Category: News

Here is our worship service from this morning

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Hespeler 20 November 2022 © Scott McAndless – Reign of Christ
Luke 1:68-79, Jeremiah 23:1-6, Colossians 1:11-20 (video), Luke 23:33-43

The Prophet Jeremiah kind of famously never quite got along with most of the kings of Judah that he knew. He didn’t like them because they were bad leaders who were making bad decisions that literally led the entire nation into an unmitigated disaster. It ended with the city of Jerusalem destroyed and the people led away into exile.

Jeremiah Criticizes the Kings

The kings didn’t like Jeremiah either because he never hesitated to tell the truth about just how bad they were as leaders. Which is, of course, what Jeremiah is doing in the passage we read this morning. “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.”

The shepherds in question are pretty obviously the kings of Judah. He is simply saying how disappointed God has been with their leadership which has resulted in the destruction of the nation and the scattering of the people. The point is clear: bad leadership leads to bad outcomes for the nation.

A Golden Age?

And I’m not sure that we could find a timelier message for the age in which we are living. For we, like Jeremiah, appear to be living in a golden age of really bad leadership. I mean, Jeremiah might have dealt with some really bad leaders, but were they really as bad as the recent Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who managed to lead her country into exile in a mere matter of 44 days? That is some pretty bad shepherding.

And I do not want to drag Canadian partisan politics into a sermon where it doesn’t really belong, so I’ll just say that none of our provincial or federal leaders of any party are looking particularly spotless in the light of recent events and leave it at that. I think we can share Jeremiah’s frustrations without getting into the specifics.

The Challenge of Christ the King

Today is Christ the King Sunday. And the thing about this day is that you really cannot deal with its themes without straying a little bit closer to political questions than we are normally comfortable with. For how can we talk about how Christ is our King without comparing him, in some sense, to the kind of leader that he’s supposed to be better than in this world? To refuse to do that is to strip the very notion of the kingship of Jesus of its radical power.

Jesus, as we know, was constantly talking about something that he called the kingdom of God (or sometimes the kingdom of heaven). And he chose that language very carefully. He was living and teaching within a kingdom that belonged to a man named Herod the Tetrarch. That kingdom was also part of a larger political entity called the Roman Empire.

Calling Worldly Leadership into Question

The central point of every parable he told and every saying he made about the kingdom of God was it was another way of doing things – a kingdom whose existence and nature called into question everything about the other kingdoms that people were living in.

The idea of the kingship of Jesus is there for the same reason. Everything about the leadership of Jesus is meant to criticise and put to shame the actions of this world’s leaders. So let us take a look at some aspects of Christ’s kingship today because I kind of feel as if our leaders could use a little bit of advice.

Who Identifies the Leader?

The lectionary gives us an odd passage to delve into that question today. Oh, the theme of Jesus’ kingship does come up in it, but it does not come up in the way you might expect. How do we usually find out that someone is identified as a leader? We expect that person to get up and announce it to us, don’t we? “Just follow me,” they will say, “and I will lead you!” And then that identity is confirmed when that leader’s supporters come to their rallies and their announcements and cheer. That is when we know that there is a leader among us.

The quintessential example of this, of course, is the former US president Donald Trump. Whenever he has been challenged as to whether he should be a leader, you know he’s going to point to one thing above all, the number of people who turn out to his rallies. He is the kind of leader who understood this right from the very beginning.

I believe that it has been confirmed that, when he began his presidential campaign with that now legendary ride down the golden escalator, the adoring followers who greeted him on that day were paid to be there. He just knew that it didn’t really matter why the people were there, he just had to show the world that video of adoring fans to convince the world that he was ready to lead.

Maybe this is something that Trump understood best, but, to a certain extent, it is something that all of our leaders are aware of. If there are no crowds, you just know that a certain person might be a politician, but they are not a leader.

Identified by Enemies

And that’s what makes this story in the Gospel of Luke so surprising. For who, in this story, tells us that Jesus is a king? Not Jesus and not his supporters and fans either; they’ve all run away at this point. No, ironically, it is Pontius Pilate who tells us. He orders his troops as they impose his sentence of death upon our Lord, to make sure they have fixed the charge that he has been accused of above his head as he hangs in agony. “This is the King of the Jews,” the placard proclaims.

