The service video from this morning is mostly edited but uploading the video files is taking much longer than expect. They will not be available one the web page until (probably) tomorrow morning. We are sorry for the delay, but hope you will watch then.
We at St. Andrew’s, like everyone else, have had
considerable difficulties navigating the ever evolving COVID-19 crisis. If we
were simply to rely on the directives that are being given to us, we would go
on with our service more or less as usual. The Presbyterian Church in Canada
has called on congregations to continue with Sunday services unless the local
health authorities indicate otherwise. And, since the local authorities are
only asking for gatherings of more than 250 to be cancelled, we are clear to
proceed.
Nevertheless, official directives do not seem to be quite sufficient at the moment. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution and care for our people, let me state that there will not be a regular morning worship service tomorrow, March 15th, but here is what will happen.
I will go to the church on Sunday morning for 10 am. I will be there and lead in worship and there will be a few people to assist me. There will be no Sunday School this week.There will be prayers and other elements of worship and I will preach a sermon. All of this will be videotaped and posted here on the webpage by 2:00 pm at the latest. I encourage you all to participate in worship by watching. While our worship and especially our prayers will touch on the present crisis, I will, in the sermon, encourage us to lift our eyes beyond the crisis to look at where God may be calling on us to go as a church in our ministry to the community. The sermon title is: When there is no water on the journey.
During this time on Sunday morning, the church will be open.
If you are not sick and have no symptoms, you may come in and join us in the
sanctuary. However, we will require that
everyone who enters must lovingly practice social distance. We will remain two
meters apart from each other (unless we come from the same household).
Finally, please remember the church in your prayers and in
practical ways. Even if many of our activities are shut down for a while, the
financial needs of the congregation will actually not lessen. We appreciate all
those who have made their commitment to the church through Pre-Authorized
giving. We probably could not weather this without your commitment. If you are
able to help us, please consider online giving. There are links on the web
page.
We will be assessing the situation throughout this week and
the next. Please know that St. Andrew’s is still in operation and will respond
to your needs even if we may have to limit face-to-face interactions. For now,
Bible study will continue, and the Food Bank is expected to still take place on
Thursday. I will begin to post daily prayers and meditations for you on the web
page. Please continue to check in.
Be in prayer for the people in the front lines battling the
virus and treating its victims. Respond to the needs of your brothers and
sisters here at St. Andrew’s, as well as those of your family, friends and
neighbourhood. Be loving and full of care as you treat all people with respect
even if (in these strange times) you may need to keep at a physical distance.
Together we will rise above these unprecedented times. (please pass this
message along to people whom you know are not online)
“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for
I am your God. I will strengthen you and
help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” -- Isaiah 41:10
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?
Join us on Sunday, April 5th, 5:00 pm, for a delicious roast beef dinner with all the fixings!
Tickets are on sale now: $15/adult; $6/12 & under; All inclusive in price of ticket.
This dinner supports our Thursday Night Supper & Social dinners.
Now the Lord said to Ashurbanipal, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Ashurbanipal went, “What, are you crazy, Lord? You want me to leave behind
everything that is familiar and comfortable, the land that I’m supposed to
inherit from my father and all of the family supports that are supposed to
protect me from all the unpredictability of life. That’s okay, Lord, you can keep your blessing.
But the Lord
was not discouraged and he went and said to Utnapishtim, “Utnapishtim, same
command. Leave your country and everything and you can have all these
blessings.” But Utnapishtim said, “Lord,
I am very flattered and everything, but I am totally swamped this month, can I
get back to you later on your plan.”
So, the Lord
went on to others – to Nahshon, Ammishaddai and Zuriel – but nowhere could he
find someone to take on the challenge of what he commanded them – until he
found Abram. And Abram, to everyone’s surprise, he just got up and went.
That is the kind of amazing thing about the story of the
call of Abram in the Bible, isn’t it? There really was nothing special about
Abram before that. He hadn’t done anything, hadn’t proven his value in
any way. When we first meet him in the Book of Genesis, there is only one thing
that sets him apart, one thing that indicates that he is different: when God
says go, he goes. He doesn’t talk back. He doesn’t ask questions or hesitate.
