The 9th Episode of the Podcast "Retelling the Bible" came out earlier today
During the first season of his podcast, storyteller, W. Scott McAndless is retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, trying to help us to see some of the historical and biblical references the author is making - helping us to hear the story more as the author may have intended.
In today's episode, the announcement of a Year of Jubilee comes to the small village of Nazareth. All males are called to return to their ancestral homes. Many of the villagers seem doubtful when they hear where this proclamation is coming from, but one young carpenter and his intended wife feel a stirring in their hearts. Gabrielle M. guest stars in the role of Mary.
I encourage you to subscribe and to listen via one of these popular Podcasting apps. Each of the links below will take you to a page where you can subscribe:
Here is a special gift to my listeners (which you will understand after hearing today's podcast) a cutout of Judas the Galilean to add to your Nativity Scene this year.
his Christmas and Advent season, I wanted to help us get a new perspective on the same old Christmas story. And I figured that the best way to do that was by listening to the story through the voices of characters that we don’t usually get to hear and to see it through their eyes. So this morning, I want to tell the story of Christmas through Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist.
I realize, of course, that I am not necessarily the ideal person to tell her story. It might take a bit of suspension of disbelief, but I hope you just go with it. At least I am kind of dressed for the part this morning.
So here we are, in Elizabeth’s voice:
I used to dread it when my husband, Zechariah, went off to do his priestly duties, to serve in the great temple with the Levitical priests of his section. It wasn’t just that I missed him while he was gone, though I certainly did. I felt so alone when he wasn’t there. There were just the two of us. My only other living relative was my niece, my sister’s daughter, Mary, who lived far off in Galilee.
Zechariah and I had had no children. It had been ten years and, for all our trying, I had just not been able to conceive. And I knew that Zechariah’s heart was broken because of this – that he longed with all his heart to have a son to teach the prayers to and who could someday take his place in the brotherhood of the priests. That was hard for him but he had no way of knowing my pain.
For me, my failure to produce a son wasn’t just my disappointment. It was my death. It made me a nobody. No one would see me, speak to me or even acknowledge my existence. They would when Zechariah was around, of course, they had to respect him as a priest. But while he was gone, it was as if I had disappeared too. It is just the way that things are. A woman needs a man – whether it be a father, a husband or a son – to give her a place to stand in the community. I didn’t blame the others for their failure to see me. They just didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t fit into their understanding of the world. I didn’t hate them, but over the years, I convinced myself that I didn’t care what they thought and I set about doing what I could to survive until my husband returned.
Just to make it through, sometimes, I would go and meet with others like me – the women in the area who had never carried a child. Every one of us had her own story. There were some, like me, who had just never managed to conceive, but there were others whose stories were even sadder, if that is possible.
There was one woman, for example, who first knew a man (much older than her) when she was very young. He promised her so much – that he would love her, that he would take her away from her father who, she tells us, would beat her often. She was so young, so naïve that she didn’t know that this man was just using her for his pleasure and had no intention of keeping any of his grandiose promises. Well, of course, they were eventually caught doing something that, well, they shouldn’t have been doing. He just accused her of seducing him. She was the foul temptress, the Delilah that had defeated another Samson, and so everyone agreed that he was not to blame. He walked away with no dishonour while she – she would carry the dishonour for the rest of her life. No one would ever marry her. Any child she might have in any sort of relationship would never be acceptable. So she was as barren as the rest of us, only for different reasons.
There was another sister who was raped by a man in her community. It was his crime and everyone knew it, but the way it was dealt with was according to the ancient law – the man could be stoned to death, or he could pay the penalty in silver… and marry her. It wasn’t much of a choice for him, of course he married her, his third wife. She was given no choice at all! And then he resented her for it after the marriage and decided to never touch her again, so of course she had so no chance of having children either.
They all had stories like that – so much sadness, so many tragedies. Our stories were all different but we had in common that we didn’t really belong anywhere. When my husband was away, the only time that I didn’t feel completely alone was when I was with them.
We would encourage each other with stories – our stories, the stories that had belonged to us long before they had come into the hands of men who wrote them in their scrolls, claiming them for themselves. They were stories that mother had passed down to daughter since before anything could be written down. And, though we all knew them, it brought us great comfort to share them with each other in this way.
There were stories about Sarah and how, even in her old age – when it was far too late for her to even dream about it – God had visited her that she might have a son. There were stories of Rebekah and how she strove mightily that she might bring her twin sons, Esau and Jacob, into the world. And, of course, there were Rachel and Leah, whose fierce competition with each other to bring children for their husband Jacob into the world created the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. And there were some who loved the story of Tamar and how she tricked Judah (who had dishonoured her) into giving her children. All of our stories were stories of women who struggled to bear and then saved the life of the nation by doing so.
But, for me, the greatest heroine of all was Hannah. I saw myself so much in her story. She, too, suffered for so long without a child. She, like me, had a husband who loved her – who knew the scorn and the rejection that she faced but who also felt powerless to help her. But most of all, I loved her because she seemed able to find a way to express her hopes and fears and frustrations to God – did it without even speaking aloud – and she found a way to be heard by God in the anguish of her unspoken words.
Hannah gave me hope that things could be different – oh, not for me. It seemed far too late for that and I dared not hope for it. But her story made me hope that maybe something could change for others someday.
The thing that made me believe that was the song of praise that she sang when God finally gave her the answer to the prayer of her heart – when her son the Prophet Samuel was born. She prayed and gave thanks to God, but not like some might. She didn’t just thank God for giving her what she wanted. She knew that God had done so much more – had overturned the very order of the world. “The Lord kills and brings to life;” she proclaimed, “he brings down to Sheol and raises up.The Lord makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts.He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honour.” That was the hope that I held onto in my hours of greatest despair.
One of the few bright spots in my life all of those years when I longed for a child was my niece, Mary. I would take care of her for weeks at a time because my sister was often sickly and later died. My favorite story – the story of Hannah – quickly became hers as well. And we would sing Hannah’s song together – our little secret and our shared hope for a different kind of world.
I don’t think I ever really understood Hannah’s story or her song until that time when Zechariah came home from his time of service in the temple. Something was so different about him. But he would explain nothing to me – in fact he couldn’t speak at all! It didn’t really matter though because I could read so much just in the look on his face. He was so excited and he took me by the hand and led me to the bedroom and, well, there are some parts of the story that you don’t really have to hear in detail, do you? Let me just say that something went right that night that hadn’t gone right before.
Before long I could finally believe it when I felt the flutter of new life growing strong within me. I knew my child would be no ordinary child – that he would be like Hannah’s child, Samuel, and would change the course of the history of my people. That was when I decided that I would make the same vow that Hannah did and that my son would drink no wine or strong drink his whole life long. He, like Samuel, would be devoted to God his whole life long. Later, to my wonder, when Zechariah could speak, it turned out that he had made the same vow as well, but for his own strange reasons.
