Homily Christmas Day Proper 3
When the Bishops of the church meeting together in the fourth century had to choose the Canon of scripture, that is the books that they judged were worthy of being sacred texts, inspired by God, they settled on four Gospels—all different accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
Today’s Gospel is John’s alternative to the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, and the absence of a birth narrative in Mark, which begins the life of Jesus with his baptism by John.
Instead of story, John uses poetry in what is often called the prologue to his Gospel.
Since John is writing to a persecuted Jewish Christian community which has been expelled from the synagogue, this prologue is an attempt to clearly establish Jesus as the Son of God, who has existed since the beginning of time as part of the Godhead.
The word, or logos, was with God from the beginning of time-the creation. The word is the light in the darkness.
John comes as a witness to the light, to testify to the light. And then Jesus, the word, becomes flesh, and dwells among us.
Yet as John’s community found, Jesus the word, was not accepted by his own people.
So John’s Gospel provides a theological view of the incarnation, the birth of Christ, the word made flesh.
While there is no birth story as such, it seems to me we need to think in larger terms about the birth of Christ, and its place in history.
Paul’s Letter to the Hebrew does this too. He reminds his readers that God has spoken through his prophets in many ways, but with Jesus, God has spoken in a new way—with an heir “of all things.”
Paul says Jesus is "the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.”
This reminder to a Jewish Christian readership emphasizes the continuity between the Hebrew scriptures, and the stories which would later become the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament.
We always have to remember when Paul was writing, there was no New Testament, and Jews and Jewish Christians alike would only have had the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral tradition of stories about Jesus.
So as we celebrate the birth of Christ today, it’s helpful to add to the wonderful story of a babe in manger, the more cosmic story of John.
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God."
And the conclusion of this stirring passage—“And the word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In a broken world, that glory, that grace and truth, reminds us of God’s gift to us—a gift that keeps giving, and kept be taken away. Thanks be to God.
Sunday 25 December 2011
The Messiness of the Birth of Christ
Christmas Eve Homily 2011, Proper 1
There is a tendency to romanticize the story of the birth of Jesus found in Luke’s Gospel. We think of Christmas card images…shepherds in handsome robes, gathered around a fire…a sky full of stars, one of which is immense and hangs over Bethlehem…a baby in a manger with fresh hay in the stable and a pastoral scene of animals quietly grazing.
But we have to remember those images present a somewhat unrealistic idea of what actually happened that first Christmas eve.
One key to the story is that it happens at night, a time of fear, a time of danger.
The shepherds lived under Roman occupation, as did Joseph and Mary.
And historians tell us shepherds, who were the first witnesses of Jesus birth were outcasts from society, looked down on, poor…just the kind of people Jesus talks about reaching out to in his ministry three decades later.
The angels, messengers of God, don’t appear to rabbis, or landowners, or even shop owners, they appear to lowly shepherds, and it’s no surprise the shepherds are fearful.
So the angels first words are “Be not afraid.”
And those words are still at the heart of the Christian Gospel, the Gospel of Christ, more than two thousand years later.
Around our world we see danger and fear—of many things—from natural disasters, to climate change, to war, to persecution, to homelessness and starvation.
Yet the message of Christmas, the message of Jesus is that God is with us, bringing light into the darkness.
Our brothers and sisters in Christchurch, New Zealand are celebrating Christmas with outdoor services, reports Bishop Victoria Matthews.
An earthquake, the latest of many, hit Christchurch on Dec. 23. It was not as damaging as the earthquake that destroyed much of the city’s downtown earlier this year, but it has renewed fears of ongoing quakes which threaten efforts at reconstruction.
The Bishop writes the outdoor services aren’t about: “buildings falling down but about having large numbers of people from the very young to the elderly in close quarters in the event of another tremor. Outdoors, away from buildings will allow for community, but not crowding. I know it isn’t what most expected, but that first Christmas was very messy also, and there was a life saving outcome from that extraordinary gathering.”
The first Christmas was very messy, and dark, and dangerous. It wasn’t like a Hallmark Christmas card.
Herod feared the birth of Jesus, and Matthew tells us the story of the Holy family fleeing to Egypt to avoid persecution. So they were refugees.
And as New Zealand Christians gather for the torchlight (they call flashlights torches) services, they will undoubtedly be very conscious of the darkness and danger of the first Christmas eve.
It is worth considering that the birth of Jesus was announced only to his immediately family, to John the Baptist and his family and to the Shepherds and the wise men.
Otherwise, the birth is unheralded. The religious leaders, and wealthy people who held authority in Israel were not told.
The birth of Jesus, came not in a palace, but in a rough stable. Jesus was born to ordinary parents, not of noble birth.
What are we to draw from this simple yet powerful story of Christ’s birth in such an unexpected way, in such an out of the way place.
Perhaps it is that power and wealth aren’t what really count. It is what is in our hearts that matters. The good news the angels announce is the beginning of what would become a call to repentance, a call to hope and a call to a new way of life in harmony with God and other human beings.
We, as Christians, are called to live in community, to model the life of Christ, to live in peace and justice and to love each other.
As the prayer book service says, quoting scripture: “This is the first and great commandment, that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul and all thy strength. This is the first and great commendment. The second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Living that out is far from easy. One term, that has been used to describe our western society in recent years, is “affluenza.”
We get so caught up in materialism, in shopping in consuming ever more that we lose our compass. We don’t care for others as we should. We allow too many riches to be concentrated in too few hands while others struggle without jobs, food, proper shelter, or hope.
Christ was born in poverty, and throughout his ministry he lived as an itinerant preacher, teacher and healer, with few possessions but the clothes on his back.
He reminds us that it isn’t ultimately what you have in riches which matters, but the spirit in our hearts and minds.
When I think of Christmas stories outside the Bible, I often come back to the Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Ebenezer Scrooge learns through his encounter with spirits of Christmas past, present and future, that accumulating wealth does not bring happiness. Instead, it can bring loneliness and despair.
We, like Scrooge, can find new enjoyment of life if we seek opportunities to help others, build relationships and seek to live out our Christian faith.
Hope, grounded in faith is what sustains us as Christian people in this broken world. Jesus is the light of the world, a light no darkness can extinguish.
There is a tendency to romanticize the story of the birth of Jesus found in Luke’s Gospel. We think of Christmas card images…shepherds in handsome robes, gathered around a fire…a sky full of stars, one of which is immense and hangs over Bethlehem…a baby in a manger with fresh hay in the stable and a pastoral scene of animals quietly grazing.
But we have to remember those images present a somewhat unrealistic idea of what actually happened that first Christmas eve.
One key to the story is that it happens at night, a time of fear, a time of danger.
The shepherds lived under Roman occupation, as did Joseph and Mary.
And historians tell us shepherds, who were the first witnesses of Jesus birth were outcasts from society, looked down on, poor…just the kind of people Jesus talks about reaching out to in his ministry three decades later.
The angels, messengers of God, don’t appear to rabbis, or landowners, or even shop owners, they appear to lowly shepherds, and it’s no surprise the shepherds are fearful.
So the angels first words are “Be not afraid.”
And those words are still at the heart of the Christian Gospel, the Gospel of Christ, more than two thousand years later.
Around our world we see danger and fear—of many things—from natural disasters, to climate change, to war, to persecution, to homelessness and starvation.
Yet the message of Christmas, the message of Jesus is that God is with us, bringing light into the darkness.
Our brothers and sisters in Christchurch, New Zealand are celebrating Christmas with outdoor services, reports Bishop Victoria Matthews.
An earthquake, the latest of many, hit Christchurch on Dec. 23. It was not as damaging as the earthquake that destroyed much of the city’s downtown earlier this year, but it has renewed fears of ongoing quakes which threaten efforts at reconstruction.
The Bishop writes the outdoor services aren’t about: “buildings falling down but about having large numbers of people from the very young to the elderly in close quarters in the event of another tremor. Outdoors, away from buildings will allow for community, but not crowding. I know it isn’t what most expected, but that first Christmas was very messy also, and there was a life saving outcome from that extraordinary gathering.”
The first Christmas was very messy, and dark, and dangerous. It wasn’t like a Hallmark Christmas card.
Herod feared the birth of Jesus, and Matthew tells us the story of the Holy family fleeing to Egypt to avoid persecution. So they were refugees.
And as New Zealand Christians gather for the torchlight (they call flashlights torches) services, they will undoubtedly be very conscious of the darkness and danger of the first Christmas eve.
It is worth considering that the birth of Jesus was announced only to his immediately family, to John the Baptist and his family and to the Shepherds and the wise men.
Otherwise, the birth is unheralded. The religious leaders, and wealthy people who held authority in Israel were not told.
The birth of Jesus, came not in a palace, but in a rough stable. Jesus was born to ordinary parents, not of noble birth.
What are we to draw from this simple yet powerful story of Christ’s birth in such an unexpected way, in such an out of the way place.
Perhaps it is that power and wealth aren’t what really count. It is what is in our hearts that matters. The good news the angels announce is the beginning of what would become a call to repentance, a call to hope and a call to a new way of life in harmony with God and other human beings.
We, as Christians, are called to live in community, to model the life of Christ, to live in peace and justice and to love each other.
As the prayer book service says, quoting scripture: “This is the first and great commandment, that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul and all thy strength. This is the first and great commendment. The second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Living that out is far from easy. One term, that has been used to describe our western society in recent years, is “affluenza.”
We get so caught up in materialism, in shopping in consuming ever more that we lose our compass. We don’t care for others as we should. We allow too many riches to be concentrated in too few hands while others struggle without jobs, food, proper shelter, or hope.
Christ was born in poverty, and throughout his ministry he lived as an itinerant preacher, teacher and healer, with few possessions but the clothes on his back.
He reminds us that it isn’t ultimately what you have in riches which matters, but the spirit in our hearts and minds.
When I think of Christmas stories outside the Bible, I often come back to the Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Ebenezer Scrooge learns through his encounter with spirits of Christmas past, present and future, that accumulating wealth does not bring happiness. Instead, it can bring loneliness and despair.
We, like Scrooge, can find new enjoyment of life if we seek opportunities to help others, build relationships and seek to live out our Christian faith.
Hope, grounded in faith is what sustains us as Christian people in this broken world. Jesus is the light of the world, a light no darkness can extinguish.
Monday 12 December 2011
Listen to the Prophets
Homily, Advent 3, Yr. B 2011
“And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. And the tenement halls. And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
Simon and Garfunkel wrote those words more than 50 years ago. And they could apply to the words of the Prophet Isaiah we heard today.
“The Spirit of God, the Master, is on me because God anointed me. He sent me to preach good news to the poor, heal the heartbroken, announce freedom to all captives, pardon all prisoners.
This passage in Isaiah was so important that it was read by Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, when he was beginning his ministry.
When Jesus read it, and said it applied to him, people got so mad they kicked him out of town. He was a threat to the way things worked in that community and every other community.
The message of Jesus was to change lives—heal the sick, comfort the afflicted, and most threatening—afflict the comfortable.