But, of course, Pilate does not mean it; Pilate is making the claim mockingly. He is making fun of the very idea that Jesus could be a king. And, of course, the people in the crowd take up the same mocking tone at the claim.

What then does this teach us about the kind of leadership that we need? I think it certainly invites us to look for something other than the enthusiasm of adoring fans for confirmation of leadership ability. A good leader is not always a popular leader because the decisions and directions that are needed are not always going to be the popular ones. Leadership always has to mean more than popularity.

Leaders who Serve themselves

But there are others who also take up Pilate’s mocking tone. The people in the crowd watching begin to call out concerning Jesus, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” Andthe soldiers who are carrying out the sentence, even though they are foreigners who barely understand the local language, know that the people are making fun of Jesus because of his claim to be a king and so they join in calling, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”

This mockery makes it quite clear that everyone present understands something about the way that leadership works in this world. They are understanding that people seek leadership and power in order, above all, to save themselves – that is to say, to benefit themselves. Any leader who fails to obtain benefits for themselves from their leadership role is just a fool and deserves to be laughed at.

A Servant King

But, once again, Jesus models a very different kind of leadership for us. If Jesus is a king, he is not a king who is there in order to benefit or enrich himself. Jesus is the very model of a servant king and nowhere is that made clearer than when we see him willingly choosing a mode of service so radical that he takes him to the cross where he gives up his very life for our sake.

Do we have such servant leaders among us today? I think we can perhaps say that they are somewhat rare. But I do believe that they still exist. And as followers of Christ the King, I think it is important that whenever we see a leader in this world acting selflessly, giving of themselves in service of the people that they lead rather than getting what’s coming to them, we need to pull out all the stops in celebrating them and honouring their contributions.

“Father, Forgive Them”

But if you thought of Jesus not seeking his own benefit from kingship was extraordinary, what about this? We are also told that, when Jesus was being most mistreated, this actually happened. “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’” And Jesus had every reason not to be forgiving at that point. He was being nailed to a cross! He had the power necessary to hold a grudge against the people who crucified him and punish them forever. But Jesus chose not to do that. Jesus showed us that leadership is not about holding grudges. How many leaders today model something so different from that? Many seem to see themselves as having a privileged position precisely so that they can punish their enemies. Again, Jesus shows us a better way.

More than that, Jesus shows us that true power is found in forgiveness. Powerful people often think that they don’t have to invest energy into understanding what the people who oppose them are thinking or feeling. But Jesus understood that his deep understanding of the people who were victimizing him, his understanding that they didn’t even know what it was they were doing, showed a much deeper strength of character. And that is always what true leadership is about.

Brings Others Along

But Jesus’ final display of leadership in this passage is perhaps the most powerful. As he hangs there in agony, one of the people who has been condemned alongside him is only too happy to join in on the mockery. But another one of the thieves shows a great deal of understanding. He recognizes that Jesus has been unjustly condemned. And so, he makes of him what seems to be a huge request, “Jesus,” he says, “remember me when you come in your kingdom.” And to this Jesus replies, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

And I know that many readers have some theological problems with this part of the story. How is it that Jesus can grant to this man heaven without requiring anything of him? He does not require repentance of him; He does not ask any faith of him. He simply grants him what he asks. But this is, you see, the power of a true leader.

Such is the depth of Jesus’ power, his love and his service, that he is able to bring people along with him by the force of who he is. If people are well led, they will get to the destination. Things like faith and commitment and repentance which leads to a change in life, these things will follow if people are well led. But when there is no leadership, there is no vision, and no one can follow.

The Challenge of this Day

To call this Christ the King Sunday is to issue a challenge to all believers and even to the whole world. I don’t care who you are or what faith you may follow, if you aspire to be a leader – aspire to be a prime minister, a president or a good monarch – you will never stand up to the example given to us by Christ. The example of Christ calls into question whatever leadership I have been able to give in Christ’s Church, but it also calls into question whatever leadership you have given in the church or in the world.

None of us will ever measure up, but the example of Christ the King is there to help us understand what real servant leadership is about, and how it actually can and does transform the world. May the Lord send us such leaders. But perhaps the prayer ought to be, may the Lord make you and me such leaders.

