Sermon for October 30, 2011 - Journey of Faith

The Scripture for this Sermon was Joshua 3:7-17

Once upon a time, I used to run somewhat regularly.  I was a member of my high school cross country team.  I don’t actually remember us doing very well.  I remember us playing a lot of ultimate Frisbee.  And I also remember one year pulling in the last five spots at an All-Colony track meet.  Still throughout my life, barring a time here or there, I have been a somewhat consistent runner.

Well, I didn’t run at all this summer.  I began in the spring with high hopes.  I quickly rebelled against those high hopes, finding a number of excuses which threw off my discipline and any inertia I might have gathered.  That being said, once late summer came around I decided I really wanted to run 5k again.  That’s about 30 minutes of running.  Nothing too significant, but something I would still have to commit to.  So I began very slowly.  I used a program I found online that I put on my phone.  Its called the 5k101 training program.  It is eight weeks, essentially going from the couch to running for 30 minutes straight.

The first week it had me running for two minutes, and walking for three, then repeating that set for a total of 8 minutes of running.  The first time I tried it, I was beat and realized how out of shape I had become.  I had to do that three times that week.  The next week, the running went up a little bit, and the walking down a little bit.  I think it was two and a half minutes of running, followed by two and a half minutes of walking, then repeating over until I had run for a total of ten minutes.  I’m on week five now.  The sets are eight minutes of running, and two minutes of walking for a total of twenty four minutes running.  And it feels really good.  I’m not there yet, but I can see myself getting there.

The most difficult thing about it, is developing a sense of patience.  Being patient with myself.  Accepting that I’m not there yet, that I can’t run for 30 minutes straight anymore.  Sometimes it is hard not to rush the whole program.  Instead I have to learn to let my body, let my legs and my lungs, let my heart, as well as my mind get used to the whole process.  It may surprise some of you (or not) that patience with myself does not come easily to me.

Has anyone heard the Chinese proverb, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”?  Can anyone think of something else that requires time and energy to accomplish?  Can anyone think of a journey of a thousand miles that starts with a single step?

In our scripture reading for today, we encounter the Israelites entering into the Promised Land.  That place which had been promised to their ancestors hundreds of years earlier.  But this is not the same group of Israelites that first went into the desert out of slavery in Egypt.  Though they were initially excited about leaving Egypt, they quickly grew disgruntled.  They argued with God, with Moses, and with themselves.  They complained about hunger, about thirst, worshiped a golden calf, doubted God’s promise.  And so they wandered in the desert for forty years.

Forty years later, we find the Israelites a completely different group of people.  They have become something else.  They have been changed.  This next generation of Israelites no longer fears entering the Promised Land.  Aware that God is among them, this is a spiritually transformed group.  And so they cross the River Jordan into the Promised Land in much the same way that they crossed the Red Sea.  Only this time they are not driven by fear, but instead by hope. 

This is not a small trickle of a river, this is a river at full flood, and we in Manitoba have seen what a flooding river looks like.  Imagine crossing the Assiniboine or the Souris this past spring, knowing that the only thing stopping you from being swept away was the presence of God.

Where did this trust come from?  Where did this faith in God come from?  How were the Israelites transformed so dramatically?  It came from forty years of wandering through the desert.  Forty years of living in the wilderness.  It did not come over night.  The faith of the Israelites was hard fought.  It was not a momentary, “Hey, we trust in God.  Look at us.”  It takes a long time for that relationship to develop.

And this is a wonderful model for our lives as Christians.  Our lives are a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage always moving towards that promised land of deeper relationship with the holy.  Our lives are a pilgrimage seeking wholeness, moving through our own brokenness.

And here’s the best part!

For me, the joy of running doesn’t come from hitting that end goal.  The joy of running comes from simply doing it.  I feel good about myself when I’m running, when I get out and enjoy the day, when I feel my own heart beat and spend time concentrating on my very breath.  I didn’t pick up the guitar in order to become a rock star (although lets face, you all heard my rendition of Tom Dooley, I’m pretty sure I will become one), I picked it up because I think it will be fun just to mess around with it.

As I was cleaning up some files in my study, I found a scrap piece of paper with something written on it.  Based on the papers around it, I think it was Shane Claiborne who said it at our Conference Annual Meeting last year, but I’ll stand to be corrected.  “Christians are so often worried about life after death, the we never even think about life before death!”  i.e. We are so worried about the destination, about the end goal, that we never even notice the pilgrimage itself.  How does our faith affect our lives here and now?

Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  It’s not tomorrow, its not a week from now, its not December 21, 2012.  It’s here!  It’s now!  He’s not talking about the afterlife, he’s talking about this world!  He’s talking about today!

There is a wonderful story I once heard a minister tell.  It was about a teacher living in Africa.  One day one of her students, gave her a beautiful gift, a certain kind of shell that could only be find at a beach miles away.  The student, who had no mode of transportation, had walked out there, found the shell and brought it back.  The teacher said, “That’s such a long journey for a gift!”  The student’s reply was “But don’t you see?  The journey is the gift!”