But the best part of all came when my beloved niece, Mary, came to visit. She was still so young – still only a girl in my eyes – but she brought her own story of an impossible pregnancy that amazed and frightened me at the same time. It frightened me for her, most of all, because it was so hard to believe and I knew that people have a hard time believing girls to begin with – especially when it comes to any story at all related to sex and childbearing. Somehow people are always only interested in what a man has to say on the subject.
But I knew that my job was merely to believe her – to take her and her word as it was. Sometimes that is the most important thing that God asks us to do for anyone. And when I did believe her (which I did with my whole heart) I felt my child jump inside me – the biggest movement that had yet come from him – and I knew that he believed her too.
It was only natural for us to fall back on the story that had always been that shared secret between us. We talked into the night of mother Hannah and how she alone could understand what we had both gone through – the scorn and rejection, the disappointment and frustration. And, because of that, she was also the only one who could feel our relief, hope and new joy. It was like she had stepped out of the history of our people and joined directly in our circle and we could not have been more happy to welcome her.
It was then that Mary opened her mouth to sing the song that was on both of our minds. And it was Hannah’s song that she sang, but it was more truly hers now, and mine too. The words had changed somewhat but I could still hear Hannah’s voice in all she sang; “"He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
And we knew that the hope of Hannah and the hope of all forgotten women down through the history of our people was finally going to be fulfilled and that God’s messiah would indeed draw near. He would be present when vulnerable girls with troubling stories were believed. He would be present when abused and rejected survivors were given a place and a voice. He would be present when the despised like me were beloved again. And then God’s kingdom would be at hand.
The 8th Episode of the Podcast "Retelling the Bible" came out earlier today
During the first season of his podcast, storyteller, W. Scott McAndless is retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, trying to help us to see some of the historical and biblical references the author is making - helping us to hear the story more as the author may have intended.
In today's episode, we jump back before the beginning to trace some of the reaction to the census that was taken at the time when Jesus was born. A rebel named Judas and his friend, Zadok, plan their response to the Roman initiative - a response that will have a big impact on the birth of Jesus and of the Christian faith.
I encourage you to subscribe and to listen via one of these popular Podcasting apps. Each of the links below will take you to a page where you can subscribe:
Here is a special gift to my listeners (which you will understand after hearing today's podcast) a cutout of Judas the Galilean to add to your Nativity Scene this year.
s that in the Bible? It is one of those questions that you just have to ask sometimes when you read this book. And few passages elicit such a response more easily than the one we read this morning. It is a story that seems odd on so many levels. Jesus is just walking along one bright morning, he sees a fig tree in the distance, sees that it has some leaves on it, and feels a little rumble in his stomach. He is hungry so he goes over to see whether it has any fruit on it.
Now, mind you, it is not exactly the right season for figs, but I guess if you’re really hungry (as I guess Jesus was) you can hardly blame a guy for hoping that there might be a few early fruits. I mean, who hasn’t been there: you open the cupboard and hope against hope, when you see the old Twinkie box shoved up in the back corner, that there will be just one golden cake still hidden inside. You can hope, but when you discover that the box is empty how do you react?
You might feel a momentary surge of anger at whichever member of your household took the last cake and failed to throw out the empty box and put Twinkies on the grocery list again. But, thankfully, most of us can deal with that anger without it turning into a homicidal rage. The really shocking thing in this story in the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus essentially goes into an arboricidal rage over his failure to get a snack. For the crime of not bearing a fruit (at a time when fig trees don’t generally bear fruit anyway), this particular fig tree is condemned by Jesus to death. “May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” he cries out against it.
And just in case anyone thinks that this is a joke or a metaphor, we all get to return to the very same spot on the path between Bethany and Jerusalem the very next morning to see that the same fig tree is now “withered away to its roots.” It is, in other words, not just a little bit sick but so completely dead that it is quite clear that no one ever will eat its fruit again.
I have heard a lot of people stumble over this passage, and not surprisingly! The initial impression that the story gives is that Jesus is behaving like a someone having a temper tantrum – using whatever power he has available to him (and he has a lot of power) to destroy something that has given him the slightest bit of irritation. So what are we supposed to do with this passage – accept that Jesus had a thing against fig trees and move on?
Well, actually no, I don’t think so. In fact there is a whole lot going on in this passage that we miss. In fact, I would even say that there is a vital message for the church today hidden in it – one that I pray that we do not miss.ld even say that there is a vital message for the church today hidden in it
One reason why we miss the message is because we forget what we are reading when we read the Gospel of Mark. We assume that we are reading a history book or a journalistic account of the events of Jesus’ life. I believe that Mark would have been appalled to know that people would read his book in such a way. Mark was writing a gospel, not a mere historical account and so the author was trying to communicate a whole lot more than just what happened. He was trying to explain who Jesus was and what he had come to accomplish and, in order to do that, he did not hesitate to use common literary tricks to get his message across.
For example, there are a number of times in his Gospel when Mark starts telling one story about something that happened to Jesus and then, all of a sudden in the middle of the story, everything gets interrupted by something else that happens, seemingly out of the blue. (For example, there’s this story when Jesus gets called on to go to the house of a man named Jairus and heal his daughter but gets interrupted on the way there when a sick woman touches the hem of his garment. Mark 8:40-56) Then, once the interruption has been dealt with, the original story resumes and is concluded. (For example, Jesus goes on and heals the girl.) This doesn’t just happen once in this gospel but several times. And, if you read this gospel closely, you start to wonder what on earth is going on. And the closer you look, the more likely you are to conclude that this has not just happened by accident but that the author has gone out of his way to tell his story in this way.
But why would Mark choose to do that? Is it just a style thing? Or is this one of the ways in which Mark deliberately chose to get his message across? It seems to be the latter because if you look closely at each instance where Mark does this, there is special meaning being communicated. In particular, in every case, there is always a strange connection between the two stories that are interrupting each other. In other words, you cannot completely understand the beginning and the end of the story without understanding the interrupting part in the middle and vice versa.
The passage we read this morning is a perfect example of this storytelling technique. Mark starts off with the story of Jesus and the fig tree, but then he gets interrupted by the story of Jesus and the temple. After cursing the fig tree, Jesus goes down to the temple and starts causing quite a commotion, driving out sellers, overturning tables and even stopping people from carrying things through the temple. It is only after all of this is over that we return to the story of the fig tree.
Therefore, if Mark is using this pair of stories in the same way that he uses the other interrupting stories, we should expect that there should be some important connection between the story of the fig tree and the story of what happens in the temple – that he has a message that he is trying to get across by putting these two stories together in the way that he does.
