I am very excited to announce that starting on November15 for 5 days, the eBook version of my book, Caesar's Census, God's Jubilee, will be available for free on Amazon website. This is a wonderful book to read right now to get a fresh perspective on the Christmas Story in the Bible.
Follow these links to download your copy before this extraordinary opportunity is gone. Make sure you share this news with others too!
Here is some more information about what the book explores:
According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus of Nazareth was born during a census that had been ordered by Caesar Augustus and, because of this census, his parents made a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, arriving just in time for his birth. It is a wonderful story that has inspired millions down through the ages, but it is also a story that has left some very puzzled.
Questions abound for many readers of the story who have any knowledge of the history of those times. Questions like:
Did Caesar really conduct a census of the whole world at once?
When did such a census take place?
When is Luke saying that Jesus was born?
Why does Luke say that all the people registered for the census in the places where their ancestors came from?
Doesn’t it make more sense to register people where they actually live?
What was the normal Roman procedure for taking censuses?
This book is an attempt to work through questions like this is a way that takes the scriptural story seriously but that also deals honestly and openly with what we know about the historical situation. It does this in two ways.
Rethinking
This book suggests that we have simply misunderstood some things about Luke’s nativity story. This is partly because we have insisted on harmonizing his story with the nativity story in the Gospel of Matthew. It also explores how the Old Testament notion of jubilee might offer a better reason for the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
Reimagining
The nativity story has been painted and drawn by some of the greatest artists who have ever lived, sung by some of the greatest singers and told by some of the greatest storytellers. A whole rich and well-populated world has grown up around the nativity story—a world so detailed that it seems very real even if much of it has little connection with the Biblical accounts. Because of this, it is not enough to just an attempt to correct a few misunderstandings about the Christmas story. New ideas would seem to attack that entire imaginative world that has grown up around the story over the centuries and would be resisted for that reason alone.
Therefore this book also includes some retelling of the Christmas story in short vignettes (called interludes) that help us to imagine the journey of Mary and Joseph within a historical setting that Luke would recognize.
Warning: if you read this book, you just might not be able to see the old familiar Christmas story in the same way ever again.
here is a river, called the Gihon, that flows to this day in the city of Jerusalem. It is a small stream, but a vital one, flowing, as it does, in a part of the world where water is scarce and a reliable source can mean the difference between life and death. It is also an unusual river because it is fed by a spring, the Gihon Spring, that is unlike most every other spring in the world. It doesn’t flow steadily, you see. It is an intermittent spring. At regular intervals it surges up and then it stops.
The importance and uniqueness of this river probably had a lot to do with the beliefs that developed about it. And it seems that there were many such beliefs. The ancient Israelites almost certainly saw it as a holy place. This was not necessarily official doctrine, but it was a popular belief. It is, as I explained last week, identified as one of the four rivers that flowed from the original paradise. It was the place where they anointed their kings and a sign that God was with them. And there is even a story in the Gospel of John that indicates that they believed that, when the spring did periodically surge forth and fill a pool that had been constructed, the waters of the Gihon had healing power.
The evidence seems to indicate, anyways, that this river (together with the nearby temple of Solomon) was one of the key places where these people experienced the presence of their God in some powerful ways. And we all have such places, don’t we? I know that our official theology states that the God who we believe in is not limited by time or by space. And one thing that that means is that there isn’t any particular spot on this earth, or even in the vast universe, where God is not. But that is not necessarily how it works in our experience.
The truth is that those who have had significant experiences of God have generally found that such experiences are much easier to find (or to be surprised by) in particular places and at certain times. That is not to suggest that everyone has experiences of God in all the same places. For some, a beautiful church building such as this one where we find ourselves is the place where they have most consistently found God, but churches don’t necessarily work the same for everyone. I know many who would say that they are much more likely to encounter God walking in the woods or along a beach than in a church. But that does not change the fact that, for most of us, there will always be certain places in our world where God just seems to be closer.
Well, one of those places for many ancient Israelites was the Gihon River in Jerusalem – a holy place that was maybe second only to the nearby temple of the Lord. And, as I say, it is wonderful to have places like that in your life. But there is also a risk that comes with that. What happens when you lose such places? Does that mean that you lose your God?
This was not just a theoretical question for them. The time came when the City of Jerusalem was attacked and besieged by the armies of the king of Babylon and, despite the presence of the River Gihon within the strong walls of the city, the city could not hold out against the invaders. Jerusalem fell. It was sacked by the invaders and then reduced to rubble. Even the holy temple of the Lord, the home of Yahweh, was left as nothing but a pile of stones. And then the Babylonians did something worse, they took the people of the city and the surrounding countryside and forced them to march off to exile in Babylon which was like a world away.
Of course this was a disaster on so many levels – devastation and loss that might feel familiar to modern day citizens of Syrian cities like Aleppo. But one particularly terrible aspect of this was the loss of those places where they had experienced their God. When you lose such places and especially when you are forcibly removed from the entire vicinity, does that mean that you lose your God too?
This was an especially urgent question in ancient times because people tended to think of their gods in very simple ways. Most ancient gods were seen as being tied to particular places. The gods of Egypt, for example, were the gods of Egypt. It was just assumed that they had no power once you left the Nile Valley. And as far as the people of Israel knew, their God was the same – after all, the question of whether the God of Israel could be present in other lands had simply never come up before. So, as far as they knew, when they left Mount Zion and the Gihon River, they would not be cut off from their God forever.
In fact, they did find their God in Babylon when they got there which was probably a big surprise. It led them to rethink everything they knew about God and was an important step towards the understanding we have of a God who is not limited by time and space. But they didn’t know that when they left. As far as they knew, when they left the Gihon, they were leaving their God.
One of the people who lived through that dramatic experience was a man named Ezekiel. He was a prophet and he saw the disaster coming and that there was nothing that could stop it. And Ezekiel was very concerned about what it meant that the people might lose their God. He even had a vision where he saw a great cloud of glory, which represented the presence of God, depart from the temple, seemingly forever. (Ezekiel 11:22)
But, though God gave Ezekiel a heads up about what was coming, he also sent other messages his way – messages of hope and of new beginnings. Ezekiel had many visions during this difficult time but one of them has proved the most enduring and meaningful. Even as the temple was being threated and destroyed (or perhaps had already been destroyed – it is hard to establish exactly when he had his visions) Ezekiel received a vision of a new temple that included, as we read this morning, a renewed Gihon River.
It is his glorious vision of the river that particularly interests me today. The river he sees is a little different from the actual Gihon River. As Ezekiel sees it, it no longer flows from near the temple mount but from the very threshold of the temple itself, but that is clearly a symbolic change and we may recognize it as the Gihon.
I believe that, if you want to understand what this vision meant to Ezekiel, you have to enter into his frame of mind. What did the loss of the temple mount and of the river – these places where he and his people had met with God – mean to him? We can’t know exactly what it felt like to him, of course, but I think that we can find some ways to sympathize. I know that many of us have felt a similar sense of loss in and through the life of the church in recent decades.
You see, one of the realities that we cannot simply avoid dealing with in the church these days is change. Across the board, churches are changing and adapting their worship and their programs and activities. Many don’t like it, I realize, but it seems to be inevitable for a number of reasons. Some churches do resist all change, of course. They’d rather die than change, they say in word and in deed. They often get what they wish for and die all the quicker as unchanged as possible, but, of course, death is a kind of change too so it really does seem that change is inescapable these days.
The fear of change has become so powerful that it is driving political change. I don’t know how to explain the events that took place in the United States this past week without understanding it in terms of huge numbers of people voting as a block to turn back the clock on change that has been taking place in society. But even such a desperate reaction and backlash will not slow the pace of change. It will overtake us all. The Babylonian army that is bringing the change of everything is outside the gate and I don’t care how high Trump builds his wall, he won’t be able to keep it out.
The big problem we have with change is the same problem that Ezekiel and his friends were dealing with. We, like they, have learned to know God in certain places and at certain times. And, of course, churches on Sunday mornings and at other key moments have traditionally been one of these places where we have encountered God. The church has been our River Gihon and Holy Temple Mount. But the pace of change means that these holy places have become strange to us and we may even have lost some of them. The natural fear is that the loss of these places will mean that we have lost God.
