Author: Scott McAndless

It turns out that there was.

Less than a week ago I was approached by some people in our National Offices (Justice Ministries) who were looking for someone to participate in an event on behalf of the Presbyterian Church: a dialogue between Christian Protestants and Shi'a Muslims to take place at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary. This three day event would see us engaging in a lively conversation on key issues concerning Muslims and Christians in the modern world.

I hadn't immediately responded to this request, wanting to give it some thought and prayer. To participate in this event will require me to prepare a paper on a specific topic and be ready to engage in the general discussions. And, well, Easter is coming; it can be a somewhat busy time!

After the events of this past weekend, though, I became convinced that my participation in this event is necessary -- even that God is calling me to do it. If recent events have taught us anything, it is that we need to do better at understanding and communicating with our Muslim neighbours. The peace and future of our world may well depend upon it. To exclude or act out in hate against a group of people simply because their faith is different from our own, is never going to make the world a better place. I want to help, not hurt.

So I have agreed to participate in a Shi'a Muslim - Christian Protestant Dialogue at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary on April 24-26, 2017. I will be preparing and presenting on the topic, "If God is merciful and rejects extremism, how do the faithful respond?" I will be speaking from my own Christian perspective. A Shi'a speaker will also present from his or her perspective. (I do not yet know who the other speaker is.) The papers written will also be submitted to be published both in English and in Farsi. Most importantly, we will all talk together. I pray we all leave the event with a better appreciation of one another.

That is what I am doing in response. Please pray for me as I pray for you and what you are doing to respond.

Hespeler, 22 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 4:1-15, 23-24, Matthew 18:21,22, Psalm 36

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ne of the complaints that you hear leveled against the church from time to time is that we never seem to talk about sin anymore. We love talking about grace and love and reconciliation – and that is fantastic – but where is that focus on faults and shortcomings that was so characteristic of the church in former days?

      And I will certainly agree that there is something to this complaint. I understand where the reluctance to talk about sin comes from – especially when it is a concept that has been so often misunderstood and even misused to gain control over people – but I also appreciate that if we do not have an understanding of sin and what it can do to us, our Christian faith will never reach its full potential.

      So I am going to dare to look closely at sin, its meaning and its power over the coming weeks. I do not necessarily feel like I have to approach the topic in the ways that Christians have always approached it. The Christian understanding of sin was largely defined way back in the fifth century by a thinker named Augustine of Hippo. It was Augustine, for example, who first came up with the idea of original sin and especially set up the close association between sin and sex that is still often made in the church to this very day.

      But I am a little less interested in what Augustine says about sin than I am in what the Bible has to say on the topic. And the Bible does say some surprising things. For example, if I were to ask you where in the Bible the idea of sin is first introduced, what would you say? Most would say, I suspect, that sin first enters the story of the Bible in the second and third chapter: in the story of the Garden of Eden. That is certainly what St. Augustine thought. But what if I told you that the Bible never uses the word sinto describe the events in that garden? I mean, yes, it does say that Adam and Eve disobeyed a commandment in that story and we may understand that as a sin, but Genesis doesn’t call it that.

      The first time the Bible brings up sin as an idea is in the fourth chapter of Genesis, in the passage we read this morning. It comes up in a conversation between God and Cain. Cain is upset with his little brother Abel. It is all wrapped up in a question of what makes an acceptable sacrifice that we don’t have time to get into here, but the basic problem seems to be that Cain thinks that God likes Abel more and he’s jealous. It really is a story about the worst case of sibling rivalry that you have ever heard of. God, clearly worried that Cain may be about to do something stupid, gives him a warning: “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

      And this little conversation, as I say, is the very first time that the topic of sin comes up in the Bible. And the concept that is introduced in this passage may not quite correspond to what you have always been taught on the subject. To start with, just think about how the idea of sin is portrayed in this little poem. Sin, we are told, is “lurking at the door” of Cain’s tent.

      But that is not how we generally talk about sin, is it? We usually talk about sin as an internal struggle – it is something that I feel inside of me that draws me towards something that I shouldn’t do. Here in Genesis – in the first reference to the very idea of sin – everything seems to be the other way around. Sin, far from being inside Cain is outside of him. It is lurking outside his tent flap like some kind of wild beast that is looking to attack and devour him.

      But that is not even the most surprising thing about this passage. It actually says something so unexpected about sin that modern translators of the Bible have actually had trouble accepting what it says. The original text of the Bible doesn’t actually say what we read this morning: “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” I looked it up in the original Hebrew text of the Bible and the correct translation should actually not be “you must master it,” but “you shall master it.”God is not warning Cain that he should tryto triumph over sin; he is promising him that he will.

      I think I understand why the translators of the New Revised Standard Version mistranslated that verse the way they did. They were kind of stuck thinking about sin the way that they had always been taught to think about it – the way that Christian theology had taught them to think about it. In particular, they were thinking of sin as this force within you that is ultimately irresistible – that you can try to resist but you are doomed to fail.

      It is true that you can find passages in the Bible that speak of sin in such terms. But this passage, near the beginning of the Book of Genesis is actually not one of them. This teaches me that the Bible does not speak about the problem of sin in just one way. The Bible uses different images to talk about sin. Here, in Genesis, sin is like a wild animal that is trying attack us and to have mastery over us but, God reminds us, sin’s triumph is not inevitable.

      Sometimes that way that we talk about sin actually lays the groundwork for its ultimate triumph over us. When we think of it as this irresistible force within us that is always going to have its way, that is exactly what happens. But here, in this passage, God seems to be suggesting that we don’t have to think of it that way and maybe if we didn’t, sin would not have so much power over us.

      But this story of Cain is even more important in that it outlines pretty clearly what the power and consequences of sin really are. God tells Cain that sin is out to get him but that Cain is actually able to triumph over it. But Cain does not triumph. He allows the beast lurking at his door to master him. The immediate consequence of this is a murder. Resentment leads to hatred and, because Cain does not manage to be the master of his hatred, hatred leads to murder.

      The message seems to be that sin, as the Bible introduces it, is primarily about hatred and violence. But the worse part of it is that it is something that only begets more violence. It works like this: Cain is mad at Abel and kills him. That is the first act of violence – the very first in all history according to the biblical view. But this one act of violence leads to another. First, God tells Cain that, because he has polluted the ground by pouring his brother’s blood into it, the ground will now be in revolt against him. Though Cain is a farmer, he will now find the very earth rebelling against him and refusing to produce its crops. The ground is responding to Cain’s violence by threatening the very life of Cain and his family.

      Cain complains – says that this is too much punishment – that he will be forced to wander the earth as a vagabond if the ground will not produce for him. But I don’t think that God is saying that this is a punishment. I believe that God is saying it is a consequence.

      And, what’s more, there are further consequences to come. Because Cain is now a social outsider, everyone will feel free to kill him. But to this God says no. Cain is marked now, God says, and because of that, if anyone harms Cain, there will be seven more killed in vengeance. But this also is not divine punishment. God is not saying that God will kill seven if Cain is killed, only that seven will be killed.