The Israelites could have wandered through the desert another forty years and still would have been in their promised land because they realized that through all that wandering, they remained in the presence of God.  It is the pilgrimage of our lives themselves that are holiness, not some end call that we are constantly striving for.

It doesn’t happen overnight, we never get to that final end goal we think we long for.  Transformation, relationship with God, encountering the holy and embodying Christ is not an on/off switch that we just need to find so we can flick it. And so we must be patient with ourselves.  We must learn throughout our lives that it is the path itself that is the pilgrimage, it is the forty years of wandering that is the promised land, the journey is the gift.  We are pilgrims together, seeking the God who exists within all of our lives and supporting one another in our travels.  In that way, we come to see that God is with us, always and in all ways.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Sermon for October 16, 2011 - Venting

Scripture Passage: Exodus 33:12-23

There is something incredibly endearing and human about so many characters in the bible.  Anyone who tells you the bible is full of saints and angelic people, probably hasn’t read it too closely.  On the other hand, anyone who tells you it is chock full of humanity, I think, gets it.

Moses is one of those humans, and as I read this passage over and over, I find I like him more and more.  I like him, because there is so much truth to him, he is very human, just like you and me.  I love Moses.

So how did we get here?  The Hebrews had been wandering around the desert for three months since being liberated from Egypt.  They are eating manna and quail, they are drinking water that flows from rocks, and they arrive at Mount Sinai.  Moses, their leader, heads up the mountain, and receives a number of laws from God, most notably the ten commandments.  Moses receives the two tablets with God’s testimony on them, inscribed into the rock by God’s finger, and he begins to head down the mountain.

While Moses was up on the mountain, his people began to get nervous.  They worried about what was going to happen.  He’d been gone so long, was he ever coming back?  Mumbles and grumbles began to work their way through the encampment.  Those mumbles and grumbles grew louder until they became a cacophony of noise.  “Oh we’ve been abandoned! We need new gods to lead us now that Moses has obviously been lost to us!”  Aaron, Moses’ brother and the high priest, appeases them with a Golden Calf.  And that’s when everything goes Kaput! 

Violence, disease, punishment, and abandonment.  God sends them away from Mount Sinai, with the words of an angry parent “I’ll decide what to do with you, later!”  Eventually going with, “I will no longer be leading you.”  And that’s when Moses turns to God.

“God, where are you?  Don’t stop leading us now, we need you so much!  We’re lost without you!  I thought I was your friend!  You keep promising things, so what’s the deal?  Show yourself to me!”

This is what I love.  This is the humanity of Moses, as the voice of the people, a voice that we can recognize really carries a strength with it.  “God, where are you?”  This is a question that resonates throughout the human consciousness spanning our history.  “Where are you God?  What’s going on?  Just show me where to go and I’ll go there! Lead me!”

This pleading is at the heart of our religious experience.  It is at the heart of our search for meaning, the heart of our greatest existential questions as people of faith.  “Where are you God?  Please! I don’t know what to do!”

Who has not faced great times of trial and tribulation in their lives?  Who has not been confronted by a difficult decision, a decision they long for guidance in, but when we ask, we find only silence?  It is entirely human for us to turn to God, and say “Hey God?  Where are you in the midst of all this?  I need you!”

This pleading, and yelling, this questioning and venting is present across the biblical narrative.

Not only Moses, but Elijah too.  Alone and lost in the desert, hunted by his enemies, Elijah throws up his hands and says to God, “That’s it!  I’m done!  I’ve done everything you ask, and look where it has gotten me!”  Elijah is mad, and tired, and sad, and afraid.  He’s had enough!

Jeremiah, similar sentiment.  “You know God, everyone says you’re so righteous!  That you are just and good!  But looking around, I have some serious questions about how just and good you are!  Where are you God?”

Even Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying to God, asking not to be in the position he finds himself.  Then on the cross crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Where are you God?  I need you right now!”

These are the voices that join with us, when we cry out, “God just speak to me!  I want something solid and tangible.  I want to know where you are in the midst of all of this!  Because right now, I can’t find you!  I can’t hear you!  Give me a sign!  Show me a direction!”

These are not only human questions to ask, human cries to make; they are GOOD questions to ask, they are GOOD cries to make.  They are cathartic!  They help us pour out those emotions that have been created into us.  They are a form of prayer.  But more than that, in asking them we are saying we trust God’s grace, we trust our relationship with God.  When crying out we are saying we trust that God can handle our venting.  And trust me, God can!

Being angry, or afraid, or sad, or lost; and venting that towards God is a Holy Experience in itself.  It was when Moses put his questions to God, that he came into the divine presence, and that the covenant between God and the Israelites is renewed.  It is when Elijah cries out, that he was invited to encounter God at Horeb.  It was when Jeremiah laid into God, that God speaks to him.  It was when Jesus cried out, that he died and the curtain in the temple was torn in two; and the world saw there was no division between God and creation.