But Ezekiel’s vision of the Gihon, as I say, is a comfort. So what does his vision say that might be helpful to us in times of such change? Well first of all, Ezekiel’s vision of a new Gihon springs, “from below the threshold of the temple.” It is a promise of God’s ongoing presence with the people. They may destroy the temple, it might be razed to the ground, and the course of the river may be fouled, but the spring will pour forth its water again.
And notice that the river, as Ezekiel sees it, no longer has that intermittent flow that he and all the people of Jerusalem would have been used to. Now it flows steadily and without interruption. This is surely a sign to us of God’s constancy for us during times of change. Everything else may change but God remains the same.
But it is not enough for Ezekiel, or for us, that the river merely continues to exist. The more important question is, how we will continue to find God in times of change. This Ezekiel is able to discover by exploring the river. First he is taken to a place one thousand cubits from the city. (That is about a half a kilometer or this distance from here to Harvey St.) Here, Ezekiel discovers, the water of the Gihon is now flowing about ankle deep. You know, just perfect for splashing around in – refreshing, pleasant and cool.
This represents how we find God again after times of great change. Our first experience of God may be ankle deep. We may be splashing around and refreshing ourselves in the water of God’s presence with us, but, in the initial stages of dealing with change, we may not find that there is a great deal of depth to our new understandings of God.
That is okay though, because Ezekiel’s vision is not finished. And what he finds is that as he moves farther down the stream and away from the familiar places and ways that he experienced God, something surprising happens – the river flows deeper and deeper until soon its flow becomes overwhelming. God is not merely promising to be with us in times of great change here, he is promising to bring us to new depths in our understanding and meaning. If we are willing to engage with God in this journey of change with openness, God is promising to reveal himself to us in new and powerful ways.
And there is an even more exciting promise than that, for we learn that as the Gihon River flows on from there, it becomes a power that is able to transform the world. So sweet and fresh is its water, we are told, that is it able to make even the toxic waters of the Dead Sea (which Ezekiel calls the Arabah) fresh and able to support huge schools of fish. Here the promise is not only that God will be with us to refresh us but that also God will flow through us to renew the whole world.
I know change is hard for all of us. It is especially hard when we see change in an institution like the church where we have so many past experiences of the presence of God. You can resist against all that change. You can fight to keep everything the same or to put everything back the way that it was. You can even vote for Trump. You can try but, given the realities we are living with today, I don’t think that you will succeed.
But if you can find a way to move with the current of change – to embrace it and let it flow through you – I think that you might find that Ezekiel’s vision has a lot of truth in it and the further you go, the deeper and more powerful your experience of God will be.
140CharacterSermon Change is hard. We’re afraid to lose God. Ezekiel’s vision of Gihon says relationships with God can deepen in such times.
he second chapter of the Book of Genesis describes a garden – a place of idyllic existence where, the Bible says, humanity first came into being. This garden was perfect – the only place where all life (human and animal alike) lived together in peace and harmony. But the story goes on from there to tell us that the garden was lost and that humanity will never be able to enter it again as long as this world exists.
The loss of the garden has been a powerful idea that has possessed many people down through the ages who have sought for a way to get back to it. Some have sought to do it by questing after the tree of knowledge of good and evil – seeking to reclaim the garden by expanding human understanding. But they have not got us there yet by that route and sometimes have led us far astray.
But what if we could find it in another way – what if it were a place on the map? I mean not a literal location that you could just punch into your GPS and drive to, but what if the geographical description in Genesis was meant to point us to a metaphorical place where we can find it in this world. The garden is said to be in a very particular (if unusual) place: “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden,” it says, “and from there it divides and becomes four branches.” The four branches are given names, some of which seem familiar. They are, Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates.
Now, half of those rivers are immediately recognizable. Tigris and Euphrates are the two great rivers that flow through the land of Mesopotamia, which means the land between the two rivers. They flow today through the country of Iraq and they mark the place where archeologists tell us that human civilization first came into being at a place called Sumer.
The other two rivers are harder to recognize. Since half of the rivers would have been well known to the people who first heard this story, the assumption is that the other half would have been as well. The first river called Pishon – a name totally unknown otherwise – and we’re told that it flows in a land called Havilah which is also unknown. But then it says that, in the place the Pishon flows, there is gold, bdellium and onyx stone. Since bdellium (a precious resin) is only found in sub-Saharan Africa and onyx was a precious stone commonly used in Ancient Egypt, some have suggest that Pishon must be another name for the River Nile which starts its course in sub-Saharan Africa and flows through the rich valleys of Egypt. The Nile would fit well in the company of the Tigris and the Euphrates as Egypt was the second great civilization of the ancient world.
In fact, when you think about it that way, it suggests a very powerful symbolic meaning for this description of the Garden of Eden. The passage states that, out of the original garden and the things that happened there, there flowed the three of the great rivers of the ancient world – Tigris, Euphrates and Nile. And these three rivers were the cradle of human civilization itself in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This suggests to me that maybe the story of the garden was not intended to explain the origin of the human species so much as it was intended to explain the origin of human civilization.
Think of the symbolism of the story of Eden. The humans are expelled from the garden, an idyllic rural existence, by their choice to pursue the tree of knowledge. Civilization is marked by the quest for knowledge and calls on people to move from a rural lifestyle into the city.
Civilization has brought so many blessings, of course, but that relentless search for knowledge has also created many problems (nuclear proliferation and climate change are two that come to mind) that may destroy us in the long run. In many ways the loss of the garden, that loss of connection with the land has also been very costly. These three rivers may give us an angle on the story of the Garden of Eden that can help us to explore those very issues which are still important today as we still search for the garden that we have lost.
But that brings us to the fourth river, the Gihon. It has long proven the hardest to identify. There has been a lot of speculation about the identity of the Gihon down through the centuries. Some have also associated it with the Nile River (or a branch of the Nile) as well because it is said to have flowed through the land of Cush and Cush is an ancient name for the land that we call Ethiopia. But there is another possibility that comes from the name of the river itself. The name comes from a Hebrew root that means “to burst forth,” which doesn’t sound like a good name for a river so much as for a spring which might be the source of a river.
And it just so happens that there was a spring that fed a river that was called Gihon – a spring that was very well known to the people who first heard this story in the Book of Genesis. It was a small spring that flowed from a spot very close to a mountain called Zion. This spring was extremely important to the ancient Israelites because it made that mountain into a good and defensible spot where you might build a fortress and a city. The city that they built there was called Jerusalem, the city of David and his capital.
The spring mattered because a decent water supply was so hard to come by in that part of the world. It made it possible, for example, for the city of Jerusalem to withstand many attacks and sieges over the centuries, something that is celebrated in the Psalm we read this morning (which was likely written as a national celebration when the city had survived an attack): “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.” The river celebrated in that Psalm is none other than the Gihon and it describes the river as a sign of the presence of God in the city.
Now, traditionally, interpreters have hesitated to identify the river Gihon that is said to flow from Eden in Genesis with the Gihon that flowed in the city of Jerusalem. In fact, I cannot find any commentary that even suggests that they are intended to be the same river. You can probably guess why. People have had a hard time seeing how this tiny stream in Jerusalem belongs in the same league as mighty and historically significant rivers like Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. Jerusalem, as a centre of civilization, is also hard to compare with the much larger ancient cities of Mesopotamia and the Nile valley. If the Gihon is just a small stream in Jerusalem, it doesn’t seem to belong in the company of the other rivers of Eden.
But here is the thing: the description of the rivers of Eden never really made sense geographically speaking. Rivers simply do not work like they are described in this passage – especially with several rivers dividing off from one original river and then somehow flowing to various far-flung corners of the world. But that is okay because I don’t think that this description was ever meant to be taken as pointing to a literal geographical location.