      What is being described in this passage is a vendetta. It is a Hatfield and McCoy type situation. Cain will found a clan and that clan will be the one to take vengeance if anything happens to him. They will kill seven to avenge the death of any of their clan in order to make people think twice about hurting one of theirs. God is not saying that this is good; he is just saying that that is how it is going to be from now on. Cain has only started the ball rolling by killing one. God is warning that the killing won’t stop there.

      And indeed it won’t because, as we read on in this same chapter (after skipping a few long and hard to pronounce names), we land on a character five generations descended from Cain. His name is Lamech and he is the great great great grandson of Cain. So what is now happening five generations later? Well, Lamech, a character about whom we are told almost nothing, is boasting to his wives and this is what he says: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

      Do you understand what Lamech is saying here? In five generations, the killing has only grown more out of control. Cain killed one. Vengeance for Cain and his generation would have been seven times. But, by Lamech’s time, not even that is enough. Vengeance has grown until now it is seventy-seven deaths for one (or you could even translate it as seventy times seven). What we have here in this passage is a picture of sin as violence spinning ever further out of control. One death is only the beginning. Surely it will continue to spiral on until all are dead.

      There is a powerful picture of sin in this passage and it is a picture of vengeance leading to violence spiraling ever further and further out of control – spinning so quickly that it is frightening. That is the kind of power of sin that we are talking about. Worse, it is a power this is still all too present in this world. This is the monster that was lurking at Cain’s door and that still lurks at our own to this very day. What is being described in this passage is frightening but we all know deep down that it is a very real force in our world – a force very much holding sway in places like Syria, Israel/Palestine, major cities like Chicago and Detroit.

      The only ray of hope I see in this passage is the promise that God gives to Cain. “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you,” God says, “but you shall master it.” Sin may be a frightful beast, but its defeat is guaranteed. But how can that be? Surely we cannot win that battle alone. Only with God’s help can we defeat the power of sin. And we believe that such help has been sent to us, particularly in the person of Jesus who broke down that never-ending cycle of hate and violence by becoming the ultimate victim of both and hate and violence through his death on the cross.

      Yes this is the same Jesus who said, when asked by Peter how many times he had to forgive someone, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” And that one can also be translated as “seventy times seven.” Do you think that it is a coincidence that Jesus’ answer to Peter echoes Lamech’s statement of vengeance? I don’t think so! I believe that Jesus was speaking directly to the story of Cain and of Lamech. What Jesus was saying was that there is only one answer to the problem of sin in this world which is a problem of hatred and violence spiraling out of control. And Jesus is that answer. Forgiveness isthat answer. Cain and Lamech can kill seven times. Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and the commanders of Isis can kill seventy-seven times in vengeance. Alt-Right agitators and Klu Klux Klansmen can kill seventy times seven for every perceived slight. That is the way of this world – that the way of sin.

      But do you know what you can do? Jesus is saying that you can forgive. And you can forgive again and again even up to 490 times. (That’s seventy times seven; I did the math.) And you know what that makes you? It makes you a follower of Jesus. It makes you part of the solution, part of the kingdom of God and part of what Jesus came to accomplish. Forgiveness isn’t just something that we do when we feel sorry for someone; it is the antidote to sin. And you can be part of changing the conversation in this world from violence to hope. It is that simple; that is what Jesus was saying.

      I think that this story in Genesis is a really helpful story about sin. It is one that teaches us new ways of thinking about sin and destroying its power. There is a lot more I would like to say on the topic and hope to look in more detail in weeks to come. But hope in the face of violence spinning out of control is a great place to start.

     

Hespeler, 15 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:1-9, James 1:19-27, Psalm 116:1-8

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esus, like many good speakers, had certain catch-phrases that he would use over and over again in his preaching and storytelling. One of his favourite lines, for example, was “the first shall be last and the last first.” It comes up so often in the discourses of Jesus in the gospels and in varying contexts (usually as the punchline of a parable) that it seems reasonable to conclude that it was one of those phrases that Jesus threw around all the time.

      But there was another phrase that Jesus must have used even more – one that just seems to have slipped out all the time – not necessarily as a part of the parable or story he was telling but almost like punctuation or emphasis. That saying was, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

      It is an odd phrase when you think about it. I mean, very few people don’t have ears. Barring some birth defects, tragic accidents or the madness of Dutch post-Impressionist painters, ears are pretty much universal. Everyone listening to Jesus had ears which would make the saying seem like nonsense. But obviously Jesus didn’t keep saying this as a nonsense phrase. It is, in some ways, an expression of Jesus’ own frustrations. Here he was communicating vital truths that, as far as he was concerned, were quite clear. He was illustrating those truths with stories and parables that were really quite easy to understand and yet people weren’t getting his point.

      Jesus was pointing out that it is one thing to have ears and to be able to hear what somebody is saying but it can be quite another thing to listen. Hearing is a passive thing. Hearing is actually something that can be very hard to keep from doing. If you are in the vicinity of a noise or of someone speaking, you can’t help but hear it unless you do something to prevent it like plugging your ears or shutting off your hearing aids.

      Listening, on the other hand, is active. You don’t listen to something unless you choose to do so. Listening means attending to what is being said and acting in response. Jesus’ frustration was that people were hearing what he was saying but that something that was preventing them from actively listening. Often it was be­cause they did not want to actually hear the truths that he was teaching and they certain­ly didn’t want to change their lives because of what they heard. It was just easier for them to hear what he was saying without actually listen­ing because, if they listened they’d probably have to change in ways they didn’t want to.

      And if Jesus were here today, would he continue to repeat that same saying? Would he be as frustrated with us over our tendency to hear without listening? I am afraid he probably would because things really haven’t changed all that much.

      I wanted to start out this New Year by preaching about the resolutions that I’d like to make and that I’d like to see more people make that might create a real difference in the world. I’ve talked so far about resolving to leave some time and space to grieve losses and I’ve talked about being committed to the truth. I think that the third resolution that we could make that would make a real difference in our world is to learn to listen. I would even go so far as to say that the failure to listen is creating a number of crises in our world.

      Take, for example, two of the most surprising political developments of the past year: the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump. Neither of those political developments were supposed to happen. They defied polling but also were contrary to what the “elites” and political “experts” and establishment said should happen. They are also events that will likely have some far-reaching effects on where the world goes from here for good or ill (and I don’t really have an agenda at the moment to say whether it will be good or ill).

      But I think that we can say a little bit about why things unravelled the way that they did. Many people did not cast their vote because they were making a positive selection of a candidate or an agenda. Many, perhaps the majority, were voting to reject instead and what they were rejecting were the opinions of the elites, the experts and the establishment political leaders. The widespread perspective was that the elites and establishment didn’t care about the needs of the great majority of people and had not listened to them and their needs for a long time. Some really big things – world-changing things happened this past year because a lot of people felt like they were not being listened to. When I say that the failure of listening is important, that is the kind of thing that I am referring to.

