Sunday, October 1st
Please join us on Sunday, October 1st.
Sunday will be a busy day.
During the Children's Message we will have our "Grand Gardener" potato weigh off to determine who grew the heaviest potato.
We will also be collecting food items for Thursday Night Supper & Social.
We will be celebrating The Sacrament of Holy Communion as part of World Communion Sunday.
Following Worship we will enjoy a soup lunch in the Fellowship Hall.
Flapjack Breakfast is Back!
Do no harm
The “Do No Harm” Rules
DO NO HARM is a non-profit non-organization.
If you think you’re a member,
You’re a member.
If you think you’re not a member,
You’re an honorary member.
There are no dues or fees.
There are no donations.
There is no official language or terminology.
There are no approved or disapproved concepts.
There is nothing special that you must believe.
There is nothing special that you must do or not do.
But . . . do no harm.
ps. Although not required, a sense of humor is helpful.
I hope you’ll support me as I “Race to Erase”
On Saturday, October 14, 2017, I will be participating in the Cambridge Race to Erase.
The Race to Erase is an annual fundraiser where teams compete in fun-filled challenges throughout their community, all in support of local charities. The Race challenges are designed to be not only entertaining, but to raise awareness and exposure to local businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Teams compete for fundraising prizes (and the top fundraising team is chauffeured in-style in a limo on Race day!) and a trophy is handed out to the team that finishes the race with the fastest time.
I will be on one of three teams that are racing to support "Hope Clothing." Hope Clothing, a ministry housed at St. Andrew's Hespeler Presbyterian Church, assists anyone in our community who needs some extra help clothing themselves and their family. We provide new or gently used clothing, footwear and accessories to anyone needing some help stretching their budgets. Small personal
items are often in stock, too. We help out dozens of families or singles, men, women and children every week. If we don’t have something that is needed we will do our best to find it.
Our team name for the Race to Erase will be The Clothes Horses. According to the Urban Dictionary, a clothes horse is
Okay, that is not exactly who I am. I may not be the most stylish person ever, but I am passionate about making sure that people who live in my community can get the clothes they need to live, work and support their families as best they can. I am passionate about used clothes distributed through Hope Clothing.
Hope Clothing is run by the generous donations from the community. The monetary costs associated with running this program rely completely on donations from St.
Andrew’s Hespeler Presbyterian Church, their members and our community. Clothing is given away free of charge. We are truly grateful for any and all donations that we receive because that means we can help
more people.
So, would you like to support me and the Clothes Horses as we support Hope Clothing? Any donations to our team are greatly appreciated. One way of doing that, if you will see me before the race, is to pass on your donation directly to me.
But there is an easier way and you can do it right now! Just follow this link:
cambridge2017.racetoerase.com
Click on "Donate" and then search for my name or the team name. It takes less than a minute and you are done! And the best part is that all administrative fees and credit card fees are taken care of by the YMCA and so 100% of your donation will go directly to Hope Clothing. It so easy you can do it right now. So why don't you go ahead and donate? I'll wait....
All done? Great! Didn't I tell you it was easy? Thank you and God Bless.
Scott
Continue reading »
The Race to Erase is an annual fundraiser where teams compete in fun-filled challenges throughout their community, all in support of local charities. The Race challenges are designed to be not only entertaining, but to raise awareness and exposure to local businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Teams compete for fundraising prizes (and the top fundraising team is chauffeured in-style in a limo on Race day!) and a trophy is handed out to the team that finishes the race with the fastest time.
I will be on one of three teams that are racing to support "Hope Clothing." Hope Clothing, a ministry housed at St. Andrew's Hespeler Presbyterian Church, assists anyone in our community who needs some extra help clothing themselves and their family. We provide new or gently used clothing, footwear and accessories to anyone needing some help stretching their budgets. Small personal
items are often in stock, too. We help out dozens of families or singles, men, women and children every week. If we don’t have something that is needed we will do our best to find it.
Our team name for the Race to Erase will be The Clothes Horses. According to the Urban Dictionary, a clothes horse is
"A person who is passionate about new clothes. A big shopper and consequently, a big spender."
 |
| The most stylish person ever? |
Hope Clothing is run by the generous donations from the community. The monetary costs associated with running this program rely completely on donations from St.
