Category: Minister

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

https://youtu.be/MHwql-9ezaw

If the above embedded video doesn't work, click this link: https://youtu.be/MHwql-9ezaw

Hespeler, 31 May, 2020 © Scott McAndless – Pentecost
Numbers 11:24-30, Psalm 104:24-35, Acts 2:1-21, John 7:37-39

The summons was sent out through all the Israelite camp. Moses had called for the elders of all the tribes to come and assemble at the tent of meeting. Each of the twelve tribes was to send six elders and the word was that it was all very important. They would be meeting not only with Moses but also with Yahweh, the God who dwelt within the tent, who sat enthroned upon the cherubim upon the ark of the covenant. And so, all of the very important men in each of the tribes quickly donned their finest robes and hurried away to the very important meeting. And so it was that, later that same afternoon seventy men gathered around the tent, standing around it on every side evenly spaced two metres apart as if they were people living in the time of covid-19. It all looked oh so very formal and ceremonial.

Except… wait a minute… something is not quite right here. Let’s see… six elders times twelve tribes… carry the one… Math was never really my strong suit but I’m pretty sure that six times twelve is supposed to be seventy-two. There are two elders missing! Oh no, this is a disaster! Who could have possibly ditched such a high-level meeting? What an insult! What an affront to the authority of Moses among the people to not show up when summoned! Who would do such a thing?

Oh wait, never mind. Don’t tell me. It was Eldad and Medad, wasn’t it?

Yes indeed, while the seventy elders were all holding hands and singing “kumbaya” as they stood around the tent of meeting, where were Eldad and Medad? They were in the camp in a tent not far from the place where the weekly market was held. And it was not, by the way, because they hadn’t received the summons to the meeting. They had received it alright. In fact, they were talking about it at that very moment – talking to each other about why they felt so utterly justified to have not bothered to go.

“Can you believe that Moses,” said Eldad to Medad. “Every time he comes up with a new idea or receives a new revelation from Yahweh, he has to summon all of the people and turn it into some big event. And then, you know how it goes, he starts complaining about how he’s carrying this heavy burden and trying to do the right thing and protecting the people and how nobody ever listens to him and does what he says. He goes on and on about this great big burden he has to carry.

“Now, I recognize what Moses has done for us. He brought us out of Egypt. He did what everyone thought was impossible and managed to get us away from the pursuing Egyptian chariots even if he had to take us through the Red Sea to do it. And I’ll grant you that we Israelites can be pretty stubborn and stiff-necked when we put our mind to it. But why do we have to constantly put up with Moses’ bellyaching about all of it. Why doesn’t he do something? Why doesn’t he let somebody else help out with the load of leadership?”

“I hear you,” replied Medad to Eldad. “But I’m telling you that it’s just not going to happen. Moses just likes complaining and controlling too much. He’s never going to let go of any part of his leadership or his ability to complain about it.”

But as it turned out, that was exactly what was going on around the tabernacle at that very moment. The reason why Moses had summoned the elders was in order to do the very thing that he had resisted for so very long. He had finally decided that he couldn’t make every decision or control every person’s action. Most of all, he had finally learned something. He had thought that the power of God’s Spirit that had been given to him, that thing that gave direction and meaning to everything that he did was a rare and precious thing. He had thought that it was something to hoard to himself and only exercise after much deliberation and care. He had finally come to understand that the Spirit of God did not work like that. In fact, like love, the more that it was shared the more of it there was to go around.

And so the elders had been called in to receive a portion of the spirit. As they stood around the tent, they could feel the excitement and the anticipation. It was as if the air was filled with electricity. Something was happening.

Perhaps the men gathered around the tent of meeting had been given some warning, some inkling that they were about to have a very strange experience. But Eldad and Medad never knew what hit them. People wonder what it is like to be suddenly filled with the Spirit of God. Is it a sudden strange feeling of ecstasy? Is it a way of feeling connected to the people who surround you in a strange unusual way? Is it just a calm assurance of God’s presence with you?

Well it can certainly be all of those things. Everyone experiences it very differently because the action of the Spirit of God very much depends on your own make up and personality. Let’s just say that Eldad and Medad were particular kinds of people. You know the kind of person who doesn’t show up for a scheduled meeting. The kind of person who sits in the back row and grumbles about the person running the meeting. You have that type of person in mind? Well, there’s your picture of Eldad and Medad.

