The Power of Hopelessness: A Sermon for Sunday December 8, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, December 8, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Gord Johnson’s “Jesse Tree” is one of my favourite songs. In tonight’s reading from Isaiah, we get the verse that Gord based that song on: “ A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” (1)
The image of the shoot that will grow out of a dead stump is a beautiful one. It is such an amazing, defiant image of hope. A shoot, a living thing, will grow out of a dead thing.
We love images like this. Just do a google search for flowers growing out of concrete sidewalks.
The image actually begins in the previous chapter of Isaiah:
“See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty,
will lop off the boughs with great power.
The lofty trees will be felled,
the tall ones will be brought low.
He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax;
Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.” (10:33-34)
A forest full of lofty trees has been cut down. All that remains, are stumps.
Things really should not grow out of stumps, a stump is what is left when you kill a tree by cutting it down. Jesse’s family tree, that was once large and majestic, that contained kings, has been cut down. It no longer resembles its former glory. It’s a dead, useless stump.
Some people take great pleasure in trying to connect imagery like this to specific events, past or present, Jamie mentioned an example of prophetic predictions gone wrong a few weeks ago. But even if you wanted to, it’s hard to pin this image to a specific event because Israel had multiple experiences that could be described in this way. They were cut down and began again multiple times.
New life can come from death. This was something they would have known from experience.
Our text from Isaiah is not describing a present reality, it is pointing to a hopeful future. At the time these words were written the new life was not yet visible. They were written when all that could be seen were the dead stumps. They are words pointing to a hope-filled future that has not yet become a reality.
The new life that the people are hoping for will come in the form of a person. Michael J Chan explains that this person will embody “the best of Israel’s traditions: He is wise and understanding (2), powerful and effective in war (2,4), able to judge for the benefit of the poor (verse 3-4), and obedient to God ( verse 2,5). [He] will rule the world in such a way that the poor are treated righteously, the meek are given a fair hearing, and the wicked are killed. So glorious is this reign that he is literally clothed in righteousness and faithfulness (verse 5).”
His reign will upend the natural order of things. Isaiah tells us that:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox (6-7).
Isaiah is saying, “Look! The mighty forest was decimated and became a field of stumps but out of one of those stumps grew a beautiful and mighty tree! And look at all of the good and wonderful things that it will be able to accomplish. It may seem like all around you is death and destruction but pay attention and don’t lose hope. New life is coming!”
And sometimes, when we are experiencing challenging times, this is exactly the kind of defiant hopeful promise we need to help us keep going.
And this is exactly the kind of message that John the Baptist was preaching.
John is one of the more colourful characters we encounter in scripture. I’m grateful that even though it would be an incredibly theologically sound choice, the church didn’t choose to model vestments on John’s wardrobe and we don’t have a single feast day in the liturgical calendar where his regular diet is on the menu.
No camel hair for the priests, and no locusts dipped in honey for the feast.
Thanks be to God.
John was a fiery character who passionately proclaimed his message to the people, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
Have you ever stopped to wonder for a moment just how one goes about making a path straight?
Well, one way would be to cut down any trees or growth that is in the way. Later in the passage John says, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (8-10)
If it’s in the way, don’t save it, don’t tell a false story about it, cut it down and throw it into the fire.
There’s not a lot of wiggle room, or grey, in John’s message. None really.
Have you ever wondered how John felt when he finally met Jesus? When he finally met the Messiah and began to understand just how Jesus’ ministry was going to unfold?
I wonder if he was disappointed. I suspect that he was disappointed.
I suspect that Jesus did not look or act like John hoped he would act.
And so, in order for John to embrace the actual Messiah, he had to let his dream of what the Messiah would be die.
He had to lose hope in his idea of what the Messiah would be like in order to embrace the actual Messiah.
Which is a hard thing to do with any person, but with the Saviour of the world? The Saviour you have dedicated your entire life to?
But John does. He cuts it down, throws it into the fire, and embraces the real Jesus.
I was out for breakfast a little while ago and I have to confess that I spent more time eavesdropping on the conversation that was happening at the table next to mine than I did actually participating in the conversation that was happening at my own table.
At this other table, a group of people were generating ideas for their church’s adult Sunday School program and one person at that table said something like this, “The church needs to teach us how to end things. We never learn how to do this or do it well. Friendships, jobs, romantic relationships, they all end, but I’ve never been taught about a faithful way to end things. I’ve only ever been taught about the importance of having hope and not giving up.”
The past few months have been really tough for me. And a lot of people have reached out to try and help. They’ve reached out in a lot of different ways, but one common way has been to try and manufacture a Jesse Tree for me. Not a legitimate one, but a quick and easy one. They’ve seen the difficult things and tried to jump to a promise of new life – the bright side, the good thing that will come from the bad.
And honestly, it hasn’t been even a little bit helpful.
Two things have been.
The people who let me just sit in the difficulty. The people who acknowledged the situation with no attempts to promise a better time yet to come, and who resisted the temptation to gloss things over by trying to graft a potted plant from the grocery store on my dead stump.
The second helpful thing was a book a friend gave me. They actually gave it to me over 2 years ago and I just couldn’t bring myself to read it until recently. In that book, Necessary Endings, author Henry Cloud talks about the importance of hopelessness.
And that concept gave me hope.
You see, while the shoot that grows out of the stump is a beautiful, powerful, and true image, sometimes a stump remains a stump.
And more importantly, sometimes a stump is supposed to remain a stump.
Sometimes things need to end.
And in order for that to happen, and happen well, we need to resist the temptation to live in false hope and instead live in the reality of hopelessness.
Some stumps will never bring forth new life no matter how much hope you have or water you give them.
Imagine your life is a forest. There are healthy trees that are doing just fine. There are trees that could use a bit of pruning, and there are dead trees that need to be cut down and, as John says, burned. Some of those stumps will remain stumps, some may develop new shoots.
It can be difficult to tell which is which. It can be tempting to pretend that everything is just fine as it is and avoid the difficult tasks that require you to take an ax to some of those trees and that’s where it’s important to have good friends, or a counsellor, or spiritual director to help you sift and sort.
Advent is a season that teaches us two opposing truths. The first is that we should never lose our ability to embrace a defiant hope that says, sure that’s a dead tree stump and no life will ever come from it and yet, look! A shoot. A tree. New life, new hope. Don’t give up.
But Advent is also a season that can teach us to let the dead things stay dead.
I know in this room there are people who embrace the season of Advent in a wide variety of ways. I take it fairly seriously and so it’s not uncommon for me to have conversations with folks whose practice is different from mine in which they assume I’m going to judge them.
I have had my tree up and I’ve been listening to Mariah Carey’s Christmas album since October, they’ll say sheepishly. Don’t judge me.
And I don’t, I really don’t, but I am curious about how those choices are helping them. If they are, great!
But they don’t help me.
For me, one of the key things I like about Advent is that it puts my practices at odds with the culture around me. While other people are anxiously rushing through the mall, I choose not to. While other people are listening to Christmas music, I choose not to.
And by the time they are all sick to death of the decorations and the music, I’m getting ready to fully enjoy those things for 12 days. And it is good. And it is enough.
There is a story being told by our culture at this time of year that the key to happiness is found in consumption. In more and more and more. If Christmas music is great for one month, then how much better is it for three? If Christmas decorations are great in December, then how much better are they if you put them up in October? If giving gifts helps us love and be loved, then why not just buy more and more and more. The credit card bills can be sorted out in January.
Why wait?
I see no hope in that story. I see no new life. I see only a dead stump. Advent is a practice that helps me to see that story as hopeless and resist the temptation to live into false hope. Advent helps me to let that story die.
By embracing Advent I learn to have less. I learn what the waiting and watching have to teach me.
And in the death of one thing, in the acknowledgment that it is truly hopeless, I find the space to embrace a new thing, and a new hope. By clearing out all the dead and dying trees, I am able to notice when a small green shoot, despite all of the odds, begins to grow on one of those stumps.
May you, in your own way, do the same.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Invited into the story: A Sermon for Christ the King Sunday
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday November 24, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
In this sermon I reference Alana Levandoski's song "Cosmic Canticle." Alana is an amazing artist and all around wonderful human being. You can find "Cosmic Canticle" and her other music by clicking here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
In Kingston, Ontario, there is a church called The Church of the Good Thief. It no longer functions as a worship space, but instead it holds the regional archives of the Roman Catholic Church. It gets its name from two sources. The first, is from the gospel story we read tonight, where one of the criminals who is crucified along with Jesus believes and is promised that, “today you will be with me in Paradise.” (43)
The second reason it’s called the Church of the Good Thief is that it was built by men who were incarcerated at the nearby Kingston Penitentiary. They quarried, carried, and placed each piece of limestone that makes up the building.
They weren’t allowed out of the prison to worship there though.
Then as now, our theological logic is rarely rock solid.
Tonight is the last Sunday in the liturgical year, next Sunday a new year begins and we enter into Advent. The church calendar isn’t linear, it doesn’t begin and end with major feasts celebrating Jesus’ birth and resurrection, but it usually has some internal logic to it.
Tonight is the last Sunday of the church year, often referred to as the Reign of Christ Sunday or Christ the King Sunday. Tonight’s gospel reading is a story that takes place towards the end of Jesus’ time on earth. It’s a story that shows us that Christ is a king with the power to grant entry into paradise, but Christ is also a very unusual king, dying as a criminal on a cross.
Jesus is complicated. And people have a lot of different ways of managing that complexity. But usually we manage it by focusing on some details and ignoring others. We just can’t see to hold the whole of who Jesus is at any one time. So sometimes we focus on his humanity, and neglect his divinity and sometimes we do the opposite.
We do this with a lot of different things in our lives, which is how it is possible to have criminals build a church, then name that church in memory of a criminal, and then not allow criminals to worship there.
Or to choose to follow Jesus, but then pick and choose which parts of his message you’re actually going to follow.
If this was a film and I was the director, my production notes would look something like this:
Scene One: We open on three men nailed to three crosses. Starting with a wide shot, we pan in until we have a close up of the three men’s faces. Their humanity is emphasized by the visible pain on their dirty, sweat covered faces. The scene is brief, the emotion high, and it provides context for everything that is going to happen next.
Scene Two: Crane shot. Make sure the production assistant finds the biggest crane in existence. The one sitting outside at All Saints is way too small. The shot pans up higher, higher, as high as we can possibly go away from the earth and then, a chorus of disembodied angelic voices sings the ancient hymn found in Colossians.
See if we can get permission to use Alana Levandoski’s version. Better yet, see if she’ll agree to sing it too.
There are more scenes to come, but first, let’s look at this one in a bit more detail.
Our first reading tonight was from a letter to the church in Colossae. This group of Christ followers were experiencing persecution because of their faith. Our reading acknowledges this abuse and seeks to provide encouragement to carry on and not give up because God will give them the strength to endure these difficult experiences with patience.
The author of the letter writes, “May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” (11-12)
So here is the good news? Following Christ will lead to persecution, but God will give us the strength to manage it.
Yeah?
Let’s unpack that a little more.