So what might that message be? Is the connection, perhaps, that Jesus was really grumpy after not having any breakfast and not finding any figs on the fig tree and that that’s what put him in a bad mood which led to the incident at the temple? No, I don’t think so. I think that Mark has something much more serious to say and that we ought to pay attention to it.
What if the fig tree and the temple are one and the same thing? That is to say, what if the fig tree is a metaphor for the temple. You see, when we read the story of Jesus in the temple, we often focus on the mechanics of what he does. He seems to be attacking the commercial activities that are taking place in the temple and so, down through the years, Christians have been inclined to apply this story by limiting or being very careful about anything that looks like commercial activity in the church. There are churches, for example, that will absolutely forbid any sort of exchange of money for services or goods within the sanctuary. We figure that we can escape the condemnation that Jesus pronounces on the temple by avoiding any activities that look vaguely similar to what was going on in the temple that day. But what if that isn’t enough? What if Jesus was getting at something deeper than specific activities?
If the fig tree represents the temple, Jesus’ anger at the tree (which is irrational on the surface) makes a whole lot more sense. Jesus isn’t especially angry at the fig tree for its failure to produce fruit in a season when it shouldn’t produce anyways. He is angry at the temple, not just for particular activities that are taking place there, but for its general failure to bear fruit.in the temple, but for it'uce fruit. He is angry at the temple, not just for particular activiti I also suspect that Jesus’ curse,curse "suspect that Jesus'ruit.in the temple, but for it'uce fruit. He is angry at the temple, not just for particular activiti“May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” is directed at the temple more than the tree. This seems especially obvious when you realize that Mark wrote this Gospel very soon after the temple in Jerusalem had been completely destroyed at a time when it was quite clear that no one would ever worship or eat from its fruit again. Mark is telling his readers that, just as Jesus could curse a fig tely destroy and no one would ever worship "ivititree to death and it would actually die a day later, he did curse the temple to death and it was destroyed forty years later.
But what if this is not just about some ancient temple? What if it is about the church and the challenges we face today? Think of in this way: Imagine that Jesus came today to St. Andrew’s Hespeler and, on the way in, had a run in with Andrew'ut the church and the challenges we face today?would ever worship "iviti a fruit tree. I’m not going to say a fig tree because we’re hardly familiar with them. So let’s say that he had a run in with an apple tree that tempted him with its leaves but disappointed him with a lack of apples. If that apple tree was us, what would it say about our church and how Jesus might react to us were he in our midst today?
In other words, what fruit might Jesus be looking for from us and from the church in general today and would he find it or not? We could talk for a long time about that question and I know that there would be many different opinions. My personal feeling is that the fruit that Jesusow that there would be many diffeerent y and would he find it or not?hh is looking for is a church that makes a place for all people. At least, that’s what I hear in Jesus’ call for the temple to be “a house of prayer for all the nations.”
One thing I think that that especially means in our modern context is that the church needs to be a place of safety for the victims of this world. If our churches are not a place where victims of domestic abuse, sexual harassment and other similar crimes can feel the freedom to tell their stories and can be believed, for example, we have a real problem. And sadly, when today I hear some church leaders standing up for abusers instead of victims, it makes me think that Jesus would get very angry indeed with at least some of our leaders!
But I suspect that there is even more fruitfulness that Jesus would look for. He would ask for a church that is involved in actions that positively impact the lives of people in the community. After all, didn’t Jesus often speak of how the kingdom of God would be found when the hungry were fed, the naked clothed and the strangers welcomed? I know that we could always do more to step up to such challenges, but I would say that at St Andrew’s we do pretty well at marking such activities a priority. Let us press on and always be open to what more Jesus is calling us to do.
I also suspect that we have an indication in this story of what Jesus might see as a sign that a church is failing in the fruitfulness department. It is true that the activities that he disrupted in the temple were those activities that were focused on the financial support of the institution. The changing of money and selling of sacrificial animals was an essential part of the financial life of the temple. After all, you can’t maintain a huge religious institution like the temple without some revenue sources. Jesus can’t argue against the mere presence of money within the temple precincts but what he seems to be complaining about is the fact that the search for revenue in the temple has become all consuming and saying that a concern for it is what has been pushing the temple away from its primary task and that was why it had become so unfruitful.
I personally don’t think that Jesus actually got so mad at a fig tree one day that he cursed it to death. I suspect that Mark took some of the things that Jesus said about unfruitful trees and the power of prayer and turned those sayings into a kind of living parable – knowing that it would be much more powerful that way.
But, in a sense, it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus did it or not – the point in Mark including this little episode was to teach us something much more important about the temple and (I suspect) the church. It is a reminder to us that Jesus is looking to us to produce fruit in this world, that that is why we are here. Everything else that we do – all of the things that keep the operation going – are here to support and enable that fruitfulness. Will Jesus be gracious and patient with us when we sometimes fail to bear that fruit? I do not doubt that he will. But if lose we sight completely of that need to produce the fruit of righteousness – especially if we are distracted by money matters – well, it seems that Jesus could have a bit of a temper… would be much more powerful trees and the power of prayer and turned those sayings into a kind of living parable -- kn
Today the 7th Episode of the Podcast "Retelling the Bible" came out.
During the first season of his podcast, storyteller, W. Scott McAndless is retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke, trying to help us to see some of the historical and biblical references the author is making -- helping us to hear the story more as the author may have intended.
In today's episode, Mary and Joseph finally arrive in Bethlehem after their long and difficult journey and seek shelter even as Mary approaches her time to deliver. They are seeking hospitality in a very particular place - just not necessarily at the particular place we have long assumed.
I encourage you to subscribe and to listen via one of these popular Podcasting apps. Each of the links below will take you to a page where you can subscribe:
This is just a reminder that the book that will revolutionize your knowledge and understanding of the Bible's story of Christmas is available now and can still be shipped before Christmas (or in the case of the ebook immediately).
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The Gospel of Luke alone tells the story of the birth of Jesus set against the background of a census taken on the orders of Caesar Augustus. This historical setting has always raised serious questions: Was there ever really such a census? Why does Luke describe the census as being carried out in a manner that does not fit with what we know of Roman practices and policies?
This book struggles with questions like those in a creative way which leads to some surprising new ways to understand Luke’s timeless story of Mary and Joseph and their journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Part investigation, part exercise in creative imagination, this book will help you to see the Christmas story in a whole new way.
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hen Mark wrote his Gospel – which most scholars agree was written sometime around the year 70 CE – he had two main purposes for doing so. The first one is kind of obvious. It had been about 40 years since Jesus had been crucified which meant that the people who had been there and seen Jesus and known him in the flesh were pretty much all gone or going soon. There was a need to set down the words of Jesus and the stories of what he had done in a way that would endure.