The people who first heard and repeated this story did not hear it as a story about something that happened a long time ago in a remote geographical location. It was a story that was part of their daily lives and, if they could look over and see a stream, flowing by the streets of Jerusalem, and recognize that stream as a river that once flowed from Eden, that would have said some significant things to them about the world that God created and their place in it.
For one thing, it gave them a sense that they had a place among the great nations and empires of the earth. They looked at the great powers of the world such as Babylon (which lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates) and Egypt along the Nile and they could say, “Yeah, but look at us! We’ve got a river of Eden that flows through our city too. We too are one of the world’s great civilizations.” It was a matter of national pride and identity.
But the connection between the Gihon River that they knew and the Gihon River of Eden was about more than that. They saw it as a point of connection between their daily lives and the ideal world promised in the original story of the garden.
Here is the thing that I have noticed. The Gihon River of Jerusalem is rarely named in the Bible but there are many passages and stories about this river. The river flows right through the whole Bible though you may have never noticed it. In fact, the very last chapter of the Book of Revelations – of the whole Bible – includes a description of a river that flows from the throne of God in the new heavenly city of Jerusalem – a new Gihon. It is the final comforting image of the Bible. Isn’t it interesting to think that the Bible both begins and ends on the banks of the River Gihon?
In our reading from the Gospel of John this morning, we find ourselves at the Pool of Beth-zatha – a pool in Jerusalem that was fed, in the time of Jesus, by the spring of the River Gihon. In this story we learn that, by the time of Jesus, the people of Jerusalem had come to believe that the waters of that stream had healing and restorative powers when the spring burst forth and stirred the water. Did they come to that belief because somewhere in their ancient traditions they connected this stream in Jerusalem to the ancient waters of Eden and the wholeness that humanity had known there? Did they believe that those waters had a healing power because of that connection?
Of course, maybe that doesn’t matter because in the story in the Gospel of John, the Gihon waters prove unnecessary and Jesus himself is able to heal the invalid. Perhaps that tells us that Jesus himself is a stronger connection to the wholeness of Eden than any stream could be.
I don’t know if Eden in the Book of Genesis was ever intended to be understood as a literal place that once existed. I don’t know if the events that we are told took place there were meant to be taken literally or symbolically. But I do know this: the story of Eden is true because it tells me so much about what it means to be human in this world. One thing it speaks to me about is that sense of what we have lost as humans on this planet. I believe that we should be able to live together in peace and harmony. I believe that there is no good reason why everyone in this world should not have enough to get by. I know that war and all of the destruction it brings shouldn’t happen – it doesn’t make sense. And there is this disconnect between how I think the world should be and how it actually is. I long for Eden – that perfect picture of what it should be – and I do not find it. I’ve never seen the garden and yet I miss it.
Traditionally, Christians have thought of Eden as totally cut off from the present world. It is a garden found in the remote past at the beginning of the world or in a remote future (a garden restored) at the end. But I am beginning to suspect that the Israelites didn’t see it that way. They walked through the streets of Jerusalem and saw, right there, a stream that was, for them, a river of Eden. The garden wasn’t remote for them, it was right there.
What might change, do you think, if we began to think in the same way? What if we could look out the door here, at the Speed River that flows just over there, and see it as a river of Eden. It might give us some hope that the dysfunction of this world isn’t fated to be, that Eden is just over there.
What if every river is a river of Eden? What if we all could find our way there by following them back? It is an intriguing idea and one that I hope to continue to explore as we continue this journey to the biblical Gihon next Sunday.
#140CharacterSermon Gihon River means #Paradise isn’t remote in time or place. It is near if we choose to believe in #peace & understanding.
f you are going to understand the two stories that we read from the Book of Genesis this morning, you need to learn the meaning of one Hebrew word. If you do not know this word, you totally miss the point of both of the stories. The word is yitschaq and it is the Hebrew word for laughing. It has been suggested that it might be an onomatopoetic word – that is, a word that sounds like the thing that it describes (you know, like the word quack sounds like the noise a duck makes and the word bark, like the noise of a dog). Apparently, to an ancient Hebrew ear, laughter sounded a little bit like somebody going “yitschaq, yitschaq, yitschaq.” I guess that some ancient Hebrews just had weird laughs.
That Hebrew word is important because laughter is an important theme in both stories we read this morning. In one, Sarah laughs in her tent when she hears an angel promise her husband that she will have a child even though she is far too old to do so. She laughs because the promise is so impossible as to be ridiculous and later she denies having laughed. In the second story, when the promised child is actually born, Sarah laughs again for the absurdity of her having a child in her old age but she is also laughing for joy.
Why is laughter so important in these stories? It is important because of the name of the child who is born. His name, in Hebrew, is Yitschaq; his name islaughter. The English form of that name, that we are a little more familiar with, is Isaac. So what we basically have in these two stories are two different accounts of how Isaac got his name.
You get this kind of thing a lot in ancient books like the Bible. Ancient people really loved to tell stories about how people, places and things got their names and the punchlines of these stories were often amusing puns and wordplays. Sometimes people loved these kinds of stories so much that there would even be competing stories about where the name came from like we have here.
The really fun things about these stories is that they were usually created long after the actual naming took place and may have had little connection with what people were actually thinking at the time. Ancient people really didn’t have a clear idea of how words and names are invented. But that was fine because the stories were not really about how something got named. The stories were about deeper truths than that.
Take, for example, these two different stories about how Isaac got his name. One takes place just before the child is conceived and, in it, the laughter is there because the very idea that a woman as old as Sarah could have a child is too ridiculous. The second story takes place after the child has been born. The two stories, it seems to me, help us focus in on different aspects about what it means to bring a child into this world.
But since it is a little bit difficult for us to relate to a child named Yitschaq who was born thousands of years ago to an aged couple named Abraham and Sarah, it might be helpful to relate them to a child who we can actually see and hold and relate to. Let us think of these passages in relation to another child named Isaac born about six weeks ago. A lot of things may have changed in the world since the days of the original Yitschaq, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that, when children come into this world, they bring with them many challenges and problems, but also many blessings and a whole lot of laughter.
In the first story, Sarah, hiding in the tent and listening to God’s promise, laughs. We are told that her laughter springs from what she says to herself: “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” She laughs because, though she greatly desires a child and long has done so, it is just not supposed to happen at this point in her life.
Perhaps she laughs because she realizes that having a child at this point in her life would also bring with it some very particular challenges. How are you supposed to take care of a baby if you are dealing with the typical challenges of old age for example: arthritis? reduced stamina? Heart conditions? How do you deal with the long sleepless nights when you have all of that going on? How is she supposed to even feed her child if, as it says in Genesis, it has “ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” Would a mother even be able to produce milk in such a state? The real challenges of parenthood are only amplified when a child arrives unexpectedly and at a time that is not considered normal according to the culture.
Well, little Isaac who we welcomed into the life of this congregation this morning, was not born to a mother well past the age of childbearing, of course. But, at the same time, he didn’t necessarily come at the usual time for a child, at least according to our modern western culture.
Older cultures had very different ideas about when the ideal time was to have children, of course, but the expectation of modern society seems to be that children should ideally enter into the picture only after the parents’ lives have settled down and they have found a certain economic stability. The modern ideal is that this is only after the mother has had time to establish herself in some career or work. I don’t really know if that modern notion is as ideal as we all seem to think it is – for one thing, it tends to mean that women delay childbearing until other problems, such as infertility, begin to be an issue – but that seems to be how we have decided that it is supposed to be done.
And, no, the arrival of Isaac doesn’t really fit that cultural ideal. That is not to suggest, for one moment that he was not wanted. There are people here who looked forward to his arrival with all the love and expectations that have been there for any child ever born. It is certainly not to suggest that he isn’t loved. But the birth of any child always brings with it certain challenges and that is all the more true when it does not come with that culturally ideal timing and circumstance. I know that Isaac’s arrival will make it more difficult, for example, for his mother to complete all of her education and to set out on a path in her life that will build her own economic security. I mean, it is hard enough for any young person today to start out and to figure out what sort of work is going to still be there for them to do and get paid for even just a few years down the road. That can be a much more difficult road to travel down with a child. The struggles of life are real and we ought not to pretend they aren’t there.