First of all, it is true that the decision to follow Jesus is not a guarantee of a simple, easy, pain-free life. Christians are not exempt from suffering and difficulty and, in fact, we can expect a degree of suffering and difficulty simply for choosing to follow Jesus.
And the letter to the Colossians is speaking about this specific type of suffering, suffering because of the choice to follow Jesus.
Not every kind of suffering fits into that category, and therefore, what the writer says in the rest of the letter does not apply to every single situation.
If you’re in an abusive situation, it’s OK to leave. It’s important to leave actually. It’s absolutely OK to make changes in your life that eliminate abuse.
And on the flip side, if you feel you are being mistreated, it’s not an automatic sign that you are suffering because you are a Christian. Sometimes, it’s a sign that you’re behaving like a jerk.
In this, as in so many situations, discernment is key.
It’s important to keep in mind that this letter was written to people who were experiencing real persecution because of their faith and we should be careful not to water down what the writer is saying by downplaying their experience.
The writing style changes dramatically in the second half of tonight’s reading. It no longer sounds like a letter, it sounds more like a poem, or a creed. The author of this letter may have written it or they may be referencing an outside source. It’s unclear.
Some theologians suspect that these verses may have been used as a baptismal hymn so it’s fitting that we’re looking at them on a Sunday when we’re also going to be celebrating a baptism. As Sally A. Brown explains, “Baptism reveals our true destiny and identity. Whatever our life stories may turn out to be, their inconsistencies will be reconciled and their coherence revealed in the reigning, cosmic, visible God for whom we were made.”
These verses paint a grand picture of who Jesus is – the image of the invisible God, firstborn of all creation, the head of the body, the beginning, the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” and so on.
These are big, sweeping statements, each one of which could take an entire sermon or even a sermon series to try and unpack.
So instead of trying to do that, I just want to point out a few things. But first, let’s listen to this hymn one more time:
“15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.
17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”
The hymn begins, “He is the image of the invisible God….” (15) If you spend too long trying to figure out how an invisible God can also be visible you might give yourself a headache, but the poetry of the line reminds us that God is in fact a paradox. Invisible and yet visible. Human and divine. Knowable and yet unknowable.
We can never see God, and yet, in Jesus, we can see God.
Christ is God, all powerful, all knowing, entirely other from you and me. The King.
But Christ was also human, lived among us, and died on a cross, as our gospel passage reminds us.
N.T. Wright explains that although it’s not obvious in our English translations, in the original text, the author is playing with the various meanings of the word “head,” which in English we have translated as “ firstborn, supreme, head, and beginning.”
But he also notes that, “Now all of this is fascinating simply as an exercise in clever writing…Part of growing up as a Christian is learning to take delight in the way in which God’s truth, whether in physics or theology or whatever, has a poetic beauty about it. But of course Paul isn’t writing this poem just to show off his clever intellectual fireworks, or to provide a sophisticated literary entertainment. He’s writing this (or, if the poem was originally written by someone else, quoting it) in order to tell the Colossians something that they badly need to know. What is it?
What they need to know above all, if they are to grow as Christians, increasing in wisdom, power, patience and thanksgiving is the centrality and supremacy of Jesus Christ. The more they get to know, and know about, Jesus Christ, the more they will understand who the true God is and what [God’s] done; who they are as a result; and what it means to live in and for [God.] Much of the rest of the letter, in fact, is an exploration of the meaning of the poem. Look on to 2:3, for instance, where Paul declares that all the treasures wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ himself.”
Wright continues “…Christianity isn’t simply about a particular way of being religious. It isn’t about a particular system of how to be saved here and hereafter. It isn’t simply a different way of holiness. Christianity is about Jesus Christ; and this poem, one of the earliest Christian poems ever written, is as good a place to start exploring it as any. This is what the Colossians needed to know and we today need to rediscover it.” (150)
Now, back to our movie. We began with a reminder of Jesus’ humanity followed by a quick cut to a crane shot that hurtled us up into the cosmos where an angelic choir sang a hymn that remind us of Jesus’ divinity.
Fully human, fully divine. It makes no sense. And yet Christians have claimed it as one of the key truths of their faith since the very beginning of the church.
And now the camera pans slowly back to earth and the films’ pacing slows down dramatically. There will be no major action sequences or montages set to a rocking soundtrack. Instead, there will be an invitation to slow down, to wait, to not rush to conclusions or an ending to this story.
This particular film will end with a story from Jesus’ life to bookend the opening scene. A story designed to emphasize his humanity and to remind us that this is not an ordinary story or an ordinary child. This is a child who will change everything.
For the final scene, the camera zooms in slowly, slowly on the baby’s face and then the scene fades to black as the words “To be continued” appear on the screen.
And the story does continue. It continues to this very night in this very church where, in a few moments, we will welcome Edmund McKenzie Newsom into this story through baptism.
We’re going to sing shortly, and as we sing, the baptismal party, friends, and members of the family are invited to join us at the back of the church.
Christ is King, and Christ invites each of us into this story. Surely this is good news.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Stand Firm: A Sermon For Sunday November 10, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday November 10, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here. Please, however, read the correction posted below before you listen.
Correction: In my sermon I get some dates wrong but I am including the text here as I preached it. Transgender Awareness Week begins on November 13th. The Transgender Day of Remembrance is November 20th. I am deeply sorry for the error and apologize for any hurt that it may have caused.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
So some religious leaders approach Jesus and ask him a question:
There are seven brothers. One gets married and then dies. As is our custom, another brother marries his widow. He also dies. This happens seven times and then, to quote directly from verse 32, “Finally the woman also died.”
Finally indeed.
So that’s the context, and here’s the question: “Whose property will she be in the life to come?”
It’s a patriarchal, heteronormative question asked not because the questioner genuinely wants to know the answer, but because they want to trip Jesus up. The group of men asking this question are identified as people who do not believe in the resurrection. They are asking what they know is a ridiculous hypothetical question because they assume Jesus’ answer will prove just how ridiculous it is to believe in the resurrection. And, by extension, how ridiculous it is to believe in Jesus.
Whose property will this poor, tired woman be when she finally dies?
No one’s.
Jesus says that the norms and practices of this world are not the norms and practices of the resurrected life. This woman will not be anyone’s property. She will no longer be a wife, she will be like an angel, she will be a child of God, a child of the resurrection. (36)
Jesus is saying, as Jesus says so very often, my ways are not your ways. If you want to follow me, you will have set aside your assumptions and learn to see the world in a new way.
For example, since the world that Jesus has come to bring about does not include a system that treats women as property, maybe we can also re-think our earthly systems that to this very day still tend to treat women this way?
Maybe we can apologize for all the ways we - in the world and in the church – have privileged heterosexual marriage with children as the golden standard of Godly living and begin to celebrate a greater diversity of ways of living. If you don’t happen to be a single person, take some time sometime to listen to the experiences of single people because I fully expect that it will break your heart when you discover all the ways, subtle, and not so subtle, that they are told that they don’t quite measure up.
We can do better.
Jesus answers their question, in the life to come women are not property, and then he says something that I find strikingly beautiful. “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (38)
Over and over again in scripture, we are told that the way of Jesus is the way of life. In John 10:10 we’re told that Jesus came to bring life and life to the full.
This is an idea we will be exploring in more detail this November in our Wednesday night series on vocation. We’re going to drill down into the question “What would it look like if each of us was fully alive? If each of us lived fully into who God created us to be?”
I hope you’ll join us.
In our gospel reading, we have a group of people questioning Jesus about the resurrection, and in our reading from Thessalonians, we find Paul trying to correct false teachings about the life to come.
Paul is not my favourite writer. His words have been used to hurt me and many people I love very deeply. There is a new trend on social media where people are beginning to post publicly the hate mail and death threats they receive and it’s shocking to see how much hate and ugliness comes from people who claim to follow Jesus. It’s shocking how often they use Paul’s words to justify their cruelty.
Tomorrow we will remember all the people who died because of war and we will say “Never again,” and on Wednesday, in services around the world, the names of transgender people who were killed in the past year because of bigotry and hate will be read aloud – and those lists will be long – and we will once again say, “Never again.”
Tonight is not the time to unpack all the ways that Paul’s words have wounded people and the myriad of ways he has been misunderstood – often willfully misunderstood – but we can look in more depth at tonight’s reading to discover a man who seems genuinely distressed that his teachings are being misinterpreted.
In her excellent book, “One Coin Found,” Reverend Emmy Kegler, who as a queer woman with a call to the priesthood has had her own struggles with Paul, imagines his life and his work in this way:
“I began to retrace Paul’s backstory. A young man, convicted in faith, watching the stoning of a seeming heretic. A righteous man on the warpath for the Lord. Well trained in scriptural interpretation and overly confident in his application.
Oh, no.
A perfectionist who pursued God with zeal but got knocked off his high horse and had to change everything he understood about faith? Explaining what God had done in his life, blending his experience with philosophy and Scriptures? Periodically horrified by what other so-called Christians were up to? Periodically his opinions on how everyone else should think and act were totally wrong?
This was sounding irritatingly familiar.” (142)
Later she writes, “I was coming to know him not as my opposition but as my brother, as flawed as I was but as hopeful too.
I heard his hope in the letters he wrote to his communities. He planted churches and then moved on, trusting in the work of the Spirit to move them more toward Christ, only to receive letters with questions that could not be answered. Scholars consider his letter to the church in Thessalonika – the letter we read from tonight – the first written words of the New Testament (predating the gospels). Our best guess, given the content of his letter, is that his new church was confused: he had promised the return of Jesus, to gather the faithful and transform the world, but instead Jesus had not yet returned, and faithful members of the community had died. Death was supposed to be conquered; Christ was supposed to be victorious. How could this have happened? [Emmy imagines] Paul pacing his tent, dictating to his scribe: Do not grieve as those to who have no hope. Death is not the end of the story, those who have gone on before us will not be away from us for long. I [am?] comforted in Paul’s promise of Jesus, both powerful enough to resurrect the dead and humble enough to take on flesh.” (150)
Like Emmy, I can imagine Paul full of energy, unable to stay still, pacing around in his tent and dictating this letter to a scribe – Paul rarely wrote anything himself.
The section we read tonight starts, “As to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we beg you…”
I tend to think of Paul as exhorting, correcting, challenging, but begging? This must be serious stuff.
“…we beg you, brothers and sisters, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed…”
Mariam Kamell explains that the word we have translated as “shaken” implies a “violent movement, like an earthquake.” “What is occurring in this church is not a mild questioning about how things might work out but an earthquake of theological doubt that is leaving vast destruction in its wake. Likewise, the word for being “alarmed” is the fear caused by surprise. Having begun in one direction based on the teaching of Paul while he was with them, they have been surprised by this new teaching and their fear is that of having their foundation pulled out from underneath them. They are paralyzed, scared, uncertain about what to believe and, from that, how to act.”
And Paul knows how scared and shaken they are and that is why he writes with such urgency.
The people are shaken and alarmed because they have heard conflicting teachings about what is going to happen next. When is Jesus returning? Has he already returned? Did they he leave them behind?