He goes.
That is what made me wonder how we’re supposed to read
this story. Was Abram the only one that God spoke to, or where others given the
same offer? Do we not hear about those others – are they entirely lost to
history – simply because they turned God down?
And if the only thing that Abram did to set himself
apart, at least at first, was respond to this command, what is the significance
of that? What did Abram do right? You might think that it was his instant
obedience that impressed God, which would mean that God is really only
interested in what you might call “yes men” (for lack of a more inclusive
term). What God wants more than anything else is someone who, when God says
jump, only says, “How high sir?”
But no, that cannot be it. If God were looking for
nothing more and nothing less than unquestioning obedience, he could have
chosen to adopt unthinking beasts instead of a human family. No, what set Abram
apart was not the instant obedience itself but the thing that made him react
that way, and that thing was faith.
In our reading this morning from his letter to the
Romans, the Apostle Paul is referring to a later event in Abram’s life when he
writes, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” but what
he says there certainly applies to this earlier event. What set Abram apart
right from the very beginning was his willingness to believe the promises that
God made to him. Paul goes on from there to explain what belief in God means in
that kind of situation, “But to one who without works trusts him who
justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” Paul says
that the faith that God is looking for is a willingness to trust God.
As I thought about the season of Lent this year, I
noticed that there was a certain theme that kept coming up in our readings for
Sunday mornings – a theme that is most clear in this Genesis reading this
morning. The readings are full of stories of people who step out and embrace
new things, new concepts and ideas, who leave things behind because they feel called
to something new. We see that theme, for example, in our gospel reading from
this morning. We see it as Nicodemus engages with Jesus of Nazareth who pushes
him to rethink just about every aspect of the Judaism that he has held onto as
a teacher of Israel. If Nicodemus is going to embrace what Jesus is saying to
him (which apparently according to this gospel he eventually does) he is going
to have to let go of many of the ideas and ways of thinking that have told him
who he has been up until this point in his life.
So, looking at that, my question was why are these the
stories that seem to be coming up during Lent? Lent has always been a very
important season in the life of the church. It is a time of reflection, of
repentance and of rededication. In the early church, it was also a time for focusing
on the basics of the faith. Throughout the season new members of the churches
would be taught what it meant to be followers of Jesus in preparation to be
baptized on Easter Sunday. So I think that we should also think of it as a
season when we focus on the absolute essentials of what makes us followers of
Christ.
With all of that in mind, how should we think of this theme
that seems to be introduced by this decision of Abram to just get up and go,
leaving everything that is familiar, just because God says so? I believe that
this is meant to teach us something absolutely essential about faith and what
it means for us as followers of Jesus Christ in the world today.
Let me ask you, how is faith generally perceived in our
society today? I would suggest that a very big stereotype of people of faith is
that they are people who cling to the past. That perception is not always true
about Christians, of course, but it is persistent, and it is not based on
nothing. There are many Christians today, for example, who cling to beliefs and
ways of seeing the world that are outmoded and largely discredited – those who
insist, for example, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the
world was all created about 6,000 years ago, and that it was all created in a
span of six 24-hour days. There are those who would claim that believing that,
in the face of all that contrary evidence, is a perfect example of what faith
is.
But it’s not just in matters of what people believe that
Christians can be particularly stuck to the past. It is also in matters of
practice and ways of doing things. We cling to old songs and old forms of
prayers and old traditions. Have you ever heard that favourite old hymn that
goes, “give me that old time religion, it was good enough for my father; it’s
good enough for me.”
And I am not saying that that is a horrible thing in and
of itself. Just because something is old doesn’t mean that it can’t be good. Old
traditions can obviously still be meaningful and comforting. Old truths can
still be true, and we should never abandon the truth. There is no problem if we
simply value these things and hold on to them appropriately. The problem comes
when we confuse blindly clinging to these things with faith; the problem comes
when we start to see stubbornness in itself as a virtue. And I’m afraid that we
often think in exactly that way.
If faith really were what we often assume it is, then
Abram would not be the ideal example of faith. He would be a negative example.
