I have written a lot of Annual
Reports over many years of ministry. They are not as easy to write as you may
think. How do you sum up an entire year of ministry on one sheet of paper,
after all? You can’t say everything, of course, but what can you do that will
at least give a flavour of what the year was like? I’m always open to finding a
fresh approach.
So, here is what I’m going to
do this year. You know those lists of questions that sometimes circulate on social
media – questions that you are supposed to post on your page and answer while
you challenge your friends to answer as well. Well, I borrowed one of those
lists and adapted it to make it:
20 Questions about Scott’s 2019
(Do
this without fibbing.)
1. Where are you answering these questions?
I am typing this as I sit in the car riding home (I’m not driving!) from a
quick visit and a supper with our daughter at college in London.
2. What is your favourite church picture you took during the year?
Session selfie!
3. Where was that picture taken?
At our Session retreat at Duff’s Presbyterian Church (February 2, 2019)
4. What was the hardest thing you had to do during the year?
Visit one of our church members in hospital. He was in a great deal of
pain, confusion and so weak and there was so little I could do for him.
5. What was the greatest privilege?
Visit that same church member in the hospital and be able to be a part of
that awful and yet meaningful and ultimately hopeful moment.
6. What moment in the year will you always cherish?
It was a moment that I cannot share with you. It was a moment of personal
counselling that I cannot tell, but the grace of God was a powerful and healing
presence. I will never forget it.
7. Best musical memory?
Most every time I got to sing with Joyful Sound!
8. What went terribly wrong and yet God turned it into something
wonderful?
On Sunday, February 3, 2019, I was awakened to the news that the furnaces
in the sanctuary were not working and it was cold in there, really cold! Oh no!
What will we do?! What we did was set up and hold worship downstairs in the Fellowship
Hall and we all had a great time and it gave us the impetus to start thinking
differently about what we really required to be a church together.
9. What was the latest you stayed up on a Saturday night getting
ready for a Sunday?
About 11:30 pm. I’ve gotten to the point that I’m really no good for much
of anything after that. I have also gotten to the point, however, when I just wake
up at 5:30 am Sunday morning and start getting ready.
10. Coolest surprise?
Carol Johnston knit Rudolph mittens for all the kids on the Santa Claus
Parade float. (Somehow, I ended up with a pair, too.)
11. Best New Development?
Our youth grew in number and decided to organize themselves and elect
their own leadership.
12. Best sign of hope?
We have a very meaningful moment when our session came together to create
a covenant with the help of Rev. Greg Smith..
13. People you couldn’t have made it though the year without?
Our amazing staff. Joni is constantly challenging me (in a really good way)
to be my best and bring out the best in others. Paula is so supportive and
uplifting. Corey consistently blows me away with her talent and her leadership
abilities. I feel I can always count on Glen to get it done. Karen is an
amazingly caring presence, pulls people together and makes a meaningful
community ministry possible.
14. Best church meal?
There were so many and they were so good but I’m going to have to go with
the Thursday Night Supper and Social Christmas feast!
15. Your earliest workday?
December 9, I got to work at 5:20 a.m. It was to open up the church and
turn off the alarm for a film crew.
16. Does pineapple belong on pizza?
Umm, maybe, under certain circumstances. Who am I kidding – it’s pizza. Of
course, I’ll eat it!
17. Most fun at a new event?
Open Mic. What an incredible cavalcade of the talents of this
congregation.
18. Who do you think will read this report?
Everyone, of course! They will pour over it like it’s a newly discovered
gospel.
19. Who will comment to you on the silliness of that previous answer?
Joni, Paula, Dominique, Ray and Allison.
20. Who will be upset that you mentioned their name in the previous
answer?
Zebedee was getting old. He’d been at this fishing trade for a long time – maybe too long. His hearing wasn’t what it once was and that was probably why he didn’t hear when the man came walking down the shores of the Sea of Galilee and spoke to his sons who were sitting at the other end of the boat. He didn’t even look up from the rather difficult knot that he was struggling to get out of the net.
Besides, he was busy talking – something that he seemed
to do all day every day – something that his two sons, James and
John, were so accustomed to listening to that they generally responded with nothing
but nods and the odd grunt.