      But it is not just something that we see happening in big political events and movements. It is a something that affects people’s personal lives and struggles. How many people go through their daily lives without ever getting the sense that anyone is truly listening to them? How many have to pay money to go to a psychologist or counsellor just to have someone actually sit there and listen to them talk.

      And what a difference that can make! I am not trying to put down the professions (like counselling and psychiatric analysis) that have a big element of listening to them. Such a level of listening does not come without a great deal of learning and practice and it truly can bring a great deal of healing into a person’s life. And there are definitely many people who will not be able to find the healing that they need without making use of such professional counsellors. No one should ever be ashamed if they need to access them. But I cannot help but think that such professions would be much less desperately needed if only more people put in the effort to really listen to people at all the various times in their lives where they really need someone to just listen to them.

      And one place where listening is surely lacking is in the church and it is precisely on that point that Jesus was expressing his frustration with the people in his favourite saying. People of faith have the opportunity to hear the word of God, but how often do we listen? We believe that God speaks through the life and example of Jesus Christ. We believe that God speaks through the scriptures that bear witness to Christ. We believe that God speaks through the sermon. And this speaking is not something that is frozen in time. We don’t say, for example, that God spoke (past tense) when the Bible was first written. The word of God is nothing if it is not living and active in the present moment. So God speaks; that is not and has never been the problem. The problem is that we don’t listen.

      So we really do need to work on our listening. How could we do it? How could we become a people who take the task of listening seriously? Well the first thing we need to recognize is that simple truth that was behind that saying of Jesus – that there is a difference between hearing and listening and that just because you have heard what somebody is saying, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have listened to them. Hearing is passive but listening is active.

      So how can we learn to be listeners? Well, I’ll start with one piece of advice that should be obvious, shouldn’t need to be said, but I’m afraid that it does need to be said. Listening means, first of all, giving undivided attention which means that when someone is speaking you turn off the phone, close the book, turn off the television or do whatever you need to do to shut out any distractions. If we are not willing to do that, we will not progress very far in our quest to learn to listen.

      The next piece of advice I am going to steal from the Letter of James. “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak.” Our own speaking is one thing that most often gets in the way of our effective listening. How often, when you are hearing someone speak, is your brain engaged, not with what they are saying, but with your own speaking. You are thinking of what you are going to say in response to them – perhaps to defend yourself or to further your own agenda at the expense of their needs. This is a symptom of what James would call being “quick to speak.” It is not actually measured by how many words you say or how soon you say them but rather by how much brain power you devote to your own agenda.

      Listening, real listening, is about being willing to put aside your own agenda in service to the needs of another person and, let me tell you, it is something that you have to work at. It does not come naturally and most of us will only be able to accomplish it by being incredibly disciplined in our minds.

      One thing that can help us to do this is the use of a practice of active listening. The next time when you have a chance to actually sit down and listen to someone, try this: say nothing. If you have to say anything, let it be to ask questions and make sure that they are questions that are focussed on what the other person has said and that help you to understanding their concerns.

      You can ask questions like, “It sounds to me like you are saying this event made you feel frightened or excited or whatever it sounded like they were feeling. Is that correct?” You can ask questions like, “What were you trying to do?” “Why are you interested in that topic?” and questions that focus on their personal background in whatever topic is being discussed. These kinds of questions will, more than anything else, convince someone that your really are focussed on what they have to say. And, what’s more, actually help you to be focussed on that very thing.

      One mistake that people often make, and in my experience it is often (but not always) men who do this, is to think that listening means that you are trying to fix whatever you perceive to be wrong about the other person. If someone is describing a situation that they are dealing with, for example, you may jump to the conclusion that they are telling you about a problem and you break in and tell them what they should do to solve it. “Well, you see, all you need to do is report your co-worker to management and let them deal with her.” Or, if you perceive that there is some kind of flaw in the person you are talking to, you break in with a prescription for how they ought to change. “You just need to be more assertive,” or something like that.

      But trying to fix people or their problems (unless that it what they are asking you to do) is not really listening to them because what you are actually doing is attending to your own agenda. You are trying to solve their problems and get them out of the way so that the focus can return to you and your needs. Most often what people need is for someone to listen to them, perhaps be sympathetic or understanding. Maybe then – maybe after they have been fully heard – you can work on solutions or changes together, but nothing important will ever happen until they have been heard.

      Listening is not easy. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us. But, precisely because it is so rare, it is an extraordinary and sometime life-changing thing. So I resolve to work on listening this year. I hope you might too because how much could the world change if people only really listened.

     

Hespeler, 8 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Ephesians 4:17-25, Psalm 43, John 8:31-38

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s you may have heard, the Oxford English Dictionary chooses a word of the year for every year that goes by – one word to capture the spirit of the age and mark significant trends in society. You may have also heard that the word that they chose for 2016 was, “post-truth.” They did not choose this word lightly or subjectively. They noted that the use of this word had grown enormously over the last 12 months – appearing 2000 percent more often in articles published over the last year.

      The word, they say, is often used in the phrase “post-truth politics’’ and it has to do with the fact that we are living in a time in which truth has become largely irrelevant. The dictionary defines it as an adjective that relates to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

      Of course, the reason why this idea of “post-truth” has become so important is because it has driven events in a powerful way. We saw it in the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom where the side that was campaigning to see the UK exit the European Union kept going on and on about all of the money that Great Britain was sending away to the European government in Brussels and how that money would be used to improve health services when they won. After the vote was over, they admitted that it that simply a slogan with no actual reality behind it and amazingly it didn’t seem to matter – at least it certainly didn’t change anything.

      And then, as we in Canada looked on, the American election rolled out with a post-truth approach taking centre stage. Now, I am not naive. I realize that politicians have been lying and stretching the truth to win elections probably ever since the Greeks first invented democracy. But something unprecedented went on in that vote. As one news organization documented it exhaustively, one of the candidates was saying something that was either partially or completely untrue 70 percent of the time that he opened his mouth. But what was really unprecedented was not necessarily the number of lies but how little they mattered. In fact, you might even make the case that telling the truth was far more likely to get you defeated than telling lies.

      But the post-truth reality is not just found in politics. It was actually even more important to journalism. With traditional news media failing all over the place (especially, sadly, in Canada) we saw a powerful new kind of media come on strong as news stories that were blatantly false – that could easily be proved as false with a moment’s research – spread far and wide and were read and largely believed by more people than ever saw much more important legitimate news stories. For example, a story that reported that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump as president was read by millions of people and widely believed even though all you had to do was google the Vatican website to know that it was fake.

      The people at Oxford were right, I think, to underline the importance of post-truth as a significant development in our day. Lies are nothing new; they have always existed and they have always been powerful. But we are dealing with something new here – something that will undoubtedly shape our society in significant ways. I am not concerned, at least for the moment, with what this means for the careers of particular politicians. I am more concerned with why it has become so powerful at this particular moment in time.