The excitement spread throughout the Hebrew camp. The people were somewhat aware that there was something going on around the tent of meeting with the leadership of the tribes, but they weren’t expecting anything to happen where the people were camped out. So there was quite a stir when, all of a sudden, they heard a great deal of shouting emanating from one of the plazas between the tents. It had been a quiet day and so the people quickly began to gather. It was, of course, Eldad and Medad.

The two men were prophesying. I know how people usually understand that. When most people hear the word prophesy, they assume that someone is foretelling events in the future. They assume that Eldad and Medad were revealing things like, “Your lucky number for the draw is 77694.” or, “In the year 2020 ad a terrible pandemic will ravage the globe.” You know, that kind of thing.

But the fact of the matter is that, in biblical times, prophecy was not primarily a matter of foretelling future events. The job of a prophet was to proclaim the word that the Lord was speaking to the people at that moment based on what their situation was and what they were struggling with. It is about truth-telling more than it is about future telling and that is what makes it so dangerous because often the truth is the last thing that people want to hear.

So what was it that Eldad and Medad were crying out in the middle of the camp? Whatever it was, it was something that was explosive enough that it made somebody freak out and go running off to tattle against Eldad and Medad to Moses where he was gathered with the elders of the people. What could have been so frightening and offensive? I’ll tell you what I think Eldad and Medad were saying:

“Hey man,” cried Eldad, “don’t you all know that this whole thing is a scam? You don’t need Moses. You don’t need all of the trappings of the Tent of Meeting and the careful sacrifices performed by the priests. You don’t even need laws and rules that lay out all of the proper ways for you to act. They want you to think that you need them but you don’t. All you need is love, man. If you love your neighbour, you’re not going to covet his stuff. You’re not going to murder or steal or lie. If you love Yahweh, you’re not going to go off and find some other god to worship.”

“That’s right,” Medad took up the diatribe, “all you need to know is that ‘the Lord is nigh to those in distress.’ All you need is God.”

When the message of the disruptive prophecies of Eldad and Medad was reported to Moses, Joshua, Moses’ assistant and his designated successor, was frantic. “We cannot tolerate this sort of insubordination,” he cried. “My lord Moses, stop them!”

But Moses had come a long way since taking on God’s plan to free his people from slavery. He had begun to realize, not only that he could not bear all of the weight of leadership himself, but that also this was not about his personal status or leadership at all. He knew that Joshua would have to learn that lesson for himself, but he could not help but point out what he knew was a weakness that Joshua bore.  “Are you jealous for my sake – or maybe for your own future privilege?” he asked. “Do you really think that the only way for us to experience the power of God is to keep it only in the hands of the chosen few so that we can control the message. That is just not how the spirit of Yahweh works.

“I used to think like you, Joshua. I used to think that it was all about my control and my authority. But do you know what I say today? I say, ‘Would that all Yahweh’s people were prophets, and that Yahweh would put his spirit on them!’”

And so, to the surprise of everybody – and of Eldad and Medad most of all – there were no punishments inflicted upon the slacker prophets. Their words were allowed to stand and the memory of what they had said was passed down.

That didn’t mean that the people always actually lived by the word that they had proclaimed. There is something about human community that always seems to pull us back into conformity and we find a great deal of comfort from things like ritual and putting our trust in people who exercise authority.

Old patterns die hard. But the message of Eldad and Medad didn’t just disappear. Down through many centuries there were other prophets who were also not sanctioned by the authorities in charge. They were great men and women. Some are famous, like Elijah and Amos and Jeremiah. They spoke a word of the Lord that was not popular, but somehow their oracles endured and some hearts in some places began to move. In time there would even come to be an entire movement of people centered around the idea of the transformative power of the spirit of God, but that is, perhaps, a story for another time.

According to the Book of Acts, the Christian Church came into being in an event that was very similar to the story of the seventy elders and of Eldad and Medad. All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, the Christian believers were filled with the spirit of God and began to speak the word of the Lord. This cements the idea that the power of the spirit of God was absolutely central to the foundation of the Christian church and has been essential to its life ever since.