But, and this is the beautiful part, in the story, Sarah doesn’t despair in the tent, she laughs. The laughter may be nervous about possible futures and it may reflect some uncertainty about what that future holds, but it is still laughter, which is a cousin to joy. There are times to worry about and especially to prepare for an uncertain future, but at the same time, it is important to see that God doesn’t just send us those challenges alone. They come mixed with blessing and laughter and I know that so much of that has already come with Isaac and that so much more is yet to come.
God also doesn’t send challenges to us in isolation. One of the greatest blessings that God gives to us is community and, honestly, how could any of us deal with the very real challenges of raising children in the modern world without a community to fall back on. One of the things that makes this event so joyful today is the tremendous amount of support that Isaac and his mother have from their family and their friends, including three godparents (which is perhaps a record here at St. Andrews) who have joyfully and lovingly stepped forward to make their own promises to support and love Isaac and to see that he comes to know the Gospel and finds his own path to live in it. This tremendous level of support means that any challenges will be more than overcome with laughter.
On top of that, of course, is the community of this congregation. We also have stepped forward in this sacrament of baptism to promise to give to Isaac every support that we can to help him grow into a man who can someday chose for himself how he serves God and lives according to God’s will in this world. That is, as far as I am concerned, the most important aspect of our celebration of baptism today and I hope it is something that we never lose sight of. Because of our commitment and our joining together with Isaac, his mother, his family and his friends, the joy and the laughter is only magnified because we all get to join in it together.
In the Book of Genesis, Sarah’s laughter after her son has been born seems a little bit different than in the first story. “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me,” She says. “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” This seems more of a laughter of pure joy than anything else. It still seems a bit ridiculous to her that she should have a child in this season of her life, of course, but any apprehension seems to have dissolved away into pure joy.
I do rather feel that we are much more in the frame of mind of the second story here today. I can sense the laughter, the love and joy that surrounds Isaac and his family today. Perhaps some of Sarah’s joy in the Genesis story comes because she is now more focussed on the future than on the past or the present. She looks at this little child that she cradles to her breast and sees, not the troubles and complications that will come with raising him, but the sheer potential that is in him. In the Biblical Yitschaq’s case, that potential is huge because God has promised that, in this little baby’s skin lies, not only the future of one life but of an entire nation. Sarah can already imagine the nation that Yitschaq will become and that will inherit all of the promises that God has already given to Abraham and Sarah themselves.
And potential is absolutely something that we can celebrate in little Isaac here today. I’m not necessarily expecting that he is going to grow up to found an entirely new nation. I think that age for that has passed. But just look at him. Who knows what he might grow up to do or be? He is going to live in a world of wonders and of change that we can scarcely even imagine. I don’t know what new goodness will come into the world because of him, but it is something that I absolutely expect because this Isaac, like the Yitschaq of old, is a child of promise.
Those promises have been repeated here today. He is a child of God. He is beloved of the Most High. He has been claimed by all of his friends and extended family as a part of their family now. He has been claimed by this congregation as a child of this congregation with all of the promises that go with that.
Isaac, you named your child – Yitzchaq in Hebrew. How fitting that you called your child laughter. May he bring much laughter and joy to you, to your family, to this, your church, and to all who meet him. Laughter is a gift of God and any of us are fools if we fail to receive that gift with much thanksgiving.
#140CharacterSermon The story of Isaac teaches us children bring many challenges that become laughter, joy & blessings when we work together
n Saturday, May 28 at 7:56 am, I did something that I had never imagined that I would do in all my life of my own free will. I stepped out of my front door and started to run and didn’t stop running until I had travelled about four kilometers. I ran through the arena parking lot down the streets, down the long path through woods to Queen St, I ran along Queen St. right in front of the church here, on through Forbes Park and up the trails that run through Woodland Park. And there, after about 4 kilometers as I said, and half way up what has to be one of the steepest hills in all Hespeler (that I foolishly took at a run), I stopped. My breath was ragged, I was carrying a great weight upon my chest and my legs and even (much to my surprise) my arms felt like lead. The muscles in my limbs would continue to be sore for a couple of days.
Why did I put myself through that? When I describe it like that, it really doesn’t sound like a very fun way to spend your Saturday morning. Well, I probably don’t need to tell most of you why I did it because you have already heard me say that I had made a decision that I wanted to run in the Jeff-a-thon and had set as a goal to run the full 10 km distance and do it in an hour. I’m not going to go over the reasons here today for why I felt that the Jeff-a-thon was a good enough reason for me to change what had been, up until that point, a very successful strict no running policy. You’ll have lots of chances to hear about that when you come out to Crieff Hills this afternoon.
But the process of getting from that morning back at the end of May to the place where I am now – ready and confident that I can do what I set out to do this very afternoon – has been an interesting journey to say the least and I believe that there are some spiritual lessons in that journey for all of us today.
I don’t pretend to be an amazing athlete. I don’t pretend to have a better grasp of training to run than lots of other people who could probably give you much better advice than me. But I can say that, over the last few months, I have learned how to run. I would even say that I have changed my identity from being a non-runner to being a runner because I know that this afternoon will not be my last run. I don’t know how I am going to do it through the coming winter, but I do know that I am going to continue running, that it is now a necessary part of my life. And it is something that actually gives me a new way of looking at parts of the New Testament.
As you may have noticed, there is a long tradition in Christian preaching of preachers and teachers seeking to bring out spiritual truths with analogies and metaphors related to sports. In fact, you are Canadians, I’ll bet that you have heard hundreds – maybe thousands – of sermons that are built around hockey metaphors. So many, in fact, that it might surprise you to learn that the Bible doesn’t actually say anything about hockey at all. I mean, it’s incredible – almost as if no one had ever heard of Canada’s favourite sport when the Bible was being written. So no hockey at all, but would it surprise you to learn that there is one sport that is used as an analogy of the Christian life in the New Testament not once but four times?
That sport is running. It is a metaphor used once in the Letter to Hebrews and three separate times in the writings of the Apostle Paul. I find it quite amazing that on three different occasions, Paul was looking for some image that would illustrate the kind of life that he was calling his disciples to live and each time Paul chose to write about running. It actually makes me suspect that either Paul was a runner himself or that he was a big fan of what actually was the most popular sport in the ancient Greek-speaking world.
So I thought that maybe it was about time that someone preached a sermon on the sport of running and what might have to teach us about the Christian life. I would like to think that, over the past few months, I have learned a little bit about running. What lessons are there in what I have learned that we could all apply to how we live out our lives as Christians in the modern world?
Of all the things that the Apostle Paul says about running, the one idea that he keeps coming back to is the idea of having a goal or aim in your running. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, “Then I laid before them… the gospel… in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain.” To the Philippians he writes, “I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain.” And finally, in the passage we read this morning, he says, “I do not run aimlessly.”
Now, I think that it is very fair to say that, if you are running in a race and you do not have the slightest idea of where the finish line is, you are not going to win that race. That much is obvious when you are running. But Paul is not talking about winning a foot race in this passage but about how to conduct your life as a Christian. So what, about that, can we apply to the life of Christian faith? I think it is true that many of us (and I will readily include myself in this) do often seek to live out our Christian life without thinking too much about our aims and goals in it. It is so easy to just develop certain habits of prayer and devotion, church attendance and activities and think that to do these things is what it means to be a Christian. And it is not that these are bad activities. These are very good habits to be in, but it can be so easy for us to lose sight of why we do these things. And when that happens, we begin to make the activities themselves the goal.
Have you ever heard people in church, when challenged to explain why they do certain things in certain ways, respond like this: “Well, that’s how we have always done it”? No, I’ve never heard that in a church either! Well, if, by chance, you ever do hear it, it might just be a sign that you are not as aware of the purpose of being a church as you need to be. The purpose of the Christian life is clear (even if the question of how we achieve that purpose may adapt and change). We are here to build up the kingdom of God. We are here to proclaim good news to the world in word and in deed. Paul uses the image of the runner to remind us that we must ever keep that aim in view in everything that we do.
