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!
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
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 newclothes. 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:
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.
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?
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 thrown 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 situationout needinghad been ions had been biaculcome out of th, 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.nd up poorer and convinced that it is their own fault.eats again elng 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.ely nothing to these or for will tie it to ou 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.
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.
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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 shellad or to the side so you were looking away from it. But my favourite solution w (they were everywhere) and hold it over the candle between you and where you were going. The locals called it a “Kerala lamp.”Kerala lamp."nd where you were going. The locals called it a "ay from it. But my favourite solution w 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 maean for us to be the light of the worldhat Jesus means when he talks about the ligng through, the y 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.
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 ofappen, the grown th grown the the growth ing that seems wasteful -- the mise ss eople who are not going to tment 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!
s all Canadians know, our much-loved Canadian national anthem was first written in 1880 in the French language. The words were written by Adolphe-Basile Routier. It was only decades later that the anthem appeared in English with lyrics by Robert Stanley Weir.
Weir’s lyrics have since been changed and edited a number of times – most significantly when the anthem was officially adopted in 1980 and there is still talk of editing them to this very day. But, since they were first written – for 137 years now – the original French lyrics have never changed.
If you only speak English, you may have always assumed that the words in French said pretty much the same thing as the words in English – after all, both languages start with the words, “O Canada.” But, if you assumed that, you would be wrong. Robert Stanley Weir didn’t translate the anthem so much as he completely rewrote it. There are significant differences between the content of the French and the English anthems. For example, the French anthem is much more religious with references to Christian faith and even to the Christian cross. The English anthem, for its part, contained no references to God at all until it was revised in 1980 to include the words, “God keep our land…”
The two versions also take a different angle on the singers’ relationship to the country of Canada. In English, as you may have noticed, the anthem focusses a lot on what we can do for our country – on how we owe it, for example “true patriot love.” Most important of all though, the anthem becomes a declaration and promise that we will “stand on guard” for Canada. That must be really important because we repeat it three times and it is the stirring climax of the whole song: “O Canada we stand on guard for thee!”
There is none of that in Routier’s original French text. There the focus is not on what we do for our country but rather on what our country does for us. This is especially clear in that same climaxing phrase which, in French, is, “Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.” That translates as, “And your valour steeped in faith Will protect our homes and our rights.”
So you might say that in English, the singers stand on guard for the country while in French the country stands on guard for the singers. And, honestly, I don’t really think that one of those is better than the other. We actually need both approaches. I believe (with some apologies to John F. Kennedy) that healthy nationalism is always found in the balance between asking what you can do for your country and appreciating what your country does for you.
But there is one thing that particularly strikes me about that final line in the French anthem and that is how relevant it is today, 137 years after it was first written and 150 years after Confederation. The final promise is poignant: Canada will protect our homes and will protect our rights but I’m sure that even when those words were written there was a recognition that there could be a clash between those two things – a clash that has only become a bigger issue in modern times.
How many times have we been told, in the last few years, that in order to protect our homes and our way of life, we would have to give up rights and liberties? How many times has a commitment to protecting rights and freedoms – especially the right to a fair trial, the right to have representation, the right to not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment – been criticised as being soft on terrorism and as something that puts us all in danger. This has all come to a head in the last week or so as the Omar Khadr case and settlement has erupted again in the news.
It is often portrayed as a choice: we can have one or the other. We can have security or we can have rights but, because of the terrible dangers at work in the world today, we can no longer have both. In the case of Khadr, I guess the message is that we can either defend his rights or we can be safe but it can’t be both. It seems rather timely that our National Anthem can remind us, every time we hear it, that we have actually been promised that we can and should have both.
I don’t think that it should be a choice. Both of those things – both rights and security – are extremely important and valuable. We shouldn’t have to compromise either of them but there is one very good reason why we think we do. The reason is fear. When people are afraid, of course they are going to begin to believe that that the need for security far outweighs the need to protect rights. And when they are terrified, they will not even think sensibly about what actually makes them secure.
And terror is the deliberate strategy that has been deployed against us. No wonder our thinking gets out of whack! But most ironically, it seems that our craving for security might just be the things that undoes us. At least, that’s what Jeremiah would say and probably Jesus too.