If faith was just about stubbornly clinging to the familiar and comfortable, then
the example that we would be celebrating today on this second Sunday of Lent
would be Ashurbanipal or Utnapishtim or whoever else turned God down flat
before Abram said yes. But there is a good reason why nobody knows who they
were.
The season of Lent is often compared to a journey. We
talk about how it is the path we have to travel in order to arrive at the sad
but beautiful truth of what happened on Good Friday when God’s love for us was
demonstrated so powerfully. It is a journey towards the incredible victory of
Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday. But every journey towards something is
also a journey away from something else; that is the truth that Abram
demonstrates to us so clearly. When he left on God’s orders, what he was
journeying towards was very nebulous. God hadn’t even actually told him where
he was going yet – had only promised to let him know when he got there.
But if Abram destination was unclear, what he was leaving
was anything but. He knew exactly what he was giving up and what it was costing
him. And that is often how it works and that is why change is hard, why it is
so much easier to cling to what you know than to embrace what you have not yet
seen.
And so, if we are going to think of our passage through
Lent this year as a journey, I’m going to propose that, instead of focussing
just on where we are going, we think about what God might be calling us to let
go of in order to get there. As you may know, it is a tradition in certain
churches to give up something during the season of Lent. People might make a vow
to stop eating chocolate or desserts or to stop doing some favourite activity
during the forty days of the season. That is may be close to what I’m talking
about here, but I think we may need to look for something a little bit more
serious than that.
I’m not talking about giving up something you like for
just a short period of time. I’m talking about giving up permanently the things
that are keeping you from grasping the full truth of what God did for you on
Easter and on Good Friday.
Let me ask you, what might you be clinging to, not
because it a good thing or a healthy thing, but simply because it is what is familiar
or comfortable. Perhaps it is an old grudge – something that you have been
holding against somebody for so long that you may have even forgotten why it
was that you were mad at them in the first place. Holding on to something like
that might make you feel good – there is a comfort to it – but it is not doing
anyone any good, least of all you. I would suggest to you that part of the
Lenten journey that God is calling you to is a journey away from that grudge.
Or maybe you’ve been resisting something – some change in
your personal life or something that you are involved in – even though you know
deep down inside that the change is inevitable. Change is hard and God
understands why we resist it, but your Lenten journey this year might well
involve you walking away from the resistance. That will mean that you will walk
into something new and unfamiliar and probably disturbing because of it, but
the walk forward is a walk of faith for you as much as it was for Abram.
I just think that you need to be reminded that, if your
faith is merely something that makes you hold onto what you’ve always known,
resist change and complain about any disturbance to what you are used to, it is
not the faith of Abram. It is not the faith that prompted God to bless Abram and
make him a nation that would bring blessing to the whole world. Walking away
from some of that will be hard, of course, but the same promise of blessing
that God gave Abram is the promise he is offering to you this Lenten season. So
let’s embark on the journey together.
When, six days later, Jesus came up to Peter, James and John and quietly said, “Hey, what do you say that the four of us take a hike and climb up to the top of that mountain over there?” did they have certain expectations about what he was saying and what might happen? There are all kinds of reasons to think that they did.
Ever since human beings (or maybe even their primitive
ancestors) first stood up on their hind legs and raised their eyes to the
distant horizon, those eyes were drawn to the hills and mountains that punctuated
that horizon. And from very early times, they seem to have come to see those
mountains as significant mostly because they were places where extraordinary
things happened.
In Southeastern Turkey, not far at all from the place
that the Bible seems to be talking about when it describes the location of Garden
of Eden, there is a mountain called, in the local language, Göbekli Tepe. In
recent years, archeologists have made some amazing discoveries at that
location. They are unearthing structures made of massive stones carefully
arranged in circles with even bigger t-shaped stones standing in the middle of
them.
The site was clearly built up over many centuries, but
the truly surprising thing about it is that there are absolutely no signs of inhabitation
– there are no remains of houses, of fire pits, or of the garbage heaps that
human beings seem to be so good at leaving wherever they go. Nobody actually
lived there, but large numbers of people built it and visited it over many many
generations. Even more astonishing, the site is over 11,000 years old.