The second thing that Paul talks about in the sport of running is dedication. “Athletes exercise self-control in all things,” he says. After that he lays out in practical terms exactly what that sort of self-control looks like: “I punish my body and enslave it,”he says.
Again, this is not something that I can really say that I understood until I seriously started to train to run 10 kilometres. I have learned that it is one thing to run 3, 4 and even 5 kilometers, but that it is quite another to run 7, 8, 9 and 10. At some point you are going to hit that place where your body is going to be crying out that it can go no further and do no more and you are only going to get more out of yourself if you push beyond what your body wants, effectively making your body a slave to your will.
That level of dedication seems to be difficult for many people to find these days. One of the reasons why we find it so hard, I believe, is because of the way we turn everything into an opportunity to shop. Do you realize that there is an unprecedented interest in fitness in our society and much of it is driven by the growth of activity trackers like Fitbits, Apple Watches and other similar devices? People are collectively spending millions of dollars these days on these sorts of devices.
And the growth in the use of these devices has gotten to a point where researchers are able to study the impact that they are having on our overall health and fitness. And do you know what they are finding? They are finding that there really isn’t much correlation between the sales of fitbits and health and weight loss. It is not helping very much.
And you know why that is? It because we have fallen into this habit of thinking that the way we solve all of our problems is by buying things. And so when you want to lose weight or get healthier, you just go out and buy a gym membership or a fitbit and you’re done and everything has been taken care of. Oh it is not as if I have to actually go to the gym or walk more than a few feet is it? Haven’t I already done enough by spending my money to get healthier? Shouldn’t what I bought do all the rest?
Can you see the problem with this approach? These devices are terrific and they certainly can help you in your quest for better health, but the device itself doesn’t solve anything for you. Without some commitment and dedication, it is actually totally useless.
And we actually have the same problem with the Christian life as well. We are often tempted to replace dedication with consumerism. Here’s an example for you: did you realize that the Bible has long been one of the best selling books in the world and Bible sales have remained strong despite many other changes in society. The book sells like hotcakes. But here is another statistic: while the Bible still sells like crazy, knowledge of what the Bible actually says and contains continues to drop like a stone. It turns out that the world’s best selling book just happens to be one of the world’s least read books.
What is going on? Isn’t it obvious? People are treating Bibles like fitbits and gym memberships. When they want to get a little bit of spirituality or religion, what do they do? They go out and buy a Bible – a nice one, a special version that promises to make all kinds of applications to their life for them. They buy the Bible, bring it home and throw it on the shelf and they are done. Read it? Why would I bother reading it? Isn’t it enough that I spent so much money to get it? Once again, the Bible is a terrific tool and a great help, but without a bit of commitment and dedication it really cannot ever amount to anything.
There is one other connection that Paul makes between the sport of running and the Christian life: the reward. Runners do it, he says, “to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.” He is referring, of course, to the kinds of prizes that were commonly handed out to winners of races in the ancient world which were wreathes woven out of various kinds of foliage. The wreathes themselves had little value and were only prized because they represented the glory that came to the victor. Paul seizes on the perishability of these wreathes in order to contrast them to the prize that comes with the Christian life that we do receive here and now but that also is able to endure far beyond the confines of this world.
The rewards of physical running (even if you never win an important race like at the Olympics) are real. They can change your life in so many positive ways. How much more the rewards of a Christian life well lived, especially when those rewards endure long after an Olympic gold medal has turned to dust.
So, yes, think of your Christian life as a race. Keep the goals of that life – the finish line – ever in view. Let commitment and dedication to those goals ever keep you moving towards them. Remember the prize that is yours today but that will endure for you forever. Run the race with endurance.
#140CharacterSermon Christian life is like a race: keep goals ever clear b4 you, practice discipline and commitment, claim an eternal prize.
was at the store the other day and there was, up in the checkout line ahead of me, one of those customers. You know the type I’m talking about. He was complaining about everything. The cashier was moving too slow. He was pretty sure that the item he was buying had been advertised at a lower price. The stock was old, the people who worked there used to be nicer and the lines moved too slow because people spent too much time talking to the cashiers. This went on for a while until he finally they arrived at his real issue. The store didn’t have his favourite brand of something. Here he was being forced – forced, I tell you! – to purchase an inferior brand and, adding insult to injury, to pay full price for it.
“Oh how retail service has declined in Canada,” he exclaimed, “that I cannot get exactly what I want. If you people were at all a decent enterprise, you wouldn’t charge me for this item at all.” So he spoke and continued on in much the same vein while we, who stood behind him, waited with varying degrees of patience. The poor cashier who, I would note, had absolutely nothing to do with the things that had displeased him, dealt with him as much grace as any human could muster, but there was nothing that was in her power to please him. His demands were eventually escalated to a manager.
The manager, when she came, knew very well that the man was being unreasonable. You could see it in her face. But she also had little time and no appetite for conflict. So in short order, and much to the chagrin of everyone who stood behind him, the man had been given pretty much what he had wanted and, at the very least, he finally left us in peace.
But that is how it works, doesn’t it? The squeaky wheel is always the one that gets the grease. The person who raises their voice to complain is the most likely to get what they want. Many have concluded, therefore, that, if you do get a chance to complain about something, you better just go ahead and do it and get as much out of the situation as you possibly can.
After all, isn’t that what we are all here for – we’re supposed to get whatever we can out of this life. Money, possessions, satisfaction, enjoyment, affection – it’s only what I deserve. And if I’m not getting enough of that, well, it must be somebody’s fault and it is only natural that I should point that out and get them straightened out.
In such a world is there a place for thanksgiving? Well of course there is. We’ll all get together sometime later today (or maybe tomorrow) with the people that we are closest to us and we’ll probably eat too much food but it will be delicious. And then, as we sit around the table afterwards, in a turkey-induced semi-coma, we will talk about the things that we have purchased, the films and television shows we have watched and the experiences that we have collected since we last met. We may even recount those times where things didn’t quite go our way and how we complained and got satisfaction for our pains. (And, of course, if we didn’t get everything we wanted, it can also be satisfying to complain about that and get some sympathy.)
And yes, somewhere in the midst of all this we may remember to bow our heads for a few moments and saw some words of thanks for all this bounty. That’s what thanksgiving is, isn’t it?
Well, apparently not if you listen to the Apostle Paul and the people of the early church. In our two readings this morning, from the letters to the Ephesians and to the Thessalonians, we find the apostle closing his correspondence by giving a little bit of last minute advice. Think of these words as Christian life hacks – little things that you can do that make your Christian life better and easier to live out. These are not intended to be deep theological reflections so much as practical tips. So we have advice like do not get drunk on wine and instead to be filled with the Spirit, and to be patient with people especially if they are idlers, fainthearted or weak.
But there is one piece of advice that is common to both of these texts that particularly interests me today and it concerns, of course, thanksgiving. “Give thanks,”believers are admonished in Thessalonians while the Christians in Ephesus are told that it is all about “giving thanks to God the Father.” And I think that we would all agree that that is pretty good advice.
It reminds me of the lesson that were all taught by our mothers and our fathers. I think I can almost still hear my mother’s voice to this very day every time somebody offers me something that I would really like to receive. “Now, what do we say?” she would say as she held out the piece of candy and I would not get it until I managed to mumble a few words of thanks.
I know, I know, and I remember thinking it too at the time. “How can I be thankful for the candy if I haven’t actually received it yet – and won’t actually receive it at all unless I say thank you.” Is that a lesson about being truly thankful or actually a lesson in how to obtain candy? But I get why parents teach the lesson in that way and you probably could have caught me doing it with my own kids too.
The lesson, as our parents tried to teach it to us as kids at least, seemed to be that you actually will get more from people as you make your way through this world by being polite with them than you will by being rude and demanding. And that is a pretty good lesson for people to learn. If more people learned it (rather than the lesson of the checkout line which is that the best way to get what you want in this world is to complain and be insufferable until someone gives it to you) it seems to me that the world would be a nicer place to live in. But do note that it is still a lesson about getting things for yourself – really just another strategy for getting what you want. As life tips go, it is a good one but it still seems to be focussed on meeting your own individualistic needs at the heart just as so many things in our society are.
