Author: Scott McAndless

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Here is a special gift to my listeners (which you will understand after hearing today's podcast) a cutout of Judas the Galilean to add to your Nativity Scene this year.

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s that in the Bible? It is one of those questions that you just have to ask sometimes when you read this book. And few passages elicit such a response more easily than the one we read this morning. It is a story that seems odd on so many levels. Jesus is just walking along one bright morning, he sees a fig tree in the distance, sees that it has some leaves on it, and feels a little rumble in his stomach. He is hungry so he goes over to see whether it has any fruit on it.

      Now, mind you, it is not exactly the right season for figs, but I guess if you’re really hungry (as I guess Jesus was) you can hardly blame a guy for hoping that there might be a few early fruits. I mean, who hasn’t been there: you open the cupboard and hope against hope, when you see the old Twinkie box shoved up in the back corner, that there will be just one golden cake still hidden inside. You can hope, but when you discover that the box is empty how do you react?

      You might feel a momentary surge of anger at whichever member of your household took the last cake and failed to throw out the empty box and put Twinkies on the grocery list again. But, thankfully, most of us can deal with that anger without it turning into a homicidal rage. The really shocking thing in this story in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus essentially goes into an arboricidal rage over his failure to get a snack. For the crime of not bearing a fruit (at a time when fig trees don’t generally bear fruit anyway), this particular fig tree is condemned by Jesus to death. “May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” he cries out against it.

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hen Mark wrote his Gospel – which most scholars agree was written sometime around the year 70 CE – he had two main purposes for doing so. The first one is kind of obvious. It had been about 40 years since Jesus had been crucified which meant that the people who had been there and seen Jesus and known him in the flesh were pretty much all gone or going soon. There was a need to set down the words of Jesus and the stories of what he had done in a way that would endure.

      But there was a second agenda to the writing of the gospel that isn’t quite so obvious to us, but that actually may have been even more important to its writer. Mark was writing the story down for the people in his church – a church that was living through some very difficult times. He wanted to show them how to be the church in those times – to be a church that would be faithful to the vision and calling of Jesus.

      And for me, that is one thing that makes this gospel so helpful to us today because, honestly almost two thousand years later, we are still trying to figure out the same thing. Of course, Mark can’t lay out too many of his lessons to the church explicitly because he is telling stories about things that happened over a generation ago. A lot of his messages come through in the way that he chooses to tell the story.

      For example, there is a long stretch of narrative in the middle of the Gospel where Jesus and the disciples seem to criss-cross the Sea of Galilee. They travel in a boat and, whenever they land in some place or another, there is always some crowd of people that Jesus needs to minister to or some problem he needs to take care of – someone to heal, a demon to cast out or whatever it may be.

      Now, of course, there is history behind that. Jesus clearly did travel all over Galilee and the Sea of Galilee was indeed one of the most convenient ways to travel long distances. But the way that Mark tells the story has a certain  pattern to it. Every time the disciples leave the boat, they are met with an urgent need. Even when (as in the passage we read last week) the disciples intentionally set off to a private place along the shoreline so that they can have an opportunity to rest and relax, they are followed there by huge crowds of people and Jesus ends up having to feed them.

      So the stops along the shore clearly represent something for the ongoing life of the church. They represent the mission of the church – how we are sent out into the world to heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and help the afflicted.

      Throughout this section of the Gospel, the only time when the disciples are alone with Jesus and he is able to give them his undivided attention is when they are in a boat, on the lake, heading to their next destination on the shoreline. There Jesus takes time to teach, correct and demonstrate the gospel to the disciples. Some amazing things happen on those crossings – the stormy winds are stilled, Jesus goes walking on the water – but it is all just for the sake and the edification of the disciples.

      So if the stops along the shoreline represent the external ministry of the church, the crossings represent the internal Christian life of the church. It represents what happens when the church withdraws from the world for a little while to learn and grow together. In modern terms, it represents what happens for us in the church today when we gather on Sunday mornings to worship, pray and support each other. This is something that has been recognized for a long time. It is one reason why this part of the church – the main part where the people sit – is often called the “nave,” which comes from the Latin word for a boat. That idea is taken from that notion that Jesus and the disciples in a boat on the Sea of Galilee is a picture of what the church is supposed to be.

      And that means that when Mark wrote this, he wanted the churches he was writing for to pay special attention to what happened and what was said on those Galilean lake crossings – to expect to find a message for how the church ought to be together. And if they were supposed to find a message there, maybe there is a message that would apply to us as well.