Do you have any idea how old that is – 11,000 years? That
is older than the invention of agriculture. So it wasn’t built by farmers but by
people who are sometimes called “hunter-gatherers.” At some point, there were
primitive hunter-gatherer people who lived in that part of the Anatolian
Peninsula, what is today Southeastern Turkey, who one day looked up and saw, in
the distance, that mountain of Göbekli Tepe and said to one another, come, let
us go up that mountain and spend enormous amounts of time and energy
constructing massive circles of stone on that mountain, but let’s not live
there, let’s just visit from time to time.
Now, hunter-gatherers don’t necessarily
have a lot of extra resources to spare. They tend to live at pretty close to
subsistence levels. So, this was no minor decision they were making. It would
have cost them a whole lot. Why, then, did they do it? The only theory that the
archaeologists can come up with that makes sense is that they believed, in some
sense, that if they went to the top of that mountain and built those massive
structures, they would be able to encounter God, or maybe gods, there.
And that speaks to something that I suspect is built into
the human psyche. We seem to think of mountains as places for divine
encounters. This is something that cuts across all people and all cultures. The
ancient Celts spoke about the idea that there are places in this world, they
refer to them as “thin places,” places where the boundaries between this world
and some other reality that we can’t even imagine are easily penetrated. And
mountains seem to be particularly thin places for many peoples. Maybe this was
an idea that first occurred to people because they thought of their gods as
living in the heavens and mountains were as close as you could get to the
heavens while still remaining on earth. But I think that this is about more than
just geography.
The Bible records many divine
encounters on mountaintops. Most significantly, God invited Moses to the top of
a mountain to give him the law. And it just seemed to make sense to everybody
that such an important encounter had to happen in such a place. Such dynamic
revelations could only happen in elevated places. Later, it would make sense to
everyone that the only place to worship God was upon his holy mountain, as we
read in our Psalm this morning: “Extol the Lord
our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy.” The impulse to seek to encounter
God on a mountaintop is deeply ingrained into our human souls. Maybe it has
been ever since Göbekli Tepe
So yes, it seems quite likely that, when Jesus invites the
three to go up the mountain with him, they are expecting that they might
experience something divine. And indeed they do! They have an experience that
is very much a parallel to the story of Moses on that other mountain. There is
the same encompassing cloud, the same frightening light and Moses himself even
shows up for the party.
There has been a lot of talk down through the centuries
about what actually happened on that mountain and what it means. The story has
a certain otherworldly quality to it, as if it is not quite real. Jesus himself
refers to what happens on that mountain as a vision, which adds to that impression.
But, whatever it was, what they experienced there seems to have been a powerful
confirmation of what they had only begun to suspect about Jesus: that he was
not just an ordinary person and that God was uniquely present in him.
This was not something that was clear under ordinary
circumstances. Surely, as Jesus moved through the towns and villages of
Galilee, he appeared to be nothing more and nothing less that an average Jewish
male just like anybody else. But the unique setting of the mountaintop was a
place where the inner truth of who Jesus was could literally shine through.
God’s presence in Jesus became undeniable.
I think that we are all offered moments like that in our
lives – moments when God is present in powerful ways. They may not all be quite
as dramatic as this gospel story, but they are real. God does break through
into our reality at certain times and places. There is a universality to such experiences.
Not every individual has them, of course, but every society seems to have
individuals who experience such things. I think our hunter-gatherer ancestors
experienced such things on Göbekli Tepe. Maybe their understanding was limited
and they couldn’t interpret what they saw as clearly as Moses would on his
mountain or Peter, James and John would on theirs, but that doesn’t mean that
God wasn’t there for them on their hill.
I think we do have such experiences, but the real
question in this story is how are we going to respond to them. Peter’s first
impulse is significant. His idea is to make three dwellings, one for Jesus, one for Moses
and one for Elijah. There is something about that that seems very familiar to
me, something that has been there in the human spirit for at least 11,000
years. Just as the ancient hunter-gatherers encountered something divine on top
of Göbekli Tepe and said, “Guys, we have got to build something up here. I
don’t care if it takes us centuries and consumes all of the extra energy of our
primitive hunter-gatherer societies, we are going to build something on top of
this to contain and preserve this experience so that we never lose it.” Peter
is possessed by that very same spirit.