Andrew’s Hespeler Presbyterian Church, their members and our community. Clothing is given away free of charge. We are truly grateful for any and all donations that we receive because that means we can help
more people.
So, would you like to support me and the Clothes Horses as we support Hope Clothing? Any donations to our team are greatly appreciated. One way of doing that, if you will see me before the race, is to pass on your donation directly to me.
But there is an easier way and you can do it right now! Just follow this link:
cambridge2017.racetoerase.com
Click on "Donate" and then search for my name or the team name. It takes less than a minute and you are done! And the best part is that all administrative fees and credit card fees are taken care of by the YMCA and so 100% of your donation will go directly to Hope Clothing. It so easy you can do it right now. So why don't you go ahead and donate? I'll wait....
All done? Great! Didn't I tell you it was easy? Thank you and God Bless.
Scott
The little kingdom that grow: The noxious weed
Hespeler, 24 September 2017, © Scott McAndless
Mark 4:30-32, Isaiah 55:8-13, Psalm 92:1-15
| J |
esus’ Parable of the Mustard Seed is one that that gets brought up a lot these days in certain discussions. If you ever get into an argument with people – either on the internet or anywhere else – about whether or not the Bible is true and trustworthy or not, chances are somebody will bring up the Parable of the Mustard Seed.
The argument will go something like this: “If you really believe the Bible,” someone will say, “then what about what Jesus says about the mustard seed because Jesus says that the mustard seed ‘is the smallest of all the seeds on earth’ but that is actually not true. The smallest seed is actually a certain variety of orchid that is found growing in the tropical rainforest of Bora Bora or something like that.”
“ So Jesus got it wrong and the Bible got it wrong. The mustard seed is not the smallest seed. And if the Bible is true and inspired, doesn’t it always have to be correct? If we can find even one small error (like if it says that something is the smallest when it isn’t) then the Bible isn’t trustworthy. It invalidates the entire book because if you can’t trust what the Bible has to say about seeds, you can’t trust what it has to say about anything.”
Now, I am not necessarily one who is overly concerned about arguments like that because I don’t necessarily need for the Bible to always be literally true and the entire Bible does not fall apart for me merely because it gets a few facts wrong here or there. I believe that there are truths that go far beyond literal truths and mere facts and I often find those truths in the Bible.
But there is another reason why it doesn’t really matter that this passage gives us false information about mustard seeds and it has to do with a question of genres. A genre is a particular type of literature. You are already familiar with various literary genres. You can easily recognize, for example, genres such as fiction or fairy tale, you know what a newspaper article looks like and you can read the ingredient list on the back of your breakfast cereal box. All of those are examples of literary genres that you encounter every day.
And we have different expectations of different genres. You would get very angry – and rightfully so – if the ingredient list on your cereal box was not 100% accurate. If it promises that the package contains no peanuts, for example, and you’re allergic to peanuts, well, there had better not be any peanuts. But you don’t expect exactly the same kind of accuracy from a historical novel or a book of science fiction, even though you may indeed learn many worthwhile things by reading such books. So you really need to know what kind of literature you are reading in order to know how to interpret the information that it presents.
This understanding is a very important one to bring to your reading of the Bible because the Bible isn’t just one book. It is a collection of books and different parts of it are written in different genres. The Bible contains history and myth, poetry and prose, gospel (which is not the same thing as history) and correspondence and many other types of literature. To know how to read a particular passage, you need to know what type of literature you are dealing with.
So, when Mark tells us Jesus’ pronouncements on mustard seeds, what type of literature are we dealing with? Because if this passage were some sort of scientific treatise on the mustard plant, we would expect a very high level of accuracy and be very upset if it should contain false information on the relative size of mustard seeds.