Now, none of them got exactly what they want.  Moses only saw the divine presence from a distance.  Elijah encountered God, not in an storm or an earthquake or a fire, but in a whisper. Jeremiah was essentially told, “All those promises you’re waiting to be fulfilled, I’m just going to make those same promises again.  Deal with it.”

God is never what we expect.  Actually, God is often never what we really think we want.  But during those times in our lives when we are overwhelmed;  During those times in our lives when we are lost, or afraid, or angry;  During those times in our lives when we are without hope, without direction; Offering that up to God, in any way, is a sign of our tremendous and awesome relationship with the Holy One, in whom we live, and breathe, and have our being.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Sermon for October 9, 2011 - Something From Nothing

Scripture Passage for this Sermon: Luke 17:11-19

Read Something From Nothing by Phoebe Gilman

You can’t get something from nothing.  These are the words, the little boy in the book we just read, was told.  You can’t get something from nothing.  It seems logical.  Matter cannot be created right?  You can’t have an effect without a cause right?  In general, people get what they deserve right?  But the story doesn’t end there does it?  The little boy does indeed get something from nothing.  He gets a story.

You can’t get something for nothing.  Jesus, called to the lepers, he invited them to lean in just a little bit.  They had been told many times over, “You can’t get something for nothing.”  They were unclean, cursed with an illness that separated them from the world around them.  They could not offer anything to the world, and so they would get nothing in return.  They were nothing, and people treated them that way. 

They leaned in towards Jesus.  Then he invited them to lean in a little bit more, and at this time, all the disciples and the whole crowd was starting to lean further and further away, because, come on, its lepers, and no one wanted to be anywhere near them.  So Jesus began to whisper, he said, “All these people will tell you, you can’t get something from nothing, but you know what?  You CAN!  And somewhere, deep down inside each of you, you believe it, you know it.  You wouldn’t have called out to me if you didn’t.  You CAN get something for nothing.”

The lepers were in shock! Could it be?  Was it possible?  They ran to the priests who confirmed that they did indeed get something for nothing.  They had been cleansed, they had been healed.  And they didn’t have to make promises about what they would do, they didn’t have to be wonderfully good people, they just had to believe that they might get something from nothing.

They had nothing!  They had absolutely nothing.  They were unclean.  They were diseased.  They were on the outside looking in.  They had no access to society.  They had no access to the temple.  They had no access to anything.  They couldn’t offer anything to the world around them.  They had nothing.  And yet they trusted that even though they had nothing, they could get something.  And they were right.  A scandalous thought in the first century CE, and still a scandalous thought today.

This is not a story about miraculous healings.  This is a story about grace.  This is a story about getting something from nothing.  These lepers were not healed, they did not encounter God because they were deserving.  All the rules and regulation, all the laws of the day, in fact, insured that they would NOT have access to God. 

And yet… Sure enough.  They woke up one morning as lepers, as outsiders, as marginalized members of society, as excluded, as unclean.   And they went to bed with the ability to fully participate in the community.  From nothing, they suddenly had something.

This is what grace is.  It is the idea that we can get something from nothing. This is the faith that Jesus compliments at the end of the story.  The faith in God’s grace; a grace that is boundless and that is freely given.  A grace that is something from nothing.  We just get it.  We just get God’s grace.

In our world, we have created a deceptive reality.  Because we ourselves so often struggle with the idea of getting something from nothing (or worse yet – giving something without reason); subsequently, our image of God is one that often demands sacrifice, demands saintly perfection, demands correct doctrinal belief.  God will love us if we believe this… God will love us if we do that…  That’s counter to the Gospel.  Jesus heals first, before anything else happens.  God’s love always, always, always, comes first.  That is grace.

But the story does not end there.  One of the ten lepers comes back.  And he’s all healed, all clean, possibly skipping like the ex-leper from The Life of Brian. And this leper, responds to that grace which all of them had received.  He says, “thank you.”

And though Jesus is saddened that the others have not come back, he is delighted with this one man.  Jesus sees in him the model of his disciples, the model of who Luke thought Christians should be.  We are all recipients of God’s grace.  We are all bound up in God’s love, created and cherished.  To be Christian is not to be loved any more than anyone else.  All ten lepers were healed.  To be a Christian is to respond to that grace with gratitude.  To be Christian is to respond to that grace with humility.  Remember, grace touches everyone, we’re not better than anyone, we are just called to be grateful for it.  To live in response to that love God gives to the whole world.  We are called to live lives within that grace.

The question I’m going to leave you with is, and this Thanksgiving Sunday, is how do we show our gratitude to the God that loves everyone and everything?  How do we live lives that say “thank you”?  How do we fully live lives that embody that grace we are freely given?