      For example, on one of these many crossing Jesus apparently just spoke up out of the blue and said, “Watch out – beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.” And it was, to be fair, an odd thing for someone to say for no apparent reason, so it certainly is understandable that this left the disciples kind of bewildered and wondering what sort of beverages made with the aid of yeast Jesus might have been imbibing.

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he First Church in the Wilderness was facing yet another crisis. The twelve member leadership council assembled to talk about it and try to come up with a solution. The problem, as usual, was the budget. There just didn’t seem to be enough resources for everything that was needed. People were coming, they were hearing the word of life and it was affecting their lives giving them hope and a sense of purpose. It was just so darn hard to find the resources to keep the whole thing going.

      And it is not just them. This seems to be a universal problem. There may be a church out there somewhere that never struggles to make ends meet, but I haven’t found it yet. It doesn’t matter whether a church is small, medium or mega. It doesn’t matter whether it is in a rich neighbourhood or a poor one, every single church I’ve ever looked at just seems to find that its revenues fall at least a little bit short of its expenses on a regular basis. I’ve seen it so often that I no longer believe that it is an accident. It is something that the designer of the church planned. There is a reason why it keeps happening.

      Nevertheless, it does tend to make the leaders (and many of the people) worry and fret. And that is what the leaders of the First Church in the Wilderness were doing. “What will we do? This isn’t sustainable. The church will just have to cut back somewhere. It can’t continue to try to help meet the needs of so many people.” The solution seemed obvious so they went to the boss with their plan.

      “Boss,” they said, “This church is going through a dry time, there are very few resources and there is not enough to go around and take care of everyone. I mean, to properly help the people around here who need it, we would need like an additional 200… thousand dollars in our budget and we just don’t have that kind of money. Here’s what we think you ought to do: all of the people who are takers – all of the people who are not contributing to the needs of this organization because they need too much help themselves – just tell them that they need to go. Let them go and find some way to take care of their own spiritual, physical and psychological needs because, once they are gone, we are pretty sure that we can stretch the resources that the church has to cover our needs.”

      I want you to listen carefully to that plan that the leadership came up with because I can tell you that it is the plan that we always come up with in the church. I’ve seen it happen again and again in innumerable churches that I have dealt with. First of all, notice what the disciples are focused on. They are focused on what they don’t have. They don’t have the $200,000 that would be necessary to take care of everyone. And that is what we always do too. Whenever things get tight – and they always manage to get pretty tight – we are inclined to be ever more worried about what resources we don’t have. What’s more, we see that as a smart and sensible way to be – that it is just common sense. You don’t spend what you don’t have.

      And I understand that approach completely. I am very sympathetic to it because it seems to make good sense to me too. But I do want to point out that there are some big assumptions we make when we think like that. We are thinking of the resources that are available to the church as a fixed sum. There are only so many resources to go around and so our task is simply to make sure that everything is stretched to cover the basic needs. That is an assumption that may be correct in certain circumstances – in a household on a fixed income, for example. But it is not necessarily true in the church.

      This assumption of a hard limit on the resources available leads to the disciples making a second assumption: that the only way to deal with the scarcity is to send away the people who are using the resources. “Send them away,” becomes the default strategy for dealing with that feeling of scarcity.

      So the leaders of the church come to the boss to make what seems to be a perfectly reasonable suggestion to deal with the shortage: “Send them all away and then we’ll be able to manage.” But the boss has another idea, not only of what to do but also of what the problem is. “Wait a second,” he says. “"Wait a second, he said, You’ve made it clear to me what you don’t have, but I have to ask you just one question: What do you have? What need-meeting resources are available to you?”

      Do you see how a question like that changes everything? They, like us, only wanted to talk about scarcity. And when you talk about scarcity, you always end up talking about what you can’t do and why you can’t do it. You are always bumping up against limits. It may be a sensible point of view but it is always a restrictive one.

      But the boss turns that around and wants to talk about what they have. And it turns out that they actually do have something. “Well, boss,” they say, “we do have a little rainy day fund set aside down at the National Loaves and Fishes Bank. We have about down at the National hat they havefive hundred in a loaves account and I think there is another couple hundred in a fishes account. But that’s nowhere near enough to even start to deal with the needs of all these people out there and we need to keep that just to make sure that the operation keeps running around here.