      It doesn’t seem to make sense. We live in an age when people have more information available at their fingertips (literally) than ever before in the history of the world. Never has it been easier for people to do the necessary research to discover the truth or lack of it behind any story, but people seem less inclined to do it than ever. What we have seen is that people are far more likely to connect to and share a story that just feels right to them or that confirms what they have already decided is true about the world. Even more important, a well-established fact or truth that is inconvenient to them or that means that they will have to change their mind or something about their life, they will be very likely to dismiss out of hand.

      Truth, it turns out, is simply a lot harder than we all thought that it was. We thought that all you had to do was expose the truth, make it accessible to people and the truth would just prevail from there. Apparently it doesn’t just work like that, at least not anymore.

      I decided that I would start out this New Year of 2017 by preaching about the kind of resolutions that we could make that would actually matter. I realize, of course, that New Year’s resolutions have a bad track record. For years millions of people have been making vows on the first of January with the best of intentions that just don’t seem to carry until the end of the month. The impulse is good, but the follow-through just seems to be lacking. But, I thought, what if we worked on changing the underlying attitude rather than just focussing on the outward actions. Maybe that would lead to real and lasting change.

      And, given some of the events that have unravelled in politics and media in the past year, it would seem that a dedication to truth is one attitude that we definitely need to be working on. In particular, it would seem that Christians need to be working on it. I would like to be able to say that Christians should be immune to the lures of the post-truth era, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, it would seem that Christians (in general – I’m sure present company is excepted) have fallen victim to this more often than the general population.

      I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and, over the years, had a number of courses at Victoria College. Every time I would enter into that beautiful old building, I would look up and see the words that were inscribed over the entrance: “The truth shall make you free,” it said. It is, I assumed, at least the unofficial motto of Victoria College. I wonder how many students who have looked at those words over the decades and were inspired by them know where those words come from. It might surprise many of them to know that that inscription is actually quoting Jesus of Nazareth as reported in the Gospel of John. I’ll bet that, if you went to that University campus today and asked the students, many of them would tell you that the last place they would look to find the “truth” would be in religion or the Bible or Christianity. That is, to a certain extent, a result of the general cynicism of our age but part of that is also on us as Christians. Christians have had a certain history (maybe especially in recent years, of being more interested in being right or in getting their way than that are in being committed to the truth no matter what.

      But what Jesus says in that passage in John is something that goes to the heart of our faith. Jesus really believed that anything that he came to reveal and represent was not at odds with the fundamental truths of the universe. To embrace the truth was to embrace him, of course, but truth was not exclusive to the revelation in Christ. All truth that might be discovered in this world (even truth that would be discovered in future centuries by the scientific method) was part of that larger idea of truth.

      Even more important, Jesus declared that there was a connection between truth and freedom – that those who remained dedicated to truth would remain free while those who didn’t care about it would become slaves. This is a very clear warning and one that we need to take very seriously.

      I think that this is something that we see very clearly in what is apparently our modern post-truth reality. Because we are now in an era where people don’t seem to care about the facts behind a report so long as it feels right and reaffirms their previously conceived notions, the population is just that much easier to manipulate so that they act and vote in the ways that the people who are publishing the fake news want. I don’t think that there is any doubt that this kind of manipulation with falsehood did play a role (though it would be hard to quantify how much) in some of the surprising political outcomes in the past year including the Brexit vote, the American election, Italy, Greece, Turkey and a number of other places.

      If people were willing to look further than their Facebook feed to figure out whether a story was true or not, the populations would not be so easily manipulated. I wouldn’t say that any of this has yet led us to a place where we are literally enslaved to the whims of powerful masters or that that will necessarily happen, but I will say that I am more concerned that that could happen than I would have been a year ago.

      In such a world, I would suggest that one of the resolutions that we as Christian people – as people of faith – should make at the beginning of this New Year is to be committed to what is true. We, the followers of Jesus really ought to be the first to make such a commitment. But what would such a resolution really look like. How would we work it out in practical terms?

      Well, first of all, being committed to truth means valuing what is true more than our own comfort. We have all experienced, I am sure, that discomfort and resistance that often comes with being confronted with a truth that we have not heard before or that contradicts what we had previously believed. It is irritating and annoying and it is often just so much easier to simply reject the new information out of hand. I am sure that I have often been guilty of that as have many of you. It is a human reaction, but it is not the reaction of someone who is truly dedicated to the truth. Being such a people means being willing to consider new truths, especially those that come in a convincing way, even if they are uncomfortable or inconvenient and maybe especially when they mean you have to rethink everything that you had always taken for granted. Jesus never promised that the truth would be easy, only that it would set you free.

      Being committed to the truth means being willing to use the critical mind that God has given you. I know that sometimes people think that having faith means that you should never have to deal with any doubts or questions. But that is not faith. That is simply certitude – often a foolish certitude because the truth is rarely that simple. In many ways, not having any doubts or questions is the opposite of having faith. Faith is actually about a relationship of trust between you and God and no truly healthy relationship can ever come when you are afraid to entertain questions or doubts. So use that brain that God gave you to ask questions and to seek answers that make sense to you. We ought not to be afraid to engage in such quests for true understanding because God can never be at odds with truth. Questing earnestly for truth can always be a part of your journey towards God.

      Being committed to truth also means, Jesus tells us, being committed to freedom. If ever you find yourself being drawn to a story because it just feels right to you, a good question to ask is if this story is leading you closer to freedom or to slavery. Is someone manipulating me with this story? That is always a question worth examining. If they are, chances are that they are not dealing in an entirely truthful way.

      It would seem that our world is in desperate need of someone to lead us into a dedication to what is true. My dream is that the Christian church could be a key leader in this journey towards a commitment to truth whatever the cost. To do so would be faithful to the calling and example of Jesus. To do so might just help to change the world in a way that truly matters.

     

Hespeler, 1 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Lamentations 1:1-7, Matthew 2:16-16, Psalm 44

t is a good thing, I suppose, that God made sure that Jesus, Mary and Joseph got out of Bethlehem before King Herod’s murderous men arrived. Three innocent lives were saved and, even more important, everything that the Messiah had been sent to accomplish was saved. But most people who read this part of the story (which, of course, we often don’t read at Christmas time because who wants to dwell on such things!) – those who do read it can’t help but ask: “Excuse me, but what about all of those other children two years old and under? Couldn’t they have been saved too?”

      We modern people are not the first to be scandalized at these events. From ancient times, this little episode has been called by the name, “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” and considered to be one of the more scandalous events told in the Bible. In thousands of years, nobody has been able to come up with any good reason why innocent children should have been left to be slaughtered apparently just to cover the escape of the Christ child.

      But, as awful as this story is, the Bible simply does not stop to explain it. God apparently knows that it’s coming – is able to send Joseph a very explicit warning in a dream – but doesn’t do anything to save any other children, and yet the Bible offers not a single word of explanation.

      But that is, unfortunately, how the world generally works. Tragedies do happen. Crimes against humanity are committed. Terrible disasters take place and as much as we grasp for an answer to the question of why, we often just don’t get it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t an answer, of course, just that it isn’t coming our way.