But there was a second agenda to the writing of the gospel that isn’t quite so obvious to us, but that actually may have been even more important to its writer. Mark was writing the story down for the people in his church – a church that was living through some very difficult times. He wanted to show them how to be the church in those times – to be a church that would be faithful to the vision and calling of Jesus.
And for me, that is one thing that makes this gospel so helpful to us today because, honestly almost two thousand years later, we are still trying to figure out the same thing. Of course, Mark can’t lay out too many of his lessons to the church explicitly because he is telling stories about things that happened over a generation ago. A lot of his messages come through in the way that he chooses to tell the story.
For example, there is a long stretch of narrative in the middle of the Gospel where Jesus and the disciples seem to criss-cross the Sea of Galilee. They travel in a boat and, whenever they land in some place or another, there is always some crowd of people that Jesus needs to minister to or some problem he needs to take care of – someone to heal, a demon to cast out or whatever it may be.
Now, of course, there is history behind that. Jesus clearly did travel all over Galilee and the Sea of Galilee was indeed one of the most convenient ways to travel long distances. But the way that Mark tells the story has a certain pattern to it. Every time the disciples leave the boat, they are met with an urgent need. Even when (as in the passage we read last week) the disciples intentionally set off to a private place along the shoreline so that they can have an opportunity to rest and relax, they are followed there by huge crowds of people and Jesus ends up having to feed them.
So the stops along the shore clearly represent something for the ongoing life of the church. They represent the mission of the church – how we are sent out into the world to heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked and help the afflicted.
Throughout this section of the Gospel, the only time when the disciples are alone with Jesus and he is able to give them his undivided attention is when they are in a boat, on the lake, heading to their next destination on the shoreline. There Jesus takes time to teach, correct and demonstrate the gospel to the disciples. Some amazing things happen on those crossings – the stormy winds are stilled, Jesus goes walking on the water – but it is all just for the sake and the edification of the disciples.
So if the stops along the shoreline represent the external ministry of the church, the crossings represent the internal Christian life of the church. It represents what happens when the church withdraws from the world for a little while to learn and grow together. In modern terms, it represents what happens for us in the church today when we gather on Sunday mornings to worship, pray and support each other. This is something that has been recognized for a long time. It is one reason why this part of the church – the main part where the people sit – is often called the “nave,” which comes from the Latin word for a boat. That idea is taken from that notion that Jesus and the disciples in a boat on the Sea of Galilee is a picture of what the church is supposed to be.
And that means that when Mark wrote this, he wanted the churches he was writing for to pay special attention to what happened and what was said on those Galilean lake crossings – to expect to find a message for how the church ought to be together. And if they were supposed to find a message there, maybe there is a message that would apply to us as well.
For example, on one of these many crossing Jesus apparently just spoke up out of the blue and said, “Watch out – beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.” And it was, to be fair, an odd thing for someone to say for no apparent reason, so it certainly is understandable that this left the disciples kind of bewildered and wondering what sort of beverages made with the aid of yeast Jesus might have been imbibing.
I have thought a fair bit about what Jesus might have meant by that odd saying. I have decided that what he actually meant wasn’t all that hard to understand. You see Jews, from ancient times, had a certain taboo against yeast. Yes, yeast was very useful for making things like bread and wine, but it was also something that, in that climate, could get into all kinds of things and be very destructive. So Jews generally saw it as an unclean thing and that was one reason why, during Passover time, they ate bread made without yeast. So when Jesus talks about dangerous yeast, he is clearly talking about something that might infiltrate the church and take it away from what it needed to be.
The threats that Jesus identifies as possibly infiltrating and leading the church astray are “the Pharisees” and “Herod.” These represent two key worldly powers in Jesus’ world. Herod, the king, represents secular power and the Pharisees represent religious power and authority. The threat, clearly, is that the church might get sucked into the agenda of the power systems in this world – that we begin to forget what our mission is in a quest to just keep on the right side of this world’s powers.
If that is what Jesus is warning against, then it is certainly a prescient warning because, as I reflect on the history of the church, this is a problem that we have run into again and again down through the years. When, three centuries after the time of Jesus, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the church suddenly had access to secular power that it could previously only dream of.
There were benefits to this power, of course. The church could build magnificent buildings, commission great music and artwork and hopefully influence society into better directions. So the church gained power but it also lost, at that point, so much that had made the church what it was. The lessons of that age alone show us that Jesus was certainly right to warn us that any alliance with earthly power can lead the church in directions that may not fit the original vision of what was supposed to be. At the very least, some caution is needed.
And if that is just too much ancient history for you, let’s consider a modern example. Our own church, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, several decades ago, entered into an alliance with the Canadian government to do something that both the church and the government felt was a good thing at the time. It was supposed to be about education and about “saving” Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. But I would argue that the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod insidiously infiltrated any good intentions that there were in that project and, as a result, so much evil was committed against Canada’s indigenous families that it has proved nearly impossible to even document. So, there again, would it not have been wise to pay some heed to Jesus’ warning about yeast?
But there is an even more contemporary example than that. This morning a letter from a number of church leaders in Alabama was published. They were voicing their support for Roy Moore – a man who it is very hard to deny by now is a serial sexual assaulter and molester of underage women – in the upcoming Senate election. There is great evil in such an endorsement. It will do a great deal of harm, in particular, in the victims who sit in the pews of those church leaders. So why did they do this detestable thing? Once again, I see the influence of the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod at work. These leaders were seduced by the lure of earthly power to do something that betrays so much of what the church should stand for. Once again, Jesus was right to warn us to be wary! the Presbyterian Church i ancient history for you, let'
So Jesus is definitely making an important point that might impact the future of the church, but the thing that really strikes me about this passage that we read this morning is the reaction of the disciples. I can’t find any better way to describe it other than to call it stupid. Here Jesus has offered a worthwhile and fairly clear lesson about something that might threaten the mission of the church, and the disciples totally miss it.
Now, Mark’s Gospel actually contains a lot of stories about stupid disciples so that, in itself, is not surprising. What is special about this story is the reason why the disciples don’t get it. They don’t get it because they are distracted and they are distracted because they are worried that they don’t have enough bread with them. In other words, they are so obsessed with the question of their own survival and the basic needs of life that they are not open to even hear what Jesus is trying to tell them.
And let me tell you, that feels very familiar to me as someone who has been working in the Christian church for over a quarter century. Every church I have worked with and that I have had connections with has had a certain level of anxiety about its survival. Every one of them felt the struggle (especially at this time of year) to meet the budget. It is a natural thing to feel when you are living in times of great change and we are certainly living in such a time. But this passage in Mark is there to teach us how dangerous such anxiety is. Our obsession with bread can make us miss the lesson about yeast. Our worries about survival can mean that we spend all of our time on that instead of genuinely listening to what Jesus is saying to us in this time and place.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t just leave us there. In this story, we see him reaching out to his disciples to help them break out of their survival fixation. So he starts asking them a series of question that is oddly specific. “When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” he asks them. “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” They are all questions from their recent experiences with him – questions that have very objective and quantifiable answers: “Twelve” and “Seven” to be specific.