“Have you heard about what happened up Capernaum way the
other day,” he had been saying to them. “You know Peter and Andrew, the two
brothers who have a boat up there? Well, they were out casting their nets just
a little off from shore when that new young man – you know, the one that just
moved down from the hills in Nazareth – came along. He apparently called out to
them across the water and he told them – get this – he told them that they
should stop fishing for fish and start fishing for people instead.
“But that’s not the really crazy part, oh no! The really
crazy part is that they actually listened to him. They jumped off their boat,
leaving behind a pretty decent catch of fish in the process, and swam to him
and then started following him. Can you believe that?
“They left everything behind. I mean, I realize that
there’s not a lot of good money in fishing these days. I know better than
anybody how hard it is to get by, but these are men who have people depending
on them. Peter’s got a wife and a couple of kids. Andrew is taking care of his
mother and his sisters. I mean, it’s just not fair that they should leave those
people behind and go off after somebody just because he’s got these crazy ideas
that maybe mean something to them. It’s just not fair that Jesus would even ask
them to do something like that.
“Well, at least I know that something like that is not
going to happen to me. I know that I can count on my boys to be there for me and
to keep this old fishing boat going when I get too old to go out there on the
water day after day. You boys know that it wouldn’t be fair for you to leave me
and… boys? Jimmy, Johnny? You guys are being pretty quiet back there in the
stern. You wouldn’t be playing a joke on your old man now would you? Boys,
boys?”
Now, obviously I don’t know if it went down like that.
The Gospel of Matthew tells the story very briefly with little detail. Maybe
James and John did have a good talk with their father before they got up and
left and the old man was in agreement. But I certainly don’t get that
impression from reading the gospel story. The point of the story seems to be
that they just got up and left. And I can’t help but think about what that
meant for their father – how he must have thought it was all unfair.
Last fall in the auction, I put a sermon up for the
bidding. I said that I would give the person who bid the most the opportunity
to tell me what to preach about one Sunday in January: this Sunday. The winner
was Andy Cann. And after, I am sure, that Andy flirted with the thought of
making me preach something that would probably end my career, he finally
suggested to me the title of this morning’s sermon: “It ain’t fair.” Which,
frankly, could still end my career if I don’t watch out.
Now, Andy was thinking about some particular things that
happen in the church when he suggested that topic. He spoke about some of the ways
in which the burden of the work of the church tends to fall unfairly on certain
people. He spoke, for example, about particular case (that I won’t spell out
because I don’t have permission from everyone involved), but it was a case where
a small group of people were supporting an important mission of the church –
something that we are all supposed to be part of – mostly out of their own
pockets. That, Andy pointed out rightly enough, that ain’t right.
I don’t really need to get into specific cases in order
to explore what Andy was getting at because this is actually something that
happens in the church all the time. I don’t know how many times over the years
I have had somebody come up to me talking about some very similar situation – a
situation where somebody feels as if they (or somebody else) are unfairly
loaded with some burden, cost or duty in the church. I don’t know how many
times I have heard people complain that others aren’t pitching in and doing
their part. And of course, there generally is a lot of truth to what is being said
because it is almost never true that the burden of being the church is evenly
distributed among all the people.
And part of me wants to use Andy’s question to stir
people up, to get them to all step up and pitch in – to make sure that we all
collectively own and support the good work that the church does. And, of course,
that is a noble goal. But I do generally find that, before we ask people to act
differently – to share the load differently – we need to ask why it is that
people behave the way that they do now. If you don’t understand that, chances
are you will not be successful at bringing about the changes that you would
like to see.
The first question, I think, is whether or not fairness
is actually what we should be striving for. The answer to that question might
be no. When Jesus came along and stole Zebedee’s two sons away from him, the
two sons that he had been depending on to take over the family business, do you
think that Jesus was aware of the hardship that he might be causing for the old
man? I think that he was. I think that he was aware that, to a certain extent,
it was unfair of him to deprive Zebedee of the family supports that he had been
counting on.
But why was Jesus there? He was there to proclaim a
message, and that message was, Matthew tells us, “Repent, for the kingdom of
heaven has come near.” Jesus was announcing that something so big had
arrived that it had changed everything. What’s more, he declared that the
arrival of the kingdom demanded a particular response: repentance. The word
that Jesus uses there – the word that is translated as repent – is a
Greek word that actually means to change one’s mind and one’s heart. Jesus was
saying that, because God had turned up on the scene to do something grand, that
it was time for everyone to start thinking about life and just about everything
else in completely different ways. Apparently, that included thinking
differently about things like the expectations that society placed upon you.