The Prophet Jeremiah lived in very troubled times – times of great fear and terror. The people most to fear in Jeremiah’s day were the Babylonians – who came, interestingly enough, from the same places that the terrorists of ISIS have their centres of power today. Babylon was an empire that was dead set on conquering the world and could be remarkably cruel while doing so. Of course when the Babylonians set their sights on conquering Jerusalem, people were terrified.
I think that Jeremiah understood their fear but what he had a problem with was what they did in response. He told them to stay where they were and ride it out, promising that it would be rough and scary in the short term but that God would see them through and re-establish the nation. But they said, “No, we will go to the land of Egypt, where we shall not see war, or hear the sound of the trumpet, or be hungry for bread, and there we will stay.”
Now, of course, Egypt was an empire too, even if it was no longer as powerful as it had once been, and the Egyptians certainly had their own history of oppressing Israelites, so you have to wonder why people would have been so willing to run there. It was a case of “the devil you know.” The Egyptians were scary but at least they were a familiar kind of scary and so they seemed a lot better than the unknown terror of Babylon.
So Jeremiah’s complaint is that these people are using neither their reason nor their faith. They are mindlessly acting on their terror by running towards something that feels safer and Jeremiah gives them a stark warning: “If you are determined to enter Egypt and go to settle there,then the sword that you fear shall overtake you there, in the land of Egypt; and the famine that you dread shall follow close after you into Egypt; and there you shall die.”
Jeremiah was right when speaking about that particular situation. The people who did flee to Egypt met with disaster there. In fact, Jeremiah himself was taken to Egypt (in his case against his will) and he died there too. While those who stayed or went to Babylon certainly had a very rough time but at least had a chance at rebuilding in future generations. But I am not just concerned for the particular prophecy that Jeremiah gave here. I am concerned for the important lesson that he gave that transcended the particular circumstances he was speaking to.
It is a lesson that no one expressed better than Jesus himself when he said, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” Both Jesus and Jeremiah recognized the importance of security, of course, but what they were both saying was that, when you allow your fear to overcome you to the point where security becomes the only thing that matters, you defeat your own purpose. You sacrifice everything that matters just in order to feel safe, and you don’t actually end up any safer.
There is a neurological reason why we do this by the way. There is one particular part of your brain, called the amygdala, that is in charge of powerful reactions like fear and anger. When you are truly terrified of something, this powerful part of your brain takes charge of everything. You were created this way so that you would be able to react quickly and save yourself from a truly dangerous situation.
But one thing that means is that when you are afraid, your brain does not prioritize the work of another part of your brain – the prefrontal cortex – that specializes in analysis and logical thinking. Your sophisticated, logical thinking machine is literally starved of the energy it needs to operate when you are afraid. Now that may be a very helpful thing when you are faced with an immediate danger – when you are being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger and all you can do is either fight back or run away – but it does mean that people will react in quite irrational ways when they are afraid of something that is not quite so immediate or when they are afraid of a more abstract idea like terrorism or foreigners that they have never met.
That does explain why the Israelites might run to Egypt because they were afraid of Babylon even though it was actually a much more dangerous thing to do than remain where they were and deal with the Babylonians. They were not thinking straight because they were so afraid.
But think of how it might also explain the actions of Canadians and Americans in the present international environment. We have been made to feel afraid. Some of that terror has been created very intentionally by those who are called terrorists because terror is really the only tool they have. They intentionally cause events to take place that will make us feel the most afraid – making the places that once felt safe feel unsafe.
But it is not only the terrorists who make us afraid. Sometimes our own leaders will go out of the way to stoke our fears or to direct our fear against particular groups who are different. They will usually do this as a way of gaining more power or something else for themselves because, believe me, they know very well what both Jesus and Jeremiah knew, that people don’t necessarily think through what they are giving away (and especially what rights and freedoms they are giving away) when they are afraid.
So, in short, fear and terror have this way of throwing off that delicate balance between protecting our homes and our rights. They make us much more inclined to sacrifice our rights and freedoms because all we can think of is our need for security.
And the worst part of that is what Jesus points out: “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” When you give up everything for security, you not only lose your rights and freedoms, it doesn’t even actually make you safer. It can even make you less safe. This is because a society where there are no freedoms and no rights is a society in which more and more people will give up on hope for the future. This easily becomes a society where lots of hopeless people start to resort to things like crime or violence. A world where people have given up their rights is a world that easily becomes more dangerous for everybody.