      And we hardly have to go travelling back in time two thousand years to find such a reason to be scandalized. I know that we are standing here on the very threshold of a new year, 2017, and that all kinds of people have been looking back at the year that just passed with a real spirit of “good riddance.” I know that lots of people have wonderful things that happened for them or for the people they loved in 2016, but the overwhelming story that seems to have been told on the year was pretty negative. We lost huge numbers of beloved cele­brities and some of them in pretty shocking ways. The story of Aleppo and most of Syria went from bad to much, much worse. Many people are incredibly disturbed by the global turn in politics to what seems to be a particularly dangerous brand of right wing populism. So, while we’re not talking about events as egregious as the slaughter of the innocents here, we can understand the idea of not looking back on the recent past with a great deal of nostalgia.

      So what are we to think of the idea that the Bible lets the slaughter of the innocents go by without a commentary? It would be a big problem, I think, if it did. But, the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t. Yes, it is true that the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t pause to explain the slaughter, but it does do, I think, something much more important: it pauses to lament. This is the commentary on the events that it does make: “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’”

      This is actually a remarkably significant response to a tragedy, but we might not recognize it as such because we live in a society that does not really acknowledge the importance of the activity known as grieving.

      Oh, we do recognize that it is necessary, from time to time, to give some people a certain amount of time and space to grieve a significant loss. People are allowed, for example, to take some carefully restricted time off of work when someone they love has died. We tolerate a certain number of tears, a limited amount of time when a grieving person may indulge in a reasonable amount of melancholy. But we don’t really have a whole lot of patience for that kind of thing. If people let it go on for what we consider to be “too long,” we don’t have any trouble telling them so.

      Even as we engage in pop psychology which talks about the various stages of grief that people have been observed to go through, we tend to turn that into a prescription for where people are supposed to be in their process of grief – telling people, “Don’t you think that you have spent enough time engaging in ‘anger’ and ‘bargaining’; isn’t it time that you moved on to ‘acceptance”?”

      Underneath all of our thinking on the subject seems to be the assumption that grief is actually a sign of weakness and that we really ought to put it aside as quickly as possible so that we can get back to being productive contributors to the economy. And this is probably especially true when it comes to our response to negative events and horrible crimes such as the slaughter of the innocents. The time spent mourning the disaster is considered to be wasted time and the assumption is that it really only gets in the way of the work of retaliation which usually includes declaring some sort of war upon the people or ideas that are held responsible for the disaster. (Think, for example, of how western nations dealt with the terrorist act on September 11, 2001. That was the pattern.)

      And, frankly, the people who wrote the Bible (such as the writer of the Gospel of Matthew) would look at our attitudes and find us extremely foolish. They recognized that grief was extremely important work; work that (if it wasn’t done) would definitely get in the way of the kinds of solutions and responses that were actually helpful. You see, they understood some things about the human condition that we seem to have forgotten.

      It works this way. We human beings have been designed by God in some pretty ingenious ways. I happen to believe that the particular mechanism that God used to design us was the process that modern science has come to call evolution and because of that, science has given us some wonderful new tools to understand that design. One thing that has become clear, for example, is that we have been designed to prioritize survival. What that means is that, when you are faced with a dangerous or traumatic situation or when people or things that are important to you are taken away, there is a process that takes over your brain in order to help you to survive that.

      The part of your brain that takes care of this is actually a fairly primitive part – a part that you can also find in far less sophisticated animals than humans. But that is fine because higher brain power is not what is needed immediately in that kind of situation.

      When you are threatened, your brain knows that what you actually need is not to waste a lot of brain power analyzing what is happening to you or even making sense of it all. Instead your brain concentrates on two key things. First, its priority is to make sure that you simply survive. This primitive part of your brain takes over and leads you through your initial response. In a situation of threat, that may mean helping you to fight back or, if that is not the best solution, run away from the situation. In a situation of loss, that means doing whatever you need to do to get through the loss.

      The other job that is very important at such moments is memory storage. Very clear and precise memories of the traumatic situation are stored in a part of your brain called the amygdala. These memories are not analyzed or interpreted, they are just stored there as episodes in living colour. This is also a matter of survival, of course, because once you have survived a dangerous situation, the important thing to do is to remember precisely how you did it because you may face such a situation again. This is why the memories of traumatic events are often so clear and vibrant even though you don’t really want to remember them at all. This is how we have been marvellously and beautifully designed for survival by a loving God.

      But there is one problem with this design. It means that, after you have gone through a certain amount of loss, danger or trauma (things that are an inevitable part of life) you end up with these powerful and clear memories stored up in your amygdala. But, as they are not particularly pleasant memories, the tendency is to avoid them, keep them locked up and pretend that they are not there. But they are so powerful that they do not stay locked up forever and they don’t just go away. So the more you try to repress them, the more they manage to sneak out. They are often triggered in unexpected ways and that means that you can continue to react to the trauma or loss that you have suffered long after the original events in ways that can be destructive to yourself or others.

      There is only one known solution to this problem and it is in a process that has also been graciously provided to us by God. That process is called grief. Going through grief is something that human beings have been doing since the dawn of civilization and probably long before. It is an activity that was very well known and seen as an essential part of life throughout Biblical times and, in fact, every scripture passage that we read this morning was an example of someone working through their grief by putting it into words.

      We read from the Book of Lamentations which is an entire book that was devoted to someone (traditionally identified as the Prophet Jeremiah) expressing his grief over the destruction of the City of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Our psalm reading this morning is an example of an ancient communal exercise of grief as all the people come together before God to mourn something that they had all lost: a national defeat or setback. And then, of course, we have Rachel weeping for her children in the Gospel of Matthew: the ancient matriarch of the nation of Israel mourning for her lost children down through the ages.

      Grief work is so important because what it does is takes those memories of trauma and loss that you have stored up in your brain – in your amygdala – and actually allows you to move them into a different part of your brain where they can actually be analyzed and given meaning. This is how you were designed to deal with these memories – to wait until the crisis is over and then take the time to take out those memories that you stored up in the time of loss or danger and figure out how they fit into the overall story of your life. This is exactly the kind of process we see people going through – with God’s understanding and help – in these biblical passages and similar ones to those we read this morning.

      So when we see the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, and Rachel the ancient Matriarch and God himself joining together to mourn the terrible events of the slaughter of the innocents, this is not a failure to respond. It is a very important response. It is about processing such terrible events, finding their meaning and taking serious steps to destroy the power of such terror (which is, of course, what the entire rest of the gospel story is all about).

      It is the first day of January, a day, traditionally, to make resolutions – to decide what changes you would like to make in your life in this New Year. That is why I have decided to spend several sermons this January talking about some resolutions we could make for 2017 that could really make a difference for good.

      I would suggest that the first and maybe most important resolution you could make for this New Year is to practice some good grief. After all, how can you possibly do better at anything in this year that is coming until you first put aside the negative things, the losses and the disappointments of 2016 and, as I say, people seem to be saying that there have been a lot of them. Don’t be afraid to deal with what you have lost or feared in this past year. Don’t be afraid to grieve and mourn in whatever ways are necessary to you despite what anyone may have to say about it. Most of all don’t be afraid to ask for help as you go through such processes if you need it. May 2017 be a time of great blessing, especially, maybe, as you learn to grieve whatever there was in 2016 that needs to be grieved.

