I have spent some time reflecting on the Lord's Prayer this week - especially the opening word in the original language: "Father" (because I'm working on a sermon for Father's Day).
Now, I am hardly what you would call a Greek scholar. What I learned in school is a bit rusty, but I was struck by some of the things that you see when you read it in the original language. The prayer, as it originally appears in the Gospel of Matthew is in Greek, although Jesus himself likely spoke Aramaic and would have prayed in that language.
The prayer, at least as it appears in Greek, has a poetic structure that is simply impossible to get across in an English translation. When you read it in the original, you see that most of the prayers and petitions are written in parallel phrases.
The first word is "Father." The second word is "of us." From there the prayer seems to bounce back and forth from the deeds of God to the needs of humanity - from the concerns of heaven to the concerns of earth.
The pattern is repeated too many times for it just to be an accident. I think that Jesus (or his Greek translator) wanted us to understand something from this structure. But unfortunately, we English readers can't see this structure. That is why I created this graphic which lays out the Lord's Prayer by maintaining (for the most part) the actual word order in the Greek.
Can you see the structure? What do you think we are supposed to learn from it?
There is one very big assumption that lies behind all of our religious and spiritual practices. It is an assumption that is so taken for granted that I think we almost forget that it’s there. The assumption is this: we assume that God exists out there somewhere.
It is an assumption that goes with the very idea of existence. Existence, as an idea, implies existence within a certain space. Now, of course, we may not know where that “somewhere” is in the case of God. We would actually resist being very specific about the place where God exists because we’re really not very sure about that.
People used to talk about God being “up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re as comfortable with that phrase anymore. People used to mean it literally. They actually imagined God as being right up there – just beyond the solid blue dome of the sky looking down upon us – but we got a little bit too sophisticated (what with things like space exploration and satellites and such) to think about it that way anymore. So we tend to be careful not to be too specific about where God is out there, but everything we do in our religion assumes that God is somewhere.
This assumption has driven most religious activities for millennia. The things that human beings do in our temples and our churches – rituals, sacrifices, hymns, prayers – have all been carefully designed to attract the attention of whatever deities people have worshipped and to persuade those gods to send their blessing, salvation and healing our way.
In ancient times this might have been something as simple as sending the smoke of your offering up into the sky as this giant beacon to attract God’s attention with both sight and smell. There are places in the Bible that talk about sacrifices in exactly those terms. As ancient societies developed, worship practices became more sophisticated. Some cultures developed musical and dance traditions. The Greeks invented theater which was, in its origins, a sacred practice that was meant to earn the favour of the gods with performances. In fact, most forms of art had their origins in the attempts of humans to get their gods to pay attention. It is one of the great contributions of religion to human culture. In fact, if religion never gave us anything more than the music of Mozart and the paintings of Da Vinci, that would be enough to say that the whole enterprise was worthwhile.
And then, of course, there are the prayers that are such an essential part of our spiritual and religious practices. Prayer is, generally, seen as a way of communicating with a God who exists somewhere out there. Somehow, it seems, God is out there monitoring the things that we say – especially when we take on certain religious postures or enter religious places. When you get on your knees and clasp your hands and bow your head, it is like you are putting out an antenna to better transmit your signal. When we enter together into a place like this and enter into prayer with one another, it is like we are entering into a broadcasting booth – into the heart of spiritual equipment that has been designed to boost and amplify signals by joining them all together.
Of course, one of the other things that we do to get God to notice us is the same kind of thing that we do in most any social situation. When you want to be noticed in your social group, what you usually try to do is make sure that you stand out from the group in some meaningful way. We try to be better or stronger or wittier or sometimes needier than everyone else and think that that will get us more attention. Sometimes it even works. When we apply that logic to our relations to a God who is somewhere else, people often try to get God’s attention by being better or more righteous or more pious than other people.
This is how it has always been – how religion has always worked. And it has always been based on that one key assumption that God exists out there somewhere and that we need to make contact with God. But what if that assumption – the one that all religion is built on – is false?
I know what you’re thinking: that’s blasphemy. That is a denial of God because if God doesn’t exist somewhere then God doesn’t exist at all and that is atheism.
Well, if that is what atheism is, then it might just make Jesus an atheist. Now, of course, Jesus believed in God – he talked about God and trusting in God all the time. But Jesus certainly had some very interesting ideas about how we were supposed to connect with that God. In particular he had some very strong ideas about religious practices and especially about prayer.
Jesus taught his disciples, “whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” Now, part of what Jesus is saying there is that he really has no patience with people who use external displays of religiosity and piety as a way to advance themselves and their standing within the community. This kind of thing was very common in Jesus’ time and he absolutely found it annoying and hypocritical.
But there is something more in this teaching of Jesus than just a disdain of hypocrisy. I mean, yes, Jesus dislikes how people are more interested in impressing other people than they are in connecting with God, but he seems to be equally concerned that the God that they are looking to connect with is not where they think God is. God is not out there but rather in here. God is not in public but rather in secret. So Jesus goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
The God that Jesus is talking about here is completely different from the general concept of God that is and has been common throughout most of human history. Now, that is not to say that Jesus is the first or indeed the only one to conceive of God this way. The God that Jesus is talking about is the same God who is described in the Psalm that we read this morning. In it the Psalmist fantasizes about going somewhere to escape the presence of God and discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that there isn’t any such place: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”
What he is describing here are the limits of the entire universe as they were understood at that time. They saw everything that existed as a three-tiered universe – like a three layer cake with heaven on top, the earth in the middle and Sheol or the place of the dead underneath. They thought that the universe began in the place where the sun rose in the morning in the east and ended where it went down in the sea to the west. So the author is imagining an impossible journey to the extreme limits of the universe as he sees it.
If we were to map what this Psalm is saying onto our modern understanding of the limits of the universe we would have to say something like, “If I descend into the black hole that is at the centre of the Milky Way you are there; if I travel to the edge of the galaxy at the farthest end of the universe, you are there. If I travel back in time to the moment of the Big Bang or move ahead to watch the last light in the universe go out, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” The picture is very clearly of a God who is present in every conceivable corner, and a number of inconceivable corners, of the known and unknown universe.
Think of it this way: God is not merely a being who exists somewhere. God is being itself. Even better, God is the source of all being – the very foundation of all existence.
So the notion that God, rather than merely being someplace, is actually everyplace is certainly older than the time of Jesus. But it seems to me that Jesus, displaying a unique understanding of the true nature of God, finally explained to us the true implications of such a concept of God.
Jesus is explaining in this passage that communication with the divine is simply not what we have always assumed. Most especially, it is not communication with some external being who communicates with us from a distance. The God we worship doesn’t need our religious practices and prayers in the traditional way that we have thought of them because God is not at a distance from us.
So Jesus rightly says that when you have a need or a request or a concern, you don’t need to tell God about it because God isn’t someplace else looking on while you try and explain to him what you need. If God is to be found everywhere, then God is to be found within you. In fact, Jesus is saying, God already knows what you need and what is really bothering you far better than you do.
Of course, you may ask, if God is really that present within you, then why pray at all? That is a very good question. The fact of the matter is that God doesn’t need our prayers. For that matter, God doesn’t need any of our religion. Does God need our praise? Does God need us to say, “How great thou art?” Of course not, God already knows how great God art. God doesn’t need any of it. So why do we do it? We do it because we need it – in fact, we need it desperately.
We need to pray, not to fill God in on what is going on, but because we need to verbalize the things that we struggle with. We need to come to terms with them so that healing can begin. And sometimes, when we don’t have the words for what we need and all we can do is groan in our pain or grief, we need to do that. But God is not some distant and detached observer as we do that. When we are in that prayer, God enters into the words or the griefs or the feelings with us. That’s what Paul means when he writes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
So more than anything, prayer, like many of the spiritual or religious practices that we engage in, is about opening ourselves up to the God who is already present with us in our longings, fears and woundedness. It is about making ourselves aware that we are not alone in what we face.
I do believe that God hears and answers our prayers. I do believe that God does heal us when healing is what we need (though, of course, healing can take many forms and we may not always get the kind of healing that we think that we need). But what I don’t believe is that God does any of this as some external being who is separated from us by time and space. God is not some being hanging around on some cloud somewhere who occasionally tunes into our prayers and, when he feels like it, decides to send some miracle in our direction. That is not the God that Jesus believed in. That is not the God that Paul worshipped. Nor is it the God that the writer of Psalm 139 discovered to his amazement.
But it is the God that most human beings throughout most of human history have imagined themselves dealing with. I think that we are increasingly finding ourselves in an age, however, where such a concept of God will no longer work for many people.
But that is okay, because we can see God in a radically different way – the way that Jesus actually spoke of his father in heaven. We have a God who doesn’t need to exist in any particular place – a God who we can just know is with us. That was all that ever really mattered.
Let this concept of God challenge the way that you pray and transform the ways that you practice your spirituality. Let it set you free. I know many people who tell me that they are afraid to pray or to try out other spiritual practices such as meditation or contemplation because they are worried that they will not do it right. Be reassured that there is no right way of doing such things because God is not watching you from some distance judging the quality of your prayers. God is within you participating in your prayers and that is what makes them worthy.