Sermon for October 2, 2011 - Community of God

The Scripture Readings for the sermon were Matthew 11:25-30 and Galatians 6:14-18

My favourite image of St. Francis is of him preaching to the birds.  There is something so simple, and marvelous about it at the same time.  They silently watched and listened as Francis walked among them.  “Sister Birds,” he says, “Be grateful that God made you.  And always praise God.”  Then they fly up in the air, heading off in the four directions, all of them singing and chirping joyfully.  For Francis, even the birds deserved to hear the good news.

This story, I think, echoes the words of Jesus from our scripture passage today: “I thank you, God, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants;”  This simple nature that we encounter in the life of St. Francis, that he points to in the birds, and that Jesus finds in young children, is what we are called to model.  But I think this story of St. Francis and this Gospel passage say a bit more than just that.

When I first moved to rural Manitoba, I was touched and amazed at how well you guys do community.  It is hard to describe.  This is why I enjoy going into the community center, or to Dora’s, or to Harrison House for lunch.  There is an attitude, an atmosphere, that says “we’re all in this together, so lets all be in this together.”  In general, you know how to get along together, to support one another through tough times, and very often you know how to disagree with one another.  You know what it means to bring a meal over to someone who is grieving.  You know what it means to help someone with a broken piece of machinery.  You know what it means to enjoy coffee with one another, and you know how important it is to welcome people into your community.  You know what it means to put your trust in the people around you.  That has been a profound blessing for me.

People will say that the problem with our world is that we don’t know how important community is.  I disagree.  I think we know how important it is.  I think we either a) don’t know how to do it, or b) don’t know how large it is.  My experience out here is that you guys know how to do community.  That is a huge leg up on so many in the world.  The next step is seeing how big community is.

This was the message of Christ.  He was not simply saying, “Community is important!” People knew that, people understood that.  He was saying “Look at how big community is!”  He would say, “You have no idea who all is included in it.  Not just the clean, the saintly, the powerful, the rich; but the lepers, the sinners, the oppressed, and the poor.  They are as important to the community of God as anyone!”  Or as in our Gospel reading, “The community of God is not just for the wise and learned!  It is for the child who may know far less, but gets it far more than any of us.”  The Apostle Paul added to this, he looked around, he saw the divide between the Jews and the Gentiles (even in the church) and he said, “Hey, wait a minute!  We can’t draw our own line around races.  We need to include more than just a single group in the community of God.  Jews AND Gentiles are a part of the community.”  And our Brother St. Francis included even more, he would go out and he preached to a wolf, he preached a sermon to birds, “We can’t just say, the community of God includes only people, but rather it includes all of creation!  All that is, is a part of the community.  And so I say ‘Hello Brother Sun, and Hello Sister Moon! Hello brother wolf and sister swallows.‘ We are all one family, united in the community of God.”

Modern science tells the same story.  It does not contradict the message of Christ, it simply proves it with a different language.  In biblical times, people could look to scripture, and say, we are all related through Noah and his family, or through Adam and Eve.  Now, we can look through the lens of evolution, and see that it is true that if we go back far enough, we are all related.  But if we go back even further, we can see that we share a common ancestor with every animal, and further, with every plant, and fungus, that our family includes all life on earth.  And if we really want to stretch our boundaries, we can see that every rock, every drop of water, every piece of soil, much of the gas in the air, we all descended from Supernovas that forged our elements in their cores.  We all come from that same moment of creation, the earliest reckoning of history, as descendants of the Big Bang.

This message is just as unpopular today as it was when it got Jesus killed.  God’s community does not end at those doors, at these walls.  God’s community does not end outside of town, outside of Western Manitoba or rural Canada.  God’s community does not end at people who look like us, or think like us, or believe in the same things we do, or act the same way we do.  God’s community does not end with the people we might like.  God’s community does not end along national or racial or ethnic or religious borders.  God’s community does not end with humanity.  God’s community does not end with animals, or with life, or with earth.

Those are our communities.  Those are our boundaries, our definitions, our lines. Those are the divisions we are constantly bombarded with in the media, in politics.  Those are our kingdoms.  But Christ was not calling us to our kingdoms, Christ was calling us to the Kingdom of God.  Christ was calling us to the community of God.

God who sent Jonah to meet his enemies, and who told him, “Don’t you dare say that these people are not a part of family!”  God who went and lived with the poor, the outcasts, the sinners of Judea and Galilee, and who said to everyone “Don’t you dare say they are not in my family!”  God who sent St. Francis to meet with a wolf and some birds, and to remind the world, “Don’t you dare say that the animals, that the natural world, are not in my family!”

The kingdom of God IS at hand!  It is everywhere, with everyone we meet.  Saint or sinner.  Farmer or politician.  Straight or gay.  Rich or poor.  Aboriginal or white.  Conservative or New Democrat.  Even Human or snake, or tree.  The Kingdom of God IS at hand!  It is we who choose not to live there.