Paul, after begging them not to be deceived by false teachings, reminds the church in Thessalonika of what he has taught them before saying, “Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?” (5)
I wonder what Paul would think about all the ways his words have been twisted and misused throughout the history of the church. I suspect it would break his heart. Here he was in his lifetime having to counter false teachings from others, imagine what he would think if he discovered that his own words have been deformed into false teachings in our present day.
The community in Thessalonika, once solidly committed to Paul’s teachings, are now unsettled by false teachings that are coming from all sorts of sources. Paul says these false teachings may arrive “by spirit – by which he means something other than the Holy Spirit - or by word or by letter, as though from us…” (2) That’s how false teachings spread, once they begin to take root in a community it can be almost impossible to trace them back to their original source.
Many people, from Paul’s day to today, have been very interested in trying to predict the future. Entire industries have been created where people try to match up current events with biblical prophecies and they can be really convincing and it is easy to get sucked in, but Paul is begging us not to be deceived.
If you want to have a discussion over a beer after church about what all of these things might mean that can be a fun academic exercise. If you want to, like the men in tonight’s gospel reading, explore a hypothetical question about relationships in the life to come, go for it. But don’t take these things so seriously that you can become obsessed or deceived by them. There are way better ways to spend your time.
But what I do think we should take seriously, is Paul’s desire that we resist being “quickly shaken in mind or alarmed…”
In November the lectionary always throws the weirdest most difficult readings at us and tonight is no exception. It may be hard to find yourself in these stories about fairly abstract ideas – what will happen in the life to come? – that are rooted in very specific historical circumstances – the last days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, the earliest days of the church.
But I suspect that we all can identify times in our lives when we’ve felt shaken to our core. When it wouldn’t have surprised us at all to discover that we had lived through a literal earthquake. When everything we thought made sense, everything we thought we could trust, everything we thought was a firm foundation crumbled under our feet.
I suspect we can all identify times when nothing seems stable, nothing seems secure, times when you are desperately looking around from something – anything – solid to grab on to but you can’t seem to find anything at all.
I’m not entirely sure why, but when I look back at my life, October is so often an earthquake month for me. Things just seem to happen in October that shake everything up. It happened to me again this year and I’m still nowhere near feeling settled.
I can’t identify with the specific issues the church in Thessalonika was dealing with, but I can identify, acutely, with that feeling of being shaken.
And so, I also take comfort in Paul’s counsel to those early Christ followers. Sometimes I believe him with all my heart, sometimes I need to grab onto his words with the defiant hope that even if I don’t believe them today, I might believe them tomorrow.
Sometimes a defiant hope in the possibility that I might believe is all I have.
Paul ends this section of the letter with words of encouragement. He reminds the people that they are God’s beloved, that God’s love for them is solid and trustworthy. (13) God’s love is the foundation that will allow them to, as Paul writes in verse 15, “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.
And isn’t this exactly what we need to hear when we’re feeling shaken? Especially if we feel like God has forgotten us as the church in Thessalonika did? When we have been shaken and feel abandoned, we need to be reminded of this foundational truth: We are God’s beloved. God will never, ever abandon us.
And then Paul closes the section of this letter with a beautiful blessing. May it be an encouragement to each one of us today and in the days to come:
“Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and work.” (16-17)
May it be so. In the name of our steadfast God who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.
On priests, power, and pockets: A Sermon for Sunday October 27, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, October 27, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here. From time to time at saint benedict's table we depart from the lectionary and use the sermon time as an opportunity to talk a little bit about why we do what we do. This year my colleague Jamie Howison and I shared this task. Jamie spoke about how the space in which we meet impacts our worship and then I shared the following reflection. Both are available at the link posted above.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
* Open with thanks to Jamie for helping us “read” the space and for his words on the peace.
It’s so fascinating to me how much thought goes into the design not only of a church building but of the worship space in particular. In a sense these sorts of buildings can be read, if you’ve been taught how to read them, and you can tell a lot about what is going on and what the community values by reading the space.
For example, this building tells us that we are a people shaped by stories, the stained glass that lines the sides of the church depict keys stories from the life of Christ and the community that he formed. Higher up, are pictures of key historical figures in the life of the community and each of those images is filled with coded with imagery that can tell you all about that person’s life if you know how to read it. There are also plaques filling up almost every single other bit of wall space each with its own story to tell.
Another way we can read what’s happening in this space is through colour. Now we use colour sparingly, but with some basic knowledge of the church calendar, you can walk into this space and know what season we are celebrating, based on the colour of the hangings on the pulpit and lectern and the colour of the stoles Jamie and I are wearing.
If you’ve only been coming recently, you may just think that green is our favourite colour because we’ve been decked out in green for a VERY long time but we’re about to shift into a time when you’ll see us in red, and blue, and white. Each colour symbolizing a different season in the church year.
Green is for ordinary time, the longest season of the church year. Blue for Advent. White for Christmas. Purple for Lent, and Red for Pentecost. Red and white can also be used at a service honouring a martyr – red – or a saint - white. And white is also used for special services like baptisms, marriages, and funerals.
The fact that the church celebrates liturgical seasons is one of the most powerful and helpful gifts the tradition has to offer us. Not only do I find it helpful to literally move through the church seasons and to notice how the practice impacts my faith – to wait in Advent, to fast in Lent, to celebrate and feast for the full 12 days of Christmas – I have come to find embracing the concept of unique seasons with unique practices has had a serious impact on my life in general. It can be helpful when things are particularly difficult to remind myself that this is a season – it hasn’t always been like this, and it won’t always be like this. Or when something particularly lovely has happened to remind myself that good things should be celebrated and to take the time to do so. We are coming up on the anniversary of my ordination, for example, and I have spent some time thinking through how I want to mark that occasion.
Another thing you can read in this space are our clothes. On most Sundays, you’ll find a handful of people wearing ties and suit jackets or really smashing wraps and you’ll also see people in jeans and t-shirts. What I hope that tells you is that this is a space where you can come exactly as you are. That you are free to be yourself here.
You’ll also normally see two people, Jamie and me, in a black shirt with a white collar before and after the service, and then in several additional layers of clothing once the service starts.
I’ve had lots of conversations with people about this clothing over the past year and one way that people tend to read this clothing is that it signifies that Jamie and I are the fanciest, most important people in the room.
Spoiler alert: We’re not. And our clothes are supposed to tell you we’re not. They’re supposed to tell you we have a particular role to play in this gathering and to help you to easily identify us, not to signify that we’re the most important people here.
We’re not the most important people in the room, but it’s understandable why you might think that given our distinctive dress. Vestments are an example of a symbol whose meaning has shifted over time.
Clothing used to be a fixed symbol that clearly communicated who a person was and how they fit into society – their gender, occupation, economic status were all indicated by their clothing. At many points in history, there have been laws dictating what a person could and could not wear. Unisex clothing wasn’t really a thing. Dressing down wasn’t really a thing. Men wore certain things and women wore other things.
Certain fabrics and colours could only be worn by people of particular economic classes. Different jobs had different uniforms.
There are still pieces of this in our modern-day society, but the lines are a lot fuzzier. One thing that remains the same, however, men can consistently expect that they will be able to buy pants with pockets. Women, not so much.
Jamie and I are wearing clothing that was modelled on the clothing of Roman servants. So the clothing that now can seem like the fanciest in the room, was once the most basic in the room signifying that a priest is a servant of the people.
This black thing I’m wearing is called as cassock and it used to be everyday wear for a priest. Everyday you’d get up and get dressed and put on your collared shirt and before you stepped out the door you’d button up your cassock – whether you were heading to church or just to do some shopping.
Now there are some variations on how cassocks are designed, but if I was going to wear mine every single day, I’d have to allot enough time to make sure all 39 buttons were buttoned up before I left the house. 1 button for each of the 39 Articles of Religion – the document that at one time in our history, outlined the basic tenants of what it meant to be an Anglican.
So even though I don’t wear my cassock everyday, you will still notice that, while I may wear it before the service begins, there are a few extra layers I put on right before we start.
This white thing I’m wearing is called a surplice. It’s not everyday wear. I only wear it when we have a service. White clothing has a long history of symbolizing baptism and Christ’s goodness and my surplice is a reminder of that.
The last thing I put on before worship is this fancy scarf thing, called a stole. The stole itself signifies that I’m an ordained person. You may recall that for most of the past year I wore it diagonally, draped over my left shoulder. That signified that I was a deacon. And although it may have made me seem extra fancy, it’s meant to copy the clothing of a servant who would wear a stole like this and use the lose ends at their hip to dry your feet after they washed them.
Now, I wear the stole around my neck. It’s meant to remind us of the yoke that a team of oxen would wear. Or in this case, the yoke of Christ, the yoke of service. It may look fancy, but it’s meant to be a symbol of humility.
And there are lots of other garments that Anglicans wear – from choir robes to the Bishop’s fancy hat – but generally at saint ben’s we like to keep things simple.
But symbolism and historic meaning aside, personally I love being able to wear vestments because of how I feel in them. When I put these clothes on I’m reminded of the job I am here to do. They help focus and center me. I am much less distracted in vestments.
I have spent almost 20 years standing in front of congregations like this talking to groups of people and for the first time, I feel like I can focus solely on my job and NOT on my clothes. I’m not wondering if you think my skirt is too short or panicking that I wore the wrong shirt and now I have to keep my hands down at my side because if I raise them too high you’ll see some skin.
And… I have pockets!
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Nevertheless She Persisted: A Sermon for Sunday October 20, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, October 20, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Both of tonight’s readings are set in contexts where the people of God are having a difficult time. Things are going from bad to worse, and they need to find a way to maintain their focus, their energy, and their sense of purpose.
Both readings speak of the need for persistence. In 2 Timothy we heard this line, “I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message, be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable... (4:1-2, emphasis mine.)
Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “persistent” as “continuing firmly or obstinately in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.”
Be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.
On February 7, 2017, the U.S Senate was debating the confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions to become Attorney General. Senator Elizabeth Warren opposed the confirmation and spoke critically of Session’s record on civil rights.
While Warren was stating her objections, she was interrupted multiple times and told to stop talking.
But she didn’t stop.
A series of fancy political maneuvers occurred in an attempt to silence Senator Warren.
But she didn’t stop.
When he tried to sum up what had happened, Senator Mitch McConnell, looking truly bewildered said, “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
And women everywhere, regardless of their political affiliations, stopped for a moment and said, “Yeah she did.”
Even if they disagreed with her politics, many women found Warren’s persistence to be inspiring.
The line, “Nevertheless she persisted,” which was meant to be a condemnation of Senator Warren, went viral and became a rallying cry for women to persist despite the many attempts to silence or ignore them.
If you google it, you can find endless social media posts containing the hashtag #neverthelessshepersisted, countless photos of people’s tattoos of the quotation, and a wide array of merchandise.
I know this in part because I received all sorts of things that say “Nevertheless she persisted” last year as ordination gifts.
Nevertheless she continued “firmly or obstinately in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.”
Nevertheless she persisted.
Today’s gospel reading is a short parable that’s set in the context of the legal system.
Most people have a general sense of how our modern legal system functions. It may not be an entirely accurate sense, it may be based more on TV crime dramas than reality, but still, we get the general idea of how it’s supposed to work. People do bad things, the police arrest them and charge them with a crime, they go to court and so on.