#TodaysTweetableTruth God's not out there someplace. God's with us & that should transform our prayers, faith & all our spiritual practices.
John 17:1-4, 20-24, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Philippians 2:1-11
I
f you are ever invited to a Greek wedding, you ought to expect that a number of great things are about to happen to you. You can be sure that you are going to have a great time. You can be sure that there’s going to be excellent food and excellent wine and probably healthy servings of Uzo. There will be people yelling “Opa!” and (warning) some dishes may be broken. But, best of all, you can also be sure that, somewhere in among the celebration, the music will start and people will stand up and form a circle and begin to dance.
The circle dance has been a part of Greek culture for a very long time. It is almost something that is programmed into the people themselves. A celebration, for them, is just not complete until at least three people (it cannot be done with two) have stood in a circle and danced around each other, in and out, in a constantly changing circle. They do the intricate steps, move in and out, under and over. The dancers begin to move faster and faster in perfect harmony until it is like the individuals fade away and it seems that all you can see is the blur of movement that makes up the whole. No one knows how old the circle dance is, but we can be pretty sure that it is at least as old as the Cappadocian Fathers.
The Cappadocian Fathers were three important church theologians who lived in the middle of the late fourth century of the common era in Cappadocia – a region in the centre of modern Turkey. Their names, just in case you want to find them in your great Christian theologian trading cards collection, are Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. And it is important to note one other thing about these three learned men: they may have lived in the territory we call Turkey, but they were ethnically and culturally Greek. This is actually quite important as you will see.
The really hot topic, in the days of the Cappadocian Fathers, was the trinity. The puzzle was basically this: Jesus and the New Testament writers had described their experience of God in a surprising and unprecedented way. Though they had experienced the unity of God – had known that God was one – they had specifically experienced God in three distinct ways: as God the Father and Creator, as God the Son and Redeemer and as God the Spirit and Sustainer. Though the Bible never actually says, not in so many words, that God is three in one and one in three, some sort of Trinitarian formulation was really the only way to make sense of what the Bible did say about God.
So, by the time the Cappadocian Fathers came along, the basic Trinitarian notion of God – one God experienced as Father, Son and Holy Spirit had been pretty well established. What the Cappadocians were trying to do was wrap their minds around how the various persons of the trinity related to each other and to us human beings. They were wise enough to realize that their poor human words could never precisely describe the functioning of the divine. What they did feel that they could do, however, was find a metaphor. They could paint some sort of picture and say, well, God is something like this.
And they did come up with a metaphor. They said that God was a perichoresis. Perichoresis is a Greek word that means rotation. And, if you listen to the way that these men described God as a rotation (and you remember that they were Greek) it becomes clear that the specific kind of rotation they were thinking of was a circle dance.
Now, let me ask you, when you hear me (or someone else) say or do something “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” what sort of picture does that draw in your imagination? I’ll bet that, for most of you, if you were forced to draw a picture of that formulation, you would come up with some sort of image of three static figures – perhaps an old man with a beard, a younger man who looks something like Jesus and some sort of a ghost or perhaps a dove to represent the Spirit.
That is what we tend to do when talking about the trinity. We imagine three distinct persons and then we try to find a way to blend them together. I’ve heard people talk about how one individual may play different roles in their life. One woman, for example, can be a mother in one part of her life, a daughter in another and a sister in another. I’ve heard people talk about the three parts of an egg – the yolk, the white and the shell. These are all attempts to wrap our human minds around a concept of the divine that cannot be understood with the human mind. They are metaphors that can be sometimes helpful to us in our understanding and imaginations and that can sometimes be very unhelpful.
Imagining God as a circle dance is, in essence, just one more metaphor among many others, but this metaphor may be more helpful than some of the others. While most of the other ways we imagine the trinity seem to be static, the image of a dance is all about movement. After all, if you put three people together in the centre of a dance floor and they just stand there – if they do not dance – they remain separate beings. But if they start to move in concert with each other, you suddenly have something new on that dance floor: you have the dance. And when you put some really good dancers together, they can produce something that is better and greater and more beautiful than anything that the individual dancers could ever do on their own. The wholeof the dance is greater than the sum of its individual parts: the dancers.
So imagine God this way. God is what is present when the individual members of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) start to dance together. God, as such, does not have any existence apart from the dance, nor does God need to exist apart from the dance because it has been ongoing from before the very beginning of creation and it will never end.
You can also understand just about everything that the Bible tells us about God or the persons of the trinity as movements in a great cosmic dance. We hear of God the Father who creates, chooses, blesses, judges and sometimes punishes. These are all steps in a dance towards and away from humanity and this world and its issues.
We read about God the Son who is begotten of the Father, who, in our reading from the Gospel this morning is sent into this world, who in the Letter to the Philippians, empties himself, takes on the form of slave and becomes fully human. We have his death, resurrection and ultimate exaltation at the right hand of God. These are all steps in and out and around humanity and ultimately encompassing the whole of creation.
The movements of the Holy Spirit, though not particularly featured in our readings this morning, may also be seen in terms of dance steps. From the movement of the Spirit over the face of the waters at the very beginning of creation to the descending like a dove upon Jesus at the time of his baptism to the Spirit coming like tongues of fire upon the church at Pentecost and working and moving within believers everywhere bringing us together and making us one, God’s Holy Spirit is found dancing among us, in us and through us.
Now every dancer in this great circle dance of the trinity has his own steps and her own movements. (Gender, by the way, really doesn’t matter very much when you are discussing matters of the nature of God. Gender is a human construct.) But here is why it matters that you think of the trinity as a circle dance. Each movement alone is really nothing without the coordinated movement of the others. Only when they move in concert with each other does any of it make any sense. So it is with the trinity. None of the actions of God throughout the history of the world make any sense unless you see them within the internal relationship of the dancers of the trinity.
So when, for example, Jesus talks about his own relationship with God to his disciples in the Gospel of John – when he talks about the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son – we see that the dance between the Father and the Son is so intricate that you can scarcely define the one without reference to the other. “Father,” Jesus says, “the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” It is like the glory of the one cannot exist without the glory of the other. They are in continual exchange of glory, love and grace within that unbroken dance. This, above all is what makes them who they are.
Jesus goes on to say, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This stresses the unity, the oneness of God but, interestingly, it seems to be a oneness that we are only able to know because of a dance move where the Father sends the Son away. A movement of sending the Son away from the Father would seem, you would think, to separate, not unite, the deity, but here we are told that it actually reinforces the unity of God. That is because the sending is a move in the great dance – a move towards humanity which is the most important movement of all.
But that is not the most interesting thing about all this that I see as I read this prayer of Jesus, who is praying for the church in the Gospel of John. Jesus repeats over and over again that God is one in this passage. But he also makes it clear that this unity of God is not exclusive to God. In fact, practically every time that Jesus refers to the oneness of God, he also seems to pivot that immediately to speak of our unity as the church.
For example, Jesus says, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. “ He is saying that the ultimate proof of the oneness of God is not to be found in theological discussion or intellectual speculation about the nature of God, but rather in our own personal experience of unity in the church. If we are one with each other, that is the only thing that can give us a glimpse of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In other words, if the trinity is a circle dance it is the kind of circle dance that you do not understand and you are not meant to experience as a spectator. In order to get the concept of God that is presented in this image, you have to get up on your metaphorical feet and enter the dance for yourself. It is the practical things that we do for one another to support and help each other that allows us to even get a sense of how God operates as one.
All of our attempts to intellectually understand and explain the nature and the internal relationship of the trinity will fail. We cannot describe it or explain it. Our human brains are not big enough to comprehend it. Our human language has not the words to express it. But we can experience it. We can experience it by choosing to care for one another, learn from one another and accept one another despite all of our differences and all of the things that could divide us. Do that, and you enter the dance together with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and once you are in the dance, you don’t need to explain these things because you are part of them and they are part of you.
So if you want to understand the nature of the trinity, don’t try and reduce it to words and explanations. That will always fall far short. Get on with the hard work of caring for one another and loving one another.
I think the Cappadocian Fathers may have been onto something when they chose to describe God as a circle dance. Of course, it was a radically different way of understanding God from what anyone had ever said before. Some found it so strange that they would accuse the Christians of being atheists because their concept of God was so different from what anyone had ever thought of before. Did the Cappadocian Fathers care about that? No, somehow I think that they were far too busy dancing with the divine.
#TodaysTweetableTruth 1 image that helps describe the trinity is a circle dance, an image you can grasp by entering into that dance yourself
About a year and a half ago, my doctor suggested to me (rather firmly) that I really needed to lose some weight. I fortunately took his advice seriously and decided to make some changes in my lifestyle. One of the key changes that I made was to become much more active. The activity that suited me best and that gave me the most pleasure was walking. I bought a step tracker and over time set a goal of walking about fourteen and a half kilometers a day.
I have greatly enjoyed it and feel much better and healthier overall. But I might not have stuck to it as well as I have if had not had something to stimulate my mind while I was exercising my body.
Walking with other people has its own rewards, of course and I love those times. But I also look forward to those times when I am walking alone because I tend to listen to podcasts.
