to always be literally true and the entire Bible does not fall apart for me merely because it gets a few facts wrong here or there. I believe that there are truths that go far beyond literal truths and mere facts and I often find those truths in the Bible.

But there is another reason why it doesn’t really matter that this passage gives us false information about mustard seeds and it has to do with a question of genres. A genre is a particular type of literature. You are already familiar with various literary genres. You can easily recognize, for example, genres such as fiction or fairy tale, you know what a newspaper article looks like and you can read the ingredient list on the back of your breakfast cereal box. All of those are examples of literary genres that you encounter every day.

And we have different expectations of different genres. You would get very angry – and rightfully so – if the ingredient list on your cereal box was not 100% accurate. If it promises that the package contains no peanuts, for example, and you’re allergic to peanuts, well, there had better not be any peanuts. But you don’t expect exactly the same kind of accuracy from a historical novel or a book of science fiction, even though you may indeed learn many worthwhile things by reading such books. So you really need to know what kind of literature you are reading in order to know how to interpret the information that it presents.

This understanding is a very important one to bring to your reading of the Bible because the Bible isn’t just one book. It is a collection of books and different parts of it are written in different genres. The Bible contains history and myth, poetry and prose, gospel (which is not the same thing as history) and correspondence and many other types of literature. To know how to read a particular passage, you need to know what type of literature you are dealing with.

So, when Mark tells us Jesus’ pronouncements on mustard seeds, what type of literature are we dealing with? Because if this passage were some sort of scientific treatise on the mustard plant, we would expect a very high level of accuracy and be very upset if it should contain false information on the relative size of mustard seeds.

So is this a scientific treatise? What would it look like if it was? We don’t have to wonder because we actually have an example of a scientific treatise on mustard written around the same time that the Gospel of Mark was written. It was by a Roman senator named Pliny (who also had a famous son so he is usually called “Pliny the Elder”) and it was an encyclopaedia of Natural History in which he included an entry about the mustard plant. In fact, this is what Pliny wrote for his entry on the mustard plant: “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

So that is what a scientific entry on mustard would have looked like at the time when this gospel was written. And you could certainly argue that if Pliny the Elder had gotten any detail about mustard seeds wrong, it would have devalued everything he had to say because Pliny set out to communicate with that kind of accuracy.

But what Jesus was doing was something quite different. He was trying to teach his followers, as he clearly says, not about the nature of mustard plants but about the nature of the kingdom of God. So of course he is going to emphasize and even exaggerate those things about mustard plants that particularly help him to make the points about the kingdom that he is trying to teach them about – like, for example, the relative size of the seeds. It is hardly a problem that the way that he puts it is not strictly correct.

So, if we want to appreciate this parable, arguing over the size of orchid and mustard seeds is to miss the point of it completely. But what is the parable trying to teach us through this image? On one level, the point is pretty simple: Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is something that grows in somewhat surprising ways. That is a lesson that we have actually found in all of the parables that we have been looking at all this month here at St. Andrew’s. It is a theme that runs through all of the parables of Jesus that Mark has collected together here in the fourth chapter of his gospel.

But what particular nature of that growth is Jesus trying to bring out in this particular parable of the mustard seed, and what might it have to teach us about the life of the church today? Well, for that we need to understand the things that the people who listened to Jesus tell this parable would have brought to what they heard. And for that, it would be kind of helpful to know what first-century people thought about mustard seeds?

Well, fortunately, we don’t need to guess at that. We are incredibly fortunate in that we know exactly what people thought about mustard – that we actually have a scientific treatise on mustard written at almost the same time as this gospel. Pliny the Elder’s book of Natural History tells us exactly what the received first-century wisdom regarding mustard was.

We know from Pliny, for example, that they knew the usefulness of mustard. “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health.” They saw it as a useful spice to add taste to food and, even more important, as a medicine in various plasters and potions that they used as folk remedies for various ailments.