In Jesus’ day, things were a bit different. N.T. Wright explains that:
“In the ancient Jewish law court… If someone had stolen from you, you had to bring a charge against them; you couldn’t get the police to do it for you. If someone had murdered a relative of yours, the same would be true. So every legal case in Jesus’ day was a matter of a judge deciding to vindicate one party or the other: “vindication” or “justification” here means upholding their side of the story, deciding in their favour. This word “justification” which we meet a lot in Paul but hardly ever in the gospels, means exactly this: that the judge finds in one’s favour at the end of the case.” (212)
Although there may very well have been more people present, there are two main characters in this story, a judge and a widow.
We are told that the judge “neither feared God nor had respect for people”– that is actually what the text says – he “neither feared God nor had respect for people” – so right away we know he’s a problematic character. (2)
The story is told entirely from the judge’s point of view. The widow never speaks, we only hear the judge’s internal monologue about her.
Through that monologue, we learn that the widow keeps coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” (3) She doesn’t stop coming, the verb tense in the original Greek implies a continuous action without a break or reprieve. Even though the judge consistently refuses to grant her request she never stops coming.
This patterns continues: she makes her request, he refuses, she makes it again, until finally the judge thinks, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (4-5)
We aren’t supposed to view the judge as the hero in this story, but I do have some sympathy for him. Because for all the reasons I admire persistence, it can also be really, really annoying.
Mike and I recently got a puppy, and it’s incredibly difficult to maintain boundaries and establish good behaviours when you’re confronted by persistent whining and begging. Even if you know you’re right, even if you know that giving in to that whining will set a really bad precedent that will only create more problems in the future, it doesn’t take that long to feel completely worn down to the point that you’re willing to do whatever it is the puppy wants you to do so long as he just stops whining and gives you a moment of peace.
Usually he wants belly rubs or treats, not justice in a court of law, but still, persistent whining will make you do things you wouldn’t normally do.
And the translation we read tonight really softens the original’s description of just how persistent this widow was.
Amy-Jill Levine explains that the original Greek uses a boxing metaphor, so what we have translated as, “so she may not wear me out by continually coming” would be better translated as, “so that she will not give me a black eye.” (v5, Levine 243)
So who is this widow with the boxing gloves anyway?
Widows are interesting characters in scripture. As a group, we know that they are vulnerable and lack power. They are regularly included in lists of people who the dominant society needs to remember to care for. As such, we tend to think of them as people we should want to help, not people we want to be.
And certainly not people who might give us a black eye.
But being a part of an oppressed or marginalized group isn’t the same as being weak. And widows in scripture prove this over and over again.
Levine notes: “Biblical widows are the most unconventional of conventional figures. Expected to be weak, they move mountains; expected to be poor, they prove savvy managers; expected to be exploited, they take advantage where they find it.” Tamar, Naomi, Ruth, Opah, Abigail, the wise woman of Tekoa, the widow of Zerepath, Judith] – all of these woman “manifest agency, and all defy the convention of the poor and dependent woman. The [widow in tonight’s gospel reading] similarly shatters stereotype, even as she epitomizes the strength, cleverness, and very problematic motives of many of her predecessors.” (239-240)
As a group, widows were vulnerable, but like the other women I just listed, the widow in this parable does not passively allow herself to be exploited. Like a fighter in a boxing ring, she fights for her rights. She persists, willing to give the judge a black eye if that’s what it takes.
So is the moral of the story that a faithful Christian life should pack a punch?
We are told in the opening of today’s gospel text, that Jesus chose to tell this story because the people “need to pray always and not lose heart.” (1)
How does this parable reinforce this idea?
What does the story of a persistent woman capable of making a judge fear her and her fists to the point that he is willing to do whatever she asks of him teach us about prayer?
First, one of the things this parable is trying to tell us about prayer is that, while we will encounter unjust judges, God is not an unjust judge. God, we are told, is the opposite of the unjust judge. We do not need to pace the ring and threaten God with a black eye in order to be heard.
Second, this parable is telling us that prayer might not always look like what we think it should look like.
I spend a fair amount of time talking to people about prayer. Together we try to figure out what prayer is and how it fits into our lives. One of the most common things we have to work through is our tendency to have a narrow view of prayer.
We tend to think that prayer is a thing that only happens when we are on our knees with our hands folded, or in church.
We tend to think prayer is a quiet thing, it’s a passive thing, it’s a safe thing.
But in 1 Thessalonians we are told to “pray without ceasing,” and I don’t know about you but I can’t kneel with my hands folded talking to God 24 hours a day seven days a week. (5:17) Eventually I need to eat, or sleep, or go to the bathroom.
Which must mean that when we define prayer as something we can only do kneeling with our hands folded we are defining it too narrowly. Certainly prayer can look like that, but it can also look like a walk in the woods, or a nap, or cooking nutritious food or a fierce boxing match against injustice.
Because in today’s parable there is a comparison being made between prayer and a persistent woman who can make a man who has “no fear of God and no respect for anyone,” do exactly what she wants him to do. (4)
That’s not passive, that’s not safe. That’s prayer.
Earlier in this sermon I told you that the Oxford dictionary defines “persistence” as “continuing firmly or obstinately in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.”
At the beginning of this parable, Jesus says that this parable is about the “need to pray always and not lose heart.”
Maybe that’s a better definition of what it means to persist. Pray always. Don’t lose heart.
I’m not sure how many people in this room know what it’s like to feel like the widow in the story. To fight and to fight and to fight and to never give up until one day, the judge grants your request.
I hope you know what that feels like.
But I suspect all of us know what it feels like to be in the ring and to get knocked down. To feel someone else’s knuckles connect with your nose, to lose your balance, and to crash onto the floor.
With this parable, Jesus is telling us that we live in a world filled with injustice. We’re all going to be in the ring for a very long time, and we’re all going to get knocked down.
Jesus is encouraging us to persist. To get back up again. To wipe the tears and the sweat and the blood out of our faces and to just keep fighting.
And he says it like this, “don’t lose heart.”
When you encounter systemic injustice and oppression. Don’t lose heart. Just keep fighting.
When the reality of climate change seems overwhelming and you don’t know where to begin, don’t lose heart. Just keep fighting.
When you’ve tried and tried and tried to make a change for the better in your life and it just doesn’t seem to be working, don’t lose heart. Just keep fighting.
When… whatever it is that you struggle with…. Don’t lose heart. Just keep fighting.
But remember, that sometimes fighting looks like treating yourself with compassion. Even world class boxers regularly need to go sit in the corner of the ring to take a break and let their coach take care of them. That’s not giving up, that’s an essential part of the fight.
Persistence may look like having a nap. Walking in the woods. Sitting in silence. Having fun with a friend.
So don’t lose heart. Just keep fighting.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Missing, Finding, Partying: A Sermon for Sunday September 15, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, September 8, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O Lord, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Ten or so years ago, I organized a workshop in my home. We had a good speaker and a good turnout but partway through the workshop I noticed that one participant was texting on her phone. And then I couldn’t stop noticing it and I also couldn’t stop noticing that our speaker was noticing it and finding it very distracting.
And I don’t really remember much of what the speaker shared with us that day but I do remember how annoyed I was and how harshly I judged that woman for being so rude as to text throughout the workshop.
I mean the nerve of her. Who did she think she was?
After the session, I talked to Ms. Texts-a-lot and she told me that she hadn’t been texting at all, she’d actually be deeply focused on what the speaker was saying and had been taking notes.
Well, it sure would have been helpful to have that information before the workshop began. It would have changed my entire experience of the event!
In today’s gospel reading, a group of religious leaders are annoyed that Jesus is partying with the wrong people and Jesus uses a series of parables which are intended to say, “You don’t have all the information, if you knew why we were partying, you’d want to join in and party too.”[1]
But from outside appearances, Jesus is hanging out with all the wrong sorts of people – tax collectors and sinners.
Generally speaking, most people don’t really like people who collect taxes. But in Jesus’ day, this was particularly true. I can at least rationalize that my taxes are going to pay for things I care about like universal health care and education but at that time the money was likely going to either Herod or the Romans and nobody thought that was a good idea.
Except maybe Herod and the Romans, they probably thought it was a great idea, but most likely no one who was paying taxes thought it was a good idea.
N.T. Wright posits that the people described here as “sinners” may actually have been people who were too poor to either know the law or to be able to afford to keep it properly.
Which is not always what is meant by the word “sinner,” of course. We also read a passage from 1 Timothy this evening and I think that author has a different definition in mind when he describes himself as the “the foremost of all sinners.”
But whoever the sinners in Jesus’ parable were, the impression we are given is that they were people who the religious leaders saw as kind of hopeless. Irredeemable. Not the sort of people you should spend your time or share a meal with.
So why does Jesus bother to associate with them?
Jesus tells a series of stories in response to that question.
Luke records three stories, but tonight we only heard two of them. The third one is often called the story of the prodigal son.
Tonight’s stories are often called the “Parable of the Lost Sheep” and the “Parable of the Lost Coin.”
Which is weird, because that’s not really what the stories are about. Sheep can certainly wander and becomes lost, but coins can’t, someone has to lose them. And neither story is told from the perspective of the sheep or the coin.
Additionally, in our context, the word “lost” implies a permanent condition, a hopeless state but what would happen, if instead of thinking of them as “lost,” we thought of them as “missing?” I we do that, I think we’d start to get a better sense of what Jesus is doing with these stories.
If we really want to give these stories titles, it might be more helpful to think of them as the “Parable of the Shepherd Who is Missing a Sheep,” and the “Woman Who is Missing a Coin.” Or the parable of the shepherd who finds her missing sheep and throws a party and the parable of the woman who finds her missing coin and throws a party.
At least several times a year, preachers pretend to be experts on the care and feeding of sheep, despite the fact that most of us have never even seen a sheep up close, let alone been responsible for their well-being. Suddenly we need to know all about sheep.
Today is one of those Sundays so… here we go.
Almost everything I know about sheep I have learned from two sources: sermons, and Sunday School room art.
For as long as I can remember, this first story was the story of a blonde haired, blue eyed man who had 100 sheep and, after putting 99 of them into a fenced in compound where they are safe and sound, he sets off in search of the one that has gone missing.
Which is not what would have happened.
First of all, the people gathered listening to Jesus would never have pictured a blonde haired, blue eyed male shepherd.
The shepherd’s skin tone and colouring would have matched their own, and the shepherd they imagined would very likely have been a woman.
Although the NRSV uses masculine pronouns, the Greek word used to describe the shepherd is a gender neutral term.
Both in Jesus’ day and in ours, shepherds in that region tend to be women and children – girls and boys. Rachel was a shepherd, David was a shepherd when he was a young boy.
The answer to Jesus’ question, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until she finds it,” was probably, “Not one of us. No one would do that. It’s a bad idea.” (v.4)
Today we tend to contain animals in fields surrounded by electric fences and barns that lock securely but sheepherding was more of a free range situation at in Jesus’ time.