      I just have to mention: isn’t it interesting that we haven’t heard anything about the five in loaves and two in fishes up until this point. All this time the disciples have been fretting about there being too many people in too much need, and somehow the loaves and fishes never came up. Even when they went to Jesus with their plan to get rid of all the needy people, it just never came up that they had a little set off to the side in loaves and fishes. They only tell him what they don’t have and he has to explicitly ask them about what he has probably already guessed that they have.

      And isn’t it obvious why they wouldn’t have mentioned it up until then? They were keeping the loaves and the fishes for themselves! That is why they were so keen on their plan where everyone else got sent away. They knew that once everyone else was gone they could break out the loaves and the fishes and maybe they wouldn’t have had a whole lot for themselves, but at least they would have had enough to scrape by. The loaves and the fishes were their personal safety net. They didn’t think of them as what they had to meet the needs. They thought of them as what they needed for themselves.

      What happens next is commonly described as a miracle. And I suppose it is. Once they have let go of it and let go of the idea that that was what would take care of them, the very small amount of resources that the leaders had set aside to take care of their own needs multiplies and grows to meet the needs of the many. I suppose that that qualifies as a miracle; at the very least it seems to defy the laws of physics. But the way the story is told, nobody appears to be showing off or trying to impress people with the miraculous provision. It just happens. The people sit down, the disciples bring them the food and everyone eats until they are satisfied. let go of it and let go of the idea that that would take care of them.st they would have had enough to scrape by. nd mbecause they were thinking teady e up teedy people, they just . Even when they went  The miracle isn’t directed at the crowds. If anything it is directed at the disciples.

      How do I know that? Because of what happens after everyone has had enough to eat. Everyone is sitting around, patting their stomachs, loosening their belts (because some of them had certainly had more to eat on this day than they had had in a very long time). The boss is just finished picking his teeth when he looks up and says, “Hey guys, some of the people out there seem to have had so much placed in front of them that they couldn’t even eat it all. Why doesn’t each one of you grab a basket and go around and pick up all the scraps and leftovers and bring them back here?

      So all twelve church leaders get up, each takes a basket and goes out gathering. You should see the look on their faces when each one of them comes back with a basket brimming full of food. Yes, there are exactly twelve baskets stuffed full of loaves and fishes left over – no more and no less.

      Don’t you try and tell me that that is just a coincidence. These twelve leaders are the very people who, back when this all started, conveniently forgot to mention that they were holding on to their own little store of loaves and fishes. What they had been storing up for themselves was hardly a massive feast. It would have looked like a meager meal indeed when stretched amongst them all, but maybe it would have been enough. Now, after collecting their baskets, they are looking sheepishly at each other knowing that they can eat all that they want and still have some left over.

      That’s why I think what happens out there in the wilderness is really directed at them. Jesus isn’t trying to impress the crowds with some stunning miracle that will blow them all away. God providing for his people, that, as far as Jesus is concerned is what God does every day. That is why he teaches them to pray and say “give us, this day, our daily bread.” That God will feed the people of Galilee with the bread and fish of Galilee if they trust him for it is something Jesus takes for granted.

      No, if Jesus pulled off a miracle for the sake of anybody, it was for the twelve disciples who clearly stand for the church – which means he did it for us, to teach us as a church. He did it to teach us that a church that is focussed on its own needs – that is obsessed with making sure that it has its own little safety net of five loaves and two fishes set up over here someplace so that it can feel safe and secure about its survival and will not risk what it has to do anything much more beyond survival – that church is the one that is in the biggest trouble. As he said elsewhere, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it.”

      But at the same time Jesus was teaching that the church that sees what little it has and takes what little it has and risks it for the sake of genuine ministry directed towards real needs, that is the church that Jesus is excited about. “But those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33) Not only does Jesus seem to be suggesting that he will heap special blessing on such churches, this story seems to be suggesting that if a church gives itself away, spends all of those things that make itself feel secure in a quest to genuinely care for those most in need, somehow from the leftovers of that ministry, Jesus will provide twelve overflowing baskets of abundance of blessing for the church.

      We are now at that time of the year when churches start to worry about meeting the budget and when we start thinking about the budget for the coming year and how that can possibly be balanced. The temptation at such times is always to focus on what we don’t have. The temptation is always to focus on the loaves and fishes that we have set aside hoping that they will make us secure. The temptation is to settle for mere survival. I pray that we don’t give into that temptation this year because Jesus seems to be giving us a choice. We can concentrate on making our few loaves and fishes stretch to meet our survival needs and maybe we’ll get by, or we can put the emphasis on mission and ministry and from the overflow and leftovers of that we can discover how many baskets of abundance Jesus offers to us.