Why do we do that? Why do we build shrines and temples
and churches on those locations where we, or perhaps where our ancestors many
generations before, had those significant experiences with God? I believe it
stems from a desire to tame or control such powerful experiences. We want to
bind the experience within a structure or institution so that we can maybe come
back and visit it from time to time, but it doesn’t escape and begin to change
everything in our lives.
Remember how I said that the ancient people who built Göbekli
Tepe expended all of that time and effort building the shrine but that nobody
actually lived there on the mountain? That was all about keeping the experience
of God at a distance – letting God or the gods know that they don’t have a
place to speak to our daily lives but that we promise to visit them on special
occasions.
Well, things really haven’t changed in the many millennia
since. Peter is still reacting just like the hunter-gatherers who had come to
Göbekli Tepe. Though he calls what he wants to build “dwellings,” (some
translations have “tents” or “tabernacles”) it is clearly not because he wants
to live on the mountain. He wants Jesus and Moses and Elijah to stay on the
mountain so that he can go on with his life without Jesus, Moses and Elijah
interfering too much. He wants to keep the powerful experience of God safe and
remote on the mountaintop.
And again, all of this is quite understandable. It is, as
I say, what people have been doing to their powerful experiences of God for at
least 11,000 years! The really surprising thing about the story of the
transfiguration is not that they had that really extraordinary encounter with
God, the really surprising thing is that they learned that day to deal with the
experience in a new way.
God speaks. God steps into the story in a very powerful
way at this point as the voice of God thunders from the enveloping cloud, “This
is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” That is
a pretty impressive way of making sure that we pay very close attention to what
Jesus says next. Peter is given a warning that, if he ignores the next thing
that Jesus says, he will be doing so at his own peril. And with such a setup,
you might expect that Jesus will have a lot to say. He, like Moses was when he
was covered by the enveloping cloud, is in a perfect position to deliver an
entire law code and Peter, James and John would be bound to receive it as a new
law.
So, our anticipation builds; what is Jesus going to say?
What he does say, of course, doesn’t seem to live up to the hype. All he says
is, “Get up and do not be afraid,” and then he presumably says, “Let’s
go back down the mountain.” That is it: don’t be afraid and let’s go. But what
he says must be loaded with meaning because we have been warned to pay heed to
it.
And indeed it is. It marks a stunning new teaching,
undoing the thing that has been built into humanity since Göbekli Tepe. For
Jesus is announcing to us that, because he has come, the experience of God is
not something that we have to respond to in fear. We don’t have to keep the
presence of God locked up in some safe spot in a temple, dwelling or tabernacle
on some mountaintop. We do not need to live in fear of it because Jesus has
come and brought God near.
But old habits die hard, don’t they? I think that, in
many ways, we are still very much like those hunter-gatherers on the ancient
Anatolian Peninsula. We still want to keep God at a safe distance in some
special place. Sometimes we treat our holy places, like for example, this sanctuary
here, as if they were on some remote mountaintop far removed from our daily
lives. We visit here, but we don’t bring our whole selves here. We leave the
rest of our lives out there and we try not to let the one affect the other.
When Jesus said that he came to announce the arrival of the kingdom of heaven, which
was his way of saying that that separation was over, God’s reality was about to
spill over into the daily world.
This is not a place for you to merely visit from time to
time and reconnect with God, this place is where the revolution that the world
still needs is supposed to begin. God is not safe here, kept apart from the struggles
of the real world. The God you meet here in Jesus Christ is going with you and
before you out into the world and into daily life. If that sounds like
something that might change everything, you’re right it is. Jesus came to
change everything, especially about how we relate to God in our daily lives.