Sheep didn’t get locked up safely in a barn overnight, so if you left the 99 to go and find the 1, odds are the 99 would have all wandered off or been eaten by wolves by the time you located the one.
It’s not a logical thing to do.
I mean, it’s sad to lose one sheep, but it would be ridiculous to gain that one and lose the other 99 who wandered off while you were searching.
No shepherd in her right mind would do that.
It kind of reminds me of my vegetable garden. This year I grew a lot of tomatoes, but I don’t expect that I’m actually going to eat every single one of them, I have to tithe at least a portion of them to the neighbourhood squirrel population.
Those filthy, irritating animals who insist on taking at least one or two tomatoes every single day, taking one bite out of them, and then depositing the rest of the tomato on top of my fence.
I could try to fight this tomato tax, but I know it’s a losing battle. Instead I assume that a certain percentage of the tomatoes I grow will be lost in this manner.
And that’s likely what a sheep herder would have thought in Jesus’ day as well. Sure she wouldn’t want to lose any of her sheep but a certain amount of loss was inevitable, it’s just part of the business.
I will inevitably lose a percentage of my tomato harvest and no sheepherd would go off after just one sheep, but perhaps we’d all search more carefully for a lost coin?
Well, that also depends on how much we value this coin. Not long ago it was relatively common for people to simply throw pennies away and some people have more change just sitting in their car or their couch cushions than they do in their wallets.
And I for one have never been invited to a lost change party.
Now the coin in the parable was worth more than modern-day pocket change - it was probably about a day’s wages for a labourer – but I’ve never been invited to a lost day’s wages party either. And spending money is an odd way to celebrate finding money.
So what on earth is Jesus getting at?
Stories like this are rich for interpretation and at different points in our lives different things will resonate more strongly with us than others.
In his book, “Transforming,” Biblical scholar Austen Hartke uses this story to reflect on the various reasons a sheep might have been separated from the herd.
He writes, “It’s incredibly comforting to imagine yourself as the lost sheep, riding back home on Jesus’ shoulders after an exciting but ill-advised adventure. There are times when this story is exactly the gospel message we need – when we need to hear that we are worthy of God’s love, and that God will risk anything to have us back home again.
But what if we imagined this story a different way? What is the lost sheep didn’t wander away from the safety and goodness of the shepherd? What is it was just trying to escape the cruelty of the flock? Sheep will occasionally pick out a flock member who doesn’t fit in – maybe because of an injury or a strange marking – and they’ll chase that individual away. There are times when I think Christians need to see ourselves more in the ninety-nine sheep who stayed put, and ask ourselves if we may have been part of the reason the lost sheep got lost in the first place.”
Austen continues, “I don’t mean to lay on the guilt too heavily here – in reality, we all have lost-sheep days and flock sheep days – but I think the metaphor holds up… what’s at stake for Jesus in this situation isn’t just that one single lost sheep, and it’s not just the ninety-nine back home. It’s the integrity of the flock as a whole. Saving just the main group or just the individual wouldn’t do any good, because the flock is more than just the sum of its parts. When Jesus goes after that lost sheep, what he’s telling the flock – what he’s telling us – is that we’re not complete without each other. ” (167-168)
Remember the context in which Jesus is telling this story. A group of religious leaders is upset that Jesus is hanging out with the wrong sort of people. And Jesus is saying there’s no such thing as the wrong sort of people. That he would go to extravagant lengths to restore even one person who was missing.
There are all sorts of people who, for all sorts of reasons have been told that they don’t belong in the flock. Their economic status or their skin colour or their sexuality or their gender are different and so they are told, in subtle and not so subtle ways that they don’t belong. They might think differently or act differently or move differently and so they are told in subtle and not so subtle ways that they don’t belong.
And so they are pushed to the edges of the flock and eventually, out of the flock entirely and they wander alone. And the flock doesn’t even notice they’re missing.
But Jesus does.
And he’s inviting everyone, the religious leaders, the tax collectors and the sinners to notice that there are people who are missing, and to rejoice and join in the party when the one who was missing is restored to the flock.
May we hear and accept Jesus’ invitation. Because it’s a shame to miss a good party.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1]Thanks for NT Wright for this image.
One Thing More: A Sermon for Sunday September 8, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, September 8, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our all hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Usually when we read scripture together in church, we read a small portion of a larger book. But tonight, we read almost the entire book of Philemon – the lectionary only cuts out the last few verses.
Philemon is a letter. Most likely written by Paul and, you might reasonably assume because of its title, written to a man named Philemon, but there you’d be wrong.
The letter is addressed to, “To Philemon our dear friend and co-worker, to Apphia our sister, to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house…” (1-2) This letter was written to a house church, a group of men and women who will gather together in Philemon’s home to hear the letter read aloud and to discuss its contents.
Much of the content is addressed directly to Philemon but the letter is meant to be read by the entire church community.
The letter focusses on the relationship between Paul, Philemon, and a man Philemon has enslaved named Onesimus.
Slavery is abhorrent. It is wrong. But it also has, in many places and at many times throughout history, been normal. So normal that people couldn’t imagine there was any other way to structure a society.
And Paul doesn’t do what I want him to do in this letter. I just want one sentence. Just one that says, “As we all know, slavery is sinful, stop enslaving human beings.” I want him to have written that. It’s one of the three sentences Paul never wrote that I wish he did. Feel free to ask me about the other two after the service.
But Paul didn’t write that sentence. And he doesn’t write on suggesting that
This newly formed Christian community should overthrow the entire political, economic and social system they live under either but I do think that he does clearly say that slavery should not exist in Christian communities. He just does it using a particular rhetorical style that may not be obvious to us on a first reading.
Spoiler alert: This may be the most sarcastic piece of writing in the entire Bible.
In the opening address Philemon is describes as Paul’s “dear friend and co-worker.” (1)
Paul and Philemon are friends, but they are also partners in God’s work. They have a job to do – to spread the gospel and grow the church – and if they are going to be successful, they need to be able to work closely together.
The letter continues with a form common in Paul’s letters, “When I remember you in my prayers…” (4). Whenever you hear those words, look carefully at what Paul says he is praying for, because it usually functions as the thesis statement for the entire letter. In this case, Paul prays that, “the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ.”
Paul is either suggesting that Philemon’s work is not effective, or that it is not as effective as it could be because he is not seeing things as clearly as Paul does.
Paul continues, “For this reason, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love…” (8-9)
They are co-workers in this venture, but make no mistake about it, Paul has more power than Philemon. Paul has the power to simply command that Philemon do his duty, but Paul is saying he prefers the “catch more flies with honey” approach. And by honey I mean words that are dripping with sarcasm.
So what is Philemon’s duty? What it is that Paul wants him to do?
Paul writes, “I am appealing to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I have become during my imprisonment.” (9)
A couple of things to note here. Onesimus was a pretty common name to give an enslaved person. It means “useful.”
In saying that Onesimus is his child, Paul is both invoking and subverting the traditional paterfamilias structure that governed households. In this system, one man was the head of the household with complete authority over all the people and possessions of that household. A slave would be a possession, not a person.
Paul is using this imagery to say two things: One, in this Christian family, Paul is paterfamilias, not Philemon. He can simply command that Philemon do his duty.
Two: Paul is saying that for Philemon’s work on behalf of the gospel to be effective, he needs to change the way he thinks about and treats Onesimus.
Paul describes Onesimus as his child, and then later, he says that Philemon should treat him as a brother. Basically, Paul is saying that both Philemon and Onesimus are his children. They are equals, which by extension means that Philemon needs to treat Onesimus as a person, not property.
Paul is writing this letter from prison. Onesimus is with him, although he is not imprisoned. How did he come to be there?
It’s not clear.
As I mentioned last week, people in prison in this time period had to rely on people outside of the prison to provide for their daily needs and its possible that Philemon has sent Onesimus to Paul to make sure he has food and other basic necessities of life.
Onesimus may also have run away. But this was an offence punishable by crucifixion so it seems odd that he’d come out of hiding to help Paul. Although, perhaps he did run away and realized that there was no safe place for an escaped slave to live so he is appealing to Paul to help him smooth over the situation with Philemon so he can return to that household.
It isn’t clear how he came to be with Paul, but it is clear that this letter is intended to repair the relationship between Philemon and Onesimus.
Paul wants Onesimus to return to Philemon’s household, and he wants Philemon to accept him when he does.
Playing with the meaning of Onesimus’ name Paul says that although Philemon thinks Onesimus is useless, he is in fact, useful to both of them.
So useful, in fact, that even though Paul would prefer to have Onesimus stay with him, he is sending him back to Philemon. And listen to the words Paul uses, “ I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me … but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced.” (13-14)
When Paul who has already stated he has the power to just command you to do your duty sends a request in a letter that will be read by your entire community recommending you do something voluntarily instead of by force, how much wiggle room do you think you actually have?
And not only does Paul want Philemon to accept Onesimus back into his household, listen to how he expects Onesimus to be treated, “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother – especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” (16)
Onesimus is not property. He is Paul’s own heart. Paul expects Philemon to receive him as his beloved brother.
The letter continues, “So if you consider me your partner, welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has wrong you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, am writing this in my own hand: I will repay it. I say nothing about your owing me even your own self…. Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do ever more than I say.” (Emphasis mine)
As if Paul isn’t laying it on thick enough with this choice of words, he employs another one of his favourite rhetorical devices. Although the bulk of this letter has been dictated to a scribe, this section was so important he wrote it in his own hand. Make no mistake, he is saying, I mean what I say.
And that’s where our reading ended. Now if you’ve been wondering why the creators of the lectionary decided to leave out the last few verses, I don’t have an answer, but I can tell you what those verses contain.
The very last few verses are just a list of other people who send greetings. Kind of like a P.S. I’d probably cut those too. But I would have extended the passage we did read by one verse.
That verse reads, “One thing more – prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping through your prayers to be restored to you.” (22)
Paul is planning to come for a visit and therefore will know if Philemon has done what he is supposed to do.
This seems to me to be the Pauline version of a mic drop.
This is my best effort at providing you with an accurate reading of Philemon, but I do want you to know that it has often been interpreted very differently.
Some commentators don’t see sarcasm in Paul’s words. They see someone writing very carefully so as not to hurt the feelings of a rich and powerful man. Which changes the tone, but not the meaning, of the letter.
This letter has also been used in countries like the United States to justify the forcible return of enslaved people who have run away. That changes the tone and the meaning. I also think it’s a willful misreading of the text.
A couple of years ago I went to Durham, North Carolina for a conference and, as I often do, I added a day to the trip to see the sites.
There was really only one place I wanted to visit: Stagville Plantation has been turned into a historic site that including original buildings where enslaved people once lived.
I wanted to see those buildings for myself. It wasn’t that I doubted that slavery existed but I was also aware that at least in some way, it existed for me as story.
I had a sense that somehow if I could stand in a place where this had actually happened, then the truth of this horrible system would sink more deeply into my consciousness.
But first I had to get there.
The Stagville Plantation was only about 20 kilometers from my hotel but it was outside the city limits so I wanted to make sure that not only would I be able to get a taxi to take me there, that I could also get one to bring me back again.