Now, I know that some of you might say that when Jesus said, “those who lose their life will keep it,” he wasn’t talking about holding on to physical life in this world but rather about gaining spiritual life in the next. And that may well be true, but what he was saying was true about spiritual life he was also saying was true about all forms of life as is clear when Jeremiah applies the same truth to the situation of those who were fleeing to Egypt in his day.
“O Canada… your valour steeped in faith Will protect our homes and our rights.” I am personally glad that those original words have remained unchanged for 137 years. I would be very concerned indeed if, at some point, we began only to celebrate how Canada protects our homes. I believe that with prayer for our country and with an understanding that we cannot allow fear to distort the way that we deal with our own rights and freedoms and the rights and freedoms of the most vulnerable among us, Canada can and will continue to protect both our homes and our rights for many years to come.
#140CharacterSermon In #OCanada there's a promise to protect our homes & rights (in French). Don't let fear make you give up 1 for the other
grew up in the church and so, from a very early age I was told about God. I heard about what God was like and what he wanted from me. I absorbed stories about God’s priorities and actions and I even learned how to speak to God in prayer. But I do not think that I can say that I actually met God in my early life in the church or in my family.
No, I would have to say that the church taught me about God, but it was Canada that introduced me to God. At least that is how I think of it. For me, and I’m sure that this is true for many Canadians, I feel that the most authentic experiences of God that I have had have happened when I left behind the cities and found myself in Canada’s vast untamed wilderness – mostly, in my case, up in the Muskokas. Consider this:
Have you been there, standing in a grove of trees, massive trunks around you on every side making you feel as if your strongest bones are like bendable twigs? Have you stood underneath the great green canopy, a vault more magnificent over your head than what any architect has achieved in any earthly cathedral or temple?
Have you ever crawled out of your tent just as the sun peeks over the horizon in order to push your canoe out over the stillest and calmest waters in all creation? Have you heard the call of the loon echo across the water as the other birds begin their calls from the surrounding woods? And have you slowly and silently dipped your paddle into the water to make your bow cut through the thin wisps of fog and known them to be far holier than the all the clouds of incense that have ever poured from a golden jewel encrusted censer?
But, most of all, have you ever gone out on cloudless and moonless night when you are far from any artificial source of light? Have you raised your eyes to the heavens and suddenly found yourself in the midst of a universe so vast that you knew you were nothing. And, at the same time, were the stars and the great river of the Milky Way so bright and so close that it seemed as if you would be able to touch them if only you managed to stretch your fingers a little higher? Have you heard the song of the stars just before dawn singing together – singing, it is to be admitted, at a frequency that cannot be detected by any human ear, and yet, all the same it is the most perfect and holy oratorio that ever could be.
Have you done these things? I have. And I have seen the night sky light up with dozens of meteors in a few minutes, I have felt the power of an approaching thunderstorm and relished in the calm that has fallen after it has passed over. And I have seen God in seeing and experiencing all of these things.
I suspect that many of you have had these kinds of experiences, though not in exactly the same ways that I have because such experience is intensely personal. And we are not alone. I believe that the very first place that human beings encountered God and knew themselves to be in the very presence of the divine was when they were confronted with the incredible beauty and majesty of nature.
The Bible makes this point often. In the Book of Job, the main character is on a continual search for God. He desperately wants God to appear before him so that he can confront God with all of the bad things that God has allowed to happen to him. Job wants to judge God and he gets rather frustrated that God doesn’t show up. Nevertheless, Job admits that, if you look in the right places, God is not so hidden as he has been pretending: “ask the animals, and they will teach you;” he declares, “the birds of the air, and they will tell you;ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” Clearly the natural world has access to certain truths that escape the rest of us.“Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”
This is the same truth that Jesus was trying to point out when he famously invited his disciples to “look at the birds of the air” and to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” Now the point in what both Job and Jesus is saying is not that the natural world will teach you theology – it will not explain to you all of the human ideas about who God is supposed to be and how God is supposed to act. What it will teach you is something much more important: that you can trust in God.
I think it is important to note that, according to these passages, reflecting on nature may not give you the answers to all the questions about God that you might have. It will not, for example, answer the question that Job is most desperately asking throughout the book that bears his name: why does God allow bad things to happen to good people. It will not answer the question, “where is God when there is suffering?” (That question was most definitively answered in the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.)