One of this week's bible readings

Here's our playlist for this week

A recording of the worship service

https://youtu.be/jAHcZKbXpdA

Hespeler, 13 November 2022 © Scott McAndless – Baptism
Isaiah 65:17-25, Isaiah 12, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19 (click to read)

Six years less one month ago, we had a very special worship service here at St Andrew’s Hespeler. It was special because it was just before Christmas and we were reading some traditional Advent passages. But it was even more special because we got to celebrate a big event – the baptism of Blake’s big brother, Rylie.

And I just want to remind you and help you get a perspective on what we were thinking about and concerned about six years ago. You see, I keep all my old sermons. And so, I know exactly what I was talking about that Sunday six years ago.

Blake’s family had just returned from out west. Her parents had moved to Alberta after school because things were booming in the oil industry and there were tons of well-paying jobs. But six years ago, things were not looking quite so rosy out in Alberta. The price of oil had crashed on the international market and the Alberta oil patch was struggling. The employment situation was not quite so great and stable anymore.

An Apocalyptic Fire

But there was actually another disaster that was on our hearts and minds at that moment. A huge, and I mean apocalyptically huge, wildfire had swept through the Alberta city of Fort McMurray. It had left so much destruction in its wake that the pictures and the videos terrified us all the way here in Ontario. Do you remember that?

I remember it, especially because Blake’s family had just moved back to Cambridge from Fort McMurray. They maybe weren’t literally fire refugees, but it had been pretty close. And they certainly brought the scope of that tragedy home to us that day. So, I was trying, on that Sunday six years ago, to see what it was that God might be saying to us at that particular moment in time when there seemed to be a lot to be worried about. That wildfire, we were told, was like a once in a century event – something the likes of which we might never see again – and I wanted us to get some perspective on it.

A Child of Promise

I turned to the scriptures of the day, which spoke (fittingly) of a child of promise being born and how things would look different by the time he came of age. And I spoke about how we might look at things differently by the time that Rylie came to a certain age. This is what I said:

My Prophecy

“The world may change, but this child, like the one born in Isaiah’s time and even like Jesus, is a sign to us from God – a sign that means that God is with us.

“How do I know that? I know it because that is how God works. I know it because, by the time this child grows up and is old enough to know the difference between good and evil, the world will have changed. I don’t even know how.

“Trump will not be president of the United States. Trudeau will likely not be our Prime Minister. The economy will have changed, and I wouldn’t mind if oil isn’t such a big part of it. We don’t know.

“But the key thing is that the things we are worried about now, the things we are afraid of, may not matter by then. Yes, maybe we’ll have new things to worry about, but even that may not matter because of one key truth that God has sent Rylie to remind us of: God is with us.”

Not a Great Prophet

I share that with you today with all humility to let you know that I probably would not make a fantastic prophet. I have no idea why I was so sure that Trump would no longer be president. As we know, that wasn’t necessarily a sure thing. And as for my prediction of Trudeau’s longevity in the office, I don’t seem to have gotten that one right. But, in my defense, I was thinking of a time a bit further out than six years.

And I actually think that the main point of my predictions still stands up. It is true that the things that we were so worried about six years ago are not the same things are worried about today.

What We Were Worried About

And, yes, in some ways that’s because things have gotten much worse. The images of the Fort McMurray fire aren’t quite so shocking today as they were then, but that is actually because there have been so many more wildfires some of which, such as the ones in Australia in 2020, were far more apocalyptic.

And, yes, we’re not so worried about a precipitous drop in the price of oil, but that is actually because the price is now so high that it’s a major driver of the inflation that is worrying us. The things we are anxious about certainly have changed, which means we probably should not invest so much into the specifics of what we worry about. But, alas, it seems, the constant is that anxiety itself never quite goes away.

But enough about the worries of six years ago. We are here today to celebrate something wonderful. We are here to celebrate Rylie’s little sister, Blake, and what her coming among us symbolizes today.

Today’s Worries

And yet, I still feel as if we can’t quite do that without acknowledging some of the anxieties and fears we are living with. I know that many of us look at young families just starting out these days and wonder how they are able to manage it.

With housing prices seemingly continuing to spiral out of control, we wonder how young families can afford to provide decent shelter for their children. With education costs so high, we wonder how they will be able to pay off what they borrowed to get their degrees. With prices so high, we worry about how parents can find the time to spend with their children when they are required to work so many hours just to make ends meet. These are huge issues for families in our times. And they affect us all, so we ought to be concerned about them.

So let us look once again to the promises that God gives to us. Let us take comfort in the faithfulness of our God. We read once again from the Book of Isaiah this morning, but the passage we read was addressed to a very different time.