World Communion Sunday is a day when we celebrate how vast our community is.  It is a day when we join with Christians around the world, and say that we are indeed one body; that we are indeed sisters and brothers in Christ.  It is a day that symbolizes our hope that one day we will come to see ourselves as a part of a much larger community; that we will see ourselves as united in creation, sharing the same blood of Christ with all that is.

You guys here in Strathclair, in Newdale, in Cardale, know how important Community is.  The world desperately needs to hear your message about community, about how to actually live in community.  About what it means to support one another, to love one another, to help one another out, and to disagree with one another.  Now is your chance to fully embody Christ in the world, to move the way of community that is etched into your very souls, to encompass the world, to find within its grasp not just those who are near and dear to us, but all that is within the depth and breadth of God’s community.

Sermon for September 25, 2011 - A River of Creativity

The Scripture Readings for this Week's Sermon are Matthew 28:1-10 and Revelation 22:1-5

I grew up beside a river, the Humber River in Toronto.  As a kid, I remember going for walks and bike rides along its banks.  Watching fish and other wildlife swim in and around it.  Sometimes we’d go to where it emptied into Lake Ontario to watch people fly kites.  The river had little waterfalls, pools and eddies.  It was great.  I went down there for a run this summer.  It smelt awful.  There was miscellaneous brown foam, making its way towards the lake.  And there was garbage everywhere.  Perhaps I’m idealizing what it was like as kid, but I can tell you, it is disgusting now.  It broke my heart.

There are many problems in the world.  There is a lot of brown foam and garbage in the world.  We have significant environmental challenges.  We live in a world divided by war and by economics.  Security, both financial and physical, have become our greatest concerns.  We watch and read about horrible crimes.  The state of discourse between ideologies has degraded to petty slurs and mudslinging at best.  The noble life is openly equated with a life where you look out for yourself first and foremost.  Ego and extreme individualism have been pandered to so that they have become social addictions.  We have become overwhelmed by our problems.  They haunt us as individuals, and they haunt us as a society.  We have become entombed by them.  Systems and structures of society, that we don’t even notice, that we take for granted have control, and we assume there is no other way to exist.  We are trapped in this way of thinking.  We are trapped in this acquiescence to fear.  We are trapped in a spiral and we don’t know how to get out.

This past week a friend of mine directed me to an online video clip (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html).  It was of Ken Robinson, an educational theorist, giving a talk at a TED Conference a few years ago.  In his discussion he told a true story about a young girl.  She was disruptive in school, her work was often disjointed and turned in late, it was difficult to keep her attention.  The teachers said that she had a learning disability.  So her mother took her to a doctor who listened to the complaints, then told the little girl, “I’d just like to speak to your mother for a moment.”  He invited the mother to leave the office with him, and as he left, he turned on the radio.  He told the mother “just watch her.”  As soon as the adults had left the room, the girl started to sway and move to the music.  The doctor said to the mother, “Your daughter’s not sick.  She’s a dancer.  Take her to a dance school.”  This girl would grow up to become Andrew Lloyd Weber’s go to choreographer.  Her name is Gillian Lynne.  She has choreographed some of the greatest pieces of theatre, Cats and Phantom of the Opera.  And she is a multi-millionaire.

Jillian’s school was entombed in a certain way of thinking.  Trapped behind beliefs about what was normal, about what was the “proper” way to be, about how things always had been and always would be.  And poor Jillian and her mother were brought into that realm, into that space of rigid thinking.  It was not until the doctor was creative enough to realize that Jillian thought differently than the “norm”, that hope was offered.  He did not say she should shut up and listen.  He said that she herself should exercise her own creativity.

And it is creativity that we need in the world now more than anything.  Robinson says that creativity, that ability to come up with new ideas rather than slotting ourselves into the same old ones, will help us function in the world at its rate of change.  He advocates quite strongly that creativity is just as important as literacy.

I think rivers are the perfect symbol of creativity.  Civilization was created by rivers.  The Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization, exists because of two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.  Subsequently, human imagination has turned to rivers for creative inspiration.  The Egyptian Empire saw the Nile River as the source of life.  By its seasons of flooding they survived, as it carried in nutrients to fertilize their flood plain fields.  Our own biblical creation story, describes the Garden of Eden as the source of four great rivers that water earth.

Even beyond the human realm, rivers are the source of some of the greatest acts of natural creation we have seen.  Rivers twist and turn, chaotically charting and carving their course across the land.  When they come up against a rock, the go around it, and over time, they wear it down.  When they come to a ledge, they are not afraid to go over it, creating some of the most dramatic natural images we can think of.  And knowing that it is the littlest trickle that can eventually bring down a mountain, that a single river can create Niagara Falls, or carve into the earth a mile deep as in the Grand Canyon is a tremendous source of awe and marvel.