But is that the same lesson that we encounter in the advice that is offered at the end of these New Testament letters? Is Paul suggesting that these Christians ought to be thankful in order to get good stuff from God or from other people? I’m not so sure because, in both cases, he doesn’t just say, “give thanks.” In Ephesians it is, “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.” In Thessalonians it is, “give thanks in all circumstances.”
That, my friends, is a whole different kind of thanksgiving than most of us practice most of the time – a very different kind from the kind that your parents taught you. It is, in fact, a kind of thanksgiving that makes no sense at all in the world that is so focussed on individualistic needs that we live in.
What does it mean? It means being thankful when you get what you need but also when you don’t get it. It means showing appreciation to people who have pleased you but also going out of your way to find things that you appreciate about people who don’t please you. Above all it means an attitude with which you approach the whole of life – an attitude which is the very opposite of this present world’s spirit which makes people focus on getting what they desire for themselves.
In fact, according to this world’s way of thinking, it is absolutely impossible to be thankful in all circumstances. I mean, sure, we can do it when all is going well or when we get at least some of what we want or need, but there is a long list of circumstances when thanks is definitely not in order. If you were a Syrian in Aleppo, would you be thankful for terrorists and bombs? If you were an abused person in a bad relationship, would you be thankful for the blows and bruises? If you were a Jew in Auschwitz, would you be thankful for Nazi propaganda and gas chambers? Of course not! There are some things in this world that we don’t just need to refuse to be thankful for but that we must reject and rage against and complain of!
So how are we supposed to apply this good advice to be thankful in all circumstances to circumstances like bombs, blows and gas chambers? Whatever we mean by being thankful in those kinds of circumstances it cannot mean that we let the terrorists or the abusers or the Nazis off the hook for the evil that they do. They must face the consequences of their crimes and we must do whatever we can to make sure that people are safe from the evil that they do.
But thanksgiving – biblical thanksgiving – isn’t about other people so much as it is about ourselves and about how we approach the world. Think about it. When we give thanks to God, for example, do we do it because God needs to hear our thanks in order to build up his own confidence and feel good about Godself? Of course not! I’m sure that God always appreciates the thanks that we offer, but God doesn’t need it and certainly doesn’t need it to know that he has done good; God is good. We offer thanks to God because we need it more than God does. We offer it because it changes us and how we interact with the world and with each other.
So, yes, when you encounter actual evil in this world, you must resist it and you are entirely permitted to complain about it because there is nothing wrong with expressing how you feel and if you don’t say anything, nothing may ever change. But being thankful in every circumstance means that you don’t need to get stuck there in the moment of the evil and you don’t need to let any resentment burn. You may have been victimized but learning to be thankful means that your identity is not limited to being a victim as can so often happen.
When, through these scriptures, God instructs you to be thankful in all circumstances, you should not think of it as another commandment to be obeyed. It is not a burden that is intended to weigh you down with responsibility. It doesn’t mean that you have to pretend to be thankful when you really don’t feel that way.
Take a good look at the people who cross your path who are the complainers – who look at everything that happens to them as another reason to complain and to demand that someone do something to satisfy them. Look at those who will take any excuse to cast themselves as the victim and who make that victimhood a part of their identity. Oh, I’ll admit it, they may sometimes get the things that they are looking for when they complain, but, over time, they also become entrapped within that identity. Victimhood becomes part of who they are. The experience of satisfaction becomes limited to them getting the things that they desire and so they become robbed of true satisfaction.
By teaching you to be thankful in all circumstances, what your God and Father wants to do for you is to set you free from that. God wants you to experience joy and a spirit of gratefulness that is not limited by the circumstances that you might encounter in life. By choosing to be thankful in all circumstances, you no longer need to be controlled by those circumstances. You are free.
I invite you, on this Thanksgiving Sunday, to experiment with this very powerful thing called thanksgiving. It may not happen today, but it will probably happen soon enough that something will not work out as you may have hoped. There will be some hiccup, some problem in your well laid plans. You will have two choices, you can seek to get whatever you can out of the situation by complaining or being miserable enough to other people to make them do what you want, or you can choose to practice a kind of thanksgiving you can make in any circumstance – the kind that sets you free from the circumstances of life by saying that they have no control over you. On this Thanksgiving Sunday, I encourage you to choose thanksgiving.
#140CharacterSermon Being thankful in all circumstances sets us free from the power of our circumstances 2 control us & define us as victims
I am very excited to announce that this summer I took a fair bit of my vacation time to finish the second draft of a book that God laid on my heart a couple of years ago.
The book is called, "The Seven Demons of Miryam of Magdala," and it is a work of historical fiction, set in Galilee in the opening decades of the common era. It is a short book (54,000 words, 164 pages) but it is one that I hope will help people see the story of Jesus of Nazareth from some very interesting new angles.
All 164 pages, if you can make them out.
The Table of Contents
I am, at this point, looking for some colleagues to look at what I have written and give me some critical feedback. I would especially appreciate some feedback from my female colleagues (when you read the book, you'll understand why).
I am sure that, after this second draft, the text still contains some spelling, grammar and stylistic errors as well as typos but I am not necessarily looking for proofreading at this point. That will come after.
So if you would be willing to help me at this critical point, please message me privately. I will be happy to send you a copy in pdf format or any other digital format you ask for. The copy I send you is DRM free and yours to keep, but I will ask you to commit to the following:
To give me your feedback.
Not to give it to anyone else without my permission.
Not to accuse me of being a heretic yet. (Please just point out any heresy that you see and give me a chance to address it or correct it.)
This book is a labour of love and I would love to be able to share it with you and, perhaps, with the world.
1 Corinthians 10:14-22, Luke 14:15-24, Psalm 104:1-15
Y
ou are all familiar enough with the gospels and the letters and other writings that make up what we call the New Testament. This little collection of books is the most important source that we have for understanding the early Christians and how they worked out their life and faith together. This morning I would like to introduce you to one other document that you really ought to know about. It is called the Teaching of the Twelve and also goes by the name of The Didache, which is the Greek word for teaching.
The Didache is a very old document – some scholars think that parts of it may well be older than parts of the New Testament. It is also a very important document for a few reasons. It may well contain genuine traditions that go all the way back to the very words of Jesus – traditions that are independent of the gospels. It contains, for example, a version of the Lord’s Prayer that is slightly different from the one that is found in the Gospel of Matthew and from the one that is in the Gospel of Luke. It seems likely that the writers of the Didache did not get their version of The Lord’s Prayer from the Gospels but from an independent tradition passed down to them from some other source – ultimately from Jesus himself.
But the book actually gives us more than just insights into the original wording of Jesus’ prayer. It also gives us a glance into the worship practices of the early church. In fact, a great deal of the book is clearly focussed directly on the worship and other customs of a certain group of churches in a certain area. Most of the scholars I have read seem to believe that they were made up of second or third generation Christians in Galilee or in nearby Syria.
I find this fascinating because it gives us what is perhaps the very first glimpse we have (outside of the Bible and not influenced by any of the Biblical writings) of how the first church actually lived and worshipped. In other words, if you want to know what the earliest Christians actually thought they were accomplishing when they ate communion or performed a baptism, the Didache may be one of the very best sources that we have.
The Didache has, for example, a prayer of thanksgiving that was to be prayed whenever the community gathered to eat what we would call the Lord’s Supper or Communion or the Eucharist, but which they seemed to call simply the Thanksgiving Meal. As these prayers are probably the oldest communion prayers in existence (and they are nice and brief) I have decided to use them as our communion prayers this morning. I think they can teach us a lot about what they thought about communion that might challenge how we think about it today.
You see, when we gather to celebrate communion, there are certain things that we say about what we are doing and there are certain images that we use. We usually say, for example, that this meal is about the death of Jesus. In particular, we associate the bread with the broken body of Jesus and the wine with the spilt blood of Jesus. The imagery we often use is the imagery of a sacrifice or an atoning death. And we also look forward to the return, someday of Christ.