What he is doing, of course, is reminding them of how God has provided for them in the past. If they can remember that God has been there for them before, the idea seems to be that it will be all the easier for them to expect it of God in the future. But I think that it is telling that Jesus wants them to remember with such precision. He invites them to dwell, not on what they felt or what it looked like but on the specific numbers that represent God’s provision.
He does that because he understands us – he understands that our human nature often makes us forget the triumphs and the victories that God has given us and focus instead on the parts that didn’t go so well. The negative (even when there is a lot less of it) easily outweighs the positive and so we need to remember specific facts and numbers from the times when we knew that God was there for us.
What would Jesus say, I wonder, if he were in the boat crossing the Sea of Galilee with us today? Would he be somewhat exasperated with us that we are obsessing over bread when there are some real yeasty concerns in our world that we ought to be worrying about? I suspect that he might. But he would also understand our concerns about bread. That is why he might ask us questions like, “That time when your church had to replace the entire heating system and the quote was so high that it scared you, how many months did it take for the money to be raised?” He might ask, “How many years now has Hope Clothing been running with no stable funding whatsoever and yet you have somehow always kept it going as a church?” He might ask us, “How many people ate at the Thursday Night Supper and Social last week and the week before, and where exactly did the food come from again?”
Now that I come to think of it, there are lots of stories that Jesus could ask us about with answers no less amazing than the disciples’ answer in the boat. And if you don’t know the answers to those questions, maybe you should – maybe if we all did we would worry less about bread and more about yeast. Maybe then we would understand.
he First Church in the Wilderness was facing yet another crisis. The twelve member leadership council assembled to talk about it and try to come up with a solution. The problem, as usual, was the budget. There just didn’t seem to be enough resources for everything that was needed. People were coming, they were hearing the word of life and it was affecting their lives giving them hope and a sense of purpose. It was just so darn hard to find the resources to keep the whole thing going.
And it is not just them. This seems to be a universal problem. There may be a church out there somewhere that never struggles to make ends meet, but I haven’t found it yet. It doesn’t matter whether a church is small, medium or mega. It doesn’t matter whether it is in a rich neighbourhood or a poor one, every single church I’ve ever looked at just seems to find that its revenues fall at least a little bit short of its expenses on a regular basis. I’ve seen it so often that I no longer believe that it is an accident. It is something that the designer of the church planned. There is a reason why it keeps happening.
Nevertheless, it does tend to make the leaders (and many of the people) worry and fret. And that is what the leaders of the First Church in the Wilderness were doing. “What will we do? This isn’t sustainable. The church will just have to cut back somewhere. It can’t continue to try to help meet the needs of so many people.” The solution seemed obvious so they went to the boss with their plan.
“Boss,” they said, “This church is going through a dry time, there are very few resources and there is not enough to go around and take care of everyone. I mean, to properly help the people around here who need it, we would need like an additional 200… thousand dollars in our budget and we just don’t have that kind of money. Here’s what we think you ought to do: all of the people who are takers – all of the people who are not contributing to the needs of this organization because they need too much help themselves – just tell them that they need to go. Let them go and find some way to take care of their own spiritual, physical and psychological needs because, once they are gone, we are pretty sure that we can stretch the resources that the church has to cover our needs.”
I want you to listen carefully to that plan that the leadership came up with because I can tell you that it is the plan that we always come up with in the church. I’ve seen it happen again and again in innumerable churches that I have dealt with. First of all, notice what the disciples are focused on. They are focused on what they don’t have. They don’t have the $200,000 that would be necessary to take care of everyone. And that is what we always do too. Whenever things get tight – and they always manage to get pretty tight – we are inclined to be ever more worried about what resources we don’t have. What’s more, we see that as a smart and sensible way to be – that it is just common sense. You don’t spend what you don’t have.
And I understand that approach completely. I am very sympathetic to it because it seems to make good sense to me too. But I do want to point out that there are some big assumptions we make when we think like that. We are thinking of the resources that are available to the church as a fixed sum. There are only so many resources to go around and so our task is simply to make sure that everything is stretched to cover the basic needs. That is an assumption that may be correct in certain circumstances – in a household on a fixed income, for example. But it is not necessarily true in the church.
This assumption of a hard limit on the resources available leads to the disciples making a second assumption: that the only way to deal with the scarcity is to send away the people who are using the resources. “Send them away,” becomes the default strategy for dealing with that feeling of scarcity.
So the leaders of the church come to the boss to make what seems to be a perfectly reasonable suggestion to deal with the shortage: “Send them all away and then we’ll be able to manage.” But the boss has another idea, not only of what to do but also of what the problem is. “Wait a second,” he says. “"Wait a second, he said, You’ve made it clear to me what you don’t have, but I have to ask you just one question: What do you have? What need-meeting resources are available to you?”
Do you see how a question like that changes everything? They, like us, only wanted to talk about scarcity. And when you talk about scarcity, you always end up talking about what you can’t do and why you can’t do it. You are always bumping up against limits. It may be a sensible point of view but it is always a restrictive one.
But the boss turns that around and wants to talk about what they have. And it turns out that they actually do have something. “Well, boss,” they say, “we do have a little rainy day fund set aside down at the National Loaves and Fishes Bank. We have about down at the National hat they havefive hundred in a loaves account and I think there is another couple hundred in a fishes account. But that’s nowhere near enough to even start to deal with the needs of all these people out there and we need to keep that just to make sure that the operation keeps running around here.
I just have to mention: isn’t it interesting that we haven’t heard anything about the five in loaves and two in fishes up until this point. All this time the disciples have been fretting about there being too many people in too much need, and somehow the loaves and fishes never came up. Even when they went to Jesus with their plan to get rid of all the needy people, it just never came up that they had a little set off to the side in loaves and fishes. They only tell him what they don’t have and he has to explicitly ask them about what he has probably already guessed that they have.
And isn’t it obvious why they wouldn’t have mentioned it up until then? They were keeping the loaves and the fishes for themselves! That is why they were so keen on their plan where everyone else got sent away. They knew that once everyone else was gone they could break out the loaves and the fishes and maybe they wouldn’t have had a whole lot for themselves, but at least they would have had enough to scrape by. The loaves and the fishes were their personal safety net. They didn’t think of them as what they had to meet the needs. They thought of them as what they needed for themselves.