     

      

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Hespeler, 4 December, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Communion

Luke 6:37-45, Psalm 72:1-7, 18,19, Deuteronomy 15:7-11

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hat was the best Christmas dinner that you ever had? How would you describe it to me? I bet that if we were to put that question out as a general survey, we would get a great variety of answers. Some would speak of dinners from long ago, even from when they were small. Others would speak of one from recent memory. You would hear of menus and guest lists and decorations.

      But if you really pressed people to say what made it truly special, they would go beyond speaking of those things. They would start to speak of something very hard to describe: a warmth, a sparkle, a glow that somehow made the gathering that special – the kind of thing that is hard to pin down but that makes all the difference.

      It would be much the same thing if I were to ask you to describe to me your very best memory of a Christmas morning. There would be some who would focus on the presents that you received or perhaps that you gave. Others would focus on the people who were there, but most would talk about something that gave a special shine to everything that happened.

      That thing – that undefinable quality – is what is sometimes called the Christmas Spirit or even the magic of Christmas. It is a shared attitude that somehow has the ability to take fairly ordinary things – food, interactions, words – and make them truly exceptional. I am sure that every single one of us has felt that Christmas spirit at least one time or another, but we would be hard pressed to describe it exactly or to force it to appear when we wanted it to.

      There have been various attempts to portray this Christmas Spirit down through the years. Sometimes I think that, more than anything, that is what Santa Claus is – an attempt to draw a picture of Christmas Spirit. But, as much as I love Santa and what he represents, I think that someone else actually succeeded better in portraying what it is all about: Charles Dickens.

      In his classic tale, A Christmas Carol, the secon d ghost that visits Scrooge after midnight is called the Ghost of Christmas Present. But I would suggest to you that, more than anything else, he is a representation of the Christmas Spirit itself – a Christmas spirit that is reborn every twenty-fifth of December.

      The ghost wears a simple green robe, bordered with white fur that hangs loosely about its bare chest. Its feet are also bare and on its head is no other covering than a holly wreath. Its face is clear and joyful and girded round its middle is an antique rust-eaten scabbard that contains no sword.

      Most interestingly, however, as the ghost conveys Scrooge upon his nocturnal journey, he bears with him a flaming torch. The purpose of this torch is not merely to cast light upon the things that they are seeing but to produce a special incense. We discover the power of this incense as Scrooge and the Ghost visit a shop where the poor folk of the city have brought their Christmas dinners. These people are so poor that they do not have the means within their dwellings to cook and so they bring their dishes to a “Baker’s Shop.” I’m guessing, that these meals are pretty poor and simple fare.

      But, as Scrooge watches, the ghost (who is invisible to everyone but him) delights himself by lifting the cover off of each dish and sprinkling it liberally with the ash from his torch. It is an odd vision, but the meaning of it seems clear. The ash represents the power of the spirit of Christmas to transform. As the story continues, it becomes clear that the ghosts cannot just transform simple meals into Christmas feasts, it can also transform ordinary interactions into signs of peace on earth and goodwill to all and ordinary gatherings into joyous signs of the kingdom of God. And Christmas does have this power. I know that we have all experienced it at some point or another in our journey through Christmas past and present.

      I think that there is a spiritual truth to be found in this. Our tendency as human beings is to judge the value of the people and things that we see. When we do this, we tend to look at the surface of things. We’ll focus, for example, on the actual contents of the Christmas meal and how it was cooked, to judge how good it is. The torch of the Christmas Ghost reminds us that we must look deeper than the surface.

      Jesus would remind us of the same thing. “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good,” he taught “and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” His point is that you really cannot judge anything unless you can see the heart and not merely the surface of things.

      This is, of course, why Jesus taught that we should not judge at all. We are so inclined to look at the surface of things that we are blind to what really matters. Jesus suggested, wisely, that it is better to leave the judging up to God who can see the heart in all matters.

      But the lessons that Ebenezer Scrooge learns from the Ghost of Christmas Present are not limited to finding that warmth and joy of Christmas by looking to the heart of things. There is also a very dark and negative side to what he learns. Scrooge hasn’t just missed the joy of Christmas, he has also actively participated in judgement against the people of his city.

      Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol, two men enter Scrooge’s offices asking for his support in their charitable efforts on behalf of the poor. Scrooge’s answer is quite memorable. “Are there no prisons?” he wants to know. And he inquires likewise of the Union workhouses, the Treadmill and the Poor Law. These were the means by which England, in that era, dealt with poor – basically by punishing them for their poverty.

      The assumption you see (and this is an assumption that Scrooge himself clearly makes) is that the poor are responsible for their own misfortune – that they are poor because they have chosen to be idle. Thus Scrooge dismisses them by saying, “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.” When the kind-hearted gentlemen inform Scrooge that some people would rather die than go to such places, Scrooge replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

      I wish I could say that Scrooge was the only one to take such a cold-hearted attitude towards the poor, but I think that you know that such an attitude has far from disappeared since his days. In some ways, I would say, it is an attitude that is only on the rise in our times. And, what’s more, such an attitude does make a certain amount of sense. If you only look at the appearance of things – if you see someone not working (or not able to get a well enough paying job) it is easy to come to the conclusion that it must be because of some deficiency on their part – they haven’t tried hard enough or lack a work ethic. It is also the easiest conclusion to come to because it means that their problems don’t really have anything to do with you.

      But, as I say, it is only possible to think that when you look at the surface of things. Once you begin to see the heart of the people involved, you begin to realize that the causes of poverty are much more complicated than that and, what’s more, our own fates are much more intertwined with the fates of the poor than we ever suspected.

      It is Scrooge’s visit to the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, that makes it impossible for him to only look at the surface of that family’s poverty and troubles. In particular, his heart becomes drawn to the Cratchits’ young son, Tiny Tim, whose health is so poor that Scrooge asks the ghost whether he will live for long. The answer is far from encouraging which leads Ebenezer to beg for a different outcome. The ghost turns the old miser’s cold words back on him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” When you begin to see the heart instead of the surface of things, you realize how cruel our normal manner of thinking is. Scrooge is appalled at himself as we should be too.

      Scrooge’s final exchange with the Ghost of Christmas Present is the most disturbing. He detects two figures that are hiding underneath the skirts of the ghost. They are two children: a boy whose name is Ignorance and a girl whose name is Want and they are in an abominable state. They are, the ghost informs him, the children of all humanity and their terrible state isn’t just a threat to themselves but, if they are not saved, they will bring destruction on all humankind.

      “Have they no refuge or resource?”Scrooge cries out and in reply, the Ghost simply turns his own words back on him again: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Scrooge falls into despair, not only because the ghost forced him to look at the heart of matters but, by looking to the heart, he has come to realize that the plight of the poor is not just their problem but that it is a problem that affects all of us and threatens to doom us all. Want leads to ignorance and ignorance is deadly. If you let enough of the people fall into ignorance, they become a force in society. They will support tyrants and demagogues. Ignorance breeds more ignorance and it all spirals out of control. Scrooge has realized that the plight of the poor and forgotten ishis own plight as well.