What Jesus preached was not salvation in some future existence—pie in the sky by and by.
The words of the prophet Isaiah were for Isaiah’s time, they were for Jesus time and they are for today.
The words of the prophet are aimed at those groups who are marginalized in society: the poor, the heartbroken, captives and prisoners. These are real people.
Salvation, according to Isaiah, is not about getting to heaven
but about life in the here and now.
So what would salvation look like in Isaiah’s view?
God sent me to announce the year of his grace -to comfort
all who mourn, To care for the needs of all who mourn in Zion, give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes, Messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit. Rename them "Oaks of Righteousness" planted by God to display his glory.
That’s Isaiah’s vision. That is a vision of a mission for God’s people.
Our Diocese is trying to seek a new direction—a direction which turns our focus outward into mission. Mission happens when we turn our attention to those who are named as recipients of the Good News: the poor, the oppressed, , the brokenhearted, the captives, the poor in spirit.
When we are called to turn our attention, we are not called just to write a cheque. Financial support of mission is important, but it is our personal engagement as members of the body of Christ, and members of a faith community that matters even more.
The great Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said the church is the only institution that exists for those who are not its members.
We exist, not to give money, but for the sake of those who are poor, oppressed and brokenhearted. How we are living out the words of Isaiah?
One of the ironies of our current economic system is that the richest part of society—the top one percent the Occupy movement has been directed against-- is rewarded so out of proportion to its
contribution to our economy.
While the church has often been aligned with power and privilege, the Bible, especially in pssages like this one in Isaiah is firmly rooted in caring for the poor and the oppressed.
Mary’s Magnificat has vision of that redistribution of wealth when it says God has “filled the hungry with good things and has sent the rich empty away.”
Jesus has many things to say about the rich people of his time, mostly landowners because Israel was a feudal agrarian society. And most of them are not good.
So as we live in a world where millions upon millions of people are homeless and hungry, while others live in unimaginable—even to us—opulence, there is a need for the church to remember its prophetic roots in Hebrew scripture.
There is a deep yearning for peace and justice, not in some distant future, but as a goal worth struggling for now.
Our Christian faith should not be a privatized faith that sees Christ’s teaching as something which will have to wait until Heaven.
We believe as Christians that God’s kingdom can be realized on earth through the struggle for peace and justice, and following Christ’s great command—to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves.
In Advent we are proclaiming the good news, the good news of John, that God cares for us, and he sends his son as a light to the world.
That Good News means paying attention to the prophets—who tell us that God hates robbery and wrongdoing, loves justice, and offers comfort to the poor, the afflicted and the downtrodden.
I was watching 60 Minutes recently. The documentary reported that not a single executive involved in the banking industry has been brought to justice for the fraudulent mortgage schemes which caused the great economic downturn in 2008 and have forced many thousands of homes to be foreclosed, and caused many people to lose their homes.
In a society which imprisons more of its citizens—mostly poor people—than any other in the world per capita—this indicates what a complete absence of fairness and justice there is…and this in a predominantly Christian country.
So we have a long way to go. And we need to listen to the prophets and to Jesus as we seek to bring the good news to our own communities.
“And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. And the tenement halls. And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
Simon and Garfunkel wrote those words more than 50 years ago. And they could apply to the words of the Prophet Isaiah we heard today.
“The Spirit of God, the Master, is on me because God anointed me. He sent me to preach good news to the poor, heal the heartbroken, announce freedom to all captives, pardon all prisoners.
This passage in Isaiah was so important that it was read by Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, when he was beginning his ministry.
When Jesus read it, and said it applied to him, people got so mad they kicked him out of town. He was a threat to the way things worked in that community and every other community.
The message of Jesus was to change lives—heal the sick, comfort the afflicted, and most threatening—afflict the comfortable.
What Jesus preached was not salvation in some future existence—pie in the sky by and by.
The words of the prophet Isaiah were for Isaiah’s time, they were for Jesus time and they are for today.
The words of the prophet are aimed at those groups who are marginalized in society: the poor, the heartbroken, captives and prisoners. These are real people.
Salvation, according to Isaiah, is not about getting to heaven
but about life in the here and now.
So what would salvation look like in Isaiah’s view?
God sent me to announce the year of his grace -to comfort
all who mourn, To care for the needs of all who mourn in Zion, give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes, Messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit. Rename them "Oaks of Righteousness" planted by God to display his glory.
That’s Isaiah’s vision. That is a vision of a mission for God’s people.
Our Diocese is trying to seek a new direction—a direction which turns our focus outward into mission. Mission happens when we turn our attention to those who are named as recipients of the Good News: the poor, the oppressed, , the brokenhearted, the captives, the poor in spirit.
When we are called to turn our attention, we are not called just to write a cheque. Financial support of mission is important, but it is our personal engagement as members of the body of Christ, and members of a faith community that matters even more.
The great Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said the church is the only institution that exists for those who are not its members.
We exist, not to give money, but for the sake of those who are poor, oppressed and brokenhearted. How we are living out the words of Isaiah?
One of the ironies of our current economic system is that the richest part of society—the top one percent the Occupy movement has been directed against-- is rewarded so out of proportion to its
contribution to our economy.
While the church has often been aligned with power and privilege, the Bible, especially in pssages like this one in Isaiah is firmly rooted in caring for the poor and the oppressed.
Mary’s Magnificat has vision of that redistribution of wealth when it says God has “filled the hungry with good things and has sent the rich empty away.”
Jesus has many things to say about the rich people of his time, mostly landowners because Israel was a feudal agrarian society. And most of them are not good.
So as we live in a world where millions upon millions of people are homeless and hungry, while others live in unimaginable—even to us—opulence, there is a need for the church to remember its prophetic roots in Hebrew scripture.
There is a deep yearning for peace and justice, not in some distant future, but as a goal worth struggling for now.
Our Christian faith should not be a privatized faith that sees Christ’s teaching as something which will have to wait until Heaven.
We believe as Christians that God’s kingdom can be realized on earth through the struggle for peace and justice, and following Christ’s great command—to love God and love our neighbours as ourselves.
In Advent we are proclaiming the good news, the good news of John, that God cares for us, and he sends his son as a light to the world.
That Good News means paying attention to the prophets—who tell us that God hates robbery and wrongdoing, loves justice, and offers comfort to the poor, the afflicted and the downtrodden.
I was watching 60 Minutes recently. The documentary reported that not a single executive involved in the banking industry has been brought to justice for the fraudulent mortgage schemes which caused the great economic downturn in 2008 and have forced many thousands of homes to be foreclosed, and caused many people to lose their homes.
In a society which imprisons more of its citizens—mostly poor people—than any other in the world per capita—this indicates what a complete absence of fairness and justice there is…and this in a predominantly Christian country.
So we have a long way to go. And we need to listen to the prophets and to Jesus as we seek to bring the good news to our own communities.
Sunday 4 December 2011
Advent: A Time for Rousing
Homily Advent 2, Yr. B, 2011
Now we are in the heart of Advent, a season of darkness where we are turning towards the light. We long for the coming of Jesus we are introduced to one of the real characters of the Bible, John the Baptist.
There are many parallels between the life of John the Baptist and of Jesus of Nazareth.
In Mark’s Gospel of the good news of Jesus Christ the beginning scene is not of a baby in a manger, born of Mary and Joseph, but a wild prophet in the wilderness, a desert, who lives off the land and preaches a gospel of repentance.
In some ways John personifies Advent. His message is clear—prepare for the Lord, the Messiah, the one who Israel has hoped for throughout its history.
John is a prophet. He invites the people of Israel to repent and change their lives, and signify this change through baptism in the waters of the Jordan River.
John is feared not only by the Jewish religious leaders, but by Herod the King.
Josephus, a historian from that period, says this of John:
“Now when many others came in crowds about him, for they were greatly moved by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence of John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulty by sparing a man who might repent of it before it should be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Machrus, …and was there put to death.”
In our Gospels we are told John’s execution was caused when he criticized Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, and we have the ghoulish story of the Baptist’s head being brought out to honour a promise Herod makes to Salome.
Either way it seems clear that John, like Jesus was unafraid of offending the authorities, and taught without fear.
We could see John’s arrest as the turning point in the Gospels because after John, who prepared the way, is gone, then Jesus begins his ministry.
Jesus has been baptized by John, and commissioned for his own ministry of teaching and healing, and the journey to the cross.
Jesus must face the same hostility from the Jewish religious authorities, King Herod and ultimately the power of Rome, that John faced.
To begin that intense period of ministry, Jesus, like John heads for the wilderness, the desert, where he must face temptation before undertaking his remarkable world changing journey.
Jesus, like John, says repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.
But we can’t and won’t ever know when the Kingdom of God, or the second coming of Christ will happen. So we live in hope and expectation.
There is no minimizing how difficult it is to understand the gaps between our hopes and dreams and the current reality of our lives.
Dietrick Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor imprisoned for resisting the Nazis wrote before his death:
“Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent—one waits and hopes and potters about, but in the end what we do is of little consequence, for the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.”
So hope is challenging even for our greatest and most courageous theologians.
Another prisoner of the Nazis, Alfred Delp, wrote this meditation:
“Advent is a time for rousing. Human beings are shaken to the very depths, so that they may wake up to the truth of themselves. The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation and surrender…a shattering awakening; that is the necessary preliminary. Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken.”
One of the reasons we observe Advent as part of the church year is to engage in a season of repentance, of watchfulness, of preparation before the celebration of the birth Jesus, and then Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the world.
We lose part of our Christian heritage if we treat Advent simply as a countdown to Christmas, and move too quickly from the wilderness with John the Baptist, to the shepherds in the fields listening to the Angels and rushing to the stable in Bethlehem.
Of course the wider culture is already in the midst of celebrating the Christmas of Santa Claus, shopping and presents. And Christmas carols have been heard in the stores since Halloween.
We are called to stay in the wilderness, at least in our thoughts, a bit longer as we mark this Advent season. It is a time of waiting, of expectation, and of joy.
Delp while still a prisoner also described joy “when one is curiously uplifted by a sense of inner exaltation and comfort. Outwardly nothing is changed…Yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God’s hands.”
Another prison admonition comes from Paul in his letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice.”
A message of faith, and a message of joy in spite of suffering.
Now we are in the heart of Advent, a season of darkness where we are turning towards the light. We long for the coming of Jesus we are introduced to one of the real characters of the Bible, John the Baptist.
There are many parallels between the life of John the Baptist and of Jesus of Nazareth.
In Mark’s Gospel of the good news of Jesus Christ the beginning scene is not of a baby in a manger, born of Mary and Joseph, but a wild prophet in the wilderness, a desert, who lives off the land and preaches a gospel of repentance.
In some ways John personifies Advent. His message is clear—prepare for the Lord, the Messiah, the one who Israel has hoped for throughout its history.
John is a prophet. He invites the people of Israel to repent and change their lives, and signify this change through baptism in the waters of the Jordan River.