I don’t know how much you pay attention to the prayers that you have heard ministers like me praying before communion services but, if you do, those are the kinds of images that we you’ll hear us use over and over again because that is what we believe that communion is about – remembering and re-enacting those things.
But if you listen to the prayers that I use today from the Didache, you will not hear any of that imagery. The prayers of those ancient Galilean or Syrian Christians speak of Jesus Christ and talk about how he reveals God to us, of course, but they do not make any reference to his death at all. There is absolutely no talk of sacrifice or atonement nor even any reference to the return of Christ.
Now, I am not suggesting that the Christian churches of the Didache community did not believe these things about Jesus and his death. Of course they did and there are references in other parts of the book to these truths. And they may well even have believed that the Thanksgiving Feasts that they shared had important connections to the meaning of the death of Jesus (though there is some evidence to suggest that this particular connection may have first been made by the Apostle Paul). You certainly cannot prove that they didn’t believe something just because they didn’t mention it in this very important prayer.
But it does suggest something. It does suggest that, when they gathered to eat this meal, they did put the emphasis in some rather different places than where we put it when we gather. And maybe we can learn something from the imagery that they used when they ate this meal.
There were two prayers that they prayed. The first one was over the cup and they prayed, “We thank You, our Father, For the Holy Vine of David Your servant, Whom You made known to us through Your Servant Jesus; May the glory be Yours forever.” That was it. The prayer is based on the image of the making of wine itself which begins with the vine and the grapes that grow upon it. For the Didache Christians the wine (and the vine that it grew on) was a symbol of their connection with their hope. It connected them with the promises made to King David of a kingdom that would last forever – promises that they believed had been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah and the son of David. That symbolism of the connecting vine is not one that we generally use when we take the cup but it is one that I think we might learn from.
But I am particularly interested today (on this World Communion Sunday) in the prayer that they prayed over the loaf: “We thank You, our Father, For the life and knowledge Which You made known to us through Your Servant Jesus; May the glory be Yours forever. As this broken bread was scattered over the mountains, And was gathered together to become one, So let Your Church be gathered together From the ends of the earth into Your kingdom; for the glory and power are Yours through Jesus Christ forever.”
For them, the bread seemed to point to two things. First of all, it spoke to them of everything that they had learned and seen in the life and teachings of Jesus. There is no direct reference to his death (which is where we put the emphasis) but rather the focus seems to be on his life.
The second focus of their prayer, however, is on an image – the image of the creation of the loaf itself. They notice that the loaf began its life spread over the mountains. This is actually one of the things that indicates to us that the Didache may have had its origins in Galilee. The best place to grow grain in Galilee was in the hill country and many of the hills were called mountains. So this prayer evokes the image of the grain growing on the mountaintops, being harvested and ground and then baked together into one loaf.
Why is this important? Because it suggests to us what it actually meant to these earliest Christians when they gathered and shared this kind of meal together. It was not primarily, for them, a feast of the dead and resurrected Christ. I mean, yes, they believed in the importance of the death of Jesus and the truth of his resurrection, but when they ate this meal that was not the first thing that came to mind. The image of the grain harvested from many hilltops and then baked into one loaf was, for them, what it all came down to.
It was a feast, first and foremost, of the unity of the church. I believe that that was at the very foundation of the feast. Even the Apostle Paul – who may have been the first one to make the connection between communion and the death of Christ – tells us that, before anything else, it is about our unity with one another. Since the authentic letters of Paul are actually the first written books of the New Testament (they were almost certainly written before any of the gospels), Paul was the first person to give us a written account of the Last Supper and to say what it meant. Yes, he said that he received that account from others who had told it to him, but he was the first one to set it down in a form that endured. So he was the one who first told us, in the eleventh chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, that Jesus said that the meaning of the bread was, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
But before Paul ever told us that, he told us in the tenth chapter of the same letter, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”So even before Paul proclaimed that the bread was the body of Christ, he also declared that the loaf was the body of the church and that eating it together was a sign of our unity. He knew that the unity came first. The experience of the resurrection was the centrepiece of Christian faith, but Paul knew that he believers would never experience the power of the resurrection until they had found unity with one another.
What that means, my sisters and my brothers, is this: this feast is the feast of the resurrected Christ. When we eat this bread and drink this cup we do proclaim the death of Christ until he comes. It is also true that, when we eat and drink this sacred meal, the risen Jesus has promised to be present with us in it – truly present. But here is the problem: none of us can know that and none of us can experience that until we are united in one body as a church. Unity comes first.
So before this bread is broken like this body of Jesus was broken on the cross, you need to understand something about it. Before this bread becomes, for us, the body of Christ, it has to become the body of the church. You are the church – all of you. You make the church not because you are all the same but precisely because you are all so different.
We are those grains who start out spread far and wide over the mountaintops. We all sprouted where we were. We all grew into faith in our own way because of our unique circumstances and experiences. Some of you brought wounds and hurts into the life of the church. Some of you brought strengths and wonderful gifts. Most of us brought a mixture of both the positives and negatives. We came as we were and we remain as we are.
But though we started out in life spread far and wide over the hills and dales, we are all ground together into one bag of flour and then we have all been baked into one loaf. All of us come from different backgrounds and life experiences and here we have come together to be one. As you can imagine, that naturally leads to problems and clashes. We sometimes fail to understand one another because we are speaking out of our very different backgrounds and experiences and hurts. We sometime fail to appreciate one another because we are all so different. But we are only the church when we become that one loaf – when we finally realize that our differences make us stronger and tastier. The diversity among us makes this loaf delicious and full of good nutrients.
When we finally realize that and embrace one another despite being all so different, we are finally ready to experience the fullness of Christ among us. That kind of unity doesn’t come naturally to us. We often have to work at valuing people for who they are rather than for the things about them that are convenient to us. We often have to work at listening and truly hearing one another. The promise is that, when we do that, the presence of the risen Jesus will always be made clear.
That is what it means as we take this loaf, that was once spread far and wide over the mountaintops but has now come together as one loaf and is become the church. Only when we become that church, can the bread become the body of Christ who is present with us when we break it.
#140CharacterSermon When we take #communion, we become united, despite our differences, in 1 loaf so that 1 loaf can become Christ among us.
Psalm 40:1-11, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, John 4:16-42
L
ast Sunday I took a rather critical look at how we often assume that the church is supposed to grow. I noted that we usually seem to operate under an “If you build it, they will come,” philosophy. We think that we just need to build a church – not just put up a building, of course, but also create worship services and programs and ministries – but we just seem to assume that if we do all that, people will just come.
Because we assume (probably without thinking too much) that that is how it supposed to work, when things don’t work out that way – when people don’t come or don’t show up in the ways that they maybe once did, we also assume that we know what the problem is: there must be something wrong with what we have built. We easily fall into criticism of how things are in the church and often our reflex is to try and turn back the clock. We think that if we can restore the building or the worship or the programs to what they used to be when more people came, they will just show up again.
But I suspect that there is something wrong with our reasoning. Oh, I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with loving and taking reasonable care of our church buildings. And of course we need to bring the best that we can to our worship services and most everything else that we do in the church. I’m just wondering why we think that anyone would come just because we do that, especially when we are living in an age when people seem to be naturally suspicious of institutions in general and especially of religious institutions – in a time when “polished” and “professional” are often seen as synonyms for “phony” and “hypocritical.”
Jesus didn’t do it that way. We see his approach to ministry very clearly in our reading from the Gospel of John this morning. He had apparently decided that some Samaritans, people from the region that lay in between Judea and Galilee and was populated with people who were generally scorned by Jews, needed to hear about what he was doing. His disciples probably wouldn’t have agreed that Samaritans deserved a place in this kingdom of God that Jesus was building, but Jesus had apparently decided to include them.