They also knew that it was really easy to grow, that it grew wild, in fact, as Pliny says, and farmers had even found ways of increasing its yield by transplanting it. But there was one catch when it came to the growth of the mustard plant. Pliny puts it like this: “but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

Pliny is saying that mustard doesn’t just grow well, it grows too well. It spreads so readily that it tends to take over the garden and squeeze out any of the other fruits, vegetables or grains you may have planted. This was, in fact, common knowledge about mustard, not just special scientific knowledge. Pliny is just reporting what everyone knew.

So, did the people who were listening to Jesus know all of this about mustard? They almost certainly did. The crowd would have been full of farmers and agricultural workers who knew very well that you did not let a mustard plant take root anywhere you wanted anything else to grow. And I can well imagine that those farmers and agricultural workers and everyone else were scratching their heads and wondering why Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God was like the most notorious weed they had to deal with in their gardens and that Jesus was even putting emphasis on how extreme the plant’s spread and growth could be.

So what on earth did Jesus mean by comparing the kingdom of God to such a dangerous and generally unwanted weed? Did he just not know what he was really saying – I mean, we are told that he was a carpenter, not a farmer, after all. Maybe he just didn’t know how destructive a mustard plant in a garden could be. No, I think that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying and exactly how shocked people would have been to hear him speak of God’s kingdom in this way.

As I said, all of the parables of Jesus that are collected in this chapter of the Gospel of Mark seem to be saying the same key thing about the kingdom of God – that it is something that grows. Jesus is teaching that growth is as essential to the kingdom of God as water is essential to a fish. To apply that to the church, Jesus is teaching that, if the kingdom of God is present in a church, that church should exhibit growth in some significant ways. But Jesus is also saying that sometimes things can happen that get in the way of the growth that is natural to the kingdom. And so, in each of the parables in this chapter, he is telling us about the things that inhibit that growth.

So what could he be teaching us about what we sometimes do that prevents growth by comparing the kingdom to a grain of mustard? I believe that he intends for people to bring everything that they know about mustard plants into this discussion of the kingdom of God. He is saying that the kingdom of God will grow in this world – will grow wild and out of control just like a mustard plant in a garden and will actually overpower other cultivated plants.

So what, therefore could possibly prevent the growth of the kingdom? The only thing that could prevent it is the same thing that could prevent the growth of a mustard seed – if you never let it take root in the first place.

And, friends, I think that sometimes we do exactly that. We do recognize the explosive growth potential of the kingdom of God in this world, and we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid that it might overtake our whole lives. We’re afraid it might make us make changes that we don’t even want to consider. We are afraid that it will disrupt this comfortable little garden that we have planted by introducing into it plants that are different from what we are used to and might just take over.

First-century gardeners would have shuddered at the thought of introducing a mustard plant into their well-organized garden and Jesus was expecting exactly that reaction. He was saying that one of the things that would prevent the growth of the kingdom of God among us is our own fear of disruption and change within our well-organized lives and our well-organized churches.

I believe that Jesus wants the church to grow – wants this church to grow – as a part of the growth of God’s kingdom in this world. He wants us, like the mustard bush in the parable, to put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. But, I wonder, will our resistance to change and our resistance to disruption be the very thing that prevents that growth? I believe that Jesus was worried about that very possibility.

#140CharacterSermon Jesus said #kingdomOfGod is like mustard seed (a swarming weed). Is he saying that the kingdom grows in disruptive ways?

Sermon Video:

The little kingdom that grows: The seed that inexplicably grew

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, September 18th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 17 September, 2017

Mark 4:26-29, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, Psalm 92:1-15

f you have paid any attention at all to the news that has come out of Texas in the past month (and there has been a lot of news to attend to) chances are that you heard the name of one Houston religious leader mentioned more than any other. His name is Joel Osteen and he is the lead pastor of Lakewood Church, one of the biggest churches in a city of very big churches.

Osteen’s church caught a lot of flack immediately after the arrival of Hurricane Harvey and the devastating floods that it brought. People were upset with it for its failure to respond – specifically its failure to offer shelter in its large and well-appointed facilities. It seemed all the worse because the church’s excuses changed a number of times in the early days. At first they said they couldn’t offer shelter because the building was inaccessible because of flooding when it clearly was not. Then, once that lie was exposed, they went with the excuse that they hadn’t offered shelter because they hadn’t been asked when lots of other companies and religious organizations had throw n open their doors without needing to be asked.