John is feared not only by the Jewish religious leaders, but by Herod the King.
Josephus, a historian from that period, says this of John:
“Now when many others came in crowds about him, for they were greatly moved by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence of John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulty by sparing a man who might repent of it before it should be too late. Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod’s suspicious temper, to Machrus, …and was there put to death.”
In our Gospels we are told John’s execution was caused when he criticized Herod for marrying his brother’s wife, and we have the ghoulish story of the Baptist’s head being brought out to honour a promise Herod makes to Salome.
Either way it seems clear that John, like Jesus was unafraid of offending the authorities, and taught without fear.
We could see John’s arrest as the turning point in the Gospels because after John, who prepared the way, is gone, then Jesus begins his ministry.
Jesus has been baptized by John, and commissioned for his own ministry of teaching and healing, and the journey to the cross.
Jesus must face the same hostility from the Jewish religious authorities, King Herod and ultimately the power of Rome, that John faced.
To begin that intense period of ministry, Jesus, like John heads for the wilderness, the desert, where he must face temptation before undertaking his remarkable world changing journey.
Jesus, like John, says repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.
But we can’t and won’t ever know when the Kingdom of God, or the second coming of Christ will happen. So we live in hope and expectation.
There is no minimizing how difficult it is to understand the gaps between our hopes and dreams and the current reality of our lives.
Dietrick Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor imprisoned for resisting the Nazis wrote before his death:
“Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of Advent—one waits and hopes and potters about, but in the end what we do is of little consequence, for the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.”
So hope is challenging even for our greatest and most courageous theologians.
Another prisoner of the Nazis, Alfred Delp, wrote this meditation:
“Advent is a time for rousing. Human beings are shaken to the very depths, so that they may wake up to the truth of themselves. The primary condition for a fruitful and rewarding Advent is renunciation and surrender…a shattering awakening; that is the necessary preliminary. Life only begins when the whole framework is shaken.”
One of the reasons we observe Advent as part of the church year is to engage in a season of repentance, of watchfulness, of preparation before the celebration of the birth Jesus, and then Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the world.
We lose part of our Christian heritage if we treat Advent simply as a countdown to Christmas, and move too quickly from the wilderness with John the Baptist, to the shepherds in the fields listening to the Angels and rushing to the stable in Bethlehem.
Of course the wider culture is already in the midst of celebrating the Christmas of Santa Claus, shopping and presents. And Christmas carols have been heard in the stores since Halloween.
We are called to stay in the wilderness, at least in our thoughts, a bit longer as we mark this Advent season. It is a time of waiting, of expectation, and of joy.
Delp while still a prisoner also described joy “when one is curiously uplifted by a sense of inner exaltation and comfort. Outwardly nothing is changed…Yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God’s hands.”
Another prison admonition comes from Paul in his letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice.”
A message of faith, and a message of joy in spite of suffering.
Sunday 27 November 2011
Wait, Watch and Hope this Advent
Homily Advent 1, Year B, Nov. 27, 2011
This morning we are here to think about hope. The hope and expectation we feel during the season of Advent each year as we await the time we celebrate the birth of the Saviour, God with us, Emmanuel.
Today’s readings may seem to have a darker tone than one might expect for a message of hope. They certainly leave themselves open to misinterpretation.
Jesus says: “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the power in the heavens will be shaken.” All this precedes the Son of Man coming with great power and glory.
Needless to say this vivid picture of the end times has created fear among some listeners and hearers throughout the ages.
And many times throughout human history at times when things have looked their worst, people have feared that the end times Jesus talked about were happening.
Our time may be such a time. Although there are no large scale wars right now, peace is fragile, and many nations are struggling with violence and internal conflict.
Environmental degradation, climate change, economic uncertainty, unemployment, hunger, and homelessness are issues which face not only third world countries but the affluent west.
The age of scientific progress and prosperity we thought we were moving towards in the 1950’s, has been replaced by a situation where many young people wonder what the future holds for them.
This malaise holds true for the church as well. Where in the 50’s we were building new churches and our pews were packed, we are now struggling—at least in the mainstream denominations—just to survive and refocus our mission and ministry.
So we like the writer of Isaiah in exile could: “O that thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down.”
Yet Jesus teaches us we will not know the time for the end days, the second coming of the Son of Man, the term he uses to describe himself as the Messiah foretold in Hebrew Scripture.
We have to live in hope, remembering as the early Jewish Christians did, that when the Temple of Jerusalem was demolished by the Romans, it would create an opportunity to focus on God’s intervention in the world, by sending his son Jesus to come among us, to be crucified and to rise again in glory.
As well as having hope, the season of advent is one of watchfulness.
One of the dangers we face is the opposite of watchfulness—sleep walking through life, drifting without purpose.
Instead of sleepwalking our Christian faith calls us to watch and pray, so we won’t fall into sin, to watch, so we are always open to renewal and growth in our own spiritual journeys, and also to watch for opportunities to serve God by serving our fellow human beings.
That’s why during the Advent season as we prepare for Christmas it is a chance to reflect on our many blessings, and think about opportunities to help those less fortunate.
We need to avoid getting caught up in the consumerism which marks the season—from Black Friday last week to frantic last minute shopping Christmas Eve.
Rather than the self-gratification of acquiring more material goods, Advent is marked by the words, come…as in Come Lord Jesus, wait….as in beware, keep alert for you do not know when the time will come…and remember…remember to have patience and humility.
God is faithful. That is the message from the earliest Hebrew Scripture to the Book of Revelation.
We can trust in God, who brought His divine love into the world in human form in a baby born in a manger in a humble stable in Bethlehem in a poor and unremarkable part of God’s creation.
So let us wait, let us watch and let us prepare, during this season of Advent. Come, Lord Jesus, Come.
This morning we are here to think about hope. The hope and expectation we feel during the season of Advent each year as we await the time we celebrate the birth of the Saviour, God with us, Emmanuel.
Today’s readings may seem to have a darker tone than one might expect for a message of hope. They certainly leave themselves open to misinterpretation.
Jesus says: “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the power in the heavens will be shaken.” All this precedes the Son of Man coming with great power and glory.
Needless to say this vivid picture of the end times has created fear among some listeners and hearers throughout the ages.
And many times throughout human history at times when things have looked their worst, people have feared that the end times Jesus talked about were happening.
Our time may be such a time. Although there are no large scale wars right now, peace is fragile, and many nations are struggling with violence and internal conflict.
Environmental degradation, climate change, economic uncertainty, unemployment, hunger, and homelessness are issues which face not only third world countries but the affluent west.
The age of scientific progress and prosperity we thought we were moving towards in the 1950’s, has been replaced by a situation where many young people wonder what the future holds for them.
This malaise holds true for the church as well. Where in the 50’s we were building new churches and our pews were packed, we are now struggling—at least in the mainstream denominations—just to survive and refocus our mission and ministry.
So we like the writer of Isaiah in exile could: “O that thou wouldest rend the heavens and come down.”
Yet Jesus teaches us we will not know the time for the end days, the second coming of the Son of Man, the term he uses to describe himself as the Messiah foretold in Hebrew Scripture.
We have to live in hope, remembering as the early Jewish Christians did, that when the Temple of Jerusalem was demolished by the Romans, it would create an opportunity to focus on God’s intervention in the world, by sending his son Jesus to come among us, to be crucified and to rise again in glory.
As well as having hope, the season of advent is one of watchfulness.
One of the dangers we face is the opposite of watchfulness—sleep walking through life, drifting without purpose.
Instead of sleepwalking our Christian faith calls us to watch and pray, so we won’t fall into sin, to watch, so we are always open to renewal and growth in our own spiritual journeys, and also to watch for opportunities to serve God by serving our fellow human beings.
That’s why during the Advent season as we prepare for Christmas it is a chance to reflect on our many blessings, and think about opportunities to help those less fortunate.
We need to avoid getting caught up in the consumerism which marks the season—from Black Friday last week to frantic last minute shopping Christmas Eve.
Rather than the self-gratification of acquiring more material goods, Advent is marked by the words, come…as in Come Lord Jesus, wait….as in beware, keep alert for you do not know when the time will come…and remember…remember to have patience and humility.
God is faithful. That is the message from the earliest Hebrew Scripture to the Book of Revelation.
We can trust in God, who brought His divine love into the world in human form in a baby born in a manger in a humble stable in Bethlehem in a poor and unremarkable part of God’s creation.
So let us wait, let us watch and let us prepare, during this season of Advent. Come, Lord Jesus, Come.
Sunday 20 November 2011
Finding our Mission in the 21st Century
Prodigal God Series #6, Reign of Christ Sunday
If you watch television news, read a newspaper, listen to radio, or scan the internet, you’ll find signs of a world in chaos. While science and technology have brought great wealth to a few, many of have been left out of the prosperity of the 21st century.
Today we celebrate Reign of Christ Sunday. As followers of Christ we have not only that he came to the world as God’s incarnate son, that he died for us, and the he rose again on the third day, and lives forever, proclaiming the Gospel to the world.
The Gospel of Christ is the gospel of the Prodigal God, a God who is extravagantly generous to us, whether we deserve it or not. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God offers us the Feast of the Father, a feast that all are invited to, regardless of nation, race or background.
As Matthew’s gospel tells us, when the son of man comes in glory, those who inherit the kingdom, the sheep… will be those who gave food to the hungry, welcome to the stranger, clothing to unclothed, care to the sick, and made the effort to visit those in prison.
In doing this “to the least of these” we do it to Jesus, the Christ.
But the goats, who are condemned to separation from God, are those who refused to feed, care for, welcome or visit “the least of these.”
This is tough stuff.
It means as Christians we are called to a faith that is far more than just following the law, doing what is right morally speaking, and professing our faith by attending worship.
It means we are called to mission and ministry, to follow the teaching of Christ
.
That’s where today’s celebration of the Reign of Christ links up with the Prodigal God series.
The purpose of looking in depth at this parable, and other related scripture passages is so we see see the link between our future as the church of Christ in this Diocese, and an outward focus on mission.
It’s one of the hardest things to come to grips with. Yet the teaching is there in scripture and it has been true throughout the history of the church.
The church is at its most faithful when it reaches out to the community. Historically Anglicans have played a major role in education, health, social welfare, and the life of the community.
However during the past half century that role has eroded as society has changed. As I’ve said before, it isn’t our fault, but the whole mission field has changed fundamentally. There are more churches than ever in Sarnia, and most of the traditional churches are shrinking while the more fundamentalist churches, with contemporary music and very little if any liturgy, are doing best with the minority of younger people who are active Christians.
That doesn’t mean Anglicans, or others who follow a more traditional pattern of liturgy, and a less literal approach to scripture, are going to disappear from the scene.
The reason we’ve followed this Diocesan wide study is to get us thinking beyond survival, and what our mission as Anglicans in southwestern Ontario is during the next decade.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the one who never ceases to seek our salvation, and draw us to himself.