I was realizing the other day that these podcasts I have been listening to pretty much every day have been an extraordinary blessing to me. They have helped me to grow and learn. They have made me laugh and cry. Sometimes, when I am walking, it is like I have an intravenous hooked to my ears and it is feeding me a constant drip of wisdom, hope and new perspectives. I have grown to love my podcasts.
I do have one problem, though. I listen to them so often that I run out of fresh podcasts on a regular basis and end up going through old reruns. So I thought I would take the opportunity to share the podcasts that have been a particular blessing to me with my friends so they might have the chance to try them out. I'm also selfishly hoping that others will take the opportunity to share their favourites with me so that I might find some new ones to love.
Here are the podcasts that have been a consistent blessing to me. I know that many of them are already well known and popular, but that doesn't mean that everyone has heard of them. I myself hadn't heard of some of the best known until recently. Hope that they might be the blessing to you that they have been to me:
This trio of podcasts is always interesting, engaging and challenging. Canadaland exists primarily to engage critically with Canadian media and often has very important comments to make on how our media works (and fails to work) in this country. It also generally helps to keep me informed of what is going on in our country and what the challenges and needs of the day are. Sadly, I often don't seem to get this awareness from anyplace else.
The Liturgists Podcast
The Liturgists do very good work raising and discussing issues in progressive Christianity. They will push you to think about your Christian faith in new and challenging ways. Some of their episodes on topics like LGBTQ issues and Racism have been extremely moving and uplifting.
Ask Science Mike
Science Mike (Mike McHarge) is one of the liturgists on the Liturgists Podcast and I enjoyed his wisdom for the longest time before I realized that he had his own podcast where he answers people's questions on science, faith and life. He has a marvelous perspective as a science geek who has a very thorough understanding of things like physics, neurology and sociology. He started out as a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church, when through a time as an atheist before returning to faith as a sort of a post-orthodox Christian mystic. All I can say is that it all make for very interesting podcast episodes.
The Robcast
I am assuming that Rob Bell's Robcast is the best known of all the podcasts mentioned here so I probably don't need to say too much about it. Let me just say that I haven't enjoyed all of the episodes I've listened to, but the ones that I just loved have been so amazing that they would make up for listening to many many hours of less inspiring stuff.
History in the Bible Podcast
Okay, I just love how Garry Stevens says, "All the history in all the books in all the Bibles." He is mostly just running through the narratives of the Hebrew Bible - retelling the story in ways I can relate to. It is helpful because he will often remind me of something in those narratives that I have missed or forgotten. From time to time he will launch into an explanation of the critical work that has been done on the Bible from a scholarly point of view. A lot of this is what I learned in my studies, of course, but I never mind the review and, often enough, I learn something that I missed or have forgotten.
The Memory Palace
Nobody but nobody can tell a story from history better than Nate DiMeo. I mostly listen because I'd love to be able to learn to tell a story like him.
So there they are, the podcasts that have most helped me to learn and grow over the last year or so. I am so thankful for the work that these people do and how they make it available to everyone to just download and listen.
So what are yours? What do you listen to and how have they changed your life?
f you were to ask me the question, “Do you believe in God? I would answer that question without a moment of hesitation: “Do I believe in God?Yes, of course I believe in God.” In fact, that is kind of the obvious answer for someone in my position to give. It is an answer so obvious that, in general, nobody would even bother to ask the question.
In fact, being a Christian is one of the things that offers me continual assurance that, yes, there is a God because, you know, sometimes I look around at the world and I see everything that goes wrong and it does make me wonder. When I do start to wonder like that, the thing that often reassures me that there is a God who exists and cares is what I have heard and learned from Jesus.
That is why I was surprised to learn recently that one of the really big problems that ancient pagans had with Christians back in the bad old days of the Roman Empire was that they considered us to be atheists.
I mean, you could say a lot of bad things about Christians. We have our flaws and shortcomings and failures. But not believing in God? I wouldn’t call that one of them.
So I’ve thought about that accusation over the last little while. I’ve thought about it a lot. Why would pagan Romans accuse Christians of being atheists? And I get, of course, that the pagans were a bit upset that the Christians wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of their gods. But this was about more than just a question of Christians refusing to recognize Jupiter or Mars or Mercury. To tell the truth, the traditional Roman religions had been on the decline for years before the Christians ever showed up on the scene.
No, this wasn’t just about protecting the status or worship of any particular gods. This was about the Christians challenging the very concept of divinity that the Greco-Roman world had. The problem was that the Christians were a-theists. The problem was that they did not believe in theos, which was the Greek word for the concept of divinity.
And, you know what, in that sense, I think that the critics of Christianity may have been right. Starting with the very words of Jesus and continuing through the life of the early church, the Christians had ways of talking about and interacting with God that totally blew that Greek concept away. If you listened – I mean really listened – to Jesus and his disciples you simply would not have been able to conceive of God in the same way again.
Think, for example, of the way that Jesus speaks of God in our reading this morning from the Gospel of John. Jesus is engaged in a conversation with a Samaritan woman about matters of religion. Jesus has just said something to her that has made her realize that she is not just talking to an ordinary person – that he can somehow speak for God. And her immediate response is to ask him a religious question: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but [Jews like] you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
The question she is asking is a theistic question. It is the kind of question that Romans might ask about their gods. Where is the best place to worship Jupiter, they might ask. The name of the god might be different but the concern is exactly the same. There are all kinds of assumptions behind a question like that. She is assuming that God requires a certain sort of worship from us. She is assuming that place matters when it comes to such worship. Even more important, she is assuming that worship, properly done in proper places, will influence God to act in certain ways.
And everyone in that world at that time would have expected Jesus to jump into that argument and explain to the woman exactly why it was right and good to worship God only in a particular place – in the temple in Jerusalem. Because if anybody in that world knew anything about gods (and this includes both Jews and Gentiles) they knew that it was vastly important that you access those gods in the right ways and in the right places.
But, while Jesus does acknowledge that, historically speaking, Jerusalem is the place for accessing God, he also says that that is no longer true now. In fact, he announces a brand new insight into the nature of God: “God is spirit,” he says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And there, right there, you have one good explanation for why people accused Jesus’ followers of being atheists.
You see, the whole development of religion is one of the ways in humans have always dealt with the basic fears that come with life in this very unpredictable world. I mean, who can stand going through this world and just not knowing what terrible thing might happen next? Sickness and disease, war and pestilence, accidents and all kinds of other terrible things that can go wrong seem to shadow our every moment of existence as human beings on this planet. And, most terrifying of all, so much of it seems to happen for no apparent reason.
And so people looked to their gods to explain these things and especially to find a way to control all of the terrible and frightening things that seem to happen in this world. Religion developed as a way to control the things that happen to us by controlling the gods who make these things happen. Holy sites were chosen, temples were built and priests are consecrated to manage all of the ways that the gods were manipulated with rituals and sacrifices to influence them and make things happen in certain ways. I think that this is true of any religion including Judaism and even Christianity in many of its forms.
But when Jesus declared that it didn’t really matter where you worship God – whether in Jerusalem or Samaria – because God was spirit, he was really declaring but he didn’t believe in that kind of God – the kind of God who could be manipulated with our religion.
And, it must be said, that this was a very dangerous thing for him to say because what was at stake was not only the question of where one might worship God. Religion, in all of its forms, has built up these complex power structures over the centuries. If the priests and religious leaders are able to manipulate the gods and so control the terrible things that may happen in this world, then they are extraordinarily powerful and they can use that power as leverage in other areas of life. That’s how religion becomes a powerful tool for manipulating whole populations and for amassing great wealth, which is what it has been for much of human history.
But Jesus, with one short phrase, “God is Spirit,”throws all of that carefully developed power structure to the wind. And I almost mean that literally. There was just one word – both in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke and in the Greek language of the gospel – one word that was used to speak of both spirit and wind. Pneuma, in Greek, is a word that mean both spirit and wind. Ruach, in Hebrew also means both spirit and wind. So when Jesus calls God spirit he is also calling God wind and, as Jesus says elsewhere in this same gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Jesus was saying that, if God is spirit, then God is about as easy to nail down and control as the wind. And I realize that we, as modern people do have a better understanding of where the wind comes from and where it goes, than did the people of Jesus’ time. We know about atmospheric pressures and air currents and how they can influence and change the flows of the wind. But all our knowledge has not brought us to the place where we can make it blow when, where and as hard as we want it to. If we could do that, we would have shut down the fire in Fort McMurray so easily, but we can’t. If the goal of our relgion is to bring God under our control and get him to behave and make life play out as we want, we will be sorely disappointed.
Religion has always had one other goal other than the controlling of the gods. It has also been very useful (especially for those who are most powerful in society) as a way to control populations. Religion has been used to make people to behave in certain ways, to make sure that they don’t ask for too much in the way of change or reform. The fear of the gods and the promise of the religious power structure to control the divine powers in this world has been used to impose laws and standards of behaviour on people and to teach them that they must tolerate the present structures of the world rather than to ask for change.
This power too is destroyed by that one simple phrase, “God is spirit.” We see that in our reading from the letter of Paul to the church in Galatia where Paul writes, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” If God is spirit then God is not outside of you telling you through laws and words and scriptures how you ought to behave, God is within you prompting your behaviour in quite unpredictable ways.