Now I am not particularly interested in piling on Lakewood Church for what they did or didn’t do after Harvey. It was a crisis situation and, while I hope that I might do better than they did in a similar situation, I recognise with all humility that I might not. But I do have one issue with something that lay behind their actions. I can understand their concerns about their building and about liability, even if I don’t think they dealt with those concerns in the right way. What I don’t get, and certainly don’t agree with, is some of the theology that may have influenced some f their decisions.

Joel Osteen, you see, preaches a very particular kind of Christian message (if it is a Christian message at all) that is known as the prosperity gospel. The promise of this message is that God wants you to be rich – that it is God’s will for you that you should have lots and lots of stuff. That is what Osteen preaches week in and week out. He has also given an excellent example to his congregation of what this is supposed to look like by amassing a personal fortune in excess of forty million dollars.

There are a lot of problems with this prosperity gospel. It certainly contradicts many things that Jesus said. Anyone remember the time when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor,” for example? The whole train of thought also has plenty of potential to lead to abuse as Christian believers are taught a very particular application of the passage we read this morning from the second letter to the Corinthians: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”

This prosperity preaching teaches that the way you switch on the prosperity that God intends for you to have is by giving extravagantly to the church. But when the generous givers fail to see the promised millions materialize for themselves, they are made to believe that it must be their own fault – that they didn’t have enough faith or they didn’t show it by giving generously enough and the cycle repeats again and again until somebody gets forty million dollars but a lot of people end up poorer and convinced that it is really their own fault.

I have trouble with this teaching for all kinds of reasons, therefore, but I must admit that I do understand why it has become so popular and why churches like Lakewood have grown so large. Who wouldn’t want to hear that God wants to give you a great deal of wealth? It is also a very pleasant when you are living in a place (such as the City of Houston a month ago) where people are rich or at least have a reasonable chance of becoming rich because the underlying assumption behind it is that, if you become rich, it must be because you have deserved it – you have earned it because of your extraordinary faith or righteousness. And who doesn’t love the feeling that good things happened to you because you deserved them?

So this can be a very successful message when all is going well. But when things fall apart completely and it is looking like they may not get back to normal for a very long time – in the aftermath of a major hurricane, for example – the prosperity gospel might fall a little short and ring a little hollow. So it is not all that surprising that Joel Osteen went through a rough patch recently in Houston, though honestly I don’t worry about him too much. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine.

But there is a question about what we do with all of this. The world is a very frightening place, after all, a place where a whole lot can go very wrong. We have been reminded of that very forcefully in recent weeks – particularly by Harvey and Irma, by massive forest fires and a major earthquake thrown in for good measure. But it’s not just the natural disasters – maybe if it was just them we could deal with that – but the human ones seem more frightening in some ways. For example, the resurgence of white supremacy and even Nazism is more disturbing in many ways.

When we are reminded so forcefully about what is going wrong in the world for so many people, it can seem supremely selfish and self-centred to be concerned with one’s own needs and especially with things like personal wealth and prosperity. I understand that we would all like to be wealthy – who hasn’t dreamed of it at least once or twice – but when people are losing homes and livelihoods and don’t even have a clue about how they might get their life back – how petty does it seem to be asking God for prosperity for ourselves and expecting that God should make it a priority.

Even more important, what sort of message should we offer to the world in such times? One temptation is to be positively apocalyptic. I have certainly heard some of that recently – that these disasters are God’s payback for our sins. This message can come in many forms: hurricanes are brought on by our cavalier disregard for the environment which is directly tied to the rise in ocean temperatures that feeds extreme weather. Or others will position it as God’s punishment for our society’s immorality, assuming that God is outraged at whatever particular immorality the speaker is upset about. Racial unrest such as the resurgence of white supremacy is variously portrayed as judgement for our failure to right the wrongs of the past or for moving forward too quickly in the present.