In our scripture from the book of the Revelation today we read about the River of life.  This flow of creative energy that comes out from God is the source of life and peace in the world.  Echoing the book of Genesis, this river is the source of re-creation.  Ezekiel describes this same river, writing “wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be many fish, once these waters reach there.  It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes.”  This water will create fruit for food, and leaves for healing.  This is the creative energy of God, and it exists within our own creativity, that great action inspired by the Holy Spirit.

And yet for some reason, in times of trial and tribulation, often it is our river of creativity that we abandon first.  As I spoke about last week, guided by fear, we try to gain control of everything, turning our backs to the creative power of the Holy Spirit.  I don’t know what it is, maybe we just want some sense of stability.  We just want to hold on to something we know and understand, and the Holy Spirit is NOT stable.  Creativity is NOT stable.  Rivers are NOT stable.  They twist, they turn, they carve.  To paraphrase Heraclitus, “You never put your foot in the same river twice.”  It is constantly flowing, it is new water each and every time.  We don’t want to hit a rock, or go over any ledges.  Creativity, the Holy Spirit, riding the River becomes a great risk.  And it is one we often feel we cannot afford to take.  But I would argue, we cannot afford NOT to take it.

In his CBC Radio One show, the Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly describes a man, Hal Wallis, who took a great risk in making a movie.  The script was based on a play, but the screenwriters hired to adapt it left when they were about a third of the way through.  He could not get the director he wanted.  The stars spent their time on set talking about how to get out of making the movie, and found the process of making the film so difficult, they wouldn’t even talk about it with their friends.  Everyone thought the dialogue was unrealistic, and the story itself was not believable.  While filming, the script had no written ending, so they decided to shoot two alternatives, hoping to pick which one they liked.  Unfortunately, they ran out of money after they shot the first ending, and had to wrap production.  The movie was declared a flop when it was previewed.  If Hal Wallis had backed down at any of these points, if he had been afraid of failure, Casablanca would never have been released.  It would never have been nominated for 8 Oscars, winning the big three, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture.  It would not be regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made. 

O’Reilly then offers a famous quote, “Ships are safe in the harbour, but that’s not what ships were made for.”  Rivers were made to smash into rocks, to go over ledges.  It is in doing things like this, that they garner their true power.

We were made to be creative.  When the bible says we are made in God’s image, I would argue that in many ways, it is our creativity that resonates with divinity.  Pablo Picasso once said, “All children are artists, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” 

It is not a matter of children being quiet so we can teach them.  It is a matter of them laughing, and giggling, and playing, and dancing, and singing, so that they can teach us.  They can remind us what that River of creativity is like, they can direct us to the Holy Spirit.  Robinson, uses another wonderful story to illustrate the free spirit of children, who are not worried about getting things wrong.  A little girl is drawing a picture.  The teacher comes up to her and asks what she’s drawing.  “I’m drawing a picture of God.”  The teacher responds with, “But no one knows what God looks like.”  The girls replies “They will when I’m done.” 

We should not be afraid of being creative, even though we might fail, we should be free to be creative.  We should not be afraid to let the Holy Spirit course through us, hitting obstacles, twisting and turning one way then another, going over ledges from which we cannot see the bottom.  This is the power by which we will remake the world.  We cannot allow ourselves to be stopped up.

In our Gospel reading for today, there was a big rock in the way.  It was forced out with the words, “Be not afraid.”  The vision of hope offered in the book of the Revelation, is creative power flowing from God.  It is the Holy Spirit in action in our world and in our hearts.  It is this creativity innate within us that we must tap in order to irrigate the world, so that something new and wonderful can spring forth.  Thanks be to God, Amen.

 

Our Wilderness Guide

The Reading for this Sermon was Romans 8:18-27

For a few years I was a leader at a summer youth program called FutureQuest.  The part of FutureQuest that the participants seemed to love the most was the three or four day camping trip we’d take.  A lot of the kids had never been camping, many had never been out of their home cities, so it was always an adventure.  But as a leader, I would always lie in my tent at night, terrified about each and every one of the kids I was watching over.  Every rustle of leaves made me think about the size of the bear licking its lips as it approached one of the tents full of youth, all of whom smelled like hot dogs.  Every crack of thunder made me worry about what tent had just been struck.  It was only after we all would be safely at home and I could hear the excitement in the participants voices that I could breathe again and realize what an awesome time we did indeed have.  This is the nature of wilderness.  It is that awareness that we are not in control.

Paul and the people he wrote to were in a wilderness of their own.  In many ways, life in the first century of the Common Era was tough.  The streets were far less safe than they are today, life had less value. With poorer sanitation and less knowledge of medicine, illness and disease were constant threats. Even the image of birthing, which Paul uses in this letter, was not just a time of great excitement, but also of fear, as the infant and maternal mortality rates were much higher than they are today. 