Now it must be said that the Christian church has had a troubled history with that declaration of the absolute freedom of believers that is proclaimed in passages like this one. The church has sought to govern over the actions and even the thoughts of its people through laws and rules and power structures, but the original declaraton of your freedom remains there in the scriptures and so, I pray, it will never be forgotten by God’s people.
So, with just three words, “God is spirit,” Jesus really does do a lot to destroy the traditional ways in which people have imagined God and how they have tended to work out their relationshiop with God. It is, I believe, one reason why, in those early centuries, people saw how the Christians lived and declared that they were dangerous atheists – people who did not believe in God in the ways you were supposed to believe in God.
Now, it is it is important to note that Jesus, in saying such things, is not throwing us into the chaos of a Godless world where anything could go wrong at any moment and nothing has any meaning. Jesus does still believe in God, and the God that he does believe in is clearly a God who is extraordinarily gracious and kind and caring. It is a God who he speaks of, above all, as Abba – a word that we will examine in more detail in several weeks. So clearly, it is not Jesus’ intention to leave us with the impression that we are stuck going through life in a dangerous universe where anything can go wrong and nothing ever makes any sense. There is a God and we can trust that God is gracious. It is just that we cannot expect to control that God through our religious practices. We do those things for different reasons.
In the same way, Paul insists, our freedom from the obligation to follow the law does not make us immoral and dangerous people who will inevitably degenerate into the worse excesses of behaviour. He insists that God, as spirit within us, prompts us to the highest of impulses, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
So do not be afraid of those three words, “God is spirit,” and where they will lead us. But they definitely disturb the ways in which the world has learned to think about God. I think it was one of the things that led to that anti-Christian accusation of atheist. Though Jesus seems to have been clear on this matter, it seems that the church has long struggled with such a view of God. It seems to be easier to fall into the old ways of thinking about and relating to God. All it seems to cost us is our freedom – our freedom from law and from fear.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get so hung up on the radical ways in which Jesus spoke about God that it would transform us? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the outside world looked at us and said, “I’ve never seen a people who believed in a God like that! Doesn’t remind me of any God I’ve ever heard of.” And then, maybe, they would ask to learn more about the God that we worship.
#TodaysTweetableTruth #Jesus said God=Spirit, presenting view of God so new it seemed atheistic. What if we had such a radical view of God?
hen I was a student studying at Presbyterian College in Montreal, I was given an extraordinary opportunity – an opportunity that few students for the ministry are afforded these days. There was a small church in the city of Laval, just across the bridge north of Montreal, called Northlea United Church. It was a church that was struggling as an English church in what had once been, but was no longer, a fairly strong English community.
The church needed a minister to care for them but couldn’t afford fulltime ministry. A student seemed like an excellent option for them, but the United Church, as a matter of policy, wouldn’t allow their ministry students to minister in that way. The Presbyterian College didn’t mind if their married students (I don’t know why, but you had to be married) did take a pastoral charge while studying, but there were no Presbyterian congregations in need of a student minister. So, when I (a married student) came along, I was asked, “Say, would you like a job preaching to and taking care of a little United Church in Laval for a bit of money and a manse to live in,” I jumped at the chance.
It worked out beautifully and not just for the obvious financial reasons. I still believe that that church taught me at least as much about being a minister as the college did. I had this wonderful place where I could take the things that I was learning in classes and apply them to the real life of the church while I was learning them. I had this place where I could go and make mistakes and get things wrong – and yes, I made lots of mistakes and got lots of things wrong – and the people still loved me and we worked through any of the ensuing problems together.
When I finally finished my studies and was ready to move on to my next steps as an ordained minister in a Presbyterian Church, the people of Northlea threw us a party. They gave thanks for all that they had shared with us. They gave us their blessing and promised to pray for us. And they gave me a gift: this preaching gown.
I have carried this gown with me ever since and worn it a lot. It has seen a lot of joyous occasions and more than its share of bad ones. It almost didn’t make it. Once, several years ago, I was wearing it at the end of a service following a baptism. I had carried a lit candle out of the service, put down the candle and then turned around and just happened to lean a little bit too far back. But, with a few minor repairs, the gown made it through. I am glad to still have it and still wear it from time to time. I reminds me of some of the really important and meaningful things I learned from and shared with the people of Northlea United Church in Laval. In many ways, they are still a part of everything that I do as a minister.
When, a little while later, I was ordained in my first charge, I received another item of clothing. This stole (designed to go nicely with my robe) was presented to me by my mother. Not only was it presented by her, it was made by her and by my three sisters each one of whom took her turn with the stitching. When I wear it, it reminds me that so much of what I bring to the work that I do is what I bring from my family who did so much to form me and build me up.
And then, a few years ago, as you all know, there was someone who I thought of as both a friend and a mentor. His name was the Rev. Ruggles Constant. When I first arrived here in Hespeler as a minister, Ruggles was dealing with many health issues and was quite limited in what he could do, but he certainly went out of his way to support me and to pass on some of his wisdom and experience in really helpful ways. When he passed away two years ago, I was honoured when he asked me to preach at his funeral and a little puzzled when he told me that I was to preach on the topic of the full armour of God – the passage we read this morning from the New Testament.
Ruggles’ daughter, Stephanie, did two wonderful things for me. She told me that her father had been kidding and I could preach on whatever I thought was best and she gave me Ruggles’ gown. When I have worn it since, I have been greatly comforted to know that Ruggles continues to be with me.
And then there is this stole given to me by someone in this congregation. Another supporting friend and, in her own way, a mentor.
This is, for me, a very special wardrobe that I carry with me. I’m sure that you understand that, for me, the value of this wardrobe is much more than just the value of the textiles.
When I came to this morning’s reading from 1 Samuel, this wardrobe was what came to my mind. In this passage we find ourselves in the middle of the tumultuous times of King Saul, first king of Israel. Saul came to be king in a time of great danger, when the people of Israel faced their greatest threat to date in the form of a very frightening enemy called the Philistines. Better equipped and better organized, the Philistines threatened to wipe the Israelites from the face of the earth. And Saul was able to do what nobody had been able to do before and created an army that could fight back against the Philistines in a disciplined and organized way.
Saul’s success was perhaps limited. It was not as if he made the threat go away, but he was able to organize a real resistance – more sustained victory than anyone, even Samson, had been able to do. Saul did slay his thousands of enemies. And his son, Jonathan, to whom he hoped to pass the kingdom someday, also became a great warrior. Everything was, well, maybe not perfect but as good as it had ever been.
And then David came along. And it wasn’t as if David was perfect; he clearly had his flaws. But he definitely was someone who had potential. He was a leader like few others had ever been. And both Saul and Jonathan seem to have recognized that immediately.
Saul saw David’s ability as a threat. Here was the man who was potentially a better war leader than Saul had ever been – who could lead men to attack and kill tens of thousands where before Saul had merely slaughtered thousands. Someone like that could get good enough to take over the kingdom from him. So Saul began to plot to bring David down.
But Jonathan, Saul’s son, seeing the exact same potential in David, had the exact opposite reaction. Of course, David was just as much a threat to Jonathan and his future as king as he was to his father. But rather than responding with fear or with that common response of wanting to put someone else down in order to bring yourself up, Jonathan was able to respond with grace.
And that is what it means when he takes off his armour and sword and arms and even his very robe and gives it all to David. In essence Jonathan is taking everything that he has built up for himself up until that point in his life – his reputation as a warrior and a leader, his skill and training, his status and making a gift of it to David. David hasn’t earned any of this yet. Yes, he did bring down Goliath with one well-placed stone, but that could have been a lucky shot. There is a great distance between that and being a great leader of men. But Jonathan’s gift opened up all of those possibilities and closed off the likelier possibility that David would have just ended up a forgotten footnote to history.
Jonathan’s gift leads me to think in two particular directions. As I have already said, it makes me think of all of those people who, in their own ways, gave of themselves so that I might become the person that God was calling me to be. It is Mother’s Day, of course, so I cannot help but think of my own mother. It is Christian Family Sunday so I cannot help but think of all of the ways in which my family nurtured me, taught me and even sacrificed of themselves for my sake. And, of course, it is not just family who do that for us, though they often do it in the most enduring way.
Families, by the way, are also so influential on our development that they can do the most damage to us when they let us down and they can put wounds in us that we end up carrying for the rest of our lives. So if you are able to remember all that you received from your family and you find that you have been blessed by them and sent on your way through this life in a positive way, you have been, in fact, extraordinarily blessed – more so than many if not most of the people in the world today. Your first application of this story, therefore, is to remember your mother and your family and give thanks to God for all that they have been to you.
On this Mother’s Day and Christian Family Sunday, if it is possible for you to do so, take the opportunity to thank your mother and those other people in your family for all of those sacrificial ways in which they acted to make you who you are.
And after your family, remember the others who invested in you – all those who, like Jonathan, took the wisdom and honour and standing that they had built up and were willing to invest some of it in you. Every single one of you has had people like that. Do you realize what an incredible gift that was? I know that I could not be who I am today without the people of Northlea United, without my teachers and mentors, without the influence of incredibly wise and gifted men and women like a certain Ruggles Constant. On this day, if it is still possible for you to do so, would it not be good for you to do whatever you could to show your gratitude to those people in your life.