Now, I won’t say that there is absolutely nothing to these apocalyptic pronouncements. There are lessons to be learned, I believe, in the midst of a string of disasters. If we, as a society, could actually learn that our actions (or failures to act) have consequences and that it is time to get past the short term selfish thinking that we are so famous for, it would only be a good thing. So, I get where all of this apocalyptic talk is coming from and am somewhat sympathetic to it, but I also think that it is problematic.

For one thing, I have some issues with how we chalk all of this up to God and God’s judgement because the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ takes no delight or comfort from any of it. God feels nothing but sorrow at the sight of people losing their homes or their livelihoods. God does nothing but sow tears of sadness when people are lost in hopelessness or fear – separated from their loved ones and all that is comforting to them.

I think that maybe one of Jesus’ simplest parables is a better way to approach the issue. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,” he said, “and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

The kingdom of God, this concept that was so important to Jesus that he spoke about it all the time, was his way of talking about what God’s best intentions are for this world. (I know that some people often talk about the kingdom of God as if it was only about what happens to people after they die, but if you study everything that Jesus had to say on the topic it becomes quite clear that it was primarily about this world. It might continue on after death, of course, but the place where you were to encounter and enter the kingdom of God was here and now.)

Jesus called it the kingdom of God precisely because he was holding it up as a counterexample to the kingdoms that you encounter in this world – kingdoms like the one that was ruled by King Herod in his day in Galilee. And the stories and parables of the kingdom of God that Jesus told make it quite clear that he believed that God’s intentions for this world are for good and not for fear and suffering.

The kingdom was something that God would do. We could participate in it, but it was ultimately dependant on God’s action. That is what the parable of the growing seed is all about. Ultimately, Jesus is saying, our responsibility is not fix everything that goes wrong in this world. That, I think, is too heavy a burden for anyone to bear. No human can carry all the burdens of this world. But, Jesus says, what you can do is plant seeds.

When you see racial injustice – when you see people who are treating other people as if they were less than human because of the colour of their skin or their faith or their background – you cannot and should not carry years of racial hatred, misunderstanding and evil on your own back. You cannot fix all of that at once, but you can stand up. You can denounce the wrong that you see. I know that is hard for any of us to do, it certainly is hard for me to do, but to do so is to plant a seed for a better world.

When you see foolish thinking, the kind of thinking that just allows people to go on with their lives without thinking of the long-term impacts of their actions. When people are unwilling to make any changes in the carbon they produce, the pollution they leave in their wake because they cannot see anything beyond their next whim or desire, you cannot fix that. You cannot just make people willing to live thoughtfully or with a long view of what the impacts of their actions are. But you can plant a seed, by setting a better example yourself, by supporting government policies that help people to see the benefit in changing and that make it affordable for those with few resources.

You don’t have to fix it, but you can and should sow seeds and I’ll tell you why. Because you never know what God can do with a seed. Someone “would sleep and rise night and day,” Jesus said, “and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Of course, we today understand a whole lot more about how seeds grow than people did in Jesus’ day, but the point that Jesus was making still stands. You don’t have to know how the kingdom of God grows among us, you just have to plant the seeds and leave the growing to God because that is always how the kingdom of God always works.

God doesn’t want you be wealthy. God doesn’t want you to be miserable either. God doesn’t want you to lose everything you have ever relied on either. God doesn’t ever want those who don’t follow in his path to suffer in great torment for it. Those ideas are all a perversion of the Christian gospel.

What Jesus does want is for you to plant whatever seeds you can in this world – to stand up for what is right and just, to challenge evil, to engage in initiatives to make the world a better place. Most of all, Jesus wants to teach us to trust in God who can take whatever seeds we do manage to plant and make them grow in this world in ways that we could never even have imagined.

Sermon Video:

The Little Kingdom that Grew: The Lamp on the Stand

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, September 11th, 2017 in Minister

Mark 4:21-25, 2 Timothy 1:6-12, Psalm 78:1-8

any years ago, I spent a summer in the state of Kerala in South India where we spent a fair bit of time way out in the hill country far from any cities of any size. We stayed with some local people – members of a local Christian church – and it was a very eye opening experience. The region is relatively well-off compared to many areas in India, but it certainly seemed, to our western eyes, as if there were many people living in great poverty. Indoor plumbing was rare. The water was mostly unsafe to drink and, while there was electricity, it was very unreliable and would go off for long periods of time.