Judah’s Families Under Stress

It was actually a time when the families of Judah were also under enormous stress. The people of Judah were, at that time, people who had been repatriated after being refugees in a foreign land. They had returned to a land that had been devastated by a series of disasters and they were trying to rebuild. It was a difficult time. They were surrounded by enemies, and they had to deal with a series of environmental and economic disasters. Any of that sound familiar?

Inflation of Biblical Proportions!

And do you want to know what one of those disasters was? It was out of control inflation. The Prophet Haggai was also active at this time and this is how he describes the situation: “You have sown much and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.” (Haggai 1:6)

Hmm, it makes me wonder whether Haggai didn’t write that description of his feelings after walking through the aisles at Zehrs and taking a look at those prices! “You that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes.” Yep, that is what it feels like today.

The Bible is Always Relevant

So, these prophecies were written at a time, in particular, when the families of Judah were really struggling. They didn’t know if they were going to be able to pay their bills. They didn’t know if they were going to have houses to live in! There is something about the Bible, isn’t there, that makes it come up ever fresh and ever relevant to what we are living through in the moment.

So I think we ought to read the promises from Isaiah this morning as promises that speak directly to Blake and her family and indeed to all young families who are dealing with various challenges and trials in our society today.

God’s Delight

God speaks through the prophet and says, “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight.” That is a powerful message for our time. It tells you that God has a very different orientation when looking at our families than the world at large does.

You see very clearly these days that the world is busy judging us all in terms of our production and our efficiency. We are constantly reminded that our value is found in one thing only – what we can produce for the economy. For that reason, families are left constantly scrambling and working to justify their basic existence.

But it is refreshing to see that God’s point of view is so very different. Do you want to know why God values you and your family? It is not because of what you produce. It is not because of your efficiency. God made you as a delight. God created you because God found joy in you. Oh, how I wish we could absorb that lesson in our modern world.

A Housing Promise

But joy and delight alone are not enough to live on, as I think we all recognize. So, let’s see what else God is promising the people at a difficult time. “They shall build houses and inhabit them… They shall not build and another inhabit.” And if there is a message that our society is more in need of than that one, at a time when young families are scraping to pay the rent or afford that down payment and those mortgage payments, I’m not sure what it is.

And what does it mean to have a God who cares about the housing needs of our families? How comfortable should we feel in our homes if we know that their skyrocketing values means that many a family will never be able to afford one of their own? This is a huge problem without simple solutions, of course. But I think it is good and comforting to know that we have a God who cares about this very issue and will push his people to make the necessary change.

Who Benefits from Labour

But it is not just God’s concern for housing that we see here. He also promises, “They shall not plant and another eat, for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.” That is another big issue we have in our society.

In far too many cases, the people who benefit most from the labour that people do is not the people themselves. With the way that wages are these days, often those who are on the lowest earning tier only find themselves falling further and further behind as they scramble to pay their bills and debts.

Meanwhile, the investor class and the ultra rich who do not need to labour in order to earn their bread are getting richer and richer. I think it’s kind of important that God puts Godself on the record here and says that families need to enjoy the fruits of their own labours.

Meeting our Potential

But, by far, the greatest promise that I see in the passage we read this morning is this: “They shall not labour in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—and their descendants as well.” And that, more than anything else, speaks of God’s commitment to our families. God is determined to bless them. God is determined to ensure that every member of every household can achieve their full potential. And God demands the same commitment from us.

God’s Commitments to Families

Six years ago we had the opportunity to celebrate a family that had just welcomed its first child – a child who came out of a vision of apocalyptic fire. That child gave us hope for the future. Today we celebrate not only that child’s little sister but a family that is more firmly established here. I know that they have challenges before them, not because of anything particular in them but simply because most all families at their stage are facing the same struggles these days.

But let our readings this morning remind us of our God’s commitment to families. And let that also become a renewal of our own commitment to support the families of this congregation and this community in a trying time. We can be bold to take on that ministry because we should never doubt God’s commitment to it. And so, thank you, Blake, for reminding us of all of that today.

One of our bible readings for Sunday

For families (it changes every week)

Apologies for the sound issues

https://youtu.be/1t1jTIgVdqU

There is an old chestnut that often gets taught to Sunday School children regarding the passage we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke. When people reading this story wonder, quite naturally, who these Sadducees are, the explanation goes like this. The Sadducees were sad you see because they didn’t believe in life after death.