      Dickens didn’t invent this idea, of course. The Bible recognized first that the plight of the whole of society is connected to the plight of its poorest members. That is why, in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses instructs the entire nation by saying, “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so.” This is not merely for the sake of those who are poor but for the blessing of all: “for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake.” There will always be poor among us, Moses warns us, the problem of poverty will never entirely go away, but God actually brings good out of it by creating an opening to blessing for all of us.

      Jesus echoes this idea when he teaches his followers and says, “give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

      The Ghost of Christmas Present teaches Scrooge a vital lesson. It teaches him that, by looking only at the surface of things, he has effectively blinded himself to the truth that surrounds him – the truth about what lies in the heart, especially in the hearts of the poor and forgotten, and the truth about how connected we really are.

      Christmas is a time when this habitual blindness is set aside. I have been amazed, for example, at the generosity that has been on display in this congregation and community over the last couple of weeks. You may have heard the story of a refugee family that showed up here about two weeks ago. It was the first real cold day of winter and they had sent their children to school that morning without any winter clothes because they just didn’t have any. We took them down to Hope Clothing and gave them as much as we could immediately and when there were a number of things still needed an urgent message was put out on Facebook.

      Do you realize that that message was shared 18 times that we know of and quickly seen by over 3000 people? And the response that we saw to that need was overwhelming both to our volunteers and to the family. People want to be generous. They want a way to look past the surface of the Syrian Refugee Crisis (which is a complex mess) and look to the heart of the people involved. Christmas is one good reason why they were willing to do that and the transforming power comes when we learn to see like that all year long. Dickens understood that. More importantly, so did Jesus.

      Will you allow the spirit of Christmas to transform you, not just during this Christmas Present but through the whole year that God places before you?

     

Hespeler, 27 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Isaiah 43:14-21, Philippians 3:4b-16, Psalm 51:1-12

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t will happen in just a little less than one month. People will go to bed filled with expectations. They will have sleep “with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.” The visions may vary from person to person. The kids w ill dream of presents and stockings bursting full. The adults, maybe, will dream of turkeys and stuffing and mashed potatoes. A huge number will dream of family, friends and loved ones coming together and what it will be like when they gather.

      Christmas, more than any other festival in our lives is full of expectations. That is as true today as it was almost two hundred years ago when Clement Moore wrote his famous poem and included that line about the sugarplums. And expectation can certainly be wonderful, but there can also be a downside to them.

      I remember the Christmas when I was about 10 years old or thereabouts when the reality of Christmas just didn’t measure up to my expectations. I guess that when I was younger than that, it wasn’t all that hard to simply be overwhelmed by the experience of opening presents and thinking about how awesome they were. But I clearly remember that year when I finished opening of my presents and I just wondered where that feeling of awe was. It wasn’t that my presents hadn’t been great – they had been. I had gotten exactly what I had asked for. It was just that that feeling of being overwhelmed by what I had received that I seemed to remember from when I was younger just wasn’t there. I was disappointed; I had been done in by my expectations.

      And I know that you don’t feel too bad for me about that. I’m sure that every child experiences that at some point and that it is a certain corrective to the infantile greediness that we experience at Christmas when we are really young. I learned and I adjusted and I think I’m the better for it. But there are other times when we are done in by our Christmas expectations and it is not necessarily a growning experience:

      A father, who has always poured his love and care into a family Christmas dinner and has always looked forward to that warm feeling of having everyone gathered around one table, finds his expectations thwarted this year. One son has a new girlfriend and it is really serious. He has been invited to spend the evening with her family and really wants to go. A daughter has joined the military and will be shipping out to Germany a week before Christmas. A second daughter just landed her first job as a paramedic and, as the low person on the totem pole has to work all the Christmas shifts this year. None of the kids will be home and, as proud as he is of his children and what they are doing, he can’t help but be bitter and angry all season long and make everyone around him miserable. His good, positive and wonderful memories of Christmases past seems to have made this Christmas almost not worth celebrating.

      In another part of town, a grandmother and matriarch of a large family has had to give up so many of the things that she has always done for her family this year. She just doesn’t have the stamina to cook the turkey, decorate the room and table, shop and wrap and do a thousand other things. Her children and grandchildren have very thoughtfully organized and parcelled out all the various tasks amongst themselves. She won’t have to do a thing but sit back and enjoy the holidays. She is so appreciative that she is doing her best to make them all feel miserable because their efforts aren’t exactly giving the results that she had in the past.

      And, lest you think that it is only good memories of past Christmas that can cause problems by building up expectations that are no longer realistic, consider these people for whom Christmas every year is a dark time:

·               The man whose father left his family one week after Christmas when he was only ten and who every year feels a deepening dread that he will lose the people he cares for as the season approaches.

·               The woman whose ex-husband drank too much every Christmas and who still feels the pain of his beatings every December 25.

·               The man who still plays out an angry discussion about politics that he was part of during a Christmas dinner ten years ago. He cannot let go of it!

      When Charles Dickens wrote his Christmas classic story about how people can change, especially at Christmas, he knew that the first thing that he had to deal with was the memories of Christmases past. They have a unique power to affect how we see and live out Christmas today. And they do that for each and every one of us.

      The first ghost that Ebenezer Scrooge meets after the warning he receives from Marley has long proved to be the hardest one for artists, animators and directors to illustrate. It is a ghost who is exceedingly hard to pin down. It’s face changes constantly to evoke figures from Ebenezer’s past and even the number of its arms and legs cannot be stated with certainty. This is a reflection of how our memories of the past affect us. They are rarely clear. Sometimes the happy events of the past are magnified (and any negative parts edited out) as we look back upon them with nostalgia. Negative events, for their part, have a tendency to grow worse as we look back on them. They are indistinct because we rarely have the courage to look back at our past memories without the adornment of our own fantasies and it is precisely for that reason that they have such power over us.

      The one feature of the Ghost of Christmas Past that is entirely clear is the light that burns like a flame from the top of his head. This light is the symbol of hope in Scrooge’s encounter with the ghost. By casting a clear light on all of the events of the past – good and bad – this light has the potential of exposing them in truth. Basically, Dickens is saying that, when we dare to examine the events of our past clearly – even if they are painful or too good to believe – we rob them of the power to destroy our present.

      So, for example, as we follow Scrooge’s journey through the past (which includes many a good memory such as the rauchaus Christmas party in Fezziwig’s shop) we discover among other things that his experience of want and poverty so deformed him that it made him into a man who loves money more than he loves humanity. It is a scar that runs deep.

      But this exposing light is so frightening to Scrooge. He cannot face it. As he jouneys through his past, Scrooge becomes ever more disturbed and fearful until at last he can take it no more. “Remove me!”Scrooge cries out to the ghost, “I cannot bear it! …Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!” And then, when the ghost does not comply, Scrooge does what we all do when we do not want to face our past clearly, he grabs the ghost’s hat which is in the form of a giant candle snuffer. He forces this cap down over the ghost’s head until he extinguishes the flame.