For a while, we stayed in a simple farm on some rice fields. At night when the electricity was out, it got incredibly dark. We didn’t have flashlights (we hadn’t thought we would need them) so when we had to go anywhere at night (like, for example, to the bathroom which was in the field) we would generally take a candle with us. And I learned a few things on those nighttime walks that have very much stayed with me ever since.

My first lesson might seem a little bit obvious, but I think that it needs to be said. The first thing that I learned while heading out over unknown and uneven fields in the pitch dark was that a lit candle was extremely valuable. The difference between going out there with a candle and going without one might mean getting completely lost, maybe falling and twisting an ankle or falling into an irrigation canal. At that moment, nothing was more important to me than being able to keep that candle lit.

The second lesson was a bit of a surprise to me. When we went out into those fields, our first instinct was to do what you might do with a flashlight or like what you see in an old movie where someone carries a candle. You want to hold the candle up right in front of you like this. I learned very quickly that that did not work at all.

The problem with doing that is obvious if you think about it. If you hold the candle in front of you, that means that all you can see is the flame. Everything else is completely dark and, in comparison, the flame is impossibly bright. Your night vision is completely ruined by the light in your eyes and you cannot see anything else. So you very quickly learn that you have to make sure that the candle shines anywhere but towards your eyes. One way to do that was to hold the candle up over your head or to the side so you were looking away from it.

But my favourite solution was the one that was shown to me by the people who lived there. You would pick up a broken coconut shell (they were everywhere) and hold it over the candle between you and where you were going. The locals called it a “Kerala lamp.” It worked really well and had the added advantage of blocking the wind somewhat from blowing out your candle.

Now, if you had lived centuries ago – before electricity and at a time when candles and lamps were rare and expensive and difficult to light because there weren’t even any matches, you would probably know everything that I had to learn about walking with a candle at night. But you and I have lived all our lives in a very different world. We may have used candles and even oil lamps before, but because we have always lived in a world where you don’t usually have to depend on such things to actually find your way in the dark, there is a sense in which we don’t actually know how they work even though we may think we do.

That means that, when we hear Jesus talk about lamps and what to do with them, it may not be quite as obvious to us what Jesus meant by what he said as it was to the people who first heard him say it and who never saw an electric light in their life.

For example, when Jesus said, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” They would have immediately understood how important a lamp could be. These were people who lived almost half their lives in the light and the other half almost completely in darkness. When the sun came up in the morning, they began to live and work. But when the sun went down their world went completely dark. Yes, they had lamps, but every moment they kept a lamp lit meant burning precious oil that represented many hours of labour growing, picking and pressing olives. It was also oil that, if it wasn’t burned up, represented an essential part of their diet. Every ounce of oil burned was oil that could not be eaten. So you can be sure that these people did not light their lamps lightly or without reason.

Light in the darkness – something that we pretty much take for granted – was something extraordinarily precious and rare to them. And when Jesus started talking to them in a parable about lamps and what to do with them, they would have immediately assumed that he was talking about something very precious and rare.

The thing that Jesus was comparing to a lamp, I think it is clear when you look at the whole context in the Gospel of Mark, was the good news message of the kingdom of God – the message of God’s grace and love and what we do in response to that message. So the people who heard him talk about this lamp would have understood that to receive the message of the gospel was a precious and rare gift.

I wonder how much we recognize how very valuable the knowledge of that message is. We have been told certain things about God and how God deals with humanity. We have been shown, in the person of Jesus Christ, that the power of love is able to overcome the greatest and darkest powers in this world. Do you realize how many people in our society today have no access to such good news – who are simply living out their existence with no reason to hope that anything might ever change in this world?

Now, I am not one to go around saying that we, as Presbyterian Christians, have exclusive access to these truths. I tend to believe that they are truths that God reveals to various people in various ways in our world and that people can perhaps even come to them by various paths and even through different faiths. But I would definitely agree with the sentiment of our reading this morning from the letter to Timothy: “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord.” We have received a testimony about the God revealed by Jesus Christ that we should not hesitate to be proud of. It is a message that has the power to change lives for the good – even to transform the world. That is the light that we are talking about in this passage.