But there is something about that old saying that is not quite right. It implies that they didn’t believe because they were sad, because they were old spoilsports who didn’t want to believe in anything. It maybe even suggests that they were proto atheists who didn’t even believe in God.

Who were the Sadducees?

I just wanted to let you know that that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Do you want to know who the Sadducees were? They were members of the most elite and wealthiest families in that society. They had life pretty good. And far from being atheists, these families counted many priests and high priests among their numbers. They made their living serving and sacrificing to God. And, in fact, the reason why they didn’t believe in the resurrection was because they saw themselves, above all, as good Bible-believing Jews.

But here is the thing, the Bible, for them, was a very small well-defined thing. Most Jews at that time would have recognized, pretty much, the whole of the Old Testament as we know it to be scripture. But the Sadducees were far pickier. For them, only the first five books really counted as scripture – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy – known as the Books of Moses.

No Resurrection in the First Five Books

And they had noticed that the notion of the resurrection just doesn’t come up in those books, like not at all. It doesn’t come up because nobody seems particularly concerned about it. People like Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses are completely focussed on this life and not on the next. God’s promises are also focussed on what happens here and now and in generations to come.

In fact, that is not just true of the first five books, it is actually true of a great deal of the Old Testament. The question of a meaningful afterlife just doesn’t come up. Oh, you can find it in a few places – the Books of Ezekiel and Daniel, for example – but those are books that were written quite late. In the oldest Hebrew literature, it is really just not there. So, in many ways the Sadducees were just trying to take the Bible seriously – something that we’re all supposed to do, right?

So Why did Everyone Else Believe?

But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the time of Jesus, the Sadducees were probably the only major Jewish group that did not believe in the resurrection. So, obviously, something had changed for most Jews by that point, but this change was not primarily based on what they were reading in their scriptures. So where did this conviction come from? Well, it turns out that I can tell you exactly where it came from. It came from a story.

Antiochus Epiphanes

About two centuries before the time of Christ, something terrible and horrible happened to the Jews living in the land of Judah. They were ruled over by the Greeks at that time. You have maybe heard of a famous fellow named Alexander the Great who conquered the world? Well, one of the places he conquered was the land of Judah.

And, generations later, the descendants of his generals still ruled over that land. And one of those rulers, Antiochus Epiphanes, was a bit of a jerk who was full of himself. And he had been having trouble with the Jews that he ruled over. And so Antiochus made a fateful decision. He decided that the problem was Jewishness itself.

Now, Antiochus did not set out, like certain other tyrants of history who shall remain nameless, to actually kill all of the Jews. His policy was not traditional genocide, but it was cultural genocide. He wanted to exterminate Jewish practices like circumcision and the Kosher diet and their strange exclusive worship of just one God. And so, he made all of that stuff illegal. But, much to his surprise, the Jews did not appreciate his policies. They resisted. And so, the king decided to up the stakes.

The Story of the Seven Brothers

And that leads us to the story that changed every Jew’s perspective on resurrection except the Sadducees. This story is told in the Second Book of Maccabees, a book that is not in our Bible but that is part of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bible. According to this book, the king arrested an entire family of seven brothers and their mother. They were arrested on suspicion of, well, acting Jewish. And so, the king brought them before him and demanded that they eat a little bit of pork. The brothers refused.

What follows is a story so bloody and graphic that I don’t really feel as if I could tell it to you. Look it up and read it for yourself in 2 Maccabees 7 if you really want to know it, but you have been warned! In the story, the king has all seven brothers tortured to death. And the torture is particularly physical as he cuts off body parts and roasts them over the fire. And so all seven brothers die. And the woman, their mother, dies as well.

The Faith of the Brothers

But the bloody details are not what are important about the story. It is the reaction of the family that stands out. They are there because of their faith and because they do not want to betray it in the face of the king’s decree. And they are there, above all, because they trust in their God who told them to live in certain ways to save them.

And at first, this faith leads them to believe that their God will save them from what the king wants to do to them. Because the promises that they know about God are all promises for this life. That’s what they have learned from their scriptures.

But, of course, that is not what happens. One by one the brothers are painfully put to death. One by one they all watch horrified as various body parts are lopped off and thrown into the fire. And God does not save them. And so, they are left with a choice. Either God’s promises have failed, or they are going to have to understand God’s faithfulness in a new way.