Jesus does this not so that we escape the world, but so that we are sent out as his disciples, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to share the good news, to feed, clothe and befriend those in need.
That is the essence of the reign of Christ, living out Christ’s teaching, celebrating our fellowship by sharing his body and blood, reconciling ourselves to one another in all our weakness, and sin.
If we look at the elder brother in the parable, we can see that if he had responded to his younger brother’s return by rejoicing, rather than groaning, cheering rather than jeering, that he would be following Jesus, the true elder brother who calls us to join the feast of the father.
A personal faith or relationship with God isn’t enough. It is by joining in the Feast of the Father, joining in community, caring for others, that we find our purpose in life.
It is in community that we can carry out our mission as followers of Christ. If we look back at our 85 years of parish history, we began as a mission to the children of north Sarnia, who needed a Sunday school.
That mission turned into a parish church, which became a hub of the community right into the 50’s and 60’s.
How do we meet the challenge of doing mission in a very different context?
That is something we have to address as individuals, as parishes, as deaneries, as Dioceses and as a national Anglican Church, part of a worldwide communion.
It isn’t a time for blame—-looking for who is responsible, or what did we do wrong.
It is a time when we need to pray for the wisdom and courage to discern what we might do as followers of Christ to carry on this mission—preach the good news, to care for each other, to care for those in need, to seek peace and justice.
We aren’t hear just to survive, as the older brother did in the parable of the prodigal son. We are here to join in the feast of the Father.
The next few months will be a time of discernment for us as a parish. We will look at new models of ministry, including shared priestly ministry, or collaboration with other parishes in Sarnia.
No solutions will be imposed on the parish, however the financial realities of parish life in the 21st century, with diminished offerings from fewer people, and the cost of maintaining buildings and staff mean the decisions have to be made to live within our means.
This is not an easy process. I’ve been through it before both as a lay person, and as a priest.
So let us conclude with a prayer for the parish from the prayer book.
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who dost
govern all things in heaven and earth:
Mercifully hear our prayers, and grant to this
Parish all things needful for its spiritual welfare
Strengthen and confirm the faithful;
protect and guide the children; visit and relieve
the sick; turn and soften the wicked; arouse the
careless; recover the fallen; restore the penitent.
Remove all hindrances to the advancement of
thy truth; and bring us all to be of one heart and
mind within the fold of thy holy Church, to the
honour and glory of thy blessed Name; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
If you watch television news, read a newspaper, listen to radio, or scan the internet, you’ll find signs of a world in chaos. While science and technology have brought great wealth to a few, many of have been left out of the prosperity of the 21st century.
Today we celebrate Reign of Christ Sunday. As followers of Christ we have not only that he came to the world as God’s incarnate son, that he died for us, and the he rose again on the third day, and lives forever, proclaiming the Gospel to the world.
The Gospel of Christ is the gospel of the Prodigal God, a God who is extravagantly generous to us, whether we deserve it or not. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, God offers us the Feast of the Father, a feast that all are invited to, regardless of nation, race or background.
As Matthew’s gospel tells us, when the son of man comes in glory, those who inherit the kingdom, the sheep… will be those who gave food to the hungry, welcome to the stranger, clothing to unclothed, care to the sick, and made the effort to visit those in prison.
In doing this “to the least of these” we do it to Jesus, the Christ.
But the goats, who are condemned to separation from God, are those who refused to feed, care for, welcome or visit “the least of these.”
This is tough stuff.
It means as Christians we are called to a faith that is far more than just following the law, doing what is right morally speaking, and professing our faith by attending worship.
It means we are called to mission and ministry, to follow the teaching of Christ
.
That’s where today’s celebration of the Reign of Christ links up with the Prodigal God series.
The purpose of looking in depth at this parable, and other related scripture passages is so we see see the link between our future as the church of Christ in this Diocese, and an outward focus on mission.
It’s one of the hardest things to come to grips with. Yet the teaching is there in scripture and it has been true throughout the history of the church.
The church is at its most faithful when it reaches out to the community. Historically Anglicans have played a major role in education, health, social welfare, and the life of the community.
However during the past half century that role has eroded as society has changed. As I’ve said before, it isn’t our fault, but the whole mission field has changed fundamentally. There are more churches than ever in Sarnia, and most of the traditional churches are shrinking while the more fundamentalist churches, with contemporary music and very little if any liturgy, are doing best with the minority of younger people who are active Christians.
That doesn’t mean Anglicans, or others who follow a more traditional pattern of liturgy, and a less literal approach to scripture, are going to disappear from the scene.
The reason we’ve followed this Diocesan wide study is to get us thinking beyond survival, and what our mission as Anglicans in southwestern Ontario is during the next decade.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the one who never ceases to seek our salvation, and draw us to himself.
Jesus does this not so that we escape the world, but so that we are sent out as his disciples, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to share the good news, to feed, clothe and befriend those in need.
That is the essence of the reign of Christ, living out Christ’s teaching, celebrating our fellowship by sharing his body and blood, reconciling ourselves to one another in all our weakness, and sin.
If we look at the elder brother in the parable, we can see that if he had responded to his younger brother’s return by rejoicing, rather than groaning, cheering rather than jeering, that he would be following Jesus, the true elder brother who calls us to join the feast of the father.
A personal faith or relationship with God isn’t enough. It is by joining in the Feast of the Father, joining in community, caring for others, that we find our purpose in life.
It is in community that we can carry out our mission as followers of Christ. If we look back at our 85 years of parish history, we began as a mission to the children of north Sarnia, who needed a Sunday school.
That mission turned into a parish church, which became a hub of the community right into the 50’s and 60’s.
How do we meet the challenge of doing mission in a very different context?
That is something we have to address as individuals, as parishes, as deaneries, as Dioceses and as a national Anglican Church, part of a worldwide communion.
It isn’t a time for blame—-looking for who is responsible, or what did we do wrong.
It is a time when we need to pray for the wisdom and courage to discern what we might do as followers of Christ to carry on this mission—preach the good news, to care for each other, to care for those in need, to seek peace and justice.
We aren’t hear just to survive, as the older brother did in the parable of the prodigal son. We are here to join in the feast of the Father.
The next few months will be a time of discernment for us as a parish. We will look at new models of ministry, including shared priestly ministry, or collaboration with other parishes in Sarnia.
No solutions will be imposed on the parish, however the financial realities of parish life in the 21st century, with diminished offerings from fewer people, and the cost of maintaining buildings and staff mean the decisions have to be made to live within our means.
This is not an easy process. I’ve been through it before both as a lay person, and as a priest.
So let us conclude with a prayer for the parish from the prayer book.
ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who dost
govern all things in heaven and earth:
Mercifully hear our prayers, and grant to this
Parish all things needful for its spiritual welfare
Strengthen and confirm the faithful;
protect and guide the children; visit and relieve
the sick; turn and soften the wicked; arouse the
careless; recover the fallen; restore the penitent.
Remove all hindrances to the advancement of
thy truth; and bring us all to be of one heart and
mind within the fold of thy holy Church, to the
honour and glory of thy blessed Name; through
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Monday 14 November 2011
The True Elder Brother
Preached at St. John the Baptist, Walpole Island, Ontario, and St. Stephen's, Courtright, Ontario on November 13 as part of a pulpit exchange with Rev'd Paul Woolley
Like you, in Sarnia at Canon Davis, we’ve been following this alternative lectionary, which began with the Parable of the Prodigal Son and has continued to explore related themes.
The purpose of the Purpose of the Prodigal God study is to shift the focus of our Diocese and its parishes to a more outward looking mission and ministry.
Now you may wonder what that has to do with the parable of the prodigal son. The reason the parable was chosen is that neither the younger brother or the older brother has followed the right path, but both have been cared for, forgiven and treated with generosity and respect by the father in the parable---who we identify with God in this many layered parable.
In the parable the elder brother refuses to go into the feast to welcome his younger brother back. He refuses even though his father comes out to ask him to come in.
Many of us can probably sympathize with the older brother. We’ve done the best we can. We’ve followed the rules. We’ve honoured our family obligations.
Yet we see younger brothers welcomed back after making a mess of things, whether they deserve it or not—at least in our view.
That is exactly what our Gospel reading today is about. Jesus is not telling us that we have to hate our families. He’s teaching us that we have to first love God, our creator and redeemer, and then love for our fellow human beings will follow.
To be followers of Christ we have to do more than the elder brother did. We have to forgive others, as we have been forgiven, but we also have to go the extra mile.
For the elder brother that would have meant not being content with having the younger brother go and squander the family inheritance, but actually taking the initiative, like the shepherd with the lost sheep, and going out to find his brother and bring him home.
This outward focus is what built our churches. We set up Christian communities, built buildings and developed mission which included word, sacrament, education for people of all ages, and outreach—care for those less fortunate.
The problem is that in many congregations we are just trying to survive, keep the doors open, serve our own members, and our focus, as a result, has turned inward. We have lost that mission impulse which brought about our existence.
It isn’t too late to change. We still have many dedicated parishioners. We have the richness of our Anglican tradition, our worship, our music.
And above all we have our true elder brother, Jesus, who
gave his life for us.
This Remembrance day weekend we are
conscious of the sacrifices made for all of us by a whole generation
during the second world war, and of the sacrifices made during
wars before that, and since.
That willingness to sacrifice, at great cost, even the cost of
life itself, is what Jesus shows us by example.
We all won’t be called to sacrifice our lives. But we are
called to be followers of Christ as a cost---the cost being putting
others ahead of ourselves, doing what is right, rather than
worshipping the God of money.
Jesus teaches us that everything he has to give is ours—
blessing, foregiveness, love, community, peace, joy and ultimately
salvation.
To follow Jesus, however, means being willing to look
outward; to meet the needs of those who are marginalized as Jesus
did.
It is in serving others that we serve God. Our ongoing task
as followers of Christ is figuring out how to do that, as individuals
and as communities of faith.
There are no easy answers. Where we are is not an easy
place to be in. We need to remember that our Christian faith is not
a destination, but a journey. And we don’t know where it will take
us in the coming years.
But we can’t do it alone. We are part of the larger body of
Christ and we believe in a loving God, who cares for us so much
he sent his son to come among us in human form, and blesses us
with the enlivening breath of the Holy Spirit.
Like you, in Sarnia at Canon Davis, we’ve been following this alternative lectionary, which began with the Parable of the Prodigal Son and has continued to explore related themes.
The purpose of the Purpose of the Prodigal God study is to shift the focus of our Diocese and its parishes to a more outward looking mission and ministry.
Now you may wonder what that has to do with the parable of the prodigal son. The reason the parable was chosen is that neither the younger brother or the older brother has followed the right path, but both have been cared for, forgiven and treated with generosity and respect by the father in the parable---who we identify with God in this many layered parable.
In the parable the elder brother refuses to go into the feast to welcome his younger brother back. He refuses even though his father comes out to ask him to come in.
Many of us can probably sympathize with the older brother. We’ve done the best we can. We’ve followed the rules. We’ve honoured our family obligations.