What happens next is commonly described as a miracle. And I suppose it is. Once they have let go of it and let go of the idea that that was what would take care of them, the very small amount of resources that the leaders had set aside to take care of their own needs multiplies and grows to meet the needs of the many. I suppose that that qualifies as a miracle; at the very least it seems to defy the laws of physics. But the way the story is told, nobody appears to be showing off or trying to impress people with the miraculous provision. It just happens. The people sit down, the disciples bring them the food and everyone eats until they are satisfied. let go of it and let go of the idea that that would take care of them.st they would have had enough to scrape by. nd mbecause they were thinking teady e up teedy people, they just . Even when they went The miracle isn’t directed at the crowds. If anything it is directed at the disciples.
How do I know that? Because of what happens after everyone has had enough to eat. Everyone is sitting around, patting their stomachs, loosening their belts (because some of them had certainly had more to eat on this day than they had had in a very long time). The boss is just finished picking his teeth when he looks up and says, “Hey guys, some of the people out there seem to have had so much placed in front of them that they couldn’t even eat it all. Why doesn’t each one of you grab a basket and go around and pick up all the scraps and leftovers and bring them back here?
So all twelve church leaders get up, each takes a basket and goes out gathering. You should see the look on their faces when each one of them comes back with a basket brimming full of food. Yes, there are exactly twelve baskets stuffed full of loaves and fishes left over – no more and no less.
Don’t you try and tell me that that is just a coincidence. These twelve leaders are the very people who, back when this all started, conveniently forgot to mention that they were holding on to their own little store of loaves and fishes. What they had been storing up for themselves was hardly a massive feast. It would have looked like a meager meal indeed when stretched amongst them all, but maybe it would have been enough. Now, after collecting their baskets, they are looking sheepishly at each other knowing that they can eat all that they want and still have some left over.
That’s why I think what happens out there in the wilderness is really directed at them. Jesus isn’t trying to impress the crowds with some stunning miracle that will blow them all away. God providing for his people, that, as far as Jesus is concerned is what God does every day. That is why he teaches them to pray and say “give us, this day, our daily bread.” That God will feed the people of Galilee with the bread and fish of Galilee if they trust him for it is something Jesus takes for granted.
No, if Jesus pulled off a miracle for the sake of anybody, it was for the twelve disciples who clearly stand for the church – which means he did it for us, to teach us as a church. He did it to teach us that a church that is focussed on its own needs – that is obsessed with making sure that it has its own little safety net of five loaves and two fishes set up over here someplace so that it can feel safe and secure about its survival and will not risk what it has to do anything much more beyond survival – that church is the one that is in the biggest trouble. As he said elsewhere, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it.”
But at the same time Jesus was teaching that the church that sees what little it has and takes what little it has and risks it for the sake of genuine ministry directed towards real needs, that is the church that Jesus is excited about. “But those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33) Not only does Jesus seem to be suggesting that he will heap special blessing on such churches, this story seems to be suggesting that if a church gives itself away, spends all of those things that make itself feel secure in a quest to genuinely care for those most in need, somehow from the leftovers of that ministry, Jesus will provide twelve overflowing baskets of abundance of blessing for the church.
We are now at that time of the year when churches start to worry about meeting the budget and when we start thinking about the budget for the coming year and how that can possibly be balanced. The temptation at such times is always to focus on what we don’t have. The temptation is always to focus on the loaves and fishes that we have set aside hoping that they will make us secure. The temptation is to settle for mere survival. I pray that we don’t give into that temptation this year because Jesus seems to be giving us a choice. We can concentrate on making our few loaves and fishes stretch to meet our survival needs and maybe we’ll get by, or we can put the emphasis on mission and ministry and from the overflow and leftovers of that we can discover how many baskets of abundance Jesus offers to us.
Jeremiah 6:10-15, Matthew 10:34-39, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
W
e call Jesus the Prince of Peace. We love to tell the story about how, when he was born in Bethlehem, the angels sang that an era of peace on earth had dawned. And Jesus was the one who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” wasn’t he? I don’t know about you, but that is one of the key reasons why I am pleased to identify myself as a follower of Jesus. We need peace. The world needs peace. And on a day of Remembrance like this when we remember all of the carnage, all of the death and all of the grief of war, we particularly look for the healing power of peace. Indeed, no one craves peace more than veterans who remember war’s horrors all too well and soldiers on active duty. So I feel blessed indeed to be a follower of the Prince of Peace
But Jesus doesn’t seem to have always remained consistent on the topic of peace. There were days when he seemed to be no fan of it at all: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” he warned. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And he further promised that he would stir up trouble between all sorts of people: sons and fathers, daughters and mothers pretty much anyone else in any household.
Is it just me, or is there a certain inconsistency there? Either Jesus came to bring peace on earth or he came to banish it. You can’t have it both ways, but Jesus apparently thinks you can. It is, in fact, one of those contradictions in the Bible that I have wondered about the longest. Except it is not a contradiction – not really – it is more a matter of definition, of people using the same words in wildly varying ways.
Let me offer you a simple example of what I mean by talking about some contemporary events. Some of you may have heard of an American football player named Colin Kaepernick. If you have heard about him, you have likely also heard that he is the player who, a few years ago, was the first NFL player to take a knee during the singing of the national anthem. And he did it, he would tell you, for a very particular reason: to protest against the treatment of his people, Black Americans and other racial minorities, in American society. He was protesting the fact that black people are imprisoned at an extremely high rate for things like drug related crimes despite the fact that they actually use illicit drugs at the same rates as people in other communities. He was protesting numerous incidents when black men were killed by police when it was far from necessary.
What Kaepernick was asking for was a bit of justice and peace for minority people who looked like him. He was just trying to create some peace for a certain group of people for whom peace was lacking.
But what has been the response to his protest and to others who have joined in. As you may have heard that there have been a lot of negative reaction. And one of the most common negative reactions seems to have gone along the lines of, “Why, Colin Kaepernick, do you want to disturb my peace. I just want to go to a nice football game, to have a nice afternoon’s entertainment and I just want to be able to stand there and feel my heart swell with pride for my country which I love as I listen to the National Anthem. Why do you have to go and ruin my peace with your self-centred grievances?”
So you see it is quite possible that Kaeperneck’s quest for peace could totally disturb the peace of somebody else. And I think that Jesus could be saying something similar to that in our passage this morning. He is not denying that he has indeed come to bring peace on earth, he is just warning that the kind of peace he is bringing doesn’t necessarily look like peace to some people.
For most of us, when we ask for peace, what we are usually looking for is tranquility. We want calm waters and smooth sailing. We especially don’t want anyone causing any trouble. That is what it means when frazzled parents ask their children for a little bit of peace and quiet. That is what people often dream of at the end of a war. When we pray and ask God for peace, that is also often what we are looking for. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?