So is this a scientific treatise? What would it look like if it was? We don’t have to wonder because we actually have an example of a scientific treatise on mustard written around the same time that the Gospel of Mark was written. It was by a Roman senator named Pliny (who also had a famous son so he is usually called “Pliny the Elder”) and it was an encyclopaedia of Natural History in which he included an entry about the mustard plant. In fact, this is what Pliny wrote for his entry on the mustard plant: “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”
So that is what a scientific entry on mustard would have looked like at the time when this gospel was written. And you could certainly argue that if Pliny the Elder had gotten any detail about mustard seeds wrong, it would have devalued everything he had to say because Pliny set out to communicate with that kind of accuracy.
But what Jesus was doing was something quite different. He was trying to teach his followers, as he clearly says, not about the nature of mustard plants but about the nature of the kingdom of God. So of course he is going to emphasize and even exaggerate those things about mustard plants that particularly help him to make the points about the kingdom that he is trying to teach them about – like, for example, the relative size of the seeds. It is hardly a problem that the way that he puts it is not strictly correct.
So, if we want to appreciate this parable, arguing over the size of orchid and mustard seeds is to miss the point of it completely. But what is the parable trying to teach us through this image? On one level, the point is pretty simple: Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is something that grows in somewhat surprising ways. That is a lesson that we have actually found in all of the parables that we have been looking at all this month here at St. Andrew’s. It is a theme that runs through all of the parables of Jesus that Mark has collected together here in the fourth chapter of his gospel.
But what particular nature of that growth is Jesus trying to bring out in this particular parable of the mustard seed, and what might it have to teach us about the life of the church today? Well, for that we need to understand the things that the people who listened to Jesus tell this parable would have brought to what they heard. And for that, it would be kind of helpful to know what first-century people thought about mustard seeds?
Well, fortunately, we don’t need to guess at that. We are incredibly fortunate in that we know exactly what people thought about mustard – that we actually have a scientific treatise on mustard written at almost the same time as this gospel. Pliny the Elder’s book of Natural History tells us exactly what the received first-century wisdom regarding mustard was.
We know from Pliny, for example, that they knew the usefulness of mustard. “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health.” They saw it as a useful spice to add taste to food and, even more important, as a medicine in various plasters and potions that they used as folk remedies for various ailments.
They also knew that it was really easy to grow, that it grew wild, in fact, as Pliny says, and farmers had even found ways of increasing its yield by transplanting it. But there was one catch when it came to the growth of the mustard plant. Pliny puts it like this: “but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”
Pliny is saying that mustard doesn’t just grow well, it grows too well. It spreads so readily that it tends to take over the garden and squeeze out any of the other fruits, vegetables or grains you may have planted. This was, in fact, common knowledge about mustard, not just special scientific knowledge. Pliny is just reporting what everyone knew.
So, did the people who were listening to Jesus know all of this about mustard? They almost certainly did. The crowd would have been full of farmers and agricultural workers who knew very well that you did not let a mustard plant take root anywhere you wanted anything else to grow. And I can well imagine that those farmers and agricultural workers and everyone else were scratching their heads and wondering why Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God was like the most notorious weed they had to deal with in their gardens and that Jesus was even putting emphasis on how extreme the plant’s spread and growth could be.
So what on earth did Jesus mean by comparing the kingdom of God to such a dangerous and generally unwanted weed? Did he just not know what he was really saying – I mean, we are told that he was a carpenter, not a farmer, after all. Maybe he just didn’t know how destructive a mustard plant in a garden could be. No, I think that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying and exactly how shocked people would have been to hear him speak of God’s kingdom in this way.
As I said, all of the parables of Jesus that are collected in this chapter of the Gospel of Mark seem to be saying the same key thing about the kingdom of God – that it is something that grows. Jesus is teaching that growth is as essential to the kingdom of God as water is essential to a fish. To apply that to the church, Jesus is teaching that, if the kingdom of God is present in a church, that church should exhibit growth in some significant ways. But Jesus is also saying that sometimes things can happen that get in the way of the growth that is natural to the kingdom. And so, in each of the parables in this chapter, he is telling us about the things that inhibit that growth.
So what could he be teaching us about what we sometimes do that prevents growth by comparing the kingdom to a grain of mustard? I believe that he intends for people to bring everything that they know about mustard plants into this discussion of the kingdom of God. He is saying that the kingdom of God will grow in this world – will grow wild and out of control just like a mustard plant in a garden and will actually overpower other cultivated plants.