Yet we see younger brothers welcomed back after making a mess of things, whether they deserve it or not—at least in our view.
That is exactly what our Gospel reading today is about. Jesus is not telling us that we have to hate our families. He’s teaching us that we have to first love God, our creator and redeemer, and then love for our fellow human beings will follow.
To be followers of Christ we have to do more than the elder brother did. We have to forgive others, as we have been forgiven, but we also have to go the extra mile.
For the elder brother that would have meant not being content with having the younger brother go and squander the family inheritance, but actually taking the initiative, like the shepherd with the lost sheep, and going out to find his brother and bring him home.
This outward focus is what built our churches. We set up Christian communities, built buildings and developed mission which included word, sacrament, education for people of all ages, and outreach—care for those less fortunate.
The problem is that in many congregations we are just trying to survive, keep the doors open, serve our own members, and our focus, as a result, has turned inward. We have lost that mission impulse which brought about our existence.
It isn’t too late to change. We still have many dedicated parishioners. We have the richness of our Anglican tradition, our worship, our music.
And above all we have our true elder brother, Jesus, who
gave his life for us.
This Remembrance day weekend we are
conscious of the sacrifices made for all of us by a whole generation
during the second world war, and of the sacrifices made during
wars before that, and since.
That willingness to sacrifice, at great cost, even the cost of
life itself, is what Jesus shows us by example.
We all won’t be called to sacrifice our lives. But we are
called to be followers of Christ as a cost---the cost being putting
others ahead of ourselves, doing what is right, rather than
worshipping the God of money.
Jesus teaches us that everything he has to give is ours—
blessing, foregiveness, love, community, peace, joy and ultimately
salvation.
To follow Jesus, however, means being willing to look
outward; to meet the needs of those who are marginalized as Jesus
did.
It is in serving others that we serve God. Our ongoing task
as followers of Christ is figuring out how to do that, as individuals
and as communities of faith.
There are no easy answers. Where we are is not an easy
place to be in. We need to remember that our Christian faith is not
a destination, but a journey. And we don’t know where it will take
us in the coming years.
But we can’t do it alone. We are part of the larger body of
Christ and we believe in a loving God, who cares for us so much
he sent his son to come among us in human form, and blesses us
with the enlivening breath of the Holy Spirit.
Monday 7 November 2011
What about the elder brother?
Homily Remembrance Sunday Prodigal God Series #4
When I was first thinking about The Prodigal God series of sermons, all revolving around the parable of the Prodigal Son and related readings, I wondered how it would work with special Sundays, like last Sunday, All Saints, and this Sunday, Remembrance Sunday.
I needn’t have worried because the challenges raised by the parable are so universal, that they address many aspects of our lives as Christians.
Take our Remembrance Sunday this morning. As I talked to John Summerfield this week, he recalled an incident difficult for him to even speak about until only a few years ago.
A comrade, who he bunked with, and worked on bomber crew with got hit with shrapnel during a bombing run, and died in John’s arms as he tried to revive him.
John went on to many more successful bombing runs. However it is that loss of a comrade that haunts him, and brings tears to his eyes still.
War is unspeakably horrible, because of the loss of life, the loss of comrades.
War is above all, if it is a just war like World War 2, a sacrifice for one’s fellow countrymen, for freedom.
War is about sacrifice; the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others.
Sacrifice is the link with both today’s Gospel passage from Luke about the rich ruler and his encounter with Jesus about what is required of him for salvation, and the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Luke’s account is challenging for us, even today. The ruler asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him if he has followed the Hebrew law, the Torah. He answers he has done that since he was a boy.
Then Jesus asks him to sell all that he owns and give it to the poor, then come and follow Jesus.
Needless to say the ruler was sad, since he was certainly not prepared to give up his possessions, as the disciples had when they left everything behind to follow Jesus.
This passage, if interpreted literally would certainly cause difficulties for all of us who are living well in an affluent society.
Jesus goes on to say it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
We have to remember Jesus was using hyperbole, or exaggeration to make his point. That method of teaching was certainly part of his Jewish heritage.
What he really wanted to underline is that our wealth can not be allowed to become God, replacing God our Father, our creator, as the God we worship.
As we look around our world today we see the fruits of making wealth a God. Many people have never had it so good, accumulating unimagined wealth, and living extravagantly while countless others are starving and homeless.
If we follow Christ we have to not only see this as wrong, but see the link between the two.
The greedy CEO’s and investment bankers who created the mess which led to the economic crisis of 2008 that still lingers today are worshipping the God of wealth. Anything goes, including profits made purely on speculation, not creating goods and services people use.
What we need is the same spirit of sacrifice that we saw in the two world wars. The spirit of sacrifice, although we paid a price in terms of loss of life, led to the peace and prosperity that followed World War 2.
What would a spirit of sacrifice look like in 2011. For a start, maybe all the CEOs could reduce their compensation packages to less than a million dollars. We could change the taxation system so the burden could fall on those who can afford to pay, rather than the stretched and shrinking middle class.
We could ask for sacrifice for the good of many. But that would run counter to the current prevailing attitude that says greed is good, and if one can accumulate extravagant wealth at the expense of other’s that is just survival of the fittest, free enterprise.
In Dicken’s Christmas Carol, Scrooge is asked to give to the poor and asks the unfortunate canvassers: “are there not prisons, are there not workhouses?” Perhaps what is needed is to “decrease the surplus population” by allowing the poor to starve.
In a sense Scrooge is just like the Ruler who confronts Jesus. He may have followed all the rules of society. But when asked to sacrifice for others, he has no heart for it. He wants to hoard his riches, and not share it with his employee, Bob Cratchett and his crippled son, Tiny Tim.
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father generously receives the younger son back after the younger son his literally squandered his part of the family inheritance, which he had the audacity to ask for before his father’s death.
That younger son broke all the rules, disappointed his father, and wasted his opportunity.
We don’t aften spend too much time looking at the lder brother in the parable. He’s only there at the end, bitter over his brother’s return, and jealous that the father killed the fatted calf and held a party to celebrate.
The elder brother, like the ruler who asked Jesus about salvation, didn’t do anything wrong.
He followed all the rules. He worked hard for his father. But he hadn’t learned from his father to have a spirit of generosity, of love, of sacrifice, of putting relationship above wealth.
Instead he was focused on himself, and what he deserved for his hard work.
What did the elder brother show in his reaction to his brother’s return:
*deep anger over what he perceived was unfair treatment.
*a sense of persecution—he had slaved for his father all these years, but a fatted calf had never been slain for him.
*no love or care about his younger brother. No rejoicing that he had come to himself.
*a sense of entitlement. Since I have been faithful to my father all these years, don’t I deserve better than for him to celebrate my younger brother’s return. What about me?
*a lack of foregiveness, and a judgmental attitude.
As we look at the elder brother for the purposes of this series, we have to consider that there are aspects of the elder brother, and the younger brother in all of us, and we need to be conscious of this as we move forward in our lives as followers of Christ.
Both brothers fell short. But at least the younger brother recognized his spiritual failings.
Perhaps the danger of the older brother’s attitude is that it allows for a kind of moralistic spirituality which treats faith as primarily a matter of following the law, and doing what is expected.
However obedience to the law is only part of the path to salvation.
The other part is loving God, and loving our neighbour, and developing the spirit of sacrifice which can lead to peace, joy, love and community.
Being self-righteous, like the elder brother, leads to a spiritual malaise.
Instead we are called to humility, to forgiveness, to always looking for the grace of God,rather than seeking salvation through our own merit.
When I was first thinking about The Prodigal God series of sermons, all revolving around the parable of the Prodigal Son and related readings, I wondered how it would work with special Sundays, like last Sunday, All Saints, and this Sunday, Remembrance Sunday.
I needn’t have worried because the challenges raised by the parable are so universal, that they address many aspects of our lives as Christians.
Take our Remembrance Sunday this morning. As I talked to John Summerfield this week, he recalled an incident difficult for him to even speak about until only a few years ago.
A comrade, who he bunked with, and worked on bomber crew with got hit with shrapnel during a bombing run, and died in John’s arms as he tried to revive him.
John went on to many more successful bombing runs. However it is that loss of a comrade that haunts him, and brings tears to his eyes still.
War is unspeakably horrible, because of the loss of life, the loss of comrades.
War is above all, if it is a just war like World War 2, a sacrifice for one’s fellow countrymen, for freedom.
War is about sacrifice; the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others.
Sacrifice is the link with both today’s Gospel passage from Luke about the rich ruler and his encounter with Jesus about what is required of him for salvation, and the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Luke’s account is challenging for us, even today. The ruler asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him if he has followed the Hebrew law, the Torah. He answers he has done that since he was a boy.
Then Jesus asks him to sell all that he owns and give it to the poor, then come and follow Jesus.
Needless to say the ruler was sad, since he was certainly not prepared to give up his possessions, as the disciples had when they left everything behind to follow Jesus.
This passage, if interpreted literally would certainly cause difficulties for all of us who are living well in an affluent society.
Jesus goes on to say it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
We have to remember Jesus was using hyperbole, or exaggeration to make his point. That method of teaching was certainly part of his Jewish heritage.
What he really wanted to underline is that our wealth can not be allowed to become God, replacing God our Father, our creator, as the God we worship.
As we look around our world today we see the fruits of making wealth a God. Many people have never had it so good, accumulating unimagined wealth, and living extravagantly while countless others are starving and homeless.
If we follow Christ we have to not only see this as wrong, but see the link between the two.
The greedy CEO’s and investment bankers who created the mess which led to the economic crisis of 2008 that still lingers today are worshipping the God of wealth. Anything goes, including profits made purely on speculation, not creating goods and services people use.
What we need is the same spirit of sacrifice that we saw in the two world wars. The spirit of sacrifice, although we paid a price in terms of loss of life, led to the peace and prosperity that followed World War 2.
What would a spirit of sacrifice look like in 2011. For a start, maybe all the CEOs could reduce their compensation packages to less than a million dollars. We could change the taxation system so the burden could fall on those who can afford to pay, rather than the stretched and shrinking middle class.
We could ask for sacrifice for the good of many. But that would run counter to the current prevailing attitude that says greed is good, and if one can accumulate extravagant wealth at the expense of other’s that is just survival of the fittest, free enterprise.
In Dicken’s Christmas Carol, Scrooge is asked to give to the poor and asks the unfortunate canvassers: “are there not prisons, are there not workhouses?” Perhaps what is needed is to “decrease the surplus population” by allowing the poor to starve.
In a sense Scrooge is just like the Ruler who confronts Jesus. He may have followed all the rules of society. But when asked to sacrifice for others, he has no heart for it. He wants to hoard his riches, and not share it with his employee, Bob Cratchett and his crippled son, Tiny Tim.
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father generously receives the younger son back after the younger son his literally squandered his part of the family inheritance, which he had the audacity to ask for before his father’s death.
That younger son broke all the rules, disappointed his father, and wasted his opportunity.