The nice white girl at the hotel desk was confused by my request. A lifelong resident of Durham, she’d never even heard of Stagville. There was no glossy brochure in the rack behind her desk either.
But she googled it and called a cab company that assured me a round trip.
The taxi driver was African American. He had heard of Stagville but had never been there and couldn’t understand why I’d want to go. Didn’t I want to go to the shopping center or some other more typical tourist spot?
Nope. Take me to the plantation please.
After we’d driven for about 30 minutes I began to wonder if something was wrong. After we’d driven about 45 minutes, I knew something was wrong because my driver was clearly panicking and eventually pulled the car over on the side of the road praying, “Help me Jesus. Help me Jesus,” under his breath.
He’d gotten lost. And he was scared.
And I knew right away that his fear didn’t simply come from having taken a few wrong turns. It came from having made a few wrong turns on deserted country roads with a white lady for a passenger.
We were strangers, but the evil legacy of slavery and racism were impacting our relationship. His fear was reasonable, and routed in experience.
Eventually we were able to sort out the situation. I assured him I had no where important to be and that this was simply an adventure and he figured out the directions. We had another 45 minutes or so to drive.
But now, he relaxed a bit and began to show me around. The little country church where his grandfather had been a preacher, the huge menacing prison where he quipped, clearly more relaxed now, “Are you sure you don’t just want to visit that plantation instead?” and finally Stagville.
As he took me up the long winding driveway, he muttered. “This place feels bad, it’s a bad, bad place.” He refused my offer of a ticket, opting to wait for me in the car.
I bought my ticket and joined a tour that was already in progress.
I’d only been there about 10 minutes when the tour guide started giving us driving directions. It turned out that the slave quarters were a couple miles up the road – which suggests the size of the original plantation and also presented me with a problem.
So I put up my hand and said, “Hi, so I’m from Canada and I took a taxi here and I didn’t know we had to drive to another location and so… would someone mind giving me a ride?”
And you know what happened right? Because of course it did.
This nice older couple said, “We’re from Canada too and not only would we be happy to give you a ride but if you’re willing to visit a few additional tourist sites with us today, we’ll drive you back to town too.”
I thanked them, ran over to pay and thank the taxi driver and release him from the misery of waiting for me at the plantation and then, while offering a silent apology to my parents, accepted a ride from strangers.
There are a lot of things that I could tell you about seeing buildings that enslaved people once lived in, but here are just two.
The first is, that these particular buildings were still standing because they were built in an era where people who enslaved other people began to realize that if they provided slightly better accommodations then their slaves would not get sick so easily and could work harder and produce more. That’s just good economic sense.
And the second is, that I was allowed to touch the fingerprints embedded in the bricks that enslaved people had made to form the chimney, and some of those fingerprints definitely belonged to small children.
Paul was challenging Philemon to think differently about human relationships and reject the dehumanizing institution of slavery.
I think he is challenging us to do the same.
May we listen. May we act.
In the name of the triune God who creates, redeems, and sustains. Amen.
Let Mutual Love Continue: A Sermon for Sunday September 1, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, September 1, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Sex, power, money, suffering, and Jesus. These are some of the key themes in today’s reading from Hebrews. Oh, and hospitality. Hospitality is definitely in there as well. Hospitality is also a key theme in our gospel reading. As it is throughout the entire Bible.
The Greek word that is usually translated into English as “hospitality” (philoxenia)literally means “love of the strange,” which is a lot more challenging than the definition I suspect most North Americans think of when they hear the word “hospitality”: this event will have coffee and doughnuts.
Hospitality is a practice that opens us up to “love the strange,” to love people and things that are different than the people and things we are used to, and our reading from Hebrews contains a number of examples of how to practice hospitality.
And I do mean practice. Hospitality isn’t a theory, or a value, or an abstract idea. It’s a practice. Something you do.
The reading begins, “Let mutual love continue,” and then the writer of Hebrews provides us with a list of ways to do just that. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it includes a call to love strangers, to care for prisoners, to honour marriage, and to resist the temptation to fall in love with money. (1-4)
Timothy L Adkins -Jones notes that the common theme in this list is the importance of “building solidarity in relationships. Mutual love means sharing power. Following a Saviour has been defined throughout [Hebrews] by the sacrifice that [Jesus] represents for us all, we are called then to join in the sacrifice of our own position in order to build relationships. The host must put themselves on the same level as those that they host, seeing to the needs of those that enter their home before their own. Those that are free must put themselves in the position of those that are imprisoned.”
And not just to make sure the needs of people who are in prison are provided for as a tasteless chore you can perform at a distance and then check off your to do list. The writer of Hebrews challenges us to remember people who are in prison as if we were in prison too. It’s a call to empathy, to feel their pain as if it was our own and then to act.
Roman prisons were more like detention centers where people who had been accused of actions worthy of punishment waited until their fate was determined. Oftentimes, they were not provided with the basic necessities required to survive while they waited – food, clothing etc. They had to rely on people’s hospitality in order to survive.
It would be wonderful if we could simply say that that was then and this is now, but we know that these sorts of practices are happening at this very moment. People who have been accused of a crime often wait incredibly long amounts of time before their trial and the news has been full of horrific accounts of people and children – children – being housed in cages at the U.S. border without access to basic hygiene and other necessities of life.
And it’s not just in the United States, recently at Theology by the Glass we discussed an article that looked at the Canadian prison system and some of the ways we also fail to provide people who are incarcerated with the basic things they need to live as well.
The writer of Hebrews is calling us to express mutual love for people in prison. To care for them as we would want to be cared for. As if we were caring for ourselves.
It’s easier to look away, to pretend these things aren’t happening. It’s easy to try and distance ourselves by making blanket statements about “those people” or suggesting “they all deserve it” but in doing do, we are suggesting that some lives matter more than others, and we are missing out on the strange and difficult but heartbreakingly beautiful things that happen when we “let mutual love continue.”
Show hospitality. Care for prisoners. Respect marriage.
What does the writer of Hebrews mean when they say, “Let marriage be held in honour by all?”
They probably meant a lot of things, but there are two I want to mention tonight.
The first, is that in a patriarchal heteronormative culture the call that marriage is to be honoured “by all” is a radical statement that levels the hierarchical nature of traditional relationships between men and women. This verse is in a list of calls to action that began with the words, “Let mutual love continue.” Mutual love. Men are being called to honour women and women to honour men. Equally. That is a huge deal.
Secondly, we are told that God will judge those who do not honour marriage. God will judge. It’s God job, and we should be wary of any attempts, by ourselves or others, to take on that role for ourselves.
And the work of mutual love, of showing hospitality, caring for prisoners, respecting relationships, those really should keep us busy enough that we should be delighted that we don’t also have to bear the burden of judgement, we should be happy that this task has been delegated to God because we have enough on our plates as it is.
And we haven’t even gotten through the entire list yet.
The list continues, “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have…” (5)
Loving God and loving people instead of loving money is always good advice. The phrasing, “keep your lives free from the love of money” points to what we experience when we love money – we are no long free, we are enslaved.
The call to “be content with what you have,” is also good advice. Our society’s drive that nothing is ever good enough is exhausting and unhealthy and also enslaves us. The drive for more status and more money and more stuff is killing us and our planet.
But in our unequal system one person’s love of money typically also enslaves other people and in that context, the meaning of these verses can be twisted in an attempt to maintain that inequality.
In a consumer society most of us can learn to be more content with what we have, but this call to “be content with what you have,” has also been used to tell enslaved people that they should not fight for freedom, or women who make less than their male colleagues that they should not demand equal pay, or people who work in sweatshops to take whatever they are given without complaining and in those contexts, it is perfectly acceptable to say, “No, I am not content because what is happening to me is not right.”
It’s easy, when we don’t consider relationships, when we don’t “let mutual love continue,” to think only about how our choices benefit us. I mean, shouldn’t we simply buy the cheapest coffee we can find or the coffee we think tastes best? Do we really need to worry about the working conditions of the people who are growing that coffee or the effects it is having on the environment?
Those are questions that are much easier to ask so long as our products are made in places far away that we will never visit by faceless, nameless people we will never meet. But what if we did meet them? Would we be able to look the poorest of the poor in the eyes and tell them, “be content with what you have?” Would we see the way they live and still be able to go back to our own consumptive lifestyles.
American writer and activist Christopher Heuertz tells the following story in a book he co-wrote with Christine Pohl called “Friendship at the Margins:”
Christopher had travelled to South India and was enjoying lunch with a family he had first met about fifteen years previous when he was doing development work in the area. He used to play with the children and was often invited to join the family for a meal or to share a cup of tea on the dirt floor of their home. Gradually, he began to feel like he was a part of their family.
On this particular return visit, the oldest daughter in the family, Sujana, noticed the shirt Christopher was wearing, a red button down he had purchased at the Gap. “I think I made that,” she said and sure enough, the label read, “Made in India.”
Sujana was very proud of her work and asked how much Christopher had paid for the shirt. “My heart sank,” he wrote, “I felt ashamed and uncomfortable. I knew that the forty dollars I had paid for that shirt was more than she earns in an entire month… Sujana and her sisters work for pennies an hour to clothe folks who can spend between $40 and $120 on a shirt… The global economics are complicated, but it is not hard to see that the overall system is still dependent on plundering the poorest.”
Christopher had come to love that family, but he could see that many of his spending choices were not reflective of that love. Was there anything that he could do to “let mutual love continue?”
Like more than one billion of our global neighbours, Sujana and her family live on less than a dollar a day. Christopher reflected that he found it hard “to comprehend their precarious economic situation. They are so hospitable, gracious and strong while they are also desperately poor.”
And somehow, when it’s a billion people, it’s easy to distance ourselves from the situation, but when Christopher was sitting with a child he loved who proudly proclaimed that she had made his shirt, he could no longer look away.
I think this is why the writer of Hebrews challenges us to do things like care for prisoners as if we were in prison ourselves, we need to break down the barriers of distance that allow us to dehumanize other people.
What Chris chose to do in order to live in “mutual love” with Sujana and her family is intriguing and encouraging. He didn’t start sewing all of his own clothes, he did try a few things that failed. He bought stock in the Gap hoping to give the profits to Sujana and her family but the stock actually lost money.
Then on a subsequent trip to India, he asked Sujana and her sisters about their jobs. Sujana and her sister Bhindu had been working at the garment factory at that point for ten years, they worked ten hours a day, six days a week and made roughly the equivalent of twenty-six cents an hour. One of their younger sisters, who had only been working at the factory for about four years, made twenty two cents an hour. They didn’t just make clothes for the Gap, but for a long list of major retailers, so the solution wasn’t just to boycott the Gap and shop elsewhere either.
The girls were also grateful for those jobs since even that meager pay is more than they would make doing just about anything else. So trying to convince the girls to try and find work elsewhere or attempting to get the factory to close down weren’t solutions either.
So he kept shopping at the Gap and other similar stores, but he also reconsidered just how many shirts he actually needed and bought less. He went to thrift stores and purchased things second hand more regularly, and, he decided to do something that he described as “small and personal.”