What James and John did, getting up and walking away from
their lives, may have broken all of the expectations that society had placed upon
them, but it was actually the perfect response to the new reality that Jesus
had brought into being. All of that is a way of saying that our human notions of
fairness, that idea that everyone else should live up to the expectations we
have of them, may have been superseded by something greater, something more
important, by the kingdom of heaven which blasts everyone’s expectations out of
the water – apparently literally in the case of Peter and Andrew.
Now, does that mean that there should be no expectation
of fairness in the life of the church? Of course not. But it does mean that we
are supposed to look at the bigger picture and not just the fairness of a
particular circumstance.
I’ve always been a bit puzzled by our reading this
morning from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Addressing the church, he says, “Bear
one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
But then, only a couple of lines later he says, “for all must carry their
own loads.” Now just wait a minute here, Paul, which is it? Do we carry other
people’s burdens or just our own? Surely you cannot have it both ways.
But, of course, Paul knew exactly what he was doing when
he put those two contradictory sentences so close together. He was trying to
get our attention. He was actually trying to show us that, when we focus on what
other people are doing or contributing, we will go astray. That is why, in
between those two contradictory statements, he slips in this little gem: “All
must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbour’s work,
will become a cause for pride.”
You see, if we only focus on what other people are doing
(or failing to do), the church can never become what it needs to be. Focussing
on what other people do, Paul warns us, is the cause of pride. Pride is a
difficult concept for us to understand sometimes. Pride can sometimes be a good
thing like, for example, when someone takes pride in doing a job well. When you
set out to do something and you put everything you can into it and get the
results you are trying for, of course you should be able to feel good about
what you have accomplished.
Paul is not here warning about that kind of pride because
it is a pride that that is related to testing your own work, focussing on what you can do.
The problem comes when you try to feel good about yourself by focussing on
other people – by putting someone else down so that you look better or by
criticizing somebody else’s best efforts. That, Paul is saying, is what is very
destructive for the church and in many other areas of life. And I will say
that, yes, that is something that I have seen often enough in the life of the
church.
Sometimes, for example, the very people who carry the
heavy loads at the church, and occasionally righteously complain about it, are
trapped precisely because they have this problem. They might well say, for
example, that they want somebody else to take on their burden, but what happens
when somebody actually steps up to do so? Well, they don’t do it right, do they?
They don’t do it in the way that it has always been done, so they can’t take
over. And so the person who tries to take on their burden gives up in
frustration and they end up still carrying that burden and (even better)
still being able to complain about how unfair it is. That is all about a
dangerous kind of pride, all about feeling better about yourself by criticizing
others and it has no place in the logic of the kingdom of heaven.
Paul suggests that the only way for you to avoid this
kind of pitfall is to focus on what you can do, how you can contribute by
bearing the burdens of others rather than on who ought to be bearing your
burdens and who ought to be doing what and how and so falling into the pride
that puts others down. The result of all of that is not always going to be fair
in the sense that the burdens will always be equally distributed. But the
kingdom was always about more than what feels fair in the moment, it is about changing
the way that we look at everything because God has suddenly shown up on the
scene.
I feel for poor Zebedee left alone in his boat. The aftermath
of all of that cannot have been easy for him. But he also had his role to play
and a burden to bear in the great thing that God was doing. I have to believe
that he came to realize that, even if it took some time. We all have our roles
to play and our burdens to carry. As we all focus on what we can do to carry
the loads of others, we will come to find the true strength of the message that
Jesus brought.
Stay tuned for lots of opportunities to explore your creativity! Starting on Sunday, January 26th and running for 6 weeks. Something for everyone, adults and children, week days and weekends. Musics and arts!
We had a great taco dinner (on Friday, December 27th) - thank you, Randy & Erin for gifting us dinner. Then we enjoyed some time together with a Secret Santa game and Christmas crackers.
For the past few years the children have celebrated New Year's Eve on the Sunday in between Christmas & New Year's. This year we decided to invite the rest of the congregation to party with us. So Scott planned a very interactive worship service, one where everyone could participate and get creative. We sang hymns together, prayed together and even enjoyed breakfast together - right in the middle of worship! Thank you, to everyone who joined us, for being such great sports and showing our children and families that they are important, too.