So the question now becomes, if we have this light, what do we do with it. Jesus says, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” Now the very idea of lighting a lamp and then hiding it underneath a basket or a bed is perfectly ridiculous and Jesus knows it. First of all, there is a practical problem that if you put your burning lamp underneath a woven basket you will probably catch the thing on fire and end up burning your house down. But, even more than that, what would be the point of lighting a lamp, burning up your precious oil, and then not even allowing it to shine on anything? It would be a stupid waste of resources.

So what does Jesus mean when he says that you would never do such foolish things? What is he trying to say about the message of the good news about God? That brings me to the second lesson I learned wandering around the pitch black hills of Kerala in South India with nothing but a candle to guide me. I learned that a candle you hold out in front of you as you walk is as good as useless. In the blackness, if you can see the flame of your lamp, you cannot see anything else. In other words, the candle is only really helpful if it shines on other things and people, not directly on you.

I believe that this was the truth Jesus was trying to get at by talking about hiding your lamp once you had lit it. He was pointing out the simple fact that the only reason you would light a lamp was if you were going to let it shine on something. It needed to shine on your book or on your path or on the thing that you were working on or there was simply no point in lighting it at all and it was merely a waste.

What that means in terms of the church and that whole task of being the light of the world is that this incredible message that we have of God’s grace and love and renewal needs to shine on something other than us or we will be guilty of squandering and wasting it.

But let me ask you, how do we usually let the light shine in the life of the church? Most often, I would suggest to you, we do it like I held up the candle the first time I went out walking in the rice fields at night. We hold it up right in front of us. We see this amazing light, we celebrate and worship God for it, and we revel in how God has loved us and saved us and given us reason to hope.

All of that is well and good as far as it goes but there is a problem. So long as you are holding up that light before your own eyes, it is all that you can see. You blind yourself to everything but that light. You cannot see, for example, the struggles that other people are going through, you cannot see the injustices that they have to deal with. And that is precisely the problem that we seem to run into far too often in the church today – the suffering that people outside of the church go through becomes invisible to us. I think that that is what Jesus means when he talks about putting your light under a basket – it means shining the light in a way that it really only shines for your own sake.

What does it mean for us to be the light of the world in the church? It means that we are not meant to keep this light – this message – to ourselves. Instead of shining it in our own eyes, we must hold it up above our heads so our eyes are not on the light but on the world that God so loved. And when we are tempted to keep it only for ourselves and use it only to serve ourselves, we must grab hold of a coconut shell, and set it between us and the light forcing ourselves to look elsewhere. The coconut shell is the example of Christ who came to live the message of life, not for his own sake but so clearly for the sake of everyone else that he laid his own life down in its service.

As you go out into the world following the service today, therefore, I would invite you to take with you the light of the knowledge of Christ that you have obtained in this church and throughout your Christian life. But carry it like this – like a Kerala lamp – so that you may allow the love and grace, forgiveness and hope of Christ to shine on others before it shines on yourself. I’ll warn you, that may mean that you find yourself thinking about the needs of others before you think of your own needs, that you may spend more energy on compassion than you do on judgement and that you may feel more deeply the struggles of others that you observe. In other words, you might just become more Christlike.

#140CharacterSermon Jesus’ teaching about the lamp under the bushel means we must not let the light of the gospel shine only for ourselves.

Sermon Video:

The Little Kingdom that Grows: The Sloppy Sower

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, September 4th, 2017 in Minister

Mark 4:1-9, Acts 2:37-42, Psalm 126:1-6

h, there you are. You’re the new sower that we hired, aren’t you? Glad to have you working with us. Let me just say I hope you work out better than that last guy. What a sloppy worker he was! I mean, you wouldn’t believe this guy. We gave him a bag with like a hundred seeds in it and sent him out into the field. And what does he do? He starts throwing the seeds all over the place willy-nilly. They’re all flying around and about twenty-five of them fall on the path. Yes, you heard me right: on a hard packed path where nothing can grow. And what happens: they just sit there, wasted, until eventually some birds come along and eat them all. Twenty-five seeds just wasted! Do you realize what seeds cost these days and yet apparently this guy thinks that they are for the birds.