But the promise is that, if you reflect on the natural world that God has created and when you see the ways that all parts of it work together to meet the needs of the birds of the air, the flowers of the field, the animals and the fish of the sea, you do indeed see that there is a compassion and care built into the creation itself that teaches you profound and true things about the character of God. It teaches you that God is a heavenly Father that you can trust even if you do not completely understand him.
In our Psalm reading this morning, the magnificent display of the stars in the dome of the heavens speaks a somewhat different truth: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” Here the lesson is about the smallness of humanity – a way of putting our own small concerns into a bit of a cosmic perspective. And yet, even here there is a message of God’s concern for God’s human creation for those who will hear it: “Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.”
I have done my studies in Bible, in theology and church history. I have learned all of the ways that human beings have developed to talk about God, about the trinity and the nature of salvation. I have engaged in endless discussions of theodicy – the same question the Job asks in his book, the question of how we can justify the things that God allows to happen – and have found answers that at least make some logical sense. These have been good discussions that have helped me to grow. But still I would argue, the greatest and most enduring lesson I ever had about God came from the woods, the lakes, the rivers and the vast open skies of Canada.
I know that God is present everywhere and that there is truly no place where God is not fully present, but I will still insist that God is closer when I am in such places because this is not about what makes logical sense. This is about encountering God in your heart, not in your understanding.
If you have ever been out in the woods or on the lakes and rivers or up in the mountains of Canada, I suspect you know exactly what I have been talking about. If you haven’t, then maybe you don’t. But I promise you that there is a truth in what I have been saying.
The question is, if there is truth in it, what do we do with that truth? How can we apply it to our lives today? The first thing I would say is this: if God is uniquely experienced in the wildlands of Canada, then, for God’s sake, let us not cut ourselves off from such places.
I know that can be hard for some of us to do. Modern life seems to conspire to cut us off from the natural environment. It is quite possible for huge numbers of people to go through their days without encountering a truly natural setting – to encounter no growing things that have not been made to grow according to some human plan. But I would suggest to you that if you do not have the time or the means to spend some quality time surrounded by nature, you need to find the time and create the means. Your spiritual life – not to mention your general health – will only improve.
Of course, one of the reasons why many of us have trouble encountering nature is that it is disappearing in too many ways. Yes, there are enormous swaths of it here in Canada – places where you can travel all day without seeing a human-made structure. But our ability to affect and damage even those huge swaths of land has grown until it is out of control. Our energy and mining projects are destroying habitats. Our consumption patterns are affecting the climate and we need to think carefully about what we do in response to that.
I know that both Job and Jesus said that you could look at nature and see in it the proof that God knows how to take care of all his creatures including us. But we have taken the wrong lesson from that. We have thought that it meant that we could just go and take and take and take from nature as if it were an inexhaustible resource that we could never deplete or destroy. That was never the message and thinking that way has taken us to a dangerous place.
What Jesus and Job were talking about was living in relationship with the natural world – entering into a conversation with the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. These things can only teach us that our heavenly Father is looking out for us when we don’t see them as something merely to exploit to enrich ourselves. If the natural world doesn’t teach us some humility, doesn’t teach us to say, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” then we have clearly missed the lesson.
So I do believe that another application of these passages is to rethink our relationship with the natural world – to learn not to see it as something merely to be exploited or as something that will just absorb our waste. This, too, is a way of finding God in the woods, lakes, rivers and mountains.
The second verse of O Canada is rarely sung, but I’m told that it goes like this, “O Canada! Where pines and maples grow. Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow. How dear to us thy broad domain, From East to Western sea. Thou land of hope for all who toil! Thou True North, strong and free!” And it is certainly true that this natural beauty is something we find very dear indeed. But it is more than that too. It is a place where God has made Godself known to us – where God draws near for those who have eyes to see him. For this we give thanks, but for this we also pray, “God keep our land glorious, free and alive with such beauty.”
#140CharacterSermon The church taught me many things about God. Canada's wilderness introduced me to God. #Canada150 #GodKeepOurLand
n the passage we read this morning from the Book of Deuteronomy, we are given an account of an ancient Israelite harvest festival. When the people harvested their crops, they were to take the first portion of that produce and present it as a gift to the Lord. This was a common practice in the ancient world and local temples of many different gods in many different places depended on it for major support.