So what, therefore could possibly prevent the growth of the kingdom? The only thing that could prevent it is the same thing that could prevent the growth of a mustard seed – if you never let it take root in the first place.
And, friends, I think that sometimes we do exactly that. We do recognize the explosive growth potential of the kingdom of God in this world, and we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid that it might overtake our whole lives. We’re afraid it might make us make changes that we don’t even want to consider. We are afraid that it will disrupt this comfortable little garden that we have planted by introducing into it plants that are different from what we are used to and might just take over.
First-century gardeners would have shuddered at the thought of introducing a mustard plant into their well-organized garden and Jesus was expecting exactly that reaction. He was saying that one of the things that would prevent the growth of the kingdom of God among us is our own fear of disruption and change within our well-organized lives and our well-organized churches.
I believe that Jesus wants the church to grow – wants this church to grow – as a part of the growth of God’s kingdom in this world. He wants us, like the mustard bush in the parable, to put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. But, I wonder, will our resistance to change and our resistance to disruption be the very thing that prevents that growth? I believe that Jesus was worried about that very possibility.
Sermon Video:
St Andrews team entered in Race to Erase October 2017
An annual event where teams compete in fun-filled challenges throughout their community, all in support of local charities.
St. Andrews' Hespeler announces that the "Clothes Horses" are entered as the team to beat in the Race to Erase! Our goal is to fundraise for Hope Clothing in the annual Waterloo Region competition on October 14th. All funds donated to the Clothes Horses go directly to Hope Clothing our missional charity. Our goal this year is to raise at least $2,000.
You can make this dream come true by:1. Enter a team of four people - ask Joni about signing up
2. Donate now via this simple website
https://secure.e2rm.com/registrant/FundraisingPage.aspx?registrationID=3947253&langPref=en-CA
from the homepage select "team" and choose Clothes Horses - Jean Godin and donate
100% donation goes to Hope Clothing
3. Make a pledge Sunday @ fellowship where signup sheets will be available until Oct 8th
4. phone, email or grab Rob Hodgson anytime with your cash, pledge or support
519-658-5237 or [email protected] worship most Sundays
 |
| The more funds donated the better chance a select group can ride in a limo and you may win a Clothes Horse tee as above. |
The single largest donation to the team "Clothes Horse" wins a Men's Medium tee as shown above. Donate now and often all funds go to Hope Clothing 100%
You can donate to St Andrews from home or on your phone app
for online donations to St. Andrews
http://www.standrewshespeler.ca/
Look for the donate button on St Andrews site and pick your choice of General, Hope Clothing or Memorial Fund. Current fundraising campaigns can be assigned to the General tab. eg. pay down the debt campaign. Then just follow the directions on site.
Current cost $0.30 per donation - a $10 donation sends $9.70 directly to St Andrew's AND immediately sends a charitable receipt to your email address. easy, peasy and economical.
This site also allows anonymous donations and monthly payments if you wish too.
Credit cards, Paypal accounts and "CanadaHelps.org" gift cards.
The little kingdom that grows: The seed that inexplicably grew
Hespeler, 17 September, 2017
Mark 4:26-29, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, Psalm 92:1-15
I |
f you have paid any attention at all to the news that has come out of Texas in the past month (and there has been a lot of news to attend to) chances are that you heard the name of one Houston religious leader mentioned more than any other. His name is Joel Osteen and he is the lead pastor of Lakewood Church, one of the biggest churches in a city of very big churches.
Osteen’s church caught a lot of flack immediately after the arrival of Hurricane Harvey and the devastating floods that it brought. People were upset with it for its failure to respond – specifically its failure to offer shelter in its large and well-appointed facilities. It seemed all the worse because the church’s excuses changed a number of times in the early days. At first they said they couldn’t offer shelter because the building was inaccessible because of flooding when it clearly was not. Then, once that lie was exposed, they went with the excuse that they hadn’t offered shelter because they hadn’t been asked when lots of other companies and religious organizations had throw n open their doors without needing to be asked.