But that is not the truly exciting thing about this story of David and Jonathan. The blessing in this story is that we sometimes get to be David and have other people build into our lives. The exciting opportunity about this story is that we also get to be Jonathan and to build into the lives of others. Every person here has the opportunity to do that. It may be someone in your family – a child, a grandchild, a niece or nephew. It may be some associate, someone in your social group. It most certainly could be someone in this congregation – a young person perhaps or someone somewhere on the fringes of this congregation – but I assure you that, if you look around, God is placing those opportunities to invest the human capital that you have built up into someone in your path.
You may ask why you should do that – why you should be willing to give of yourself or sacrifice of yourself for the sake of another. I will admit that it is something that seems not to make much sense according to the way of thinking of this world. This world is mostly interested in Saul’s approach – is much more inclined to want to keep others down in order to protect its own interests. I’ll be honest, this is an approach that I have even seen too often in the church. No sooner does someone start to accomplish something and build a worthwhile ministry or outreach than other people start to tear them down, criticize them and otherwise make sure that they don’t get too big for their britches.
The world may favour Saul’s approach, but God favours Jonathan’s. When you choose to invest yourself in others for the sake of the kingdom of God, God will bless that and bring amazing things out of it. The greatness in Jonathan, because of his choice to share it graciously with David, became something that endured long beyond Jonathan’s life. It continued through the kingdom that David built and the dynasty that he founded. It continued and continues still through his distant descendant, Jesus the Christ. That opportunity to do something important, significant and lasting is God’s gift to you.
#TodaysTweetableTruth You can be a Saul and put others down to lift up yourself up or you can be a Jonathan and invest your life in a David.
Here is a video introducing our next sermon series that begins on May 15, 2016
he story of the creation of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis was always about much more than just the question of where the human race came from. Adam was never just supposed to be a historical figure. Even the earliest people to tell and pass down this tale knew, after all, that the name Adam meant man and that he represented humanity as a whole. They knew that his wife’s name meant living, and so they understood that this story was not about history or events that took place in the earliest mists of time so much as it was about what it meant to be human beings living in this world here and now.
For example, the particular selection of verses that we read from Genesis this morning seems to be preoccupied with one particular question about being human. The question is this: why do human beings wear clothes. I mean, think about it, the story originated in the ancient Near East which has one of the most temperate climates in the whole world. They didn’t have to deal with the extremes of a Canadian winter. Even rain was a rare event. Clothing, for them, was not a physical necessity most of the time, so they needed an explanation for why human beings, alone among all the creatures on the earth, wore clothing. So if you were going to tell a story about what it meant to be human, that mystery was something that, in their minds, you needed to tackle.
And the story makes it clear that, in the ideal world as God originally intended it, clothing was not necessary. “The man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” The need for clothing, apart from protection from the elements, is, according to this story, actually a reflection of what has gone wrong with human life in this world.
Think about what that means for a moment. The
Bible says that the need for clothing is a symptom of what is wrong with our humanity. There certainly is something to that idea. For nothing divides and dehumanizes us quite like clothing does. Did anyone here go to high school? We have a lot of people here who went to high school in very different time periods. So let me ask the question: when you were in high school, was there an “in” group and an “out” group? And was clothing used as a marker of whether someone was in or out? When you were at high school was the way that somebody dressed ever used as a reason to mock or exclude that person? Clothing is definitely used to separate and divide people in unhealthy and unhelpful ways.
Clothes, in the Genesis story, also seem to represent that human fear of being ourselves. When Adam and Eve are first created, the idea that they are “naked and not ashamed,” seems to symbolize a relationship were they are able to fully share themselves with each another. They don’t need to hide behind anything; they can just be themselves. That they suddenly feel uncomfortable with such nakedness after their disobedience is an indication that something has gone wrong. And, to this very day, we still struggle with just being ourselves in front of other people.
So clothes are part of the problem. But they also seem to be an undeniable necessity given the failures and the shortcomings of our human nature. We just can’t go through life letting it all hang out – not literally and not figuratively. Yes, there are exceptions to that. A few times in your life you might hope to have a relationship with somebody where you feel completely free to be yourself all the time. It can happen in a good marriage or an excellent friendship. But it is rare and most of us spend our lives hiding who we really are from the vast majority of people that we meet; afraid that, if we were to show our true selves, we would be rejected.
This is something that this story in the Book of Genesis is acutely aware of: human beings are flawed. We have our shortcomings and we have our failures. That is a part of what it means to be human. But the amazing thing that we see in the story in Genesis is that, although God is clearly angry at the failure of his humans and deeply disappointed in them, that does not prevent him from being entirely gracious to them.
When the man and the woman first awake to the realization that they are flawed and find this deep inner need to cover up those flaws, they attempt to improvise a solution to their problem: “they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” But this is, clearly, at best a temporary solution. Fig leaves are simply not the most flexible or durable material to make clothing out of but it seems to be the best that we humans can do sometimes.
But then, right at the end of the story, there is a little surprise. At the end of the story, after God has handed out all of the consequences to the woman and the man for their disobedience and to the serpent for his part in it all, there is a little side note: “And the LordGod made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them.” And so we learn that, as far as the Bible is concerned, the invention of the first durable set of clothing is to be credited to God. Think of it; the Lord God was the very first person to design a line of clothing.
And I find this idea of God as the first cosmic fashion designer to be very interesting. It tells me a few very important things about God and our relationship with God as human beings.
It tells me, first of all, that we have a God who understands our weakness and failures. God clearly understands what the man that the woman are struggling with, which means that he understands the struggles of all humanity. This is rather extraordinary when you think about it for God has no experience of shame. Why should he? And yet he understands that the man and the woman need clothes not out of their physical necessity but because they feel shame for their inadequacies.
This willingness of God to deal with us where we are as opposed to where God thinks we are supposed to be is of enormous importance. Have you ever had somebody in your life who absolutely refused to deal with you the way that you were – somebody who simply would not accept that you might be fearful or shy or lacking in confidence or whatever particular problem you were dealing with? I’ll bet that each and every one of us has had to deal with someone like that at some point. Was that person helpful to you? Probably not. In order to really help you with getting where you need to be, your friends need to start with you where you are and not where they think you ought to be.
I don’t know how often I have encountered in people this notion that they are unable to access God’s grace or be part of the church or even to pray because they don’t have everything worked out in their lives. “I can’t talk to God,” they will say, “because my life is such a mess.” Well God, fortunately, doesn’t work that way. If he did, none of us would have any hope and no one would ever belong to the church. It is very helpful to know that that is where God joins us on this journey of life where we actually are and not where we are supposed to be.
The second thing I would note about this is that God’s gift of clothing is different in substance from what the man and the woman are able to create by themselves. This is obvious: Adam and Eve’s attempt to clothe themselves is plant-based; God’s gift is animal based. And one of the problems seems to be that Adam and Eve’s approach is less durable because it is plant-based than the one that God offers.
But there seems to be more than a question of durability at stake here. Here is one thing I notice: when we wear plant-based clothing, when we wear things like cotton or linen or even fabrics like wool that are harvested from animals, nothing needs to die in order for us to be warm and cover our “shame.”
Death itself doesn’t seem to be part of the plan at the beginning of the story of the Garden of Eden. At least, the way that it is described, the man and the woman and all of the animals were supposed to live together in such harmony that nothing ever needed to die. The lion and the lamb were supposed to lie down together without anyone getting eaten and even the strongest of predators were supposed to live as vegetarians. It is rather interesting that we seem to have, in this portrayal of ideal life in God’s original garden, a world where nothing has to die in order that something else may live.
But that ideal has apparently failed with the failure of the humans, and it is interesting to see that God’s very first act upon learning that his ideal vision for life in this world is not going to work out is to kill something. Some animals (it doesn’t say which ones) have to die in order to create the right kind of clothing for the humans. These are, according to Genesis, the first recorded deaths. This has to do with more than just the relative quality of plant-based and animal-based clothing.
When ancient human beings finally became aware of their place within this world, when they realized that there was a difference between them and the other animals that lived alongside them (a realization that they came to by telling stories like this one in the Book of Genesis), they discovered something kind of scary and amazing. They realized that other living beings were dying so that they could live and be strong and healthy – so that they could eat meat from time to time and so that they could have strong and durable clothing. They realized that there was something tragic about that, but they also realize that there was something sacred about it.
Almost all ancient humans of all races and cultures came to that amazing realization and many ancient cultures celebrated that sacred tragedy with a ritual called sacrifice. An ancient sacrifice was how you killed and prepared your supper in a way that acknowledged how sacred and tragic the death of that animal was. But the ritual of sacrifice also had a great benefit. Most of the sacrificial animal was eaten by the worshippers who brought it and by the priests who prepared it for them. In addition, skins were taken and turned into clothing and leather and to make other useful things.