Oh but wait a minute because that was only the beginning. He’s still flinging the seed everywhere and another twenty-five seeds fall on the rocky ground. Now I know that might seem alright at first because these seeds sprout up almost immediately. The rocky ground turns green with life but just when you see them growing and you start dreaming of all the crops that you are going to be able to reap what happens: the sun rises and it burns hot. The crops that grew among the rocks didn’t take enough time to put down a decent root system and they can’t stand the heat. They all turn brown and die. More seeds are gone.

Then, to cap it all off, this so-called expert sower just happens to fling the next twenty-five seeds right among the thorns. Right in the middle of them! Now even I know that you can’t grow any good crops in there and, even if you could, who is going to go in there to try and harvest them? Not me, I’ll tell you that! So those seeds were effectively wasted too.

So, you look like a smart young person. I’m sure you can figure out what all of this means: this guy has just thrown away seventy-five of the precious one hundred seeds that we gave him. Do we look like we are made of seeds? No, I’ll tell you, we are not.

And, of course, that also means that out of all the seeds we gave him, only twenty-five of them ended up in the good soil. And, sure, those seeds grew and produced – in fact, some of them thirty, some of them sixty and some of them even a hundred times as much in the way of crops. So, when we had harvested it all, we did end up with 1,580 grains, but that is hardly the point. Think of what was wasted on the way to that harvest!

But now you’re here. I can see that you are the kind of worker who will be much more careful at what you’re doing. So here are your seeds. Off you go… What? Oh yes, I know that there aren’t very many seeds in your sack. In fact, I know exactly how many seeds you’ve got there. I gave you exactly twenty-five seeds. That is a much as actually grew with the last guy. The other seeds we gave him obviously didn’t matter. Just don’t be wasteful like him and I’m sure that we’ll all get along and it will all turn out just fine.

I can’t shake the thought that that is exactly the lesson that we would take from Jesus’ famous parable of the sower today. Jesus told the story (as he told most of his stories) to illustrate what the kingdom of God is and how it works. In particular, he seems to have been trying to show people how, on earth, the kingdom of God grows. But when we hear it, being conditioned by modern society with ideals of production and constant growth, our attention jumps right to the end of the story.

At the end we hear that the seeds that were planted multiplied and produced many more times the grain than was planted. That, we assume, was the whole point of the enterprise: producing explosive numerical growth. We usually want to apply that directly to the church, of course, and may even assume that what Jesus was trying to say was that the church should always be expanding in size – multiplying in size thirty, sixty and even a hundredfold.

But if you look at the story that Jesus told, that couldn’t have been his only point. He is talking about seeds in this parable – seeds that are cast into the ground. Do you really think that punch line of a story about seeds would be, “the seeds grew”? That is like telling a story about a driver who drives someplace or a cook who makes a meal. The ending is just expected.

No the interesting part of the story – the part that would have caught people’s attention – was the part that looks like failure to us. Jesus spends much more time describing how it happens that seeds don’t grow when they are sown than he does describing growth. And indeed, the way that he tells the story, three times as many of the seeds end up not growing than end up growing. So why did Jesus direct our attention where he did?

Well, if Jesus was telling this as a parable of the kingdom of God (and I think he was) then I think he was trying to tell us something very important about the kingdom. It was, of course, a story about growth because the seeds that are planted in the good soil do experience some tremendous growth. So one of the applications of this parable would be to say that we ought to expect that growth – all kinds of growth – should be a sign that the kingdom of God is present.

To apply that to the church, yes, we should expect that growth should be a regular dynamic of the church. The church should grow and should be a place where people grow. Now, that may not always mean numerical growth or growth in membership. That is certainly something that many churches in many places struggle with these days. But, over the long term, as long as the church is a place where people are experiencing personal growth and so long as the commitment to mission is growing, the church should naturally be a place that is drawing more people unto itself.