Now I am not particularly interested in piling on Lakewood Church for what they did or didn’t do after Harvey. It was a crisis situation and, while I hope that I might do better than they did in a similar situation, I recognise with all humility that I might not. But I do have one issue with something that lay behind their actions. I can understand their concerns about their building and about liability, even if I don’t think they dealt with those concerns in the right way. What I don’t get, and certainly don’t agree with, is some of the theology that may have influenced some f their decisions.
Joel Osteen, you see, preaches a very particular kind of Christian message (if it is a Christian message at all) that is known as the prosperity gospel. The promise of this message is that God wants you to be rich – that it is God’s will for you that you should have lots and lots of stuff. That is what Osteen preaches week in and week out. He has also given an excellent example to his congregation of what this is supposed to look like by amassing a personal fortune in excess of forty million dollars.
There are a lot of problems with this prosperity gospel. It certainly contradicts many things that Jesus said. Anyone remember the time when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor,” for example? The whole train of thought also has plenty of potential to lead to abuse as Christian believers are taught a very particular application of the passage we read this morning from the second letter to the Corinthians: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”
This prosperity preaching teaches that the way you switch on the prosperity that God intends for you to have is by giving extravagantly to the church. But when the generous givers fail to see the promised millions materialize for themselves, they are made to believe that it must be their own fault – that they didn’t have enough faith or they didn’t show it by giving generously enough and the cycle repeats again and again until somebody gets forty million dollars but a lot of people end up poorer and convinced that it is really their own fault.
I have trouble with this teaching for all kinds of reasons, therefore, but I must admit that I do understand why it has become so popular and why churches like Lakewood have grown so large. Who wouldn’t want to hear that God wants to give you a great deal of wealth? It is also a very pleasant when you are living in a place (such as the City of Houston a month ago) where people are rich or at least have a reasonable chance of becoming rich because the underlying assumption behind it is that, if you become rich, it must be because you have deserved it – you have earned it because of your extraordinary faith or righteousness. And who doesn’t love the feeling that good things happened to you because you deserved them?
So this can be a very successful message when all is going well. But when things fall apart completely and it is looking like they may not get back to normal for a very long time – in the aftermath of a major hurricane, for example – the prosperity gospel might fall a little short and ring a little hollow. So it is not all that surprising that Joel Osteen went through a rough patch recently in Houston, though honestly I don’t worry about him too much. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine.
But there is a question about what we do with all of this. The world is a very frightening place, after all, a place where a whole lot can go very wrong. We have been reminded of that very forcefully in recent weeks – particularly by Harvey and Irma, by massive forest fires and a major earthquake thrown in for good measure. But it’s not just the natural disasters – maybe if it was just them we could deal with that – but the human ones seem more frightening in some ways. For example, the resurgence of white supremacy and even Nazism is more disturbing in many ways.
When we are reminded so forcefully about what is going wrong in the world for so many people, it can seem supremely selfish and self-centred to be concerned with one’s own needs and especially with things like personal wealth and prosperity. I understand that we would all like to be wealthy – who hasn’t dreamed of it at least once or twice – but when people are losing homes and livelihoods and don’t even have a clue about how they might get their life back – how petty does it seem to be asking God for prosperity for ourselves and expecting that God should make it a priority.
Even more important, what sort of message should we offer to the world in such times? One temptation is to be positively apocalyptic. I have certainly heard some of that recently – that these disasters are God’s payback for our sins. This message can come in many forms: hurricanes are brought on by our cavalier disregard for the environment which is directly tied to the rise in ocean temperatures that feeds extreme weather. Or others will position it as God’s punishment for our society’s immorality, assuming that God is outraged at whatever particular immorality the speaker is upset about. Racial unrest such as the resurgence of white supremacy is variously portrayed as judgement for our failure to right the wrongs of the past or for moving forward too quickly in the present.
Now, I won’t say that there is absolutely nothing to these apocalyptic pronouncements. There are lessons to be learned, I believe, in the midst of a string of disasters. If we, as a society, could actually learn that our actions (or failures to act) have consequences and that it is time to get past the short term selfish thinking that we are so famous for, it would only be a good thing. So, I get where all of this apocalyptic talk is coming from and am somewhat sympathetic to it, but I also think that it is problematic.