Paul himself, often faced persecution for his beliefs, and even within the Christian community, he faced opposition.  The Christians of Rome in the first century also faced their share of persecution and division.  There was division between the Gentile and Jewish Christians.  The Roman authorities, at least twice came down hard on the Christian community there.  Once Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because, to quote a Roman historian, they made “disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus” (probably a misuse of the word Christus or Christ).  And later they were intensely persecuted by Emperor Nero as a scapegoat for a fire that burned Rome.  These were people for whom life, in many ways, was beyond their control.

Times have not changed as much as we like to think they have.  We are a species that cannot admit it lives in the wilderness.  We cannot admit it, because it terrifies us.  Not having control, is frightening.  So we commit vast amounts of energy and resources into maintaining it, or at the very least, maintaining the illusion.

This desire, this longing for control, this denial of wilderness manifests in ways beyond count.  We see this manifest in the clear cutting of our natural wonders, trying to wield them to do our bidding.  We see this manifest itself in the cookie-cutter confines of suburbia.  We see this manifest itself in our refusal to even talk about death, or in our struggles to sit with those who are sick.  We see this manifest in thousands of years of sexual repression, trying to deny those feelings that make us feel out of control.  We see this manifest itself in thousands of years of religious oppression, the idea that we control whether or not we are in God’s good books.  We see this manifest in our violent attempts to maintain some sense of security. We see this manifest in the Gospel of America, that to be honest, we hold very close to our hearts in Canada, the delusion that somehow I am entirely in control of my own destiny.  That a poor person on the street, for some reason deserves it.  That who we are is somehow all a result of worth.  That is why, when bad stuff happens, we ask deep within our hearts, “What did I do to deserve this?”  We ask this, because we want an answer.  But when the answer comes back, “Nothing.”  We are terrified.

We hold onto these messages, we long for these rules and codes, for these opportunities to judge others and judge ourselves based on circumstances; because if they are not true, we see how out of control and how powerless we really are.

We live in the wilderness.

Let me say that again.  We live in the wilderness.  We live in the wilderness, and our guide is fear.  And so we run through the wilderness in a panic, trying to transform it into something that we can control.  Trying to shape it, to landscape it.  To turn it from a desert into Las Vegas, to turn it from a forest into a park.  We long to control the wilderness that we all live in. Until, one day, we forget that we are even in the wilderness.  And when a sandstorm strikes Las Vegas, or wild animals begin appearing in the park, we give our hearts once again to our trusted guide.  Our guide then tells us to tame the lions into kittens, to turn the wolves into puppies.  And when the kittens maul us, and the puppies bite, we give even more of our hearts over to our trusted guide.  Soon, all we have to trust, is fear.

This is why the Way of Christ is such a ridiculous faith.  Because it defies all semblance of logic, it stands in the face of one of our most base emotions, and offers a very different guide through the wilderness.  Hope.  Hope we encounter in the person of Jesus, hope that is embodied within our experience of the wilderness itself.

Truthfully, I find the Way of Christ, the Christian Scriptures to be among the most honest lenses to look at the world through.  Our faith is upfront (or at least it should be) with its admission that we live in the wilderness.  It admits that you can be the most noble being, the literal embodiment of goodness and holiness, you can live and breath God, devoting your life to charity, to justice, and to compassion, and still end up on a cross, rejected by family and friends, and declared a criminal.

What happens to us is not based on worth.  That idea is foundational to our faith.  Jesus said, “It rains on the just and the unjust, alike.”  His life’s ministry constantly showed that because someone was poor, or sick, or an outcast, did not mean they had done something wrong, and just because someone was rich and powerful did not mean that they had done something right.

This resonates still today, along with numerous other messages.  We can live the healthiest life in the world and still die of cancer, or still have a heart attack.  And I remember hearing an interview with the oldest woman in the world at the time, who admitted to being a lifelong smoker.  Economies collapse and affect those who have done tremendous good in their lives; and those who have lived lives of corruption may walk off unscathed.  In times of war it is not just the “bad guys” who die.  In fact , it is far more likely that it is the innocents who do, women and children often bear the brunt of violence.  The people in Somalia are not responsible for the famine that is causing such devastation.

Life is a wilderness.  And we can either deny that, and let fear dictate how we live our lives.  Or we can listen to the words of Paul, Paul who invites us to live lives of Hope.  Hope in something that Paul freely admits he cannot describe. 

Hope that even though the wilderness is beyond our control, we might encounter something unimaginable for ourselves, that we might see sights that take our breath away and resonate within our hearts.  Hope that one day we will learn to not run away from wilderness on our own, but walk through it with one another.  Hope that we see embodied in Christ, who though he saw himself walking towards the cross, would not change his direction out of fear.  Hope that as we walk through the wilderness, as we encounter our struggles, that we come to know we do not walk alone. Hope that it is in the wilderness that we encounter God. Hope that when we surrender our control, when we stop trying to wield this world, one another, and ourselves, that the Holy will be with us.  Hope that it is through the wilderness that God walks with us.  Hope that we come to know God intimately as we join Christ in his walk through the wilderness towards the cross.