A New Understanding

The terrible holocaust they are being put through convinces them that if God is truly faithful, then God’s promises must also extend beyond this present life. And if their enemies are going to destroy their bodies because they remain faithful to God, then God’s faithfulness and justice have to mean that God will give them those bodies back again.

Basically, they believed that if God had been able to create them in the first place, then surely God would be able to raise them up and create them as new bodies at the end of all things. So, the belief in the resurrection became established when people heard the story of what that family had experienced. And by the time of Jesus, it had become accepted by the great majority of Jews.

The Sadducees’ Version of the Story

And that is what makes it so hilarious when this group of Sadducees come up to Jesus one day to try and convince him that he is wrong about the resurrection, and they do it by telling him a story about seven brothers and one woman who all died. Oh, I’m sure they thought they were being clever, but I’ll bet their story went over with the crowd like a lead balloon.

Everyone in the crowd knew the story of King Antiochus and the seven brothers; everyone in the crowd believed in the resurrection because of that story. But the Sadducees thought that they had found the one weakness with that story. If only one of the brothers had been married, they argued, then for them to be raised from the dead would have broken one of the obscure laws in one of the Books of Moses because it would have meant that that one woman would be married to all of them in the afterlife.

It was a ridiculous argument of course, and I am betting that Jesus and everyone else were laughing at them as Jesus gave his answer. But do you want to know what they got wrong? They were trying to do their best to respect the scriptures as they knew them. But they forgot one key thing.

The Greater Truth

The scriptures are there to point us towards the truth. But the truth that they point to is not merely certain doctrines or laws. They point to the greater truth of who God is. And, as Jesus said to the Sadducees, who God is is the God of the living. A God whose essence is found in love and life itself.

The complete knowledge of such a God could never possibly be contained within the pages of a single book, no matter how extraordinary. Instead, the book points us to the experiences that others have had of God and to the experiences that we could potentially have. For it is only through human experience that we can come to know God, because human experience is all that we have.

So, the experience of the Jews who lived through the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanies led them to the new insight that their God was a God who would raise the righteous from the dead. In the same way, when the first Christians experienced that Jesus was still alive and with them after he had been crucified, that also taught them to trust in the God who would raise them from the dead.

When we are limited to what we find in the written word, when we allow that to dictate our experience, we will never know the fullness that God wants us to have.

The Suffering of War

On this Remembrance Sunday, we remember all those who suffered through the horrible trauma of war. We remember those who never returned. We remember those who came back broken in body and in spirit. We mourn the terrible loss and destruction that have been brought upon the earth as a result of war and we recommit ourselves to doing whatever we can to build a just and peaceful world so that no one will resort to war. I hope we can also commit ourselves to learning the lessons of wars and conflicts past. After all, as they say, those who do not learn from such histories are doomed to repeat them.

In the fires of the terrible affliction that the ancient Jews suffered under the Greeks, they discovered something important about their God. They discovered that their God was committed to them, not only for this life, but also beyond it. They learned that the God who had created them would give them new life again.

What have we Learned?

What have we learned, I wonder, as a result of the wars, police actions and peacekeeping that we have been involved in? You would hope, of course, as a result of our involvement in World War II that we might have learned something about the dangers of building a sense of nationalism out of ideals of racial purity and excluding the ones who are different. You would hope that, but sometimes looking around I do wonder if we are forgetting that lesson.

You would hope, based on our tragic experience in Afghanistan, that we would have learned something about using religion – any religion – as a tool for motivating terror and hatred. You would hope so, but I sometimes wonder what we have learned.

Growing in our Knowledge of God

But the most important lessons, I would still insist, are the lessons we learn about our God. I know there are many who learned faith in God in the midst of the trauma of conflict. I also know that there are many who learned that the image of God that they had been given was totally inadequate in the midst of such trauma. Both of those lessons are equally valid and essential.

I believe that the error that the Sadducees made was to think that they had come to the end of understanding who God was. They had a wonderful book, but the problem was that they believed that that book limited who God could be. Jesus challenged them to open up their minds to new possibilities about who God would be for them, even in the midst of the worst traumas of their lives.

But I suspect that the Sadducees were a little bit too comfortable in their lives, they had too many things going their way, so they were not open to learning something new about God. And that is kind of sad, you see.