For one thing, I have some issues with how we chalk all of this up to God and God’s judgement because the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ takes no delight or comfort from any of it. God feels nothing but sorrow at the sight of people losing their homes or their livelihoods. God does nothing but sow tears of sadness when people are lost in hopelessness or fear – separated from their loved ones and all that is comforting to them.
I think that maybe one of Jesus’ simplest parables is a better way to approach the issue. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,” he said, “and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”
The kingdom of God, this concept that was so important to Jesus that he spoke about it all the time, was his way of talking about what God’s best intentions are for this world. (I know that some people often talk about the kingdom of God as if it was only about what happens to people after they die, but if you study everything that Jesus had to say on the topic it becomes quite clear that it was primarily about this world. It might continue on after death, of course, but the place where you were to encounter and enter the kingdom of God was here and now.)
Jesus called it the kingdom of God precisely because he was holding it up as a counterexample to the kingdoms that you encounter in this world – kingdoms like the one that was ruled by King Herod in his day in Galilee. And the stories and parables of the kingdom of God that Jesus told make it quite clear that he believed that God’s intentions for this world are for good and not for fear and suffering.
The kingdom was something that God would do. We could participate in it, but it was ultimately dependant on God’s action. That is what the parable of the growing seed is all about. Ultimately, Jesus is saying, our responsibility is not fix everything that goes wrong in this world. That, I think, is too heavy a burden for anyone to bear. No human can carry all the burdens of this world. But, Jesus says, what you can do is plant seeds.
When you see racial injustice – when you see people who are treating other people as if they were less than human because of the colour of their skin or their faith or their background – you cannot and should not carry years of racial hatred, misunderstanding and evil on your own back. You cannot fix all of that at once, but you can stand up. You can denounce the wrong that you see. I know that is hard for any of us to do, it certainly is hard for me to do, but to do so is to plant a seed for a better world.
When you see foolish thinking, the kind of thinking that just allows people to go on with their lives without thinking of the long-term impacts of their actions. When people are unwilling to make any changes in the carbon they produce, the pollution they leave in their wake because they cannot see anything beyond their next whim or desire, you cannot fix that. You cannot just make people willing to live thoughtfully or with a long view of what the impacts of their actions are. But you can plant a seed, by setting a better example yourself, by supporting government policies that help people to see the benefit in changing and that make it affordable for those with few resources.
You don’t have to fix it, but you can and should sow seeds and I’ll tell you why. Because you never know what God can do with a seed. Someone “would sleep and rise night and day,” Jesus said, “and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Of course, we today understand a whole lot more about how seeds grow than people did in Jesus’ day, but the point that Jesus was making still stands. You don’t have to know how the kingdom of God grows among us, you just have to plant the seeds and leave the growing to God because that is always how the kingdom of God always works.
God doesn’t want you be wealthy. God doesn’t want you to be miserable either. God doesn’t want you to lose everything you have ever relied on either. God doesn’t ever want those who don’t follow in his path to suffer in great torment for it. Those ideas are all a perversion of the Christian gospel.
What Jesus does want is for you to plant whatever seeds you can in this world – to stand up for what is right and just, to challenge evil, to engage in initiatives to make the world a better place. Most of all, Jesus wants to teach us to trust in God who can take whatever seeds we do manage to plant and make them grow in this world in ways that we could never even have imagined.
Sermon Video:
St Andrews’ will field at least one team – grab some friends and join us!
Cambridge
Saturday, October 14th, 2017The 4th Annual Race to Erase is back on October 14th, and you can help support a great local charity. Grab three friends, family members or co-workers to form a team of four today. Teams choose which charity they would like their funds to support and all the money raised goes to that local charity - 100% of funds received! Prizes are handed out to the top fundraisers.
On Race Day teams travel throughout their community, competing in a series of fun-filled challenges along the way. The team that finishes the challenges in the fastest time is crowned the Race to Erase champion. Note: this is not a running race! The challenges are a combination of savvy and smarts - no goofy shorts required.