How would you recognize an immature Christian – someone who was just starting out in their walk of following in the way of Jesus Christ? I’ll bet if you surveyed your average group of Christians, you would probably find a great variety of answers. Say you went to a fairly normal congregation like this one and asked people, confidentially of course, who they felt were the most mature Christians among them, they might say something like, “Well, brother Bob over there has taken many courses in theology and Bible study and he probably understands more about God than just about anyone. He is a very mature Christian.” And then someone else might say, “But look at sister Susan over there, she has served as an elder for so many years she has chaired many committees and even headed up that big building project. Now there’s a mature Christian for you.” Or someone else might point out brother Phil, who can pray like nobody’s business, or maybe sister Catherine who has taught generations of students in that Sunday school room.
Those are the kinds of things that we look at. We look at
education, leadership, ability and service. We look at what people have
accomplished and sometimes just it how long they’ve been around to judge
whether or not they are mature in how they live out the Christian faith. And, I’ll
be honest, that is generally how I think about it too. And I will say that I
have certainly been blessed, down through the years, to have known many mature
Christians according to those criteria. That is why I was kind of shocked when
I realized what it was that the Apostle Paul was saying in our reading this
morning from his letter to the Corinthians.
Paul speaks to the Christians in Corinth and sadly tells
them that he can’t treat them as mature Christians. In fact, he says that they aren’t
just immature, they are babies. He has to feed them milk, he says, and not
solid food. Paul is speaking here as if he were a nursing mother with a little
baby. Nobody knows for sure how long mothers nursed their children in the
ancient world. There are some indications that they may have nursed them until
they were at least three or four years old! But they still must have introduced
solid foods well before that age. Perhaps they exclusively fed their children on
milk for about the same period of time that modern mothers are recommended to
do so by the experts today: about six months
So what Paul is implying to the Corinthians is not merely
that they are immature. He’s suggesting that they are little more than newborn infants.
He’s actually casting himself as a nursing mother with a baby who cannot even
handle pablum. But what is really surprising is how it is that Paul knows that
they are immature because he doesn’t look at any of the things that we would
look at. He doesn’t look at education or experience or service or ability or
any of that stuff. There is only one indication that matters to him. “For as long
as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human
inclinations?” The fact that they
are quarreling with each other is all Paul needs to look at to know that they
are spiritual infants.
What would it be like
if we in the church today had the same understanding of spiritual maturity as Paul?
Because I’ll tell you that we don’t tend to think that way at all. We often go
to the other extreme. What do you do, for example, if you have a person in your
congregation who is, let’s say, really forceful when it comes to getting their
point of view across, who has this way of making sure that everybody goes along
with their plans? What do we do? Well, we usually let them do whatever they
want because we are scared of how they might react if we don’t. We also tend to
look at them and say, “Wow, there’s a leader for you; there’s somebody who
knows how to get things done.” And so we advance them into leadership or put
them in charge of some project.
And then, before too
long, you find yourself in a position where almost all of your leadership team
is made up of exactly that type of person and if you don’t watch out you soon
have them butting heads with one another because, I’ll tell you, none of them
are about to back down on anything. We behave as if these people are the
spiritually mature, responsible leaders and not the spiritual babies that Paul
would have seen. We act as if quarrelling and fighting are an essential part of
being the church and even reward the behaviour.
And I know that we
often excuse it. We say that people are not really fighting because it isn’t
physical. We call it being passionate or forceful and often even push the blame
onto those who complain or feel hurt by the process – tell them that it is their
fault because they are being too sensitive. You know, maybe we ought to check
with Jesus before we say things like that.
Jesus said, “You
have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’;
and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment,’” and we agree. We think,
that because people aren’t murdering each other everything’s fine. We’d go even
further and say that so long as nobody’s having fist fights in the parking lot or
keying people’s cars, we must be all good. But here’s the thing. Jesus said
that in order to reject it and say that it wasn’t good enough. He said it in
order to say, “but I say unto you…”
Jesus is giving us, in
this short passage from the Sermon on the Mount, some instructions on becoming the
kind of mature Christians that Paul was looking for but didn’t find in Corinth
– the kind of Christian who doesn’t give into quarrelling and fighting. And this
first instruction is key. He says that it’s not just about not murdering
each other. It’s not just about avoiding actual physical violence. We
need to look at deeper questions about how we treat each other, how we speak to
each other and how we behave. Words can hurt just as surely as blows can. Raised
voices and aggressive movement can frighten and even terrify.