      The Ghost of Christmas Past is the only ghost that Scrooge has the power to banish. By extinguishing its light he makes it go away. And we too have that power. We can choose to extinguish the light the illuminates our own past and allows us to see it for what it truly was. We often do so because, like Scrooge, we are afraid to face the reality of our own past. We suppress it deep inside and think we have controlled it. We have not. We have only given it more power over us. Scrooge can only be free of the past that has enslaved him to the pursuit of money by facing this past, and so his trials will continue as he faces his other ghosts.

      Dickens’ Christmas Carol is a great work of literature and, as such, it contains great and universal truths – truths that we call in the church Gospel truths. The truth that he teaches about the past and its power to enslave us is also found in the Bible. We read two passages this morning that talk about how God would release us from the power of the past to deform us. In the Book of Isaiah, God implores the people of Israel, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” He is asking them to make sure that they aren’t trapped by their memories of the past. And the past he is talking about here is a good past; he is talking about the time when God saved them from the Egyptians by leading them through the Red Sea. In fact, the prophet describes those past events in some detail, speaking of “the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”

      But God is aware of how even memories of the most positive events can mess us up. When he says, “do not remember the former things,” he does not mean to repress them or to quench them, like Scrooge, with an exstiguisher cap. He actually invites the Israelites to examine the past closely by describing it. He’s talking about how trust in God can help to keep that past from controlling you or destroying you.

      The Apostle Paul says much the same thing in his letter to the Philippians, talking about how he forgets what lies behind and strains forward to what lies ahead. Here the past that might destroy him is not all good. It is more of a mixed bag. He talks about positive things like his heritage and education but also negative things like his past persecution of the church.

      The message, however is much the same. Paul is teaching us, by example, that we cannot allow the past to have power over us. He is not telling us to repress the past or our memory of it. On the contrary, he describes these things from his past in quite explicit detail: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

      He knows these things intimately because he has not hesitated to examine them closely under the harsh light of reality. It likely made him uncomfortable as it made Scrooge uncomfortable but he would not snuff out the light of truth and it is precisely because of that that he has the freedom to strain forward to whatever God has put in front of him without being weighed down by his past.

      Sisters and brothers, I know that many of you are like Ebenezer Scrooge. I am not accusing you of being a miser or of being as cruel as him. That is not what I mean! But I am suggesting that many of you, like him, have allowed your memories of the past to have too much power over you to define you, to tell you what you can and cannot do and to overwhelm you with guilt or regret or grief or a host of other feelings that threaten to destroy you. Know that God wants to set you free from the power of your past to control and define you. That is why he sent Jesus into the world. That is what forgiveness and redemption and death and resurrection were all about: setting you free from all that.

      Will you trust God enough to take a lamp (or the light that shines from the head of the Ghost of Christmas past) and examine your past and see it for what it truly was so that God may set you from living under its power. That action was the first step towards making Ebenezer Scrooge the man that God had always meant him to be. It can be for you and for me as well.

     

Hespeler, 20 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Luke 8:1-3, Matthew 15:32-39, Psalm 1

M

agdalena, I have decided that I want to speak to you today. On some long distant day, your parents will likely tell you the story of how they chose to give you your name. And the story they will tell you, I happen to know, will go something like this: When your mom was only a couple of weeks pregnant with you, your grandma got a phone call from your great Aunt Maggie who lived way out west. She had called to tell your grandma, before your mom had said a word, that your mom was pregnant and that she was going to have a girl.

      That event was what prompted your parents to name you after your great Aunt Maggie (whose full name, of course, is Magdalena). And I’m sure you can be proud of being named after her – a strong woman who is obviously sensitive to things that many of us are not.

      But I didn’t really want to talk to you about your Great Aunt Maggie today, but about another woman – maybe one of the strongest I have ever heard of – after whom you are also named. We know her, as Mary Magdalene, one of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

      Now, Mary Magdalene is a very important person in Christian tradition. Down through the centuries, all kinds of things have been said and written about her. She has often been identified as a prostitute or as that repentant woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. I wanted to tell you first of all, Magdalena, that there is absolutely no reason to think that Mary Magdalene was any of those things. At least, at no point does the Bible say any such things about her. These are all ideas that somehow became attached to the figure of Mary Magdalene in later church traditions.

      It might even be that these negative images of Mary were intentionally connected to her by later church leaders as a kind of a smear campaign. You see, she was a little bit embarrassing to later Christians because it is pretty obvious that she was an important leader in the early church and, as time went by, an increasingly male-dominated church didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that women could even be leaders.

      So, Magdalena, ignore what later Christians and traditions said about Mary Magdalene and lets just concentrate on what the Bible says about her. It may not seem like there is a lot in the Bible, but I think that what there is you will find very interesting.

      The first thing that we know about her is her name: Mary Magdalene. And that name marks her already as someone rather unique. Most women in that world at that time would have used a name that indicated her relationship to some man in her life. So a normal name for someone like her should have been Mary, daughter of Jacob or Mary the mother of James or, as we have in an example in the passage we read from the Gospel of Luke, Joanna, the wife of Chuza. This was because women, in that world, were defined and limited by the men in their life. I’m not saying that it was right – I’m just saying that that was how it was.

      But Mary Magdalene doesn’t have that kind of name. Already that marks her as unusual – as a strong and independent woman who was able to make a mark on the world all by herself. Wouldn’t it be something to be named after a woman like that!

      But what is the meaning of her name if it is not a reference to some man. The last part of her name most likely refers to the place where she comes from. It means that she comes from the town of Magdala. And, as it turns out, that also tells us a lot about her because we have learned a few things about that place. Magdala, in the first century ad, was an important town on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. It would have been a fairly prosperous town when Mary was born there with three local industries: fishing, fish processing and textiles. In fact, Magdala was so prosperous that some of its citizens came together to build one of the very few stone synagogues to be found anywhere in the region at the time

      The name of the town, Magdala, meant tower. Some have suggested that the name referred to some tall structure in the town built for the drying of fish orfor some step in the process of dying clothes, but I suspect that the name actually came from something else. The most prominent geographical feature of the town was a cliff (the south end of Mount Arbel) that stood just outside of town. This distinctive cliff watched over the entire town like a protective bodyguard. Its distinctive form would have led fishermen like a beacon safely to their home harbour from far out over the lake. It even looked like a tower. So I believe that the south end of Mount Arbel gave the town its name.

      So there young Miryam grew up for her entire life under the shadow of that tower – the cliff of Mt. Arbel. And life must have been pretty good while she was young, but then, everything changed almost overnight. In the year 20 AD – that is, about ten years before a man named Jesus showed up on the scene – King Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, did something stunning. He totally reorganized his kingdom. He abandoned his capital city, which he had been building for years at a place called Sephoris, and decided to build a brand new capital in a brand new city that he called Tiberias.