But some parts of the animal couldn’t be used. These parts – the bones, the fat and some other bits – were burnt up on the altar as a gift to God. In this way, they believed, the sacrifice created a meal that was shared with both God and the worshippers – a shared meal that was all about rebuilding the broken relationship between God and his people.
And I believe that this action of God who slaughters some animals in order to clothe Adam and Eve is anticipating that – all of that. It is a recognition that the world is a tragic place where things die and that sometimes animals die so that you can live and become who you need to be. It is also aware of the sacredness of such an act and the potential for healing to come out of it.
Christians don’t practice sacrifice, in part because they believe that Jesus, in himself, has fulfilled everything that could ever be achieved by animal sacrifice and that he did that by offering himself up for the sake of those who fell short of what they needed to be. If that is true, then it means that God, in his first act in the garden was already anticipating both the sacrificial system and the coming of Jesus himself. It is all right there in that short line at the end of this morning’s reading.
It is about what it means to be human because it is talking about things that we all struggle with. But, even more important than that, it talks about a God who is there with us in our struggles and whose presence makes all the difference in the world.
#TodaysTweetableTruth God clothes Adam & Eve with skins reminding us that God meets us where we are with grace and of Jesus’ death for us.
m I the only one who reads this morning’s passage from the Gospel according to Matthew and just wishes that everybody would just calm down a little bit? We have, in this passage, a parable of Jesus – a story of a dinner party. In this case, it is a wedding feast given by a king in honour of his son. The basic premise of the story is simple enough. The host of the feast wants lots of prominent guests and so he invites a large number of important people. The twist comes when none of the important people are able to attend the meal and the king kind of panics because, in that society, to give a feast and have nobody show up would reflect very negatively on the host. He ends up packing his dining hall with all sorts of undesirable people in the end.
And that is, basically, the parable that Jesus did tell to his disciples. In fact, if you were to turn over to the Gospel of Luke you would find a version of this same parable where that is all that happens. I have always preferred Luke’s version of this parable for that reason. The story is simple and straightforward without anything extra going on. I’ve always kind of avoided Matthew’s version of the parable because everybody in the story seems a little bit crazy. They all overreact.
We have, first of all, the guests who are first invited to the feast. The king sends his servants out to deliver the invitations because, of course, this was before the days of the internet when you can invite a bunch of people to your party with a few emails and Facebook messages. And the people who receive the invitations, just like in the parable in Luke’s gospel, are unable (or perhaps unwilling) to come. Now, I don’t know about you, but I was always taught that if you are invited to go someplace and you cannot attend, you politely say that you are very sorry. You return the RSVP with a friendly note that expresses your regrets. Is that what these invitees do? No they do not.
They seize the servants who bring the invitations, turture and kill them! I don’t care how much you don’t want to go to a dinner party, there is absolutely no way that murder and torture is a reasonable way to communicate that to your host. So yes, I really wish that the invitees would just calm down a little bit.
But then, as I continue reading, I’m not sure that the king’s reaction is all that much better. The king is upset at how the people he invited to his party treated his servants. That is understandable. But his reaction is very much an over-reaction. He doesn’t just punish the murderers, no. He gathers his troops, attacks the entire city where they live and burns the place to the ground. That is definitely overkill.
So we go from a bloody RSVP to an even worse response on the part of the king. After that, however, the whole thing just becomes bizarre. The king has just filled his banqueting hall with whoever the slaves could find – a crowd that is described as including “both good and bad.” It is clearly a mixed bag and he knew that when he invited them to come in. But then the king comes across one of these guests who is, in his estimation, not appropriately dressed. Well what did he expect?
Nevertheless (and we really shouldn’t be surprised at this point) the king overreacts. He kicks the inappropriately dressed guest out of his party but he’s not even content just with doing that, as excessive as that might seem. No, his instructions are, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Once again, how is this an appropriate way to respond to the minor ettiquet breach of somebody being underdressed at a party?
So there seem to be all kinds of problems specifically with how this parable is told in Matthew’s gospel. Did Jesus have two wildly different versions of this one parable – one where people acted in a fairly reasonable fashion and one where everyone acted a little crazy – that he told on different occasions? And then did Luke copy one version into his gospel while Matthew copied the other?
That’s one possibility, but it is more likely that, when Matthew wrote down his version of this parable, he was trying to help his readers by making it clear to them what his own understanding of the parable was. And Matthew, plainly, saw this parable as an allegory. An allegory is a special kind of story in which every element represents something else. So, in Matthew’s mind, the king, in this parable represents God. The people invited to the feast are the Jews whom God has invited into his kingdom. The servants are the prophets who bring God’s message to the people of Israel and so on.
When you read it as an allegory, the strange overreactions make a lot more sense. The way that the invitees abuse the messengers is so crazy because it is supposed to represent how the nation of Israel historically rejected God’s message by abusing and killing the prophets.
And by the time that Matthew wrote this gospel, the City of Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Roman army and so Matthew even states that this parable predicted that terrible event by including the destruction of a city by troops in his allegorical interpretation. Again, an event that makes little sense if it is an attack provoked by an impolite response to an invitation to a party but that makes a whole lot more sense if you see it as the consequence of an entire nation rejecting the message of God that was brought by the prophets and by Jesus the Christ himself.
So that is one thing that is going on in this passage: Matthew is turning Jesus’ parable into an allegory. But that particular allegory does not especially help us to understand the part at the end of the parable where the guest is thrown out of the party because he is not appropriately dressed, so let me point out something else about the way that Matthew tells the story. Did you notice one very particularly annoying pattern of behaviour in this parable? Did you notice, in particular, that nobody seems to be able to accept a gift or to be the recipient of generosity?
I mean, the people who are invited to the wedding feast, their invitation was essentially a gift. They were turning down nothing other than an evening of good food, entertainment and conversation. And yet they set the whole story off its rails by being unwilling to receive a free gift and doing so violently. What’s more, I would suggest to you that the man who is not wearing the wedding robe at the end of the story is essentially doing the same thing.
We do not know what all of the customs were around wedding celebrations in ancient Biblical societies, but we can be pretty sure that there were a lot of them. And some people have suggested that one of the customs at important weddings may have been for the host of the wedding to provide his guests with fancy robes to wear at the wedding. If that was the custom, then everyone who heard this story would have seen the man who is not wearing the wedding robe in a very different light.
It is not that he doesn’t have appropriate clothes to wear; he has been provided with the appropriate clothes. It is just that he has refused that gift, perhaps because he thinks that his own, dirty and everyday clothes are good enough. When you look at the parable from this angle, it seems to be all about people who have a hard time accepting generosity from others.
And you wouldn’t think that should be a problem, would you? After all, every single one of us has had times in our life when we were unable to meet all of our needs by ourselves. We all have had times when we get by with a little help from our friends. And given that that is something that literally every human being will have to deal with at some point in their life, you would think that it wouldn’t be hard for anybody to accept generosity from somebody else.
But it is. I’ll bet every single person here knows somebody who just can’t stand to receive a gift or a generosity. You all know people who, if you try to give them something or do something for them, they will drive you crazy trying to stop you. Maybe some of you are like that yourself and you just cannot stand being on the receiving end of a gift.
Why do people do that? Why do we have trouble accepting the help we need when we need it? Part of it is that we believe that we are supposed to be entirely self-sufficient in all things and that, if you are anything less than that, you must have failed in some way. Even if you find yourself in a position of need because of something that was entirely out of your control, you are still made to feel that it must, in some way, be your own fault and so you resist accepting help or, if you absolutely have to take it, you do everything that you can to cover up that fact.
If you are involved in the outreach ministry of this church, or most any church, this is something that you run into all the time. We have the privilige of being involved in giving people things – things like food, clothing, good nutritious meals, counselling – that they would not be able to get otherwise or, in some cases, they would have to give up something else that they also needed in order to obtain it.
And, I’ve got to say, it is a real privilige to be able to be involved in this kind of ministry. The people involved genuinely enjoy being able to give these things away and we also enjoy the people that we give them to. But, of course, few people enjoy havingto receive in this way. Few people want to come in and access the services that we offer. Over time, the people that we serve become our friends and they enjoy coming here because our workers and volunteers create a warm and hospitable atmosphere.
And it is good that we help people to learn to receive because I would suggest to you that none of us can ever achieve our potential as followers of Christ, or as human beings, if we do not learn to receive. We cannot even be followers of Jesus without learning to receive from Christ. Our salvation, our hope and our new life in Christ are all things that we cannot make happen for ourselves. We can only receive them as gifts from God.
The robe in the parable, the robe that the guest refuses to wear, has often been seen as a symbol of those gifts from God. It is the robe of righteousness and salvation and new beginnings and we do not have the capacity of wearing such robes by providing them ourselves. We can only receive them from the hand of God. God gives these things freely but we, foolishly, often have trouble receiving them. We would like to think that we are good enough and strong enough and capable enough to achieve all of these things on our own. Like the guest at the party, we insist on wearing our own robes instead.
But the lesson of the parable is that if you do not learn to receive from God when you need to receive from God, you do not belong at the party. And I don’t actually even think God needs to cast you into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth because you have already cast yourself out of the party by a simple refusal to receive a gift freely given. It is that important to learn to receive. Our very salvation – our potential to be all that we are meant to be in this world – depends upon it. And one of the ways in which we learn to better receive from God is by practicing receiving from others.