We don’t aften spend too much time looking at the lder brother in the parable. He’s only there at the end, bitter over his brother’s return, and jealous that the father killed the fatted calf and held a party to celebrate.
The elder brother, like the ruler who asked Jesus about salvation, didn’t do anything wrong.
He followed all the rules. He worked hard for his father. But he hadn’t learned from his father to have a spirit of generosity, of love, of sacrifice, of putting relationship above wealth.
Instead he was focused on himself, and what he deserved for his hard work.
What did the elder brother show in his reaction to his brother’s return:
*deep anger over what he perceived was unfair treatment.
*a sense of persecution—he had slaved for his father all these years, but a fatted calf had never been slain for him.
*no love or care about his younger brother. No rejoicing that he had come to himself.
*a sense of entitlement. Since I have been faithful to my father all these years, don’t I deserve better than for him to celebrate my younger brother’s return. What about me?
*a lack of foregiveness, and a judgmental attitude.
As we look at the elder brother for the purposes of this series, we have to consider that there are aspects of the elder brother, and the younger brother in all of us, and we need to be conscious of this as we move forward in our lives as followers of Christ.
Both brothers fell short. But at least the younger brother recognized his spiritual failings.
Perhaps the danger of the older brother’s attitude is that it allows for a kind of moralistic spirituality which treats faith as primarily a matter of following the law, and doing what is expected.
However obedience to the law is only part of the path to salvation.
The other part is loving God, and loving our neighbour, and developing the spirit of sacrifice which can lead to peace, joy, love and community.
Being self-righteous, like the elder brother, leads to a spiritual malaise.
Instead we are called to humility, to forgiveness, to always looking for the grace of God,rather than seeking salvation through our own merit.
Sunday 30 October 2011
Of Saints and Discipleship
All Saints, Oct. 30 2011, Prodigal God Series Part 3,
Mark 10:35-45
What’s a saint? A dictionary definition would be a person who is officially recognized by the church through a process called canonization, as pre-eminent in holiness.
But there is a larger group of saints referred to in Paul’s letters. That group includes faithful Christians, followers of the way of Christ throughout the ages, and that is who we are called to remember today.
Even those officially recognized as saints by the church are flesh and blood human beings. They have special gifts from God, which have enabled them to perform remarkable service to their fellow human beings in God’s name.
But they are also prone to human failings, just like you and I. In 1982 I met Mother Teresa when she visited a small town in northern Alberta. I was one of a few journalists on the scene and we had a chance to ask a few questions and meet this Nobel prize winning nun who is now going through the process to become a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
I was impressed by her down to earth manner, her serenity, her smile.
Recently years after her death a translation of her writings found that for years while she was helping people, she was experiencing inner desolation, a feeling of separation from God. But she persevered.
In today’s Gospel reading two of Jesus disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, ask Jesus to do whatever they ask of him. What they want is to sit at his right hand and at his left in the kingdom, in paradise.
Think back to the parable of the Prodigal Son—that’s what the younger son was asking of his father---to do the unthinkable, that is to sell the land that is his estate ahead of time, so he can give it to the younger son.
Both requests are completely unreasonable and selfish.
Jesus responds, as he often does with a question to James and John. Are you able to drink the cup I drink, and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?
By this he means being willing to be baptized with death on the cross. This passage follows one of Jesus predictions of his death in Mark’s gospel.
The two disciples don’t understand. They say they are able. Jesus responds they will be asked to sacrifice their lives, in his name, but not yet. And places at his left and right hand, are not his to give.
The request of James and John causes disunity among the twelve disciples. They are angry at the two for requesting special privileges.
But Jesus uses this opportunity to teach about the nature of discipleship. What he calls for is servant leadership, not the kind of authoritarian, tyranny they are accustomed to in first century Israel. “Whoever is great among you must first be your servant.”
This ties in to the lives of many of the saints who have been recognized by the church. Mother Teresa served the poor of Calcutta with her sisters. Saint Francis of Assisi rejected the wealth of his family, and began the Franciscan order which has served those in need for centuries.
Jesus himself defied the conventional expectations of the “Son of Man,” the term for Messiah, not only because he came to serve others, but because he came to give his life as a ransom for many.
Let’s go back to the two disciples James and John. Like the two sons in the Prodigal Son, they have lost their way. They don’t really understand what God’s grace means. They don’t understand what loving God means.
James and John want to be at Jesus’ side in glory, but they don’t understand either the cost of that request, or what it would mean for them, or for the other disciples.
In Mark’s gospel in particular, the disciples are often depicted as slow to catch on to Jesus’ teaching, and this is just one of many examples.
It must have been difficult for these ordinary, uneducated men to grasp the teaching of a leader who literally turned the teaching of the world, and even the Hebrew faith upside down.
Yet in the three years the disciples were with Jesus, they were given the strength to go through hardship and persecution after his death, and lay the foundations for the building of the Church.
And after three centuries of the early church as an underground movement, came the radical transformation which saw Roman temples transformed into Christian Churches, such as the Pantheon in Rome.
Those disciples learned servant leadership. The saints through the ages learned servant leadership.
And servant leadership is the key to renewal of the church today. We need to find ways to recapture that spirit of serving others. Our parish starting with the goal of offering a Sunday school mission to the children of north Sarnia.
So we began as a mission, as an outreach. In those early days, the church was a centre of community life. There were plays, a football team which won the city championship, and records showed as many as 600 people attended services many Sundays.
Of course that was a different time. Sarnia was different. Life was different. In our current life as a parish we need to discern our mission, how we can serve God, and serve our community. Let us pray.
GOD the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the
faithful: Sanctify this parish by thine abiding
presence. Bless those who minister in holy things.
Enlighten the minds of thy people more and more
with the light of the everlasting Gospel. Bring
erring souls to the knowledge of God our Saviour;
and those who are walking in the way of life,
keep stedfast unto the end. Give patience to the
sick and afflicted, and renew them in body
and soul. Guard from forgetfulness of thee those
who are strong and prosperous. Increase in us
thy manifold gifts of grace, and make us all to be
fruitful in good works; O blessed Spirit, whom
with the Father and the Son together we worship
and glorify, one God, world without end. Amen
Mark 10:35-45
What’s a saint? A dictionary definition would be a person who is officially recognized by the church through a process called canonization, as pre-eminent in holiness.
But there is a larger group of saints referred to in Paul’s letters. That group includes faithful Christians, followers of the way of Christ throughout the ages, and that is who we are called to remember today.
Even those officially recognized as saints by the church are flesh and blood human beings. They have special gifts from God, which have enabled them to perform remarkable service to their fellow human beings in God’s name.
But they are also prone to human failings, just like you and I. In 1982 I met Mother Teresa when she visited a small town in northern Alberta. I was one of a few journalists on the scene and we had a chance to ask a few questions and meet this Nobel prize winning nun who is now going through the process to become a Saint in the Roman Catholic Church.
I was impressed by her down to earth manner, her serenity, her smile.
Recently years after her death a translation of her writings found that for years while she was helping people, she was experiencing inner desolation, a feeling of separation from God. But she persevered.
In today’s Gospel reading two of Jesus disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, ask Jesus to do whatever they ask of him. What they want is to sit at his right hand and at his left in the kingdom, in paradise.
Think back to the parable of the Prodigal Son—that’s what the younger son was asking of his father---to do the unthinkable, that is to sell the land that is his estate ahead of time, so he can give it to the younger son.
Both requests are completely unreasonable and selfish.
Jesus responds, as he often does with a question to James and John. Are you able to drink the cup I drink, and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?
By this he means being willing to be baptized with death on the cross. This passage follows one of Jesus predictions of his death in Mark’s gospel.
The two disciples don’t understand. They say they are able. Jesus responds they will be asked to sacrifice their lives, in his name, but not yet. And places at his left and right hand, are not his to give.
The request of James and John causes disunity among the twelve disciples. They are angry at the two for requesting special privileges.
But Jesus uses this opportunity to teach about the nature of discipleship. What he calls for is servant leadership, not the kind of authoritarian, tyranny they are accustomed to in first century Israel. “Whoever is great among you must first be your servant.”
This ties in to the lives of many of the saints who have been recognized by the church. Mother Teresa served the poor of Calcutta with her sisters. Saint Francis of Assisi rejected the wealth of his family, and began the Franciscan order which has served those in need for centuries.
Jesus himself defied the conventional expectations of the “Son of Man,” the term for Messiah, not only because he came to serve others, but because he came to give his life as a ransom for many.
Let’s go back to the two disciples James and John. Like the two sons in the Prodigal Son, they have lost their way. They don’t really understand what God’s grace means. They don’t understand what loving God means.
James and John want to be at Jesus’ side in glory, but they don’t understand either the cost of that request, or what it would mean for them, or for the other disciples.
In Mark’s gospel in particular, the disciples are often depicted as slow to catch on to Jesus’ teaching, and this is just one of many examples.
It must have been difficult for these ordinary, uneducated men to grasp the teaching of a leader who literally turned the teaching of the world, and even the Hebrew faith upside down.
Yet in the three years the disciples were with Jesus, they were given the strength to go through hardship and persecution after his death, and lay the foundations for the building of the Church.
And after three centuries of the early church as an underground movement, came the radical transformation which saw Roman temples transformed into Christian Churches, such as the Pantheon in Rome.
Those disciples learned servant leadership. The saints through the ages learned servant leadership.
And servant leadership is the key to renewal of the church today. We need to find ways to recapture that spirit of serving others. Our parish starting with the goal of offering a Sunday school mission to the children of north Sarnia.
So we began as a mission, as an outreach. In those early days, the church was a centre of community life. There were plays, a football team which won the city championship, and records showed as many as 600 people attended services many Sundays.
Of course that was a different time. Sarnia was different. Life was different. In our current life as a parish we need to discern our mission, how we can serve God, and serve our community. Let us pray.
GOD the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the
faithful: Sanctify this parish by thine abiding
presence. Bless those who minister in holy things.
Enlighten the minds of thy people more and more
with the light of the everlasting Gospel. Bring
erring souls to the knowledge of God our Saviour;
and those who are walking in the way of life,
keep stedfast unto the end. Give patience to the
sick and afflicted, and renew them in body
and soul. Guard from forgetfulness of thee those
who are strong and prosperous. Increase in us
thy manifold gifts of grace, and make us all to be
fruitful in good works; O blessed Spirit, whom
with the Father and the Son together we worship
and glorify, one God, world without end. Amen
Thursday 27 October 2011
The Scandal of the Teaching of Jesus
Homily Sunday October 23 Prodigal God Alternative Lectionary part 2
One of the challenging threads of the Gospels is echoed in today’s reading from Luke. Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, seems to attract the wrong kind of people.
Instead of devout religious folks, observant Jews, Pharisees, and leaders in the society, his followers, as Luke puts it, are “tax collectors” and “sinners.” These weren’t respectable people in a society built on honour and shame.
Jesus appealed to moral outcasts, and that very fact scandalized the Pharisees.