The quest for tranquility and calm waters, although understandable, has certainly taken us to some bad places. Over the last several weeks, we have heard a number of terrible accusations of sexual harassment, misconduct and even rape against high profile and powerful men in the entertainment industry, media, politics and other places. So many stories have surfaced and they are so terrible that it seems undeniable that there has been (and continues to be) an epidemic of abusive, powerful men in our society who have gotten away with it for a very long time.
But the obvious question is how – how is it that so many victims of so much abuse have been persuaded or forced to remain so silent for so long? That is a complex question with multiple answers, but one of the answers is definitely that our society often prioritizes peace over justice. Women who have experienced abuse have had it drilled into them that they must not disturb the waters or cause conflict by complaining or reporting. Peace in the workplace – and especially peace for powerful men – is considered to be more important than doing what is right for victims. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?
In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. went down to Birmingham, Alabama (in the heart of the most racially segregated part of the country) to lead some non-violence actions. While he was there, not surprisingly, he was arrested and thrown into the Birmingham City Jail where he remained for quite some time. While he was there, the clergy in the area – the white clergy – gathered and came up with a statement that they published. They declared that the Civil Rights Movement was seeking what was right – that it was working for racial justice. But they condemned the actions of King and the other leaders. They said that stirring up trouble and getting people upset was not the way to bring about the change that was needed.
Martin Luther King, as you might expect, disagreed. And from his jail cell he wrote a letter – famously known as the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It is a letter that I like to keep with me and take out and read from time to time because King had a way of putting his finger right on what the problem is with the wrong idea of peace. He wrote this, in part, “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
That is, I believe, a helpful way to think of the issue. There is such a thing as a negative peace which is all about the absence of things like tension, conflict and trouble. And I understand how attractive that kind of negative peace is. I also understand that we all need it sometimes because you cannot live in continual conflict. But Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the one whose advent offers peace on earth doesn’t promise you that kind of peace. Sometimes he will bless you with it and you can be grateful when it comes, but when a negative peace becomes your main goal, you become an obstacle to true peace. The white moderate Christians that King was talking about, by prioritizing order and a lack of conflict, were actually perpetuating the problems and injustices that would prevent genuine peace or what King calls positive peace.
Positive peace is the kind of peace that Jesus did come to bring on earth – peace with justice, peace that is the very presence of justice. That is actually a promise that is coded into that very angelic hymn that was sung at Jesus’ birth. When the angels sang about “Peace on earth to people of goodwill,” that phrase would have been very familiar to the shepherds and to anyone who heard the story.
“Peace on earth,” was a propaganda phrase that was used by Roman Emperors at that time – a phrase that has been found on countless monuments and inscriptions. One of the things that made the Emperor an emperor was the fact that he had brought about peace on earth. He had brought peace on earth through victory – by defeating all of his enemies so that there was nobody left to make war any more. It was a negative kind of peace – a peace that was created through the absence of conflict – but as far as the Romans were concerned, that was the only kind of peace that mattered and only the Emperor could bring it.
For the angels and the early Christians to just say that somebody other than Caesar had brought peace on earth was to defy the emperor. It was also to say that the emperor’s definition of peace on earth – a negative peace – was insufficient.
Remembrance Day is celebrated every year on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, because it was at that moment in time in 1918 that the First World War ended. Except it wasn’t called the First World War at the time. It was called the Great War and it was called the War to End all Wars. It was called that because victory in that war was supposed to bring a permanent peace. It was a peace through victory moment – a negative peace through an ongoing lack of conflict.
How did that turn out? Not so well. The peace that the victors imposed on Germany and its allies in the Treaty of Versailles did not have a whole lot in the way of justice going for it. Today it is generally agreed that the peace that was imposed in 1918 set Europe up for the terrible war that began twenty one years later.
We celebrate today and on this coming Saturday all of those who served and who fought in those conflicts and in too many others that have followed. Few of those people fought because they loved the conflict; they fought for the sake of peace and in the hope of peace. But I must ask what would truly honour their service and their sacrifice? I would suggest to you that what truly honours them is not simply a pursuit of negative peace. That is the temptation, of course. So many of us would settle for a mere absence of conflict – especially those who have gone through the horrors of war. But negative peace will never be a truly lasting peace.
That is why I believe that we must truly honour our veterans by choosing to dedicate ourselves to positive peace, the peace that can only come when justice reigns in this world. But if we are going to do that, we will have to take what Jesus says in our gospel reading this morning seriously. It means that we must not shy away from conflict or from uncomfortable situations when questions of justice and what is right are on the line. That does not mean that we should resort to violence, by the way (Jesus taught his disciples that committing violence can and should be avoided whenever possible) but it does mean a willingness to disturb the waters and maybe to make people feel uncomfortable.
Peace is a worthy goal – one of the things that this world needs most these days. But it is so very important and valuable that we must not settle for anything less than true positive peace and the road to get there may sometimes be rough indeed. God give us all the strength to stand up for justice and for what is right, as troubling and uncomfortable as that can be sometimes. That is how we will discover the fullness of the promise of the kingdom of God in this world here and now.
140CharacterSermon #Peace, according to #Jesus was not avoiding conflict. Sometimes working for peace with justice meant creating conflict.
lmost exactly five hundred years ago, on the last day of October in 1517, a young monk and doctor of theology took a piece of paper upon which had been printed 95 theses and he nailed it to the door of a church in Wittenberg. It was not, I want to be clear, an act of vandalism. Though Luther was angry about a few things that day, he was not taking out his anger on that door with a hammer.
It was actually quite an ordinary thing for a professor in his position to do. He had written down these 95 little ideas on one sheet of paper because he thought that they were provocative ideas. He didn’t necessarily think that people would agree with them – not all of them anyway – but he wanted people to discuss them together so that, out of the discussion, they might come to a better understanding of where the truth lay. Nailing the theses to door was simply the normal way of posting them in public. The church door was basically the sixteenth century version of Facebook.
But the banging of the hammer that nailed that document to the church’s door was loud – so loud that it has echoed down through the last five centuries. For the posting of that list of ideas did not lead to the civil discussion that Luther was looking for. It was the spark that ignited protestant reformations that would transform the spiritual landscape.
Today is actually a big deal in church history. It is the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And, in Protestant churches across the country and around the world, churches are celebrating, in particular, the unique contributions of Protestant Christianity. And there is no question that there is much that is worth celebrating. The Protestant reformers, starting with Luther, really did open up new possibilities for how we could think about and relate to God.
The reformers did that by declaring what are often called the Five Solas. (Sola is a Latin word that means alone – like when someone sings alone and we call it a solo.) By declaring these solas, the reformers were saying that we only really needed these five things in order to work out our salvation and our relationship with God. The five solas are: Sola Fide (by faith alone), Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone), Solus Christus (through Christ alone), Sola Gratia (by grace alone) and Soli Deo Gloria (which means glory to God alone).