But ever since, it seems, the church has been in a struggle between those, like Joshua, who believe that the action of the Spirit must always be ordered and under proper authority and those, like Eldad and Medad, who hear the spirit calling us to freedom and disruption. I believe that we need both kinds of people, both approaches to the Spirit, to thrive. There is a danger, when we cut ourselves off from the disruptive potential of God’s Spirit because we’re afraid of it, that we may also be robbing ourselves of the real transformative power that is available to us.

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

Here's Scott's daily devotion.

Here's Scott's daily devotion!

Here's Scott's daily devotion

https://youtu.be/k3oVjeLFWco

Hespeler, 24 May, 2020 © Scott McAndless
Acts 1:3-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35, 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11, John 17:1-11

If you were to ask people today how long it has been since everything shut down for this pandemic, what sort of answer might you expect? Someone might give you the literally correct answer, of course, and say that we have been locked down in Ontario now for 68 days. But really, most people wouldn’t have that number at their fingertips and, short of somebody stopping and taking out a calendar and counting, I would not really expect that answer

What somebody might say is, “It’s been umpteen days,” or “a bajillion days” or “a zillion days.” Everyone would understand that answer and I suspect that many people would see it as an answer that is about as accurate as 68 days. Umpteen days would probably better capture how many people feel about the extent of time than any specific number.

Words like that – a jillion, umpteen, a bazillion – are what are called fictitious numbers. They do not refer to specific quantities or amounts but are rather a way of expressing a large, perhaps overwhelming amount. In that sense, it is pretty accurate to say that we’ve been under lockdown for umpteen days.

Those are English fictitious numbers, of course, but many other languages have their own ways of expressing the same kinds of ideas. Some use actual numbers as fictitious numbers. In Latin, for example, the word sescenti literally meant 600, but it was commonly used to mean a lot.

Ancient Near Eastern languages also had a number that they used in the same way; that number was forty. That is the reason why the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” has forty thieves in it. I hope this is not a shock to you, but nobody actually counted the thieves in that story, they didn’t need to, they just knew there were a lot of them so they said forty.

That is probably also why the number forty comes up a lot in the Bible – 40 days of rain during Noah’s flood, 40 years in the wilderness for the children of Israel, 40 days of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the devil – the people in that culture understood whenever they heard that number 40, that the number didn’t need to be precise. It just meant a long time.

With all of that in mind, I’ve always wondered how we are supposed to read the beginning of the book of Acts when it says, “After his suffering [Jesus] presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Is Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, referring to a very specific period of time when he says forty days or is he basically saying that Jesus was with them for umpteen days?

Ah, but you might say that hanging around with Jesus following the resurrection is not at all like living through a pandemic. That is a joyful thing, not something that’s going to seem like it’s lasting forever, is it? Why would it seem like it was umpteen days long? But, you see, it is not just negative events that can seem interminable. Sometimes it feels that way when you are anticipating something and that seems to be the case here.

We’re told that, during those umpteen days, Jesus was incessantly speaking to them about “the kingdom of God.” That was indeed one of Jesus’ favourite topics of conversation and an exiting idea, but maybe – just maybe – the disciples were feeling as if they had listened to Jesus’ talk about the kingdom long enough and it was time for them to see some action.

In fact, that is exactly what they say: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” In other words, “Enough with the talk! We’ve heard all of the parables and the sayings. We remember the time when you said ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ It’s time for less talk and more showing: show us the kingdom now!”

And I’m going to be completely honest here. I am kind of with the disciples on this one. And that is especially true right now after umpteen days in lockdown. Now, I will admit that I probably don’t mean it in exactly the same way that the disciples meant it. It seems, from what they said, that they had a very particular idea of what the kingdom of God looked like and that they were assuming that it had to include the restoration of Judean sovereignty over what had once been the Kingdom of Judea. It meant, in other words, kicking the Romans out. But, if that is what they were expecting, they really weren’t listening all that closely the parables of Jesus. The kingdom that he announced did not require a particular political resolution.

But even if I don’t see the kingdom of God in exactly the same terms that they were imagining, I’ve got to say that I am feeling very impatient for the kingdom of God that I understand Jesus was talking about. Why can’t we see it now?