Hespeler, 5 November, 2017 © Scott McAndless Remembrance Sunday

Jeremiah 6:10-15, Matthew 10:34-39, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

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e call Jesus the Prince of Peace. We love to tell the story about how, when he was born in Bethlehem, the angels sang that an era of peace on earth had dawned. And Jesus was the one who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” wasn’t he? I don’t know about you, but that is one of the key reasons why I am pleased to identify myself as a follower of Jesus. We need peace. The world needs peace. And on a day of Remembrance like this when we remember all of the carnage, all of the death and all of the grief of war, we particularly look for the healing power of peace. Indeed, no one craves peace more than veterans who remember war’s horrors all too well and soldiers on active duty. So I feel blessed indeed to be a follower of the Prince of Peace

      But Jesus doesn’t seem to have always remained consistent on the topic of peace. There were days when he seemed to be no fan of it at all: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” he warned. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And he further promised that he would stir up trouble between all sorts of people: sons and fathers, daughters and mothers pretty much anyone else in any household.

      Is it just me, or is there a certain inconsistency there? Either Jesus came to bring peace on earth or he came to banish it. You can’t have it both ways, but Jesus apparently thinks you can. It is, in fact, one of those contradictions in the Bible that I have wondered about the longest. Except it is not a contradiction – not really – it is more a matter of definition, of people using the same words in wildly varying ways.

      Let me offer you a simple example of what I mean by talking about some contemporary events. Some of you may have heard of an American football player named Colin Kaepernick. If you have heard about him, you have likely also heard that he is the player who, a few years ago, was the first NFL player to take a knee during the singing of the national anthem. And he did it, he would tell you, for a very particular reason: to protest against the treatment of his people, Black Americans and other racial minorities, in American society. He was protesting the fact that black people are imprisoned at an extremely high rate for things like drug related crimes despite the fact that they actually use illicit drugs at the same rates as people in other communities. He was protesting numerous incidents when black men were killed by police when it was far from necessary.

      What Kaepernick was asking for was a bit of justice and peace for minority people who looked like him. He was just trying to create some peace for a certain group of people for whom peace was lacking.

      But what has been the response to his protest and to others who have joined in. As you may have heard that there have been a lot of negative reaction. And one of the most common negative reactions seems to have gone along the lines of, “Why, Colin Kaepernick, do you want to disturb my peace. I just want to go to a nice football game, to have a nice afternoon’s entertainment and I just want to be able to stand there and feel my heart swell with pride for my country which I love as I listen to the National Anthem. Why do you have to go and ruin my peace with your self-centred grievances?”

      So you see it is quite possible that Kaeperneck’s quest for peace could totally disturb the peace of somebody else. And I think that Jesus could be saying something similar to that in our passage this morning. He is not denying that he has indeed come to bring peace on earth, he is just warning that the kind of peace he is bringing doesn’t necessarily look like peace to some people.

      For most of us, when we ask for peace, what we are usually looking for is tranquility. We want calm waters and smooth sailing. We especially don’t want anyone causing any trouble. That is what it means when frazzled parents ask their children for a little bit of peace and quiet. That is what people often dream of at the end of a war. When we pray and ask God for peace, that is also often what we are looking for. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?

      The quest for tranquility and calm waters, although understandable, has certainly taken us to some bad places. Over the last several weeks, we have heard a number of terrible accusations of sexual harassment, misconduct and even rape against high profile and powerful men in the entertainment industry, media, politics and other places. So many stories have surfaced and they are so terrible that it seems undeniable that there has been (and continues to be) an epidemic of abusive, powerful men in our society who have gotten away with it for a very long time.

      But the obvious question is how – how is it that so many victims of so much abuse have been persuaded or forced to remain so silent for so long? That is a complex question with multiple answers, but one of the answers is definitely that our society often prioritizes peace over justice. Women who have experienced abuse have had it drilled into them that they must not disturb the waters or cause conflict by complaining or reporting. Peace in the workplace – and especially peace for powerful men – is considered to be more important than doing what is right for victims. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?