These were wonderful and powerful ideas in their time especially because, in Luther’s day, the institution of the church as it existed then had been trying to control every aspect of the human relationship with God. The church had been teaching people that it’s traditions and authority were sufficient to fix our relationship with God and that you could even purchase the forgiveness of your sins with gifts of money. That was the thing that had made Luther particularly mad when he nailed up those 95 theses.
So the reformers came along and said no, you didn’t need to be dependent on the church and its traditions and officials; you really only needed five things. You could work out your relationship with faith alone, with scripture alone, through Christ alone, by grace alone and so that God alone should be glorified. That was a beautiful and liberating message and, as I said, it transformed the world.
I happen to believe that the message of grace was by far the most important part of that. They realized that it is pointless to try to please God with your good works or by being more righteous than anyone else. Nothing you could ever do could impress God after all. All you can do is receive God’s gracious gift of salvation, forgiveness and whatever you need most. You can never pay for it.
But I have a question. What is the best way to honour what those reformers did? Should we just take their lessons and wisdom and set them in stone? Should we just say that they figured it all out once and for all and we don’t have to think about any of it anymore? That can easily become the temptation on this 500th anniversary of the Reformation – to get frozen in what happened 500 years ago. But does that really honour Luther’s courage and the courage of the other reformers?
The Christian church is now about 2000 years old. And someone recently pointed out to me that in those 2000 years, the church has gone through three major shifts. The church began, after the time of Jesus, as a small movement that was at odds with the power structures of this world, especially the Roman Empire, but by about the year 500, it completed its first great transformation to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. That changed everything. Then, 500 hundred years after that, the church was shaken by a second great transformation as it split for the first time into two great churches, the Roman Catholic in the West and the Orthodox in the East. From there the two churches took two very different courses. In particular the western church gave ever more power to its hierarchy which led to a number of abuses which led, five hundred years after that, to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
Every five hundred years the Christian Church has gone through a major upheaval – a series of events that changed everything. It is consistent enough to make me think that there is a design to it all – to make me think that perhaps it is part of God’s plan. But, of course, you have realized the other question that such a history raises: what if, five hundred years after the Reformation, we are due? Is it possible that God is going to do something new in the church today? This is not to suggest for a moment that God is leading us to question or reject the wisdom that comes to us from the Reformation, but maybe we have gone somehow astray in how we have been living them out and God is getting ready to call on us to live out the gospel more authentically given the new challenges of the twenty first century.
I tend to think that that might be just the case. I see many indications that we are in a time of transition. For example, one of the developments that drove the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago was the invention of a new communication technology. You may have heard of it; it was called the printing press. It allowed for the ideas of the reformers to spread about at an unprecedented speed – so fast that the people who were invested in just maintaining things the same as they had always been could do nothing to stop it. Well, we are living in an age when new developments in communications are coming at us so quickly that almost nobody can keep up. Things are moving so quickly that the authorities – including church authorities – cannot manage the change.
So this looks like a time when God might be doing a new thing. But what new thing could God be doing? I don’t claim to know that for sure, but I wonder if God might not have sent us a messenger today. We had the great privilige and honour today to welcome Clara into the life of the church through baptism. We have admitted her into all of the fullness of what it means to be a Christian. But we have done that, as you may have noticed, without her really understanding what it means to be a Christian. We asked her some questions but she really couldn’t answer them. Her parents had to answer for her, as did we as her church family.
I believe that God has sent Clara to us to teach us about being a Christian in this present age. We believe and confess, as we have read, that we are saved by grace. That means that we believe that we are brought into the very presence of God (both now and for all eternity) not because we have done anything to deserve it but because of God’s kindness and love shown to us (particularly through what Jesus Christ did for us).
That is an essential part of the teaching of this church – of all Protestant churches – and one of our key inheritances from the Reformation that began five hundred years ago. But I suggest to you that we don’t really believe it. We don’t believe in salvation by grace because we constantly give into the temptation of adding conditions. We say, for example, that what we have done for Clara is not quite complete – that some day, when she is able to have some intellectual understanding of some of the things that we have said to her, she will have to make her own personal decision about whether or not she believes it. We suggest that her faith is not yet complete because she lacks in understanding.
But I suggest to you that, while she certainly will have to work out what she believes about many things for herself someday, none of that needs to limit the gift that God gives her today. Remember what Jesus said to his disciples when they wanted to prevent the little children from coming to him. He said, not merely that they could come to the kingdom of God but that the kingdom actually already belonged to them. Jesus believed that little children were actually more capable of the faith that gave them the kingdom than his disciples were. Maybe the disciples understood more, but Jesus knew that faith isn’t really about what you believe or understand, it is about who you trust and trust comes much more naturally to children than it does to us.
Ah, but you see, we Protestant Christians have this tendency to want to set up barriers. We are like the disciples in the story who “spoke sternly to those who brought” the children to Jesus. There are days when I really feel like there is a lot of stern speaking going on in the church. Anyone who disturbs your notion of what the church is supposed to be – who likes the wrong kinds of music, who doesn’t read the Bible in the same way that you do, who has a different understanding of how relationships are supposed to work – you speak sternly to them. Anyone who does something in a way that you think it is not supposed to be done, who makes the wrong noise at the wrong time, who leaves a mess behind them, you speak sternly to them. I’m sorry to say that I see it and hear about it all the time in the church. We may say that we are welcoming and loving, outwardly we may speak that way, but it is so easy to speak sternly to those others and it turns them off. Whenever we do it, we are forgetting the message of God’s grace.
So, I don’t know exactly what Reformation God may be aiming to start in the coming years. I am no Martin Luther and I don’t want to be one, but I can think of a few theses – a few ideas that it might be worth opening a discussion about. I don’t necessarily know what the answers are to these ideas are, but I also don’t know what new avenues for change might be opened up if we did boldly tackle these issues. So, in closing, I would propose a few theses for the church door in 2017.
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1.What if we actually took Jesus at his word and acted as if we believed that Clara and infants like her have a better grasp of what the kingdom of God is actually about than we do?
2.What if we didn’t speak sternly to children, or to anyone really, just because they had a different idea of what it means to live out their trust in Jesus than we do?
3.What if we believed in the grace of God so much that we actually treated everyone like a genuine sister or brother without regard to their ideas, their background, status, gender, sexual orientation or intellect.
4.What if we actually decided that the Good News about Jesus Christ and the people that that news is for were more important than keeping up the institutional traditions and trappings of the church?
I invite you to consider these four theses. (Nails the 4 Theses to the church door.)
Now, I don’t know if these are the right ideas to be debated. I don’t know if the debate will ever be held. But I do know this: sometime soon, God will take a few new ways at looking at questions similar to these and make a Reformation out of them. I also know that if you are more concerned for the state of an old church door than you are for the question to whom does the kingdom belong, your priorities might be out of whack.