Something that is unique about this harvest festival as described in Deuteronomy, though, is the speech that every Israelite male was to repeat as he gave his gift, a speech that began, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” From there the worshipper went on to tell the whole story of the people of Israel through their slavery in Egypt and how, through Moses, God saved them from slavery and brought them out through the wilderness and into the land that he had promised to that wandering Aramean ancestor. It is quite a story to have every single male citizen tell once a year; you have to wonder what all of that is about.
I have a bit of an idea. You know that story of the origins of the people of Israel? It is a great story, but here’s the thing: it probably didn’t happen exactly like that. I mean, it never does – there is always a difference between the story that a people tells about where they came from and how it actually went down.
Even the Bible occasionally admits as much. This morning we read an account of the moment when the children of Israel left the land of Egypt. You all know what that moment is supposed to look like. It is a big dramatic scene in the movie, The Ten Commandments. All of the Jews are gathered around – one people united together around their common ethnic and cultural identity, ready to set out to search for freedom together.
Except, the Book of Exodus lets it slip that it wasn’t exactly like that. lets it slip that it wasn' onelike. It is a big dramatic like. It is a big dramatic It says that, when the Israelites were ready to leave Egypt, “a mixed crowd also went up with them.” What? I don’t remember seeing that in the Ten Commandments! But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Ancient Egypt, the most powerful empire in the world at that time, was a slave economy and it drew its slave population from all the regions around it. Of course all these slaves resented their captivity. Of course they longed to be free! Any opening, any loosening of Egypt’s brutal regime would have been seen as a reason to hope for escape. Of course as many slaves as could have managed to would have joined any such exodus.
But what does that do to the story? It certainly muddies the story of the origin of the people of Israel that we have been told. It suggests that maybe they weren’t all descended from one common ancestor. I mean, sure there could have been a core group that traced their origins back to a certain tribe, but the Bible suggests here that others may have attached themselves to this group and come to join them in the worship of their God and in other customs. That is, after all, realistically what happens in the origins of most national identities.
There is a word that appears in the ancient documents and inscriptions of that part of the world at about that period of time – in the writings of people such as the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Sumerians and others. They speak of a group of people that they call the “Apiru.” They do not speak highly of them. The context seems to indicate that this word meant slave, nomad or bandit somewhat interchangeably. Apparently this word, Apiru, was loosely applied, to roving bands of troublemakers. It doesn’t seem to indicate any specific ethnic group so much as a social designation of generally undesirable people.
Well, the theory is that this ancient word, apiru, is actually the origin of the word Hebrew. You see, that is how outsiders would have seen the people who came to be known as the Hebrews (or the Israelites) when they first appeared on the historical stage – as a loose collection of slaves, nomads and general troublemakers. In some ways, that was who they were, but over time they did manage to forge a common identity, particularly as they went through some powerful experiences of God together.
And one of the keys to their development of that common identity was the telling of the stories of those experiences of God. Without the stories, the experiences didn’t make sense. So that explains why it was considered so important that every Israelite tell the story regularly. That was why every individual, whether directly descended from Abraham or not, needed to stand before the priest and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…”
That is how a national identity always works. The actual history of how a people come to be living together in a land is always messy. People usually enter into the land as individuals. Some might be raiders, exiles, slaves or refugees. Others arrive as rulers, investors or entrepreneurs. But once they are there, the only way that they can find an identity beyond their particular tribe or group is by telling common stories that they all share. That is the process that we see at work in the passage in Deuteronomy and, frankly, in many of the national stories told throughout the Old Testament. It’s not that the stories aren’t true, it is that they are more than just true – that people found meaning in them beyond the literal meaning of the story.
This question of identity is also important to Canadians as we continue to celebrate 150 years and more of history. People sometimes complain that there is just no clear Canadian sense of national identity. Sometimes we simply define ourselves by what we are not: specifically that we are not Americans. We play up minor little quirks like the way we pronounce the last letter of the alphabet (and, yes, of course it has to be “zed”), or a rather unique way of saying “out and about” that we have that everybody but us can hear. And of course we will go on about peculiar passions like Tim Horton’s coffee, hockey and beer that actually tastes like something. But we don’t seem to feel as if all of that, put together, really amounts to what you would call a solid national identity.
Our Old Testament story teaches us that national identities don’t just happen. They are formed, sometimes intentionally, through shared stories.o what you woudsomething. onounce the last letterere is just no clear Canadas of that nation and adopting them a If Canada is lacking when it comes to a strong sense of national identity, is that because it is lacking when it comes to things to be proud of? Of course not! There are so many achievements that we can celebrate in the areas of science, art, sport, policies and so much more.