And I know that some
people might find that to be too much to ask. How can we censor our every word
and movement all the time? It is a lot to ask and I know that it is
something that we will all fall short of at least from time to time. I fall short
often enough. But Jesus never said it was supposed to be easy. He demanded more
of his followers and it is the kind of maturity that we may sometimes fail to
achieve but that we must always aspire to.
But that is just one
part of the advice that Jesus gives to us as he encourages us to maturity. He
also teaches us to, “Come to terms quickly,” when we are faced with such
strife. That is (I suspect Paul would agree) what a mature Christian should do rather
than quarrel and fight. Now, coming to terms is something that takes some work,
it takes some communication and in some cases it might take some mediation. It
might even take some give-and-take or what you call negotiation. Sometimes it’s
really hard and sometimes it is nigh impossible, but coming to terms is
something that we can all work towards together.
But I’ll tell you
something that coming to terms isn’t; it isn’t what we often do. What do you
do, for example, when you find yourself in a situation, whether in the church
or someplace else in life, and somebody begins to act inappropriately with
someone else – insulting them, making fun of them or maybe speaking in
inappropriate racial or sexual ways? I know how people often react and I’ve
done it, sadly enough, myself. People withdraw, look down as if they had
suddenly become very interested in their shoes. And I understand why we do
that, we are afraid to speak up, afraid of the discomfort of it or that maybe
the person who is misbehaving will turn his or her attack on us. We hope that
maybe, if nobody says anything, it’ll just be over and we can pretend that it
never happened. And, indeed, that is exactly what we sometimes do afterwards as
well. But let me ask you, is that kind of response what Jesus was thinking of when
he said that we should “Come to terms?” No, he was not.
But, of course, that
is just one way that we deal with the discord that sometimes arises among us.
Sometimes, when somebody has hurt you in some way, maybe even without realizing
that they have done it, you might respond by withdrawing from that person, becoming
cold and even hostile in your reactions to them. I get that reaction. It can
really feel so good, you almost feel as if you are getting back at them by
doing it. But, let me ask you, do you think that that’s what Jesus was talking
about when he said “Come to terms”? No, it was not.
Okay then, how about, “agreeing
to disagree”? Is that what Jesus was talking about when he spoke about “coming
to terms”? Sometimes, I will admit, that is a position that we’re going to have
to take. The simple reality is very clearly that we are not always going to
agree about everything. There is no escaping that. But sometimes I feel as if we
can say that in a rather cynical way, as if we are grudgingly giving someone
permission to be wrong from our point of view and somehow I really don’t feel that
that’s what Jesus was getting at when he spoke of “coming to terms.” Surely
there are ways to say that and to truly respect and honour that person who
holds a different point of view, to be willing to learn from them even if, in
the end, you don’t agree. I think that could be close to what Jesus was talking
about when he said, “come to terms.”
But most of all, what
I think Jesus was saying was that we need to truly love one another. And if you
truly love one another and you run into one of those inevitable patches when you
see something differently or are hurt by something that somebody does either
intentionally or unintentionally, then you are going to put in the effort and
the time to actually communicate what you feel and what you need. You will put
in the time and effort you need to understand where somebody is coming from and
why they might be feeling the way they are (which, I have found, often has
little to do with the disagreement at hand but with something deeper that might
be going on in their life).
It also means you are
going to be willing to tell somebody the hard truth, like how they might have
hurt others with their behaviour. That is a hard thing for anyone to hear, but
when it comes from a place of love, it can be a transformative moment. I think
that that might just be a piece of what Jesus was getting at when he told us
that we should come to terms.
Is any of that easy?
Of course it isn’t. Is any of us going to be able to do that all the time? Of
course not. We will all fall short at least from time to time. But, as Paul
makes very clear, our failures to do this do not mean that we are not followers
of Christ or that we have no place in the kingdom of heaven. It means that we
are immature Christians who can’t quite handle solid food. But full maturity is
what we should all desire. It is what Christ has called us to. So let us all
put in the work to get there.