He created a Personal Retail Equality Tax. Every time he shopped at a store that purchases clothes from the factory the girls worked in he decided to charge himself a 12% tax on those items and at the end of the year, he cashes out the fund and sends the money to Sujana’s family.
He sees it as more than just sending money to a poor family. He sees it as a way of continuing to build a relationship with folks who have become his family. He sees it as a way of making a direct connection between how he lives, what he consumes, and what his lifestyle and consumption costs other people. He knows it’s an awkward way to make sure that one family comes closer to having a living wage, but he also knows it will make a difference from them, and for him.
Christopher says, “When we get to know people who are vulnerable, we are challenged to take more seriously the power and opportunities we have. We might need to rethink our vocations in light of God’s purposes for the world. Can we more consistently use our training and skills for human good? Can we use our leisure time in ways that more fully reflect our love for Jesus and his friends? Friendships with people who are poor make our lives bigger and invites us to enlarge our circle of responsibility. They remind us that our small lifestyle decisions matter – they matter to God, to our spiritual identities and to our friends.”
In our gospel reading we are told that we should never sit in the place of honour because someone who is more distinguished than us might arrive and put us in the embarrassing situation of having to move to a seat of lower honour to accommodate them. How much better is it, the gospel writer asks, to take a lower seat and then to be told, “Friend, move up higher.” (10)
And that does feel good, and it’s a practical way to avoid feeling embarrassed in public but how much better might it feel to intentionally choose a sit of lower privilege so that you can turn to someone else and say, “Friend, I have chosen to have less so that you can have more, please, move up higher.”
Christopher’s decision to tax his clothing purchases and give that money to Sujana’s family is one way to choose that lower position in order to say, “Sujana, friend, move up higher.” I don’t expect that we all will walk out of this room with the commitment to create own own personal clothing tax but I do hope we feel challenged to think creatively about ways that we too, in our own lives can find ways that are appropriate to our own situations to resist the temptation to hold tight to our privileged positions, to release some of that privilege and move down a few seats so that you someone else can hear those wonderful words, “Friend, move up higher.”
May we all seek to let mutual love continue.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Shape of Freedom: A Sermon for Sunday August 25, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday August 25, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Here’s something I’ve been wondering about for a very long time: Jesus can heal people. So, why doesn’t Jesus heal everyone? Why does he seemingly pick and choose who he is going to heal? Why didn’t he just walk through the crowds of people who tended to form whenever he was around with his hands outstretched and just zap everyone in the crowd with his healing power?
Isn’t that more efficient? Isn’t that more compassionate?
Well, as I thought about this throughout the week, I came up with a couple of hunches.
The first, is that Jesus values consent. I didn’t do an exhaustive search of every healing narrative this week but as best I can remember, Jesus never heals anyone who doesn’t wish to be healed. They either come to him asking to be healed, or he directly asked them if they wish to be healed.
There is no consent in a practice of just walking through a crowd zapping people, and so Jesus doesn’t do that.
Consent matters.
Hunch number two: I think that when Jesus looks at people, he sees them very differently than I do.
If Jesus and I walked through a crowd together and counted the number of people who required healing, I think that my number would be a lot higher than his because even though I know in my head this is not true, I still have a tendency to think that every person who is deaf wants to hear, and every person who thinks or moves or looks different than the standard I have internalized wants desperately to conform to that standard.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, and I’m working on getting better, but I still tend to think that the ideal for humanity looks a lot like a Ken doll and a Barbie doll. And if you don’t look like that, then there is something wrong with you, and you know it, and you want to be healed so that you can conform to that standard.
A standard I don’t conform to. A standard no one conforms to.
But God’s standards and my warped standards are not the same. Thanks be to God.
God’s vision of what is means to be human is infinitely more diverse than Barbie and Ken. Humanity is more complex and beautiful than anything I have ever tried to reduce it to.
And we need the diversity. We need people who move and think and look and love differently than we do. That diversity enriches and deepens community.
Healing isn’t about making us all the same. Healing is a way of saying, you are not currently living the life you were created to live, and I want to help you with that.
The woman in today’s story is in need of healing. We are told that a spirit has been crippling her for eighteen years, bending her down towards the ground, and making it impossible for her to stand up straight. (v.11)
This is not how she wants to live or was meant to live.
Being freed of this crippling spirit would dramatically improve her life.
And we’ll get to her in a moment, but first, let’s look at the circumstances that frame her story.
Today’s gospel begins with Jesus teaching a crowd in a synagogue. This means he must have impressed the leader of the synagogue, who allowed him to teach, and also the people of the area, who have gathered to hear him speak.
The synagogue leader’s positive impression of Jesus will change, however, when Jesus chooses to heal on the Sabbath. Healing is work, and you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath day.
The idea of Sabbath is one of the most powerful and precious gifts we have ever been given. One that we’ve largely forgotten and desperately need to reclaim. Sabbath has both individual and communal implications, and today’s story focusses on the communal.
Sabbath was a gift that God gave to the people of Israel after they had been enslaved for generations in Egypt. When the people spent a day without working, it was meant to remind them that once they were slaves, but now they were free. It was a day that was always meant to be about freedom, not legalism.
Luke’s gospel is carefully structured and so when we read this story of Jesus teaching in a synagogue, it’s helpful to remember an earlier story of Jesus teaching in another synagogue. In that earlier story, Jesus says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4:18-19)
Sabbath is about freedom and liberation. When he heals the woman he says she is to be “set free” and “released” from her “bond.” (apoluo, v. 12; luov.16, desmosv. 16). Jesus also draws directly from the 10 Commandments where Sabbath is directly linked to Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt when he debates with the synagogue leader. (Deut. 5:12-15).
Jesus therefore sees the Sabbath as a day to both remember and celebrate freedom from slavery so actions which liberate Israelites in the present day are in keeping with the spirit of the Sabbath.
Which is why Jesus argues that his decision to heal the woman and restore her to full participation in her community is in keeping with the tenants of Sabbath. She also deserves to be free and so Jesus frees her.
Additionally, given that his contemporaries had found a work around to their strict “no work on the Sabbath” practices that allowed them to care for animals, then surely it was also OK to provide care for a human being?
Or was that perhaps part of the problem. Did the people actually need to be reminded that this woman was a human being?
Jeannine K Brown imagines the woman’s story in this way: “She had gotten used to looking at people out of the corner of her eye, by looking up and sideways.
After eighteen years, she could hardly remember any other way of seeing the world.
On this particular Sabbath, there was a special excitement at the synagogue, where she regularly went to worship. A Galilean preacher and prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, had arrived in town and would be teaching there. She and the others in town had heard reports about Jesus--how he talked about God's reign arriving soon and how he healed sick people.
She was not sure how many of the rumors to believe, but she was trying not to get her hopes up. Her life already had too many disappointments to count.
When she entered the synagogue, the place was abuzz. As Jesus began to teach, however, the room was hushed. Moments later, his words turned from teaching to invitation. He had caught her eye--no mean feat, given that he had to lean over and incline his head to do so. "Come here," he said to her. She slowly made her way to the front of the assembly.
What happened next amazed the whole congregation. "Woman, you are set free from your ailment." When this man, Jesus, spoke those words and put his hands on her broken, bent body, she felt power surge through her. Without hesitation, she straightened her once crooked back. She stood tall and praised her God . . .”
Imagine being this woman. Because of your distinctive bent posture, people can spot you from a mile away. Plus, in a small town everyone knows everyone else’s business, so everyone knows yours. You can’t blend in or hide so you’re always visible. But your posture also makes people uncomfortable so they ignore you, ostracize you, making you simultaneously overly visible, and invisible.
It’s a lonely way to live.
In his article, Disability and Healing: A Rereading Based on the Synoptic Gospels, Cuban theologian Rolando Mauro Verdecia Ávila takes this further by explaining that at this time, in order to be understood to be human, you had to conform to certain standards and one of the key standards was the ability to be in an upright position, a position that would allow you to look up at the sky, to look up to where God was believed to live. This was one of the key criteria that distinguished a human being from an animal.
So when her neighbours saw her, shuffling bent over through the streets, they did not see a human being, they saw someone who was inferior, an animal, and therefore, they saw no reason to treat her with respect, no reason to include her, no reason, really, to notice her at all.
And so, when Jesus heals her, he does not simply straighten her back. The healing begins when he notices her, takes an interest in her, touches her, and it continues when he gives her the dignity of a name and a place within the context of that community.
She is not just healed of a physical ailment. She is liberated from societal isolation, she is liberated from the forces that have enslaved her.
Rolando observes that “Jesus reinterprets the physical illness in terms of oppression and slavery. But, as if that were not enough, he also has the boldness to highlight the identity and dignity of that woman by calling her daughter of Abraham. (v.16) acknowledging that she has always been a legitimate member of her people, and not just now that she is no longer a person with a disability.
So all those affirmative actions, together with the controversy with the head of the synagogue, who opposed the fact that the healing occurred on the Sabbath day (vv.14-16) become, on the one hand, an indisputable denunciation of the hypocrisy and injustice of those who place institutions and traditions above the value of the life and wellbeing of person, and on the other hand, a radical and integral liberation for all the social, economic, cultural and religious burdens that weighted heavily on the back and on the life of that woman and kept her oppressed and enslaved.”[1]
Jesus does more than simply heal this woman’s bent back. He restores her to the community that has rejected her. He provides her with dignity and a name, calling her “daughter of Abraham,” a phrase that does not occur anywhere else in the entire Bible. This name emphasizes that this woman is a member of the community and even more than that, that she always has been. She does not receive this name because she has been healed, it is a name that has always belonged to her. Even if many people have forgotten it.
When Jesus heals the Daughter of Abraham the first thing she does is praise God. When the people hear Jesus’ argument that if animals can be lead to water than can’t a woman be set free from eighteen years of bondage on the Sabbath Day they also realize that he is right and Luke tells us “the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that [Jesus] was doing.” (17)
They too were set free in that moment. Set free from a legalistic way of thinking. Which is certainly something to celebrate.
In what ways have you been bent out of shape? It is a series of poor choices? Institutional systems that have not been designed with you in mind? Patriarchal forces? Old, hurtful stories or lies from your past?
What unnecessary burdens are you carrying? Where have you been bent out of shape and are in need of healing?
Today’s gospel is a story of individual healing but also of a person being restored to her community. What kind of community do we want to be? Do our religious traditions help or hinder us in that process? If a “daughter of Abraham” joined us today, would she find welcome or condemnation? And if condemnation, what do we plan to do about that?
Because when someone is being oppressed, when someone is being bent down towards the ground, we need to do something to lift them up.
May we always be a community of freedom and liberation that inspires each other to live fully into being who we were created to be.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1]Disability and Healing: A Rereading Based on the Synoptic Gospels by Rolando Mauro Verdecia Ávila , 18.
Fruits and Goods: A Sermon for Sunday August 11, 2019
The following sermon was preached at saint benedict's table on Sunday, August 11, 2019. You can also listen to the live recording or subscribe to our podcast. Just click here.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in your sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
When I was reading tonight’s passages in preparation for this sermon my first thought was OK… so my choices are money or sex. Money or sex. Hmmm…. I’m going with money. Little did I know at that time that in addition to money I was also going to need to say something about guns.