Therefore, I would encourage you, this week, to do one simple thing to deepen your walk with God. This week, when somebody offers to give something to you or do something for you and doesn’t want anything in return, just take it. Receive that gift and do it without feeling guilty for receiving. Receive it, without it hurting your pride. Take it without plotting to pay them back in anyway. Just receive it. Just practice gratitude and say thanks. If you are unable to do this, try to get to the bottom of why you can’t. Receiving can be just as important as giving. It is an act of grace. Practice receiving grace from others and you may just find yourself able to receive more from God and starting to grow more into the person that God has called you to be.
#TodaysTweetableTruth Ask yourself why u have so much trouble receiving from others. Receiving can be just as necessary as giving sometimes.
id you notice that nobody asked Peter to do anything? Peter was in Lydda when a highly respected and well-loved woman named Tabitha died in the nearby town of Joppa. And people had obviously heard something about Peter. He had a certain reputation for healing and for miracles, so they sent for him with an urgent request that he come, but that was the whole content of the message. They didn’t tell him that he was supposed to heal her (it was kind of too late for that anyways). They didn’t ask him to come and doanything – just come, please, as soon as you can.
And when he came, even then, they didn’t actually ask anything of him. They just took him to an upper room where they had laid out Tabitha’s body but they don’t even seem to have pointed her out to him. No, what Peter actually saw and noticed was not her body but a room full of weeping widows. They didn’t say anything, they just wept and showed him their clothes. And that is why they didn’t need to ask him to do anything. The clothes actually spoke much louder than any words ever could have.
The story of Tabitha in the Book of Acts, makes me ask, first of all, one immediate and very important question. If you were Tabitha, what would the widows show to Peter?
I am often called upon, as you would expect, to speak at the funerals of people who have passed away. I have always found it to be true that every person’s life has something profound and beautiful to say to us at such times and I do see it as a great honour and a privilege to be the one who gets to point out some of those profound and beautiful things.
But I have also noticed that there are often things that are deeper and stronger than words at times like that. They are objects or actions that hold special symbolic meaning and they often will prove far more enduring than the words we say about someone who has died. People will cling to something that the deceased gave to them or did for them and find great comfort in that. That was what those widows were doing when Peter arrived.
Widows are, in the Bible, kind of the stereotypical poor person. They were seen as the most helpless and needy people in all of society. Of course, there are problems with that stereotype. I would never be so foolish as to think of a widow (or any woman unattached to a man) in such terms today! In fact, some of the strongest and most capable people I have ever known have been widows or other women who, by choice or by circumstance, navigate this world without a husband.
And even the ancient perception that widows were helpless actually had nothing to do with the capabilities of individual women. It was just that, in that society, women were not permitted to make their way in the world without a dominant male controlling them. They were not allowed to participate in the economy in any honourable way and so they were forced to be utterly dependant on charity.
So these women in Joppa may have been very strong and confident women. They may have even been practicing the freedom of the Christian gospel by choosing not to be married. But they lived in a society that did not allow them to make their own way apart from a dominant man. These women, because they broke the conventions of society, became dependent on the community of the church.
And Tabitha, had been particularly generous to them. But it obviously wasn’t just the fact that she was generous that had moved them. She had made these clothes with her own hands. Her generosity to them had been personal, caring and individual. That’s what made the common, everyday tunics and dresses and robes they were showing to Peter absolutely priceless in their minds. These tunics represent to them everything that summed up Tabitha’s kindness, goodness and love shown to them.
And I don’t know about you, but if that were me and I had died or moved on in some other way, I just think it would be really nice if, after I was gone, someone could just hold up something and point to it and say, “This is something that tells me that Scott was here and that his presence in this place mattered.” So it is a really good question to ask, “what tunics would people show to Peter after you were gone?”
But actually, I have a much more urgent question to ask here today. The story of Peter and Tabitha is a terrific story to read just after Easter because it is a story of resurrection. Maybe I should have said, “spoiler alert,” before bringing that up, but we did actually read the story and you heard how it ended. Tabitha didn’t stay dead. So it would be very easy to take this story and apply it to our post-resurrection hope as followers of Christ.
Certainly one of the reasons why the early Christians remembered and repeated this story was because it reminded them of their Easter hope in a life after death. The life after death that we hope for is not exactly what happens to Tabitha. We don’t expect Jesus to restore us to thislife again after we die, but rather to a different kind of life in a new place that we can scarcely even imagine. But what Peter does for Tabitha is a symbolic reminder of that hope for life after death.
But there is, I think, another way to read this story as a story of resurrection. After all, it is not just people who die. Groups and organizations and institutions, they can die too. And, as a matter of fact, we are living in an age when institutions are passing away more quickly than ever before. Churches and congregations, in particular are affected by this and they are passing away (or amalgamating or changing to such a degree that they are unrecognizable) at an unprecedented rate today. So would it not be a good question to ask, as believers in the power of resurrection, what is the hope for resurrection for our churches and Christian institutions?
If your church were to die (or go through a radical change that might feel like death) what would you like to leave behind from its life right now that would tell the world that it was worth being here? Now, I know that when we think of our churches and the things that make them special to us, we tend to focus on the things that have been meaningful to us personally. We talk about our beautiful buildings and sanctuaries. We talk about memorable moments in worship services and about the things we have done there with our friends. We also have a certain tendency to go on and on about past glories and to celebrate the way that things used to be.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with loving these things about our churches. But the story of Tabitha makes me wonder, when our congregations are dead (or when they are transformed in coming years) what will make people remember them as they were and believe that they were important? This story makes me think that it may not be the buildings or the activities or the musical moments. What if, in the end, what really matters are the pieces of clothing.
I can think of this quite literally because we have, in this congregation, a clothing ministry called Hope Clothing where we are regularly handing out really good quality used clothing to people simply because they need it and can make good use of it. So I do know just how meaningful such a simple act can be. I am in the church often enough when people come in and bring their donations of clothing. Just knowing that it is our intention to give it all away according to need means a great deal to people in the world today – a world where used clothing has become a big business that creates large profits for some.
I also get to hear the stories that they tell me as they bring the clothes in. Not too long ago, I had a woman come in bearing the clothes of her mother who had passed away recently. She joyfully and sorrowfully (it’s amazing how the two of them can go together sometimes) told me very sacred and holy things about her mother and her sense of style and how she dressed and some of the things she had struggled with over recent years. I know without a doubt that it was a healing moment for her to be able to share her mother’s clothes and her stories in that way. And providing that opportunity is absolutely something that will last long beyond the present state of this congregation.
Of course, I also get to be part of it when people come to take the clothes that they need. We could tell you so many stories of people finding just the right piece of clothing at the right time in order to go to a job interview or a wedding or some other really important event. We could tell you stories of the right piece of clothing showing up as a donation only minutes before someone comes looking for that very thing. It is a little shop where minor miracles happen every week. Sometimes you know you’re participating in a miracle when you are just there and ready to respond when someone comes up against an emergency – a house fire, a situation of abuse or whatever it might be.
And let me tell you, if someday our congregation should cease to exist and the Apostle Peter were to drop by and ask me what really mattered about St. Andrew’s Hespeler, I think we could do a lot worse than to show him those pieces of clothing that were shared and the impacts they had on people’s lives. I know he would be moved by that. And of course, it is not always literally clothing but it is the acts of kindness that manifest themselves in concrete things that are shared with others.
For example, last week I preached this sermon at St. Andrew’s Church in Guelph and they don’t have a clothing ministry. They are, however working diligently towards welcoming a refugee family into Canada. I promised them that the concrete things that they do for that family will be of eternal value and will indeed endure beyond the present life of their congregation.
So I hope that this story of Tabitha might make us re-evaluate the things that we feel are really important about our churches and ask ourselves what we really need to spend our time and energy investing in as congregation. Maybe it is time for some of those priorities to change.
But remember that I said that this is a post Easter story. It is a story of the power of Christ’s resurrection and what it can do for us in our churches today. And I do see us living in an age where death is a real possibility for our congregations. Please understand, however, that I am not, in any way, predicting the death of St. Andrew’s Guelph or St. Andrew’s Hespeler. In neither case do I see that as a likely possibility and I am not here as a prophet of doom today.
But I will tell you this: we are living in days of great change for the church. We have a Lord who will not abandon his church in these days. Christ will be with his church through whatever change may come. That’s the good news. The somewhat more troubling news is this: Christ has a particular strategy for renewal in his church and in his people’s lives. And it is not a strategy of incremental change that never makes us feel uncomfortable. Christ’s favourite strategy for change is death and resurrection.
For me that means that maybe even many of our strongest and liveliest churches may be heading for a Tabitha moment – for a time when it may just feel like we have been washed and laid out in a room upstairs and that we are done. I fully expect many of our congregations to deal with moments like that in coming years.
Why would God allow us to go through such painful moments of loss? Not because he has abandoned us. He will send for Peter to come and raise us up again to new life and new beginnings. Christ will not abandon his church. So why would he put us through that?
Well maybe, just maybe, it’s because he wants us – like those widows in Joppa – to realize what really matters about who we are and what we do as a church together.