What we may lack, however, is that sense of a shared narrative. Canadians have come from many backgrounds and individual stories. The First Nations were here like just about forever and everyone else entered as an immigrant, refugee, exile or transient. We talk about all of that forming a great cultural mosaic and there is certainly a great richness and beauty in that diversity. But if we can’t find a way to tell a story of this nation that everyone can feel a part of, it will not be enough.
That is, I think the real genius of the story that is prescribed in Deuteronomy. It is the kind of story that anyone should be able to find themselves in. I mean, not everyone may have a literal wandering Aramean – the actual Abraham – as their ancestor, but they probably have a wandering Scotsman expelled from his farmland to make way for sheep, or a starving Irishman desperately looking for something to fill his stomach with after the potato crop has failed.
Not everyone might have had the Egyptians treat them harshly and afflict them, by imposing hard labour on them, but there are many who suffered under various forms of modern day slavery, who fled repressive regimes and unlivable conditions to find freedom.
Not everyone might have experienced God delivering them “with terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders,” though I know that some have. But every single one of us has experienced the joy of coming to live in “this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” and a land overflowing with the beauty and bounty that God has placed in it for our wise use.
I guess that what I am saying is that there is a story of what it means to be Canadian and to love this country and to know it to be your home, but it is not necessarily the story that they keep telling us. This year, in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday, the CBC created an extended documentary called, “The Story of Us,” that attempted to do what I have been talking about and offer Canadians a common story that we could all share.
As you have probably heard, the series was sharply criticised from many quarters. People complained that it contained many historical inaccuracies, that various groups were given stereotypical representations, that entire communities were written out of the story altogether. Some of these flaws, I think, were unavoidable. You can’t tell a good national story without being inaccurate sometimes, and you cannot include every group in the story. These things alone shouldn’t have derailed the project.
I suspect that the bigger problem was the assumptions that they made about what a national story was supposed to be – a notion that they may have picked up from our neighbours to the south. Maybe they thought that the story was supposed only to be about the winners, the triumphs and the accomplishments. These things are a great part of it, to be sure, but I don’t necessarily think that they are the heart. So many who have come to love this country, have not come to do so through their triumphs but through their struggles. They found refuge here. They found safety and hope when the world elsewhere had offered them little of either.
Many First Nations people, for example, have hardly had an experience with the Canadian government that has been joyful and affirming but have developed and displayed a deep love and commitment to this country and have worked at calling us to be our best. That is an essential part of Canada’s story and it stirs my heart more than many a tale of victory on the Plains of Abraham or on the banks of the Red River.
A colleague of mine, Rev. Tony Boonstra recently posted a rewrite of the passage we read from Deuteronomy this morning. I was amazed to see someone else thinking along the same lines that I was, so I can’t think of a better way to close this morning than by sharing Tony’s take on a what a story of Canada is:
My great, great, great grandfather was a feudal serf, eking out a living for his family, literally by the sweat of his brow. There were numerous children and the family clan grew in number.
We suffered severe deprivation under the feudal system and were grievously persecuted during the time of the Reformation. Our family was torn apart; some who remained true to the Roman Catholic faith; some who joined the Protestants under the leadership of Prince William of Orange.
During the Industrial Revolution, we experienced the bitter pain caused by the tremendous social upheaval. Then in the beginning part of the 20th century, we suffered scarcity of basic essentials during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This was hardly past when we suffered humiliation and the loss of freedom under the German occupation during World War II.
Many times in desperation we cried out to God. In time, He chose to lead a few of us in number, to a land flowing with milk and honey, a country we affectionately call Canada. For a generation we remained quiet and to ourselves getting used to what for us were foreign traditions and uncommon values.
But now we have come to bring our first fruits. We have chosen to share in the responsibility of making this country a welcome haven and home for all its citizens. And so today we bring our gifts, our ideas, our values, our dreams, our story, and we offer them freely in gratitude to Creator God, who so lavishly has entrusted to our care, the whole word.
We covenant with you to make Canada a country where all people are given the respect they deserve, where people are given the freedom to embrace the values and traditions that are dear to them. We want Canada to be a country where the beauty of all God created is appreciated and where all people are valued for the unique beings they are.
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.