So what does Jesus do? We’ll he certainly doesn’t employ our usual “If you build it” strategy. He doesn’t come into town and set up a preaching point or a ministry. He certainly doesn’t put up a building or set up an administrative structure and wait for Samaritans to come to him. What had does do is wander into town and sit down by the well.
Why does he sit down there? We might not quite realize the important role that a well played in an ancient town because that we live in a day of municipal water systems and indoor plumbing. Water, for us, is mostly a private and individual matter. But in the ancient world, a visit to the well was a necessary part of everyone’s day and it also tended to be the centre of the social life of the community.
So what would be the modern equivalent of sitting down by the town well? It was the place that everyone visited several times a day, where everyone, especially the common folks had to come and fill their vessels. It would have also naturally been the place where conversation, debate and common gossip were shared.
Where is Jesus sitting down? He’s sitting in the local pub, the corner coffee shop, the arena, the mall. Think of any spot in modern cities where people tend to gather and interact: that is where Jesus just sat down. He did the very opposite of setting up a special place for religious gatherings and waiting for people to come and join you there.
I have thought about that in terms of the expectations that are often put upon people in my position in the church. People seem to expect that I should spend a substantial amount of my time sitting in an office or standing around in other places in the church building waiting for people to come to me with their problems, needs or questions. If I were really following Jesus’ example, shouldn’t I be sitting at the well – wherever the people are. Aren’t the most important hours of my weeks the ones that I spend in the café or the park or, dare I say it, in the bar?
I may do other work or even meet with church folks while I’m there – I’m not suggesting that need to neglect my duties. Nor am I suggesting that I chase people around asking them if they have heard about Jesus. Jesus himself didn’t do that. He only spoke to the woman he met there at first to ask her for some water. No, it is more a question of being there and being open and ready to talk with people about anything – whether it be about the problems they have been having with their plumbing, the weather or the eternal state of their or my soul.
And, even more important than that, it is not about what I or other people in myposition do, as much as it is about how we all live out our Christian lives. It is easy for us to embrace our Christian identity in a place like this where we’ve built a special institution outside of the general culture. We can easily talk Christian and act Christian when we are gathered together with our own kind. But how often do we think about what it means to wear our Christian identity and our allegiance to Christ at the town well? That is where it actually matters.
But Jesus is actually only one example for us in this particular story; there is another – the woman at the well. She is, in fact, the model of what it is to be a Christian in a time like the one in which we live. This is clear because it is only through her that all of the other people who live there come to know Jesus. Before the story is over, she has brought huge numbers of her friends and neighbours to meet Jesus.
Now, when I call her a model for us, please note what that doesn’t mean. She is obviously a thoughtful and intelligent woman, but she is not really a woman who has got her life all sorted out. In fact, Jesus tells her (and she doesn’t disagree) that she has had five husbands and is living, unmarried with a sixth man. This would have been seen as a disastrous and quite immoral life situation in such a time and place. And, while Jesus doesn’t condemn her for this (he merely points it out to her), she and the others around her obviously look upon this with a certain amount of shame. For whatever reason (and it need not be her own fault) she just hasn’t managed to get her life together very well.
But obviously whatever has gone wrong in her life up until that point, none of it prevents her from very effectively brings all kinds of people to Jesus and to be part of what he is doing. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” She eagerly says to anyone who will listen. And if you want to know the truth about how the church grows, that is it right there. It grows when people don’t hesitate to say, “Come and see.”
This is one clear result that you will find in all studies that are done on churches that are growing. The churches may differ greatly in a number of ways, but they generally have one thing in common: the people of the church are actively involved in inviting other people into the church. New people hardly ever just show up on their own at the church; the vast majority of new visitors and new members come in as guests of somebody who has been there a while. I’m not talking about people doing hard-sell evangelism, by the way. It is not that people are out there preaching at people or condemning them for not coming or for who they are. I’m just talking about people naturally sharing a key concern of their life with the people that they know and care for. That is how churches grow.
And I know that we hesitate to do that. And I even understand some of the reasons why we hesitate to it – after all, I find myself hesitating sometimes too. We see the reason in the story of this Samaritan woman. As she goes out, she does say, “Come and see,” but she can’t stop there. The full quote is, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” and that really is saying a whole lot more, isn’t it? Because, in the case of this woman, “everything I have ever done!” includes a lot of things that reflect poorly on her in the community. By saying such a thing, she is actually opening herself up for her neighbours to insult her, abuse her and mock her.
What I am saying is that inviting people to come and see what we have received from Jesus means becoming vulnerable with people. It means that they might mock you or judge you. It especially means being willing to share what Jesus has done for you to heal you or give you forgiveness. That is what this woman does with her neighbours. But, to do that means that you are admitting where you need or have needed healing and that means admitting your weakness or grief or sickness. And it also means being willing to admit that you have sinned or failed. That is not easy. Many of us spend our lives desperately trying to hide such things.
So I do understand where the hesitation comes from. It just seems so much safer to us if we just hide all of that personal stuff from the people we meet throughout the week. So it doesn’t come easy but sometimes the things that don’t come easy are the things that we find most worthwhile in the long run.
That is certainly what Jesus discovers. You see, all this time that Jesus has been talking with this woman by the well, the disciples have been off to the local famers’ market to pick up something for Jesus and themselves to eat. Just after the woman leaves Jesus to go and invite her neighbours to come and see, the disciples finally return bearing the food they have found. But Jesus doesn’t want it. He’s not hungry, he says, even though he hasn’t had a decent meal in a few days. Of course they wonder why and Jesus explains it to them by speaking about what he has just been doing in these terms: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”
Jesus is not talking about physical food here, of course. He hasn’t had any of that. What he is saying is that, even though it can be difficult to be that vulnerable with people, it is also remarkably rewarding. There are many blessings to be had by being willing to open yourself up to other people – blessings that rebound back onto you regardless of whether the people you are talking to find their way towards the church or not.
That is the freeing thing in all of this. It is not as if it is up to you to bring people into the church. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. But if you do practice that kind of truth telling with yourselves and others that Jesus and the woman do in this story, you give people an opportunity to decide for themselves where they want to be.
That’s what the people of Samaria do at the end of the story. They say, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.” Everyone must decide for themselves where they want to give their allegiance. It is not your job to persuade anybody. What you can do, however, is invite them to come and see for themselves.
So will you do that this week? Would you be willing to reveal a little bit of yourself to one person this week and admit what you have gained from your ties to Jesus and his church? You might find that such openness nourishes you in some surprising ways.
#140CharacterSermon It’s risky to invite people to come & see Jesus. It makes us vulnerable. But it’s an activity that brings many blessings
Last night was Presbytery night in the Waterloo-Wellington and, as is usually the case, it was a meeting that had its ups and downs -- its high points and its low points.
After adjournment, as happens in many Presbyteries I am sure, some of the members made arrangements to break up a long drive home by stopping off at a local watering hole to talk over (and commiserate over) the events of the evening.
About seven members ended up sitting around a table in a bar. Just by chance, they all happened to be male and they all happened to be clergy.
We talked together and toasted various discussion points from earlier in the evening. We toasted the committees and agencies of the Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church with good will towards all. We were enjoying one another's company.
The place was mostly empty but there was a friendly group over at the bar -- paramedics, it turned out, at the end of their shift. We interacted a bit and they made a few comments about how we were all dressed alike (we all had short sleeved dress shirts open at the collar. I would't have thought much about it but they called it our "uniform").
Uniform?
Anyways, they were talking together for a while. Little did we suspect that they where overhearing our conversation and speculating. They had decided that, whatever we did, we were all in the same line of work and were trying to figure it what that line was.
Finally they could stand it no longer and interrupted us to ask us what we did.
We, of course, refused to answer until they had told us what their guesses were.
Based on how we were dressed and what they had heard us talking about, they guessed that we were:
1) Zehr's executives gathering after a long day of strategy meetings. (Zehr's is a grocery chain in our part of Ontario.)
2) Failing that, perhaps we all worked in the deli department at Zehr's.
3) Accountants
4) A bunch of museum curators.
The honest truth, those were their guesses.
Don't know whether to laugh that they were so far off base...