#TodaysTweetableTruth The widows showed Peter Tabitha’s tunics proving she had mattered. What would they show him after yr church was gone?
Note: I have created the backstories of Mary and Joanna that are featured in this sermon. My speculation on these two characters began with the introduction of these disciples of Jesus in Luke 8:2-3 and has spun off in some interesting directions as I have been working on a future book that may be titled something like “The Seven Demons of Miryam of Magdala.”
Luke 23:50-24:3, Luke 24:13-32, Psalm 118:1, 2, 14-24
M
ary Magdalene opened the package of spices and ointments that Joanna had brought back from the market and inhaled deeply. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the scents: cinnamon, cassia, balsam and resin. She could even smell the small amounts of frankincense and myrrh that her dear friend, Joanna, had only been able to afford by selling the very last pieces of jewellery that she had plundered from her abusive husband, Chuza, when she had fled his household to follow Jesus.
It smelled beautiful, but it was also emotionally dangerous for her. Smell is a powerful trigger for the memory. The part of your brain that processes olfactory information is only separated by a few synapses from your amygdala which is the part of your brain where your most powerful and emotionally charged memories are stored. That is why sometimes just getting a whiff of some scent that is connected to your past can transport you back to events that you may have thought you had completely forgotten.
And there was no question that the smells of these spices and resins were connected to many traumatic memories in the lives of all the women who were there in that room. Mary herself was instantly transported back to the day when her intended husband was drowned while fishing on the Sea of Galilee. She remembered the deep grief and confusion that she felt as they carried the body of her promised husband to his family tomb outside the town of Magdala. At that moment it had seemed as if her entire life had been over and, in a very real sense it was.
Beside her, Joanna was reeling from the fact that the same smells had taken her back to the day, so many years ago, when she and her servants had laid to rest the tiny, stillborn body of her only child. She was suddenly filled with a grief that was so raw that it was as if no time had passed at all. And the same was true for every woman who was present as each one of them felt as if a scab had been ripped off the poorly healed wound in her life that had formed when she lost someone whom she loved: a parent, a child, her sibling or cousin or best friend. Life in Galilee could be very brutal indeed. Their new grief at the loss of their teacher, Lord and friend mixed and mingled with so many old griefs.
There was a reason why they all reacted so similarly. Women in that culture had very well defined roles and duties around death. When someone died, everyone always automatically looked to the women to do what needed to be done. They sang the laments and songs of grief. They told the story of the person’s life and death. They led the procession to the tomb. Most especially they washed and prepared the body with the traditional mixtures of ointments and spices and wrapped it in the linen cloths.
Everyone (even the men) agreed that men just weren’t any good at that kind of thing. So heavy were the expectations of so-called “manly” behaviour placed upon them that men could not express emotions like grief or sorrow in any sort of helpful way. So it was always left to the women – one of the few places in public life where they were actually allowed to take a leadership role. So they had all done it so many times before.
It was somewhat distressing to the women that they had not been permitted to prepare the body of Jesus for burial – that a man named Joseph, a secret ally on the council – had taken care of it by quickly wrapping the body in linen cloths and stowing it in some tomb that had no connection with Jesus’ family. But there was no helping that. Not only had there been no time to do things properly as the sun was setting and the sabbath was about to begin, the situation was also far too dangerous for any open displays of grief on the day when he was crucified.
But the women were determined that they would do whatever they could to make it right. A lot of people have wondered why the women would have returned to the tomb where Jesus had been laid on the third day and why they would bring with them the spices and ointments that were commonly used to prepare a body before burial when he had already been buried, even if hastily so. It is not as if they could have unburied him in order to do it all over again. Even if it had not been for the large stone covering the tomb and forming an impossible barrier, such an act would have unacceptably disturbed the dead.
But we do know that there was a custom in many ancient Mediterranean societies – and in ancient Palestine as well – of a special visit to the grave that took place on the third day following a death. It was a celebration that was led, like all other activities around death, by women. The mourners would go out to the tomb where a beloved friend or family member had been laid and they would take with them a simple meal: bread, wine, maybe some fish and olive oil. These things would be taken as a special gift to the dead, so it wouldn’t be all that surprising if women were to take as well such things as burial spices and ointments.
But the point of the third day gathering by the tombs was not merely to honour the memory of the dead with gifts. There was a belief, common among many cultures and, the evidence suggests, also among first century Jews, that when they gathered to share this simple kind of meal by the tomb of a beloved friend or family member, the dead would join with them in that meal. This was something that all of the women who followed Jesus from Galilee would have experienced before. They had gone with other women to tombs and experienced the presence of the dead on the third day.
What exactly had they experienced previously, I suspect, would have been something like the kinds of experiences that people still sometimes report to this very day. I have often had people tell me about the ways that they were comforted after losing a loved one – how they just felt the presence of that person watching over them or saw something that confirmed to them that their beloved was still with them in some very important way. These are not unusual experiences. Many have had them following a death. People doubt such experiences, of course, because it is notoriously hard to prove any very personal experience, but many have been greatly comforted by these things that reassured them that their loved ones were still with them.
So it wouldn’t really be that surprising if these women were preparing to go out to the tomb and minister to their dead Lord and friend with an expectation of finding some kind of reassurance of his presence. They packed up the spices and ointments, some bread and wine and the other elements of a simple meal and they waited for the dawning of the third day. But it seems that they were about to get more than they had bargained for.
The women who went out to visit Jesus’ tomb at the dawning of the third day had all experienced grief and loss before. Everyone in that society agreed that grief was women’s work. So it was all so very familiar to them – the feelings, the smells, the songs that they sang and the atmosphere. And, given that human life was cheap in Galilee, they had all doubtlessly lost people that they loved. It had been very personal before.
But this was different. Jesus hadn’t just been a friend or a teacher to them. He had been a reason for them to start to live again. He had given them hope that things could actually be different. And so, as they headed out to the tomb to share a meal there and bring offerings for the dead, they may have expected to experience the presence of their now-dead Lord in the same way that they had experienced it before for their other loved ones, but surely they were hoping for something… more.
Christians believe that they did experience something more than the commonly experienced reassurance of the presence of the dead. What exactly happened to them would be impossible to describe precisely because even the Bible has a hard time pinning it down. There are four different accounts of what those women experienced at the tomb in the Bible and not one of them agrees in all the details with the others. But I don’t necessarily think that that is a problem because what these passages are describing are deeply personal experiences that changed the lives of the women who had them irrevocably. It wasn’t just about what they saw and felt and heard and touched, it was about what all of that meant on a very personal level.
I imagine, though, that they arrived at the tomb and they told, one more time, the story of how he had died and what his death meant, just as it would continue to be told whenever the church gathered in the years to come. And then, as was traditional at these sorts of third day gatherings, they took some bread and they broke it. And how could that not have made them think of him – not only because of the last meal he shared with this disciples but also because of how he loved to gather and eat with all sorts of people and especially with outcasts and sinners and all the other people that everyone else rejected. That act alone must have made it seem as if Jesus was very near.
But there was more to it than that. As they took the bread and shared it, as they drank wine from a common cup, they knew that he was there – not just in their memory (though, of course, he would always be there), not just in spirit as they may have experienced it with others they had lost, he was there in body, in whole person. Most of all, he was there in reality. It was like the realest thing that any of them had ever experienced.
And that experience, my friends, is the basis of our Christian hope. I believe that those women experienced it there outside his tomb on the third day after his death. That was when it all started. That is not to say that they immediately understood everything that they had experienced. I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if it took them years to really put it all into words that could even make sense to people. And, of course, it wasn’t just that one time outside his tomb either. None of it would have probably amounted to anything if people had not continued to consistently experience the reality that he was alive.
Each experience of the risen Christ was unique, but clearly one of the ways that people continued to experience him was when they shared these same kinds of simple meals of bread and wine and common foods when they gathered. They were often surprised that he was present in those meals with them just as the women had experienced.
That kind of process is described to us in the story from the Gospel of Luke. It takes place on Easter day when two disciples are walking to Emmaus. They have heard about what the women experienced at the tomb: “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us,” they say. “They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.” They know about what the women experienced, but they don’t seem convinced – not until they experience it for themselves as the stranger with them breaks the bread and shares some wine and they are suddenly part of the same feast that the women shared outside the tomb.
And that is what Easter is really about. It is not just about what they experienced, as real as that was. It is an invitation to all of us to share in that experience together. It is an invitation to share a bit of bread and some wine and to know that this is an event that is not limited to this particular place and time. If you are open to it, it is a meal that can transport you back to the moment when those women gathered on the third day outside his tomb. I pray, and I hope that you join me in this prayer, that at least some of us here today might find some small taste of that in this simple shared meal. That is why we do it.
#TodaysTweetableTruth #Easter isn’t about their experience at the tomb. It is an invitation to experience an event unlimited by time & space
Now, I am hardly what you would call a Greek scholar. What I learned in school is a bit rusty, but I was struck by some of the things that you see when you read it in the original language. The prayer, as it originally appears in the Gospel of Matthew is in Greek, although Jesus himself likely spoke Aramaic and would have prayed in that language.