And perhaps even more difficult for the good Jewish people Jesus was scandalizing, was that he told parables like the two short ones offered today, which are both situated before the parable of the Prodigal Son.
First we have the shepherd who will not leave the wilderness with his 99 sheep until the one lost sheep is found. Then he will leave and have a celebration. So Jesus says there will be more rejoicing over one repentant sinner, than over 99 who have no need of repentance.
Then this is reinforced by the story of the woman who won’t cease the search for her lost drachma, then rejoices when it is found, leaving Jesus to conclude there is “more rejoicing among the angels of God over one repentant sinner.”
This teaching of God’s grace is hard for us to understand.
The Pharisees and other religious leaders complained Jesus not only attracted tax collectors and sinners, he ate with them. Table fellowship was highly valued in the first century culture, and Jesus was showing acceptance and respect for those who were rejected and outcast.
Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with our “Prodigal God” theme which began last week with Bishop Terry preaching on the parable of the Prodigal Son.
What Jesus is trying to do is challenge the assumptions of the religious leaders, and all his listeners about God’s grace, sin, and salvation.
In both short parables, the lost sheep, and the lost coin, are both incapable of being found, except through God’s grace. They represent people who are spiritually lost, like the prodigal son. The sheep is lost through helplessness, the coin through thoughtlessness, and the son through wilfulness.
Sin is difficult for us to deal with. We all sin to varying degrees, part of our human nature. But in Jesus we find forgiveness through repentance and faith.
Salvation also enters into our parables, because if we think we have found God, and are sure in our faith, then one of the pitfalls we face is that we are tempted to look down on others who haven’t found God.
Jesus teaches that salvation doesn’t come to those who search hardest for God, but instead through God’s grace, not through our own merit.
That is a difficult concept for us. The joy is in finding those who are lost, those who are marginalized, those who are excluded.
Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not members.
In the parables the Pharisees don’t see themselves as lost sinners saved by God’s grace. Indeed they feel superior to sinners. But Jesus teaches heaven rejoices when sinners repent.
Now to most people today Christianity represents both religion and moralism. But in the early church, and in Jesus teaching that was certainly not the case.
After all in the early church in the first three centuries there were almost no church buildings, no full-time clergy, no sacrifices, no Temples or Cathedrals.
Instead early Christianity was “The Way,” a way of sharing table fellowship and the sacraments in the homes of believers or the Catacombs of Rome; A Way of following Jesus who was himself the ultimate sacrifice.
Indeed religious people were offended by Jesus. It was outsiders, the underclass who formed the backbone of the early church. Jesus attracted the irreligious, and offended the believers of Hebrew scripture—the only Bible in his day.
Today the problem particularly in the west is that churches are not appealing to sinners and outcasts, or to younger brothers described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
We are challenged as we undertake this Diocesan study to consider that while we mean well, we are too often like the older brother---we have worked hard, we have kept the faith, we have supported the church, and we like things the way they are.
Don’t we have enough on our plate without looking for new models of mission and ministry?
There are no easy answers. But all over North America and Europe many parishes and churches of all denominations are facing the same issues. It’s ironic that the areas where the church is fastest growing are those where the western churches did mission in the 20th century, in Latin America, Africa and Asia. We have a lot of financial resources, but lack in membership. They have few resources, but are growing quickly.
Let us close with a prayer from a Celtic resource Book.
“Grant us a vision, Lord,
To see what we can achieve
To reach out beyond ourselves
To share our lives with others
To stretch our capabilities
To increase our sense of purpose
To be aware of where we can help
To be sensitive to your presence
To give heed to your constant call,
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Amen”
One of the challenging threads of the Gospels is echoed in today’s reading from Luke. Jesus, our Lord and Saviour, seems to attract the wrong kind of people.
Instead of devout religious folks, observant Jews, Pharisees, and leaders in the society, his followers, as Luke puts it, are “tax collectors” and “sinners.” These weren’t respectable people in a society built on honour and shame.
Jesus appealed to moral outcasts, and that very fact scandalized the Pharisees.
And perhaps even more difficult for the good Jewish people Jesus was scandalizing, was that he told parables like the two short ones offered today, which are both situated before the parable of the Prodigal Son.
First we have the shepherd who will not leave the wilderness with his 99 sheep until the one lost sheep is found. Then he will leave and have a celebration. So Jesus says there will be more rejoicing over one repentant sinner, than over 99 who have no need of repentance.
Then this is reinforced by the story of the woman who won’t cease the search for her lost drachma, then rejoices when it is found, leaving Jesus to conclude there is “more rejoicing among the angels of God over one repentant sinner.”
This teaching of God’s grace is hard for us to understand.
The Pharisees and other religious leaders complained Jesus not only attracted tax collectors and sinners, he ate with them. Table fellowship was highly valued in the first century culture, and Jesus was showing acceptance and respect for those who were rejected and outcast.
Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with our “Prodigal God” theme which began last week with Bishop Terry preaching on the parable of the Prodigal Son.
What Jesus is trying to do is challenge the assumptions of the religious leaders, and all his listeners about God’s grace, sin, and salvation.
In both short parables, the lost sheep, and the lost coin, are both incapable of being found, except through God’s grace. They represent people who are spiritually lost, like the prodigal son. The sheep is lost through helplessness, the coin through thoughtlessness, and the son through wilfulness.
Sin is difficult for us to deal with. We all sin to varying degrees, part of our human nature. But in Jesus we find forgiveness through repentance and faith.
Salvation also enters into our parables, because if we think we have found God, and are sure in our faith, then one of the pitfalls we face is that we are tempted to look down on others who haven’t found God.
Jesus teaches that salvation doesn’t come to those who search hardest for God, but instead through God’s grace, not through our own merit.
That is a difficult concept for us. The joy is in finding those who are lost, those who are marginalized, those who are excluded.
Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple said the church is the only institution that exists for the benefit of those who are not members.
In the parables the Pharisees don’t see themselves as lost sinners saved by God’s grace. Indeed they feel superior to sinners. But Jesus teaches heaven rejoices when sinners repent.
Now to most people today Christianity represents both religion and moralism. But in the early church, and in Jesus teaching that was certainly not the case.
After all in the early church in the first three centuries there were almost no church buildings, no full-time clergy, no sacrifices, no Temples or Cathedrals.
Instead early Christianity was “The Way,” a way of sharing table fellowship and the sacraments in the homes of believers or the Catacombs of Rome; A Way of following Jesus who was himself the ultimate sacrifice.
Indeed religious people were offended by Jesus. It was outsiders, the underclass who formed the backbone of the early church. Jesus attracted the irreligious, and offended the believers of Hebrew scripture—the only Bible in his day.
Today the problem particularly in the west is that churches are not appealing to sinners and outcasts, or to younger brothers described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
We are challenged as we undertake this Diocesan study to consider that while we mean well, we are too often like the older brother---we have worked hard, we have kept the faith, we have supported the church, and we like things the way they are.
Don’t we have enough on our plate without looking for new models of mission and ministry?
There are no easy answers. But all over North America and Europe many parishes and churches of all denominations are facing the same issues. It’s ironic that the areas where the church is fastest growing are those where the western churches did mission in the 20th century, in Latin America, Africa and Asia. We have a lot of financial resources, but lack in membership. They have few resources, but are growing quickly.
Let us close with a prayer from a Celtic resource Book.
“Grant us a vision, Lord,
To see what we can achieve
To reach out beyond ourselves
To share our lives with others
To stretch our capabilities
To increase our sense of purpose
To be aware of where we can help
To be sensitive to your presence
To give heed to your constant call,
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Amen”
Sunday 9 October 2011
Giving thanks and thinking about truth and justice
Homily Oct 9, Pentecost 17, Yr. A
This Thanksgiving weekend as we gather with our families, we realize that we have a lot to be thankful for. So many things our pioneer ancestors never dreamed of are within reach of most Canadians.
Materially, we are blessed, but the challenge remains to live out our calling as followers of Christ, amidst an increasingly secular, and non-Christian society.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one place to start if you are looking for teaching on the Christian life. The passage we heard this morning is surely one of the most inspirational in Paul’s letters.
“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice,” Paul writes.
So as we live out our faith we are to do so, not in attitude of grumbling or reluctance, but in joy and enthusiasm
.
There is a great need to look on the positive side of life, to see possibilities not obstacles. To see opportunities, not lost causes.
This applies in our lives in the communities we live in, where we work and in the church.
You’ll notice Paul names two of his co-workers Eudoia and Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. That means these two women who have struggled beside Paul, must have either disagreed with other, or perhaps even with Paul. But Paul is urging them to work out their differences---literally in the Greek exercising their minds.
So what Paul is urging is not conformity but learning to solve problems while being faithful to God.
This is a help in our own life together as church. We can’t possibily agree on everything. But as followers of Christ we can learn to work things out and move ahead for the benefit of the whole body Christ, the whole community.
Paul tells us that the peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, will help keep our minds and hearts in Christ Jesus.
So our faith can help bring about that peace and unity Jesus calls us to, provided we trust in God.
The next promise is one I’ve personally found immense comfort in. Paul says whatever is true, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Paul is inviting us to look at the world in a whole different way, a positive life affirming way.
The trouble is if we complain, if we get angry, if we get caught up in blaming others, or always criticizing, or never being satisfied, then it poisons our whole approach to life.
Spiritually, Paul’s advice, offers us a way forward. While acknowledging the evil of the world, the Philippians are being urged to focus on the highest aspirations which humanity has: the search for truth, beauty, justice, excellence, and peace.
In that search we move forward with thanksgiving, rejoicing in the gifts that God has given us, in the things that give meaning to our lives amidst a hurting world.
Paul concludes by urging the Phillippians to keep on doing what they have been doing—to persist in what they have learned as followers of Christ.
God will be with them, and give them peace, as God offers us peace.
The message Paul had for the Philippian Christians is timeless. Indeed it seems even more needed today, as the world struggles with such huge and seemingly insoluble problems.
Instead of being overwhelmed with the difficulty of facing global economic difficulties we can’t do anything about, we need to be thankful for the gifts we have been given, and think about whatever is true, just, pleasing, commendable, praiseworthy.
From Paul, I’d to talk briefly about the Prodigal God, a Diocesan wide study program which begins next week.
We are lucky to have Bishop Dance, who is one of the finest preachers I’ve ever heard, launch a special six week set of readings starting with one of the most popular parables in the Bible, the Prodigal Son.
The study is based on a book called the Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller. As well as the six week lectionary and sermons based on it, there will be a weekly study six weeks on the Prodigal God starting Thursday Nov 3 at 10am in the Canterbury Room. Copies are for sale after church for $9.00.
There will also be a one day condensed study for those who can’t attend a weekly study Saturday Nov. 12 from 9:30 am to 2pm including lunch.
You may ask why a Diocesan wide study. The idea came from the Diocesan strategic planning process, which hopes there will be an opportunity to start looking outward as we consider the mission and ministry of the church.