Tonight’s gospel reading contains a conversation and a parable.
Someone in the crowd calls out to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
Jesus’ response makes it clear that this person has misunderstood Jesus’ mission. Jesus did not come in order to be a legal expert who would settle disputes between people through his wise analysis of legal code.
And Jesus doesn’t see this conflict as a conflict simply about who is right and who is wrong according to the law of the land. Rather, he sees it as a conflict about greed and scarcity.
So rather than a clever legal analysis, Jesus gives a warning: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” (15)
If both brothers were willing to let go of the belief that there was never enough, then the one would be more inclined to share and the other less inclined to believe that he was being cheated.
Jesus’ warning should be seen as good news by both brothers, because if they heed his warning, no one loses. They both win.
The parable that follows this conversation illustrates the point.
This parable is one that always jumps out at me because it is tied to a specific memory. Several times while I was in university I had the opportunity to see Bruce Kuhn perform his one man show “The Gospel of Luke,” in which he acts out the entire King James’ Version of the Gospel of Luke word for word.
And in his portrayal of this story, this rich man is Scottish. And oh, how I wish I could do a half decent Scottish accent for you right now so you could get a sense of just what that does to this story.
But even without the accent, it’s just a wonderfully crafted little story.
“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.”
It’s theatrical. That lovely line, “And I will say to my soul, Soul…” Fantastic.
It’s lovely, but we are meant to see this man as a fool. At no point does he credit or thank God for his abundant harvest. He assumes that everything his fields have produced belongs to him and him alone and his only responsibility is to store his wealth, not to share it.
Which takes me to the news of latest mass shootings in the United States.
While I am largely at a loss for what to say about the tsunami of gun violence overtaking the United States, I do have a few thoughts to share with you today.
First, in the first 219 days of 2019, there were 250 mass shootings in the United States. That is 250 too many.
Second, we need to be very careful about any sense of superiority we might feel about the fact that this is happening in a foreign country, not only because that superiority doesn’t help anyone, but also because the attitudes and beliefs that lead to that sort of unimaginable horror are very present in our own country and in our own lives. Don’t let a sense of false superiority drown out that reality.
Third, while I do not have all of the answers, or any answers really, I do believe that the attitudes and beliefs we see reflected in this parable are also at the root of why so many people are buying guns and killing people.
Sadly, it doesn’t require too much of an imagination to add a few lines to this parable that would read, “I will build barns to store all of my possessions, and I will buy guns to protect those possessions, and I will live in fear that at any moment a person – most likely a person whose skin colour is different from my own – will try to take those possessions so I will place all of my sense of safety and security in my ability to shoot them if they try.”
Lord have mercy.
This rich man believes that his ability to lead a good life is bound up in his ability to obtain and securely store a vast amount of goods for his own personal use, and, as a result, he winds up being a total loser.
Because he will not, in fact, simply “eat, drink, and be merry,” because God says to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” (20-21)
What does it mean to be rich towards God? What are we supposed to do with our fruits and goods?
Our fruits and goods are not just reflected in our bank balances, but today I do want to spend some time focusing on money.
Talking about money can be a tricky thing, which doesn’t mean we should avoid doing it, it just means that we tend to avoid doing it, and as a result we’re often not really good at talking about money so we need to be prepared to feel awkward, and to make mistakes, and to apologize when we do.
One of the trickiest things about talking about money is that, in our culture, money is one of those things that it’s very difficult to generalize about and as such, especially in a context like this where I am speaking to a large room full of individuals and then also to our podcast audience something that hits one of you as good news may feel like condemnation to someone else.
Yikes.
Although it’s hard to generalize about money, here is one thing I believe is true of all of us. For each one of us there is some area of our relationship with our money and with our stuff that can be challenged. Some area where there is room for growth. It won’t be the same for everyone, but it’s there.
So what I want to do now is tell you a series of stories of places that I have seen people push into the growth edge of their relationship with money and with stuff, in the hopes that it might spark your own imagination.
When we moved into our house, the former owner left a ladder in the back yard. The kind that is perfect for cleaning out eavestroughs. I suppose it is our ladder now, but it doesn’t really feel that way because all of our neighbours use it too. It just sits in our back yard and they come and get it whenever they need it. And better yet, sometimes groups of neighbours come by and go from house to house cleaning out each other’s eavestroughs together. And we borrow other things from each other as well because it just seems silly that everyone on the block would have their own ladder – a tool we all only need about twice a year – when we can share.
***
There is someone in this congregation – and don’t worry I’m not going to out you – who pays careful attention to the times when I need to be at church for extended periods of time – Holy Week or Sundays when we have both a 4 and 7 o’clock service or when Jamie’s away and they’ll text me to see if I need help and they’ll often slip me a Power Bar because they know perfectly well I haven’t had supper. It’s a generous and thoughtful act. The kind that easily goes unnoticed. The kind that makes all the difference.
***
I have a friend who spent most of his life on social assistance. He spent a decent portion of his life living on the streets and in homeless shelters as well. When he turned 65 he moved off of social assistance and began collecting Canada Pension.
Suddenly he felt like his was rich because although Canada Pension is not a lot of money, it’s still higher than what a person receives on social assistance.
And not long after that, I noticed two things. One, he began going to Tim Horton’s almost every morning for a coffee, and two, every time we invited him to do things like go to a movie, his automatic response was “I can’t afford to.” He didn’t pause, he didn’t think, he just said, “I can’t afford to.”
And after a while we had a conversation, the kind I wouldn’t recommend you have with just anyone, but the kind that made sense within the context of the trust we’d built in our relationship.
I pointed out that I noticed he always turned down our offers to go out by saying, “I can’t afford it,” and yet, it seemed to me, that he probably could afford it because he was spending at least the same amount as a movie ticket each week on coffee at Tim Hortons and if he chose to make coffee at home instead he could come with us.
Well, to summarize a fairly long conversation, we uncovered a few things that day. The first, was that he didn’t really like going to movies but he did love the ritual of getting up, going for a walk, and chatting with people at Tim Horton’s. It wasn’t just about the coffee, it was about community, it was about an experience. An experience he couldn’t simply replicate by making coffee at home.
The second was, that it was a choice. And this was revolutionary. For the first time in a very long time he had a small amount of disposable income and he could choose how to spend it. He realized that he whenever we had asked him to go to the movies he had become so used to not being able to afford things like that that his response “I can’t afford it” was an automatic one. He never stopped to think if he wanted to go to a movie or if he could in fact afford it.
The realization that he had the power to choose was incredibly important and life giving even though his choices weren’t that expansive. Even though there would always be many things he actually could not afford. But he could choose what he did with what he had.
***
Since I graduated from university I have never worked in the for-profit sector. I have always worked for not-for-profits – charities and churches – and this has taught me an awful lot about money. I could talk for a loooong time about scarcity and abundance and control in the finances of non-profits, but I’ll save that for another time and just share a few things I’ve learned with you today.
At the first church I worked at, the church’s bookkeeper taught me a lot about church finances and one of the key lessons I learned from her was this, “Everyone tends to think that churches like ours exist because a few very rich people give a large amount of money, but that’s just not true. Our church exists because a lot of people with modest incomes each give a small amount of money. Our average donation is about $20 not $20 000.”
This inspired me because I realized that I thought my offering, which was rather small at the time, couldn’t possibly matter to the church. It didn’t inspire me to give more than I was already giving – I couldn’t afford to give more – but it did encourage me to think differently as I dropped my envelope in the collection plate. Since then, as I have continued to give to causes I care about, I have come to see just how important giving it, not simply because of how that money can be used by the charities I support to help other people, but how it changes me. How it helps me to feel like I am part of making the world a better place, how it helps me to trust that I can live on less than I earn.
Later when I found myself running a small charity I saw that this principle was true there as well – we sometimes got bigger donations, but we relied on the faithful people who gave $10 or $20 a month to keep the lights on. I suspect it’s true of most churches and charities actually. I wanted to highlight this reality and so I began to talk about our donors by describing a fictious donor who was a reflection of our actual donors. “Oma Schmidt from Plum Collee.” Oma who prayed for us regularly and faithfully sent $10 or $20 a month from her modest pension.
When we’d purchase something we needed we’d say, “Thanks Oma,” and when I asked people if they wanted to go for coffee with me they’d often ask cagily, “That depends, is Oma paying?” Sometimes she did, sometimes we split the cheque.
***
Oftentimes, when people donate money to charity they try and control what the charity does with that money by designating what the charity can do with that money and usually by saying that they can’t use that money for their operating budget or salaries or admin costs. It’s difficult, because a charity’s operating budget generally describes the things they need in order to do the work they were created to do. And paper for the photocopier might not seem like the most exciting thing to spend money on, but if you don’t give your people the tools they need to do the work, how can you expect them to do the work?
One time, however, I received a donation that came with a lovely note of encouragement and this line, “Use this money however you see fit.”
I had just discovered that we needed to treat a house that seven people lived in for bedbugs. Now I just said the word “bedbugs” and at least about half of you shuddered, imagine living through it.
And so I used that donation to hire an exterminator but the tremendous freedom I felt I had been given by the line “use this money however you see fit” also allowed me to use that money to buy slurpees.
Now I feel reasonably certain that if I had sent out a fundraising letter requesting money for slurpees that I wouldn’t have had donors beating down my door to meet that request – even here in the Slurpee capital of Canada. But I can tell you that beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you are working with people who are living through one of the most stressful things a person can live through, that sometimes a break from the chaos and a little bit of sugar water are exactly what is needed.
I never met that donor, I’m not sure I ever will, but I will always be grateful for their choice to both be generous with their resources, and to release control of them as well.
***
Clearly, we are entering a new phase in this life of this particular church building, but for years, All Saints has operated under the belief that the things they have are not simply for their own personal use and as a result, this church was, until recently, the home of 3 church congregations and multiple charities like Agape Table. These buildings were used so regularly and so well that the church hall became so tired it literally needed to be torn down.
And I think it would have been so much easier for All Saints to simply tear it down and build a parking lot for the benefit of its members, or to generate some rental income but they had a much bigger and more expansive imagination than that – a 12 story apartment building sized imagination.
So what about us? What about saint benedict’s table? What can we do with the fruits and goods we have?
What could happen if we each – in a way that makes sense to our particular situation – chose to release control of some of our own personal resources. Choose to believe that we, as a community, could do more with those resources by working together than each of us could do individually?
Well, currently, it looks like being able to meet together regularly for worship, to explore fringe theater or big ideas and then have meaningful conversations.
It means that last year, as in year’s past, we also gave away almost $18 000 to groups like Agape Table, Hand in Hand with Haiti, the Good Food Club, Bell Tower Community Café, and Art City to name just a few. We gave also money to help a hospital in Mali and migrant caravans in Mexico. We told them all “use this money however you see fit.”
What are your “fruits and goods” and what are you going to do with them? What are our “fruits and goods” and what are we going to do with them? How can we continue to lean into abundance and resist the myth of scarcity?
I can’t wait to find out.
In the name of our God who abundantly creates, sustains, and redeems. Amen.