But, as I say, Jesus spends a lot more time talking about the seeds that don’t grow so I suspect that he might also be trying to teach us about the things that get in the way of the growth of the kingdom of God. The sower in his story is wildly wasteful. As we have noticed already, he literally wastes three-quarters of his seeds by throwing them in places where they cannot grow and produce. I suspect that many of the listeners who heard Jesus tell this parable, most of whom would have had firsthand farming experience, would have remarked on this point. I mean, I know that no matter how careful you are at sowing (even with modern farming equipment) you cannot prevent having some of your seeds land in places where you don’t want them to be, but this guy truly is ridiculous.

It is so exaggerated that I think it just might be Jesus’ point. I think he is saying that the kingdom of God cannot grow if we are not sufficiently wasteful in the ways that we share it. Unfortunately, that is precisely the lesson that we most often resist in the life of the church today.

For example, it is not uncommon for the leadership of a church that is heavily involved in mission and outreach to the community to run into lots of criticism from the congregation for such an emphasis. This happens because church people notice that the people in the community who are served by that mission are unlikely to show up and add to the membership of the church. Statistically this seems to be how it works. Very few of the people who are given help by the church – food, clothing, counselling and so on – will ever show up and participate in the life of the church.

I mean there are exceptions to that and it is wonderful to have such people in our churches, but it is true you are very unlikely to grow the church very much by adding the people who are the primary focus of the local mission. They are just not very likely to come. And so church people will complain: “Why are we spending so much time and effort and money supporting these people in the community who won’t ever come to church and who, if they did, likely wouldn’t be able to help support the church anyway?” It’s like casting seeds on the path, they’ll say, it is all wasted.

I have also heard people talk about ministry to young people in much the same way. Youth ministry can be expensive after all. You may have to pay youth leaders. You usually need to make a fairly large investment in terms of money and space and energy to create programs that will attract young people. And that often creates a problem for the church folk because there is no guarantee that those young people will remain and become a long-term part of the congregation. In fact, it is kind of unlikely.

After all, the younger generation today are more mobile than any previous generation in the history of our society. They will likely move as they pursue educational and employment opportunities and as other things change in their life. This is especially true for many of our churches that are located in places where there are no post-secondary education opportunities. It is also true (and this is something that is true in all denominations and all theological wings) that young people today are more likely to drop out of faith altogether than were any previous generation.

So a lot of church folk today look at youth ministry and don’t see it as a very good investment – it seems highly unlikely to bring much return in the way of growth – and so they will not make it easy for those church leaders who want to make it a priority. They feel as if youth ministry is just throwing our seeds on the shallow ground where we might see some short-term growth but it will never last.

In fact, generally speaking, if you put any energy and resources in the church into efforts to communicate and connect with people who do not come to church, you will likely get pushback from the people who do come. After all, the vast majority of people you reach out to in those ways will not come and will certainly never become regular attenders. They already have lives that are filled with so many other things. They are like seeds that fall onto ground where they are surrounded by weeds and thorns. Why would you spend anything to invest in that?

Those are just a few examples but there are many more. People just seem to make this assumption that the key way for the church to grow is to put the most money and the most energy into taking care of the people who are there and, if there is going to be any attracting of new people, those people who are wanted are people who are just like the people who are already there. The assumption seems to be that you need to spend all your time taking care of those seeds that have already fallen on the good soil. After all, aren’t they the ones most likely to grow and produce good fruit?

I believe that Jesus told this parable of the sower for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was to counter those very kinds of complaints. His promise was that the kingdom of God will grow, but in order for that growth to occur, a certain wastefulness is actually necessary. You have to sow broadly. You have to share liberally and even extravagantly without thinking about what you’ll get back for your investment. And if you attempt to cut back on the sowing that seems wasteful – the seeds that fall on the path or on the shallow ground or among the thorns – you will actually impinge on the growth that God wants to make happen even on the good soil, the growth of the kingdom of God among you.

#140CharacterSermon If you want the #church to grow, you need to sow wastefully. Sow seeds on the path, shallow ground & among weeds too!

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