      In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. went down to Birmingham, Alabama (in the heart of the most racially segregated part of the country) to lead some non-violence actions. While he was there, not surprisingly, he was arrested and thrown into the Birmingham City Jail where he remained for quite some time. While he was there, the clergy in the area – the white clergy – gathered and came up with a statement that they published. They declared that the Civil Rights Movement was seeking what was right – that it was working for racial justice. But they condemned the actions of King and the other leaders. They said that stirring up trouble and getting people upset was not the way to bring about the change that was needed.

      Martin Luther King, as you might expect, disagreed. And from his jail cell he wrote a letter – famously known as the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It is a letter that I like to keep with me and take out and read from time to time because King had a way of putting his finger right on what the problem is with the wrong idea of peace. He wrote this, in part, “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

      That is, I believe, a helpful way to think of the issue. There is such a thing as a negative peace which is all about the absence of things like tension, conflict and trouble. And I understand how attractive that kind of negative peace is. I also understand that we all need it sometimes because you cannot live in continual conflict. But Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the one whose advent offers peace on earth doesn’t promise you that kind of peace. Sometimes he will bless you with it and you can be grateful when it comes, but when a negative peace becomes your main goal, you become an obstacle to true peace. The white moderate Christians that King was talking about, by prioritizing order and a lack of conflict, were actually perpetuating the problems and injustices that would prevent genuine peace or what King calls positive peace.

      Positive peace is the kind of peace that Jesus did come to bring on earth – peace with justice, peace that is the very presence of justice. That is actually a promise that is coded into that very angelic hymn that was sung at Jesus’ birth. When the angels sang about “Peace on earth to people of goodwill,” that phrase would have been very familiar to the shepherds and to anyone who heard the story.

      “Peace on earth,” was a propaganda phrase that was used by Roman Emperors at that time – a phrase that has been found on countless monuments and inscriptions. One of the things that made the Emperor an emperor was the fact that he had brought about peace on earth. He had brought peace on earth through victory – by defeating all of his enemies so that there was nobody left to make war any more. It was a negative kind of peace – a peace that was created through the absence of conflict – but as far as the Romans were concerned, that was the only kind of peace that mattered and only the Emperor could bring it.

      For the angels and the early Christians to just say that somebody other than Caesar had brought peace on earth was to defy the emperor. It was also to say that the emperor’s definition of peace on earth – a negative peace – was insufficient.

      Remembrance Day is celebrated every year on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, because it was at that moment in time in 1918 that the First World War ended. Except it wasn’t called the First World War at the time. It was called the Great War and it was called the War to End all Wars. It was called that because victory in that war was supposed to bring a permanent peace. It was a peace through victory moment – a negative peace through an ongoing lack of conflict.

      How did that turn out? Not so well. The peace that the victors imposed on Germany and its allies in the Treaty of Versailles did not have a whole lot in the way of justice going for it. Today it is generally agreed that the peace that was imposed in 1918 set Europe up for the terrible war that began twenty one years later.

      We celebrate today and on this coming Saturday all of those who served and who fought in those conflicts and in too many others that have followed. Few of those people fought because they loved the conflict; they fought for the sake of peace and in the hope of peace. But I must ask what would truly honour their service and their sacrifice? I would suggest to you that what truly honours them is not simply a pursuit of negative peace. That is the temptation, of course. So many of us would settle for a mere absence of conflict – especially those who have gone through the horrors of war. But negative peace will never be a truly lasting peace.

      That is why I believe that we must truly honour our veterans by choosing to dedicate ourselves to positive peace, the peace that can only come when justice reigns in this world. But if we are going to do that, we will have to take what Jesus says in our gospel reading this morning seriously. It means that we must not shy away from conflict or from uncomfortable situations when questions of justice and what is right are on the line. That does not mean that we should resort to violence, by the way (Jesus taught his disciples that committing violence can and should be avoided whenever possible) but it does mean a willingness to disturb the waters and maybe to make people feel uncomfortable.

      Peace is a worthy goal – one of the things that this world needs most these days. But it is so very important and valuable that we must not settle for anything less than true positive peace and the road to get there may sometimes be rough indeed. God give us all the strength to stand up for justice and for what is right, as troubling and uncomfortable as that can be sometimes. That is how we will discover the fullness of the promise of the kingdom of God in this world here and now.

     

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

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

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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.

      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.

      

Hespeler, October 15, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

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

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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)ay that you get full otory of the contest  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!

Hespeler, 8 October, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Thanksgiving

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

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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.ea and American Race relacidented flooding.

      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.