We live in the midst of wilderness.  Who will be our guide?

Sermon for September 11, 2011 - Cain's Choice

The Scripture Reading for this sermon came from Genesis 4:1-16

Cain stormed down from the mountain.  His face was bright red and he cursed with each step he took.  His brother called from behind him, but he didn’t answer.  When he reached his field, he grabbed some of the crop that had not been harvested, and pulled it out by its roots.  He flung it at a nearby tree with a yell, and dropped to his knees.  With his head in his hands, he began to cry.

“What’s wrong Cain?”

“It’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair?”

“Why him?  Why do you prefer his sacrifice over mine?”

“Does it matter Cain?”

“Yeah it matters!  What, do you prefer meat more than grain?  Was my offering in someway less perfect than his?”

“No Cain.  It doesn’t matter.  I liked his offering more than yours and there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.  The only question that matters is, what are you going to do about it?”

Cain opened his eyes and looked up.  “What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean is that, sometimes things happen that are beyond your control.  They can be good, they can be bad.  The only thing that you have control over, is how you respond to them.  You can either respond to them well, with compassion, empathy and with love.  Or you can fall prey to sin, and respond with hatred, with vitriol, fear, and selfishness.  So yeah, if I tell you that I liked Abel’s offering more than yours, what are you going to do about it?  Something bad has happened to you Cain, what kind of person are you going to be?”

Throughout the years people have tried to figure out why God accepted Abel’s offering, but was displeased with Cain’s.  There have been a number of different theories put forward.  They range from Cain’s offering being the dregs of his crop, while Abel offered the best of his flock; to God’s preference for ranchers over farmers.  But there really isn’t too much evidence for any of these within the text.  Because this story is not about what sort of sacrifices God likes.  This story is not about whether Cain did anything wrong that would cause his sacrifice to be unfit. 

Nor is this story a polemic against fratricide or murder in general.  The murder itself takes up only a verse in the chapter.  Following his conversation with God, Cain takes Abel out to the field, and kills him.

“Where is your brother, Cain?”

“So now it’s my job to take care of him?  You love him so much, you find him!”

“What have you done?”

Silence.

“What have you done, Cain?  The earth is crying out with the blood of your brother!  What have you done Cain?”

Cain has made his choice.  Something bad happened to Cain, something beyond his control.  God pointed out the two paths for him, the path of doing well, of doing right, and the path of sin that was waiting for him, calling to him, luring him into its jaws.

Has Cain mastered sin?  Has he controlled himself enough to walk the path of righteousness?  Or has he been lured away, down the other path?

Ten years ago today, I was, somewhat ironically, in an ethics class.  We were given a short break midway through to go to the washroom, or to get a snack.  When class started again, another student came in and informed us that the U.S. was under attack.  The professor, somewhat distracted tried to continue teaching, but eventually he realized he couldn’t concentrate, and neither could any of us, so he let us all go find various tvs throughout campus.

I remember coming home on the bus that day, hearing all sorts of crazy rumors about the number of missing planes, about how many of them were over Canada.  Even watching the news was madness, as none of the stations seemed to have a clue what was going on either.  When the dust settled, numbers, names, and stories could finally be put together.

And though it was the U.S. that was attacked that day, we should never be so smug as to sit safely behind national boundaries.  It was our society that was attacked, the United States just happens to be the greatest symbol of our society.  It was terrifying, it was tragic, and three thousand people lost their lives.

What was our response?  What has happened in the 10 years since September 11, 2001?  How much have we invested into the past ten years?  I don’t just mean dollars and cents.  What has been the cost?  Have we surrendered to anger and fear, rather than mastering them?  Do we control them or have we become their prey, as God warns Cain against?

I was reading in the Observer this month, that today we also celebrate another anniversary.  On September 11, 1906, Mahatma Gandhi, began his campaign of Satyagraha in South Africa.  It was this movement that he would later bring to India, and would influence some of the greatest names of the Twentieth Century, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.  Though it literally means firmness of truth, Dr. King described this movement in his “I have a Dream” Speech as “confronting physical force with soul force.”

Why is it that we hold up figures like Gandhi, like Mandela, like Martin Luther King, Jr.?  The oppression in colonial India, in Apartheid South Africa, and against blacks in America, was unfair and beyond control. Against the overwhelming nature of the violence committed against them and their people, how did they respond?  Were the oppressed groups controlled by fear and anger, or did they master and wield their emotions?

The story of Cain and Abel is a story about the choices we all face.  When confronted by opposition, when confronted by events outside of our control that are unfair, that are unjust, that hurt us, how do we respond?  The next time violence descends upon our society, the next time our economies collapse, the next time a natural disaster strikes, will we be our brothers’ keepers?  Will we offer the sacrificial love of Christ?  Or will we walk down that ever so tantalizing path of sin, the path of surrendering to anger and fear, the path that will forever brand us with the mark of Cain?