Jesus spoke of a kingdom where “the first would be last and the last would be first,” where, in other words, the ordinary social and economic order would be completely disrupted and overturned and where the poorest and the weakest came out on top. He spoke of a kingdom where the outcasts were included and the neglected and forgotten were given a place at the table and where God demanded justice for all. These are the kinds of themes that come out consistently in everything that Jesus said about the kingdom of God. And I have long felt as if the world has been in great need of some of that. But, I will confess, since all of this crisis began umpteen days ago, I, like the disciples, have been feeling all the more impatient for the kingdom to be established.

I don’t know about you, but for me this particular crisis has made me think a whole lot about who is first and who is last. And the people we used to think of as being first, the millionaires and the celebrities for example, it’s been amazing to see how irrelevant they have become – how little they seem to deserve to command vast amounts of wealth while the people who were near the bottom of society, the lowly people who laboured away in the service industry and in the supply chain and who produced and connected us to our food supplies, how very important they have become. I’ve got to say that it has made me think that it is well past time for the first to become last and the last to become first.

The long-term care crisis in Canada in particular has really pointed out many of the shortcomings of our ways of operating. Do you realize that, over the past several weeks, long-term care facilities across this country have seen infection rates from covid-19 that are roughly the same whether those facilities are government-run, nonprofit or for-profit. But here is the huge difference between those different types of facilities. Once an infection has made its way into a long-term care facility, residents are four times more likely to die if they live in a for-profit facility.

It is not all that hard to see why this has happened. For-profit facilities receive the same amount of funding as other facilities but they need to generate profits to pay dividends to their investors. Because of this, they need to save money someplace and generally do that by paying as little as possible to their workers and saving as much as possible on equipment. The result is that these facilities are understaffed and staff are under equipped. That calculation – placing profits over people – has proved to be especially dangerous and deadly in the age of covid-19.

This pandemic has been a tragedy in so many ways but it would be a double tragedy if we failed to learn anything from it. What I find myself yearning for us to learn is some of the basics of the kingdom of God that Jesus preached. So I stand with the disciples in their demand: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” But I guess that I, like them, would be wise to listen closely to Jesus’ answer.

“It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” Of course, that’s not really the answer I would like to hear. I, like you, am kind of tired of waiting around for somebody else to tell me that it’s time to exit the present state of emergency. But I think we’ve all come to appreciate the wisdom of listening when it comes to such important matters.

What Jesus is saying here is that the times are not merely in the hands of chief medical officers of health or politicians but ultimately in the hands of God and that is a good place for them to be. As hard as that may be to hear, we are going to have to trust in God for the establishment of the kingdom of God and the justice that comes with it. If we were to seek to bring it about on our own it could easily devolve into violence or worse injustice as those who have attempted to set up utopian societies in the past have often discovered.

But just because it is not up to us to create the kingdom of God whole cloth, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a part to play in its establishment on earth. Jesus goes on from there to say, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” We do indeed have a part to play, and that part is to be witnesses to Jesus. And that means that we must bear witness to everything about Jesus – to his birth, his life, his death and resurrection and what that has meant to us for new hope and healing and salvation.

It also means bearing witness to his teaching including all of the teaching 2about the kingdom of God. What might such witness look like in our present situation? It might mean that we are to point out what we see going on in our society and the need for change and the reasons why the first might need to be last and the last first right now. Bearing witness to Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom of God might be extremely unpopular at times like this, but Jesus calls on us to do it anyways.

But just in case that all seems a little bit overwhelming, don’t worry that is not the entirety of Jesus’ message because, before he says, “you will be my witnesses” he gives this promise, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” My friends, do not be afraid because not only has Jesus given to you a message that can challenge and change this world by turning it upside down, Jesus has also given to you the power you will need to bear that witness even when things are hard and no one wants to hear it. That power is made available to you in God’s Holy Spirit.

Next week is Pentecost Sunday and on Pentecost we will turn our minds to the exploration of the power of God’s Spirit and how it gives us what we need to be those witnesses in the world. But know for now that that power is real and it is transformative. It is the power that was at work in creating this world and it is available to us. It is the power that brought the church into existence and it is available to us. It is the power of God to transform the world and it is available to us.

I can’t promise to you that the kingdom of God is about to be established because such timing is in God’s hands. But you have a part to play and you can be bold to speak, to act and to challenge – maybe especially at such times as these.