Its meant to start a conversation, and I hope some of you will be able to join in.
The Prodigal God reference is to the fact that the father in the parable, who is so generous with both his sons, is extravagant in his generosity, as God is to us.
How do we respond to God’s generosity. How do we reach out to the community? How do we regain our outward focus?
These are all questions we will look at through the lens of the parable of the Prodigal Son.
This Thanksgiving weekend as we gather with our families, we realize that we have a lot to be thankful for. So many things our pioneer ancestors never dreamed of are within reach of most Canadians.
Materially, we are blessed, but the challenge remains to live out our calling as followers of Christ, amidst an increasingly secular, and non-Christian society.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians is one place to start if you are looking for teaching on the Christian life. The passage we heard this morning is surely one of the most inspirational in Paul’s letters.
“Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice,” Paul writes.
So as we live out our faith we are to do so, not in attitude of grumbling or reluctance, but in joy and enthusiasm
.
There is a great need to look on the positive side of life, to see possibilities not obstacles. To see opportunities, not lost causes.
This applies in our lives in the communities we live in, where we work and in the church.
You’ll notice Paul names two of his co-workers Eudoia and Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. That means these two women who have struggled beside Paul, must have either disagreed with other, or perhaps even with Paul. But Paul is urging them to work out their differences---literally in the Greek exercising their minds.
So what Paul is urging is not conformity but learning to solve problems while being faithful to God.
This is a help in our own life together as church. We can’t possibily agree on everything. But as followers of Christ we can learn to work things out and move ahead for the benefit of the whole body Christ, the whole community.
Paul tells us that the peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, will help keep our minds and hearts in Christ Jesus.
So our faith can help bring about that peace and unity Jesus calls us to, provided we trust in God.
The next promise is one I’ve personally found immense comfort in. Paul says whatever is true, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
Paul is inviting us to look at the world in a whole different way, a positive life affirming way.
The trouble is if we complain, if we get angry, if we get caught up in blaming others, or always criticizing, or never being satisfied, then it poisons our whole approach to life.
Spiritually, Paul’s advice, offers us a way forward. While acknowledging the evil of the world, the Philippians are being urged to focus on the highest aspirations which humanity has: the search for truth, beauty, justice, excellence, and peace.
In that search we move forward with thanksgiving, rejoicing in the gifts that God has given us, in the things that give meaning to our lives amidst a hurting world.
Paul concludes by urging the Phillippians to keep on doing what they have been doing—to persist in what they have learned as followers of Christ.
God will be with them, and give them peace, as God offers us peace.
The message Paul had for the Philippian Christians is timeless. Indeed it seems even more needed today, as the world struggles with such huge and seemingly insoluble problems.
Instead of being overwhelmed with the difficulty of facing global economic difficulties we can’t do anything about, we need to be thankful for the gifts we have been given, and think about whatever is true, just, pleasing, commendable, praiseworthy.
From Paul, I’d to talk briefly about the Prodigal God, a Diocesan wide study program which begins next week.
We are lucky to have Bishop Dance, who is one of the finest preachers I’ve ever heard, launch a special six week set of readings starting with one of the most popular parables in the Bible, the Prodigal Son.
The study is based on a book called the Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller. As well as the six week lectionary and sermons based on it, there will be a weekly study six weeks on the Prodigal God starting Thursday Nov 3 at 10am in the Canterbury Room. Copies are for sale after church for $9.00.
There will also be a one day condensed study for those who can’t attend a weekly study Saturday Nov. 12 from 9:30 am to 2pm including lunch.
You may ask why a Diocesan wide study. The idea came from the Diocesan strategic planning process, which hopes there will be an opportunity to start looking outward as we consider the mission and ministry of the church.
Its meant to start a conversation, and I hope some of you will be able to join in.
The Prodigal God reference is to the fact that the father in the parable, who is so generous with both his sons, is extravagant in his generosity, as God is to us.
How do we respond to God’s generosity. How do we reach out to the community? How do we regain our outward focus?
These are all questions we will look at through the lens of the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Tuesday 4 October 2011
A Love Affair with Evensong
Evensong Reflection
Having preached this morning on the ten commandments from Exodus, I think this wonderful service of evensong deserves more of a reflection and less teaching and sermonizing.
My thoughts seemed to coalesce around this service of Evensong, and what it has meant to me and countless more Anglicans over almost five centuries since Thomas Cranmer put together the Book of Common Prayer.
I think it is safe to say evensong has resisted any attempt at rewriting as part of the modern liturgical movement. Unlike the communion and morning prayer services, where it is offered, it continues to offer the traditional language of the Book of Common Prayer, with its power, its poetry and its majesty.
I can’t claim to have much acquaintance with evensong as a youth, although I heard about it from my Dad who always went to church twice on Sunday—for morning mass and then evensong. My grandmother sang in the choir at St. Mary Magdalene’s Church, Toronto, with the great Healey Willan.
When I was in the West Indies for the summer as a youth exchange group member in something called the Anglican Overseas work tour I had my first acquaintance with evensong, as it was a regular part of our Sunday worship on the island of Nevis.
Then at Trinity College,Toronto, when I did my undergraduate work, and at parishes in Calgary and Edmonton, I was an occasional attender.
But what really made me appreciate the beauty and power of this service was the chance to hear choirs like this one sing Evensong almost every night in a different cathedral on a trip to England.
Sadly Evensong is no longer a part of regular worship in many churches. Despite its liturgical strength, and the beauty of the music written for the service by countless composers, and the wonderful evening hymns, evensong has been a casualty of modernity in the church—save for choirs like St. Paul’s which keep it alive on occasions like this.
My love affair with evensong was capped while I was in seminary by the opportunity to sing with a talented group of students less than half my age in the Trinity College Chapel Choir. So every Wednesday in term I was able to sing arrangements of the Nunc Dimmitis, Magnificat, and Preces, along with a new anthem. We rehearsed twice a week. So it was demanding.
As an act of praise and worship Evensong can be sublime at its best. We offer our voices, our prayers to God to give thanks for all our blessings.
Let us give thanks for this treasure of our Anglican worship life, and especially to those like the choir of St. Paul’s which help to keep the flame of Evensong alive.
Having preached this morning on the ten commandments from Exodus, I think this wonderful service of evensong deserves more of a reflection and less teaching and sermonizing.
My thoughts seemed to coalesce around this service of Evensong, and what it has meant to me and countless more Anglicans over almost five centuries since Thomas Cranmer put together the Book of Common Prayer.
I think it is safe to say evensong has resisted any attempt at rewriting as part of the modern liturgical movement. Unlike the communion and morning prayer services, where it is offered, it continues to offer the traditional language of the Book of Common Prayer, with its power, its poetry and its majesty.
I can’t claim to have much acquaintance with evensong as a youth, although I heard about it from my Dad who always went to church twice on Sunday—for morning mass and then evensong. My grandmother sang in the choir at St. Mary Magdalene’s Church, Toronto, with the great Healey Willan.
When I was in the West Indies for the summer as a youth exchange group member in something called the Anglican Overseas work tour I had my first acquaintance with evensong, as it was a regular part of our Sunday worship on the island of Nevis.
Then at Trinity College,Toronto, when I did my undergraduate work, and at parishes in Calgary and Edmonton, I was an occasional attender.
But what really made me appreciate the beauty and power of this service was the chance to hear choirs like this one sing Evensong almost every night in a different cathedral on a trip to England.
Sadly Evensong is no longer a part of regular worship in many churches. Despite its liturgical strength, and the beauty of the music written for the service by countless composers, and the wonderful evening hymns, evensong has been a casualty of modernity in the church—save for choirs like St. Paul’s which keep it alive on occasions like this.
My love affair with evensong was capped while I was in seminary by the opportunity to sing with a talented group of students less than half my age in the Trinity College Chapel Choir. So every Wednesday in term I was able to sing arrangements of the Nunc Dimmitis, Magnificat, and Preces, along with a new anthem. We rehearsed twice a week. So it was demanding.
As an act of praise and worship Evensong can be sublime at its best. We offer our voices, our prayers to God to give thanks for all our blessings.
Let us give thanks for this treasure of our Anglican worship life, and especially to those like the choir of St. Paul’s which help to keep the flame of Evensong alive.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Thanks Be To God
Homily Harvest Thanksgiving 2011
“You crown the earth with your goodness, O Lord.” So writes the psalmist.
As we mark both Harvest Thanksgiving and Back to Church Sunday, perhaps the link between welcoming people to our Christian fellowship, and the traditional Harvest Festival is the idea of people coming together to give thanks to God for everything He has provided for us.
Perhaps as we have grown in material well-being as a society, we have lost our sense of thankfulness, our sense of gratitude in the never ending quest for more wealth, and technological advances.
The idea of Back to Church Sunday started in England when Anglicans in Manchester realized they were dwindling in numbers, and had lost their focus on welcoming new members to their parishes.
Now the idea has spread throughout the world, and many denominations.
We need to come together to give thanks, at the Harvest, and indeed every Sunday because it is too easy to accept God’s gifts, without properly giving thanks, and having an attitude of gratitude.
In our Gospel reading the one leper who came back whole had not only been healed of his disfiguring disease, but had understood the importance of giving thanks to Jesus, the agent of his healing.
The other nine may have been physically healed, but their lack of response to Jesus showed that they were still not whole persons.
This story would have had quite an impact on Christians, since most still saw themselves as Jews. The reason: the one who returned to say thanks was a Samaritan. And he alone received Jesus’ blessing.
Samaritans and Jews were bitter enemies. They would have no dealings with each other. Yet Jesus pronounced the Samaritan as the one of the ten healed who was truly whole, and blessed him.
This was no coincidence. Jesus wanted the Jews to understand the salvation of God, the gifts of God are for all people.
The other lepers who were healed followed the Jewish law in going immediately to show themselves to the priest, as Jesus advised them.
But for Jesus, thankfulness is an integral part of real healing, real wholeness.
Lepers were outcasts in first century Galilee. If a leper was on the windward side of a healthy person, he was told stand at least 50 yards away.
Jesus is depicted throughout the Gospels as showing only love for Lepers, not fear or contempt. They were often the focus of his healing ministry.
Unlike some of the healing stories, Jesus does not touch the ten lepers, Luke reports they are healed “as they went.”
Not only is the Samaritan leper thankful, he takes action by turning back, glorifying God, and falling on his face giving thanks.
This humility; this attitude of thankfulness, is something we need more of as Christians today.
Rather than worrying about what’s wrong with our lives, we need to give thanks for our many blessings.
That is a challenge for all of us. We get so caught up in the details of our lives that we don’t take the time to give thanks to God, or members of our families or our friends.
An attitude of gratitude helps in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes we don’t realize how much expressing thanks really means.
Gratitude to God is part of living out our faith. It’s easy to fall into being a foxhole Christian—only coming to God when things are at their worst.
God is the source of our being. Without the fruits of the harvest we could not survive.
So we need to give thanks, and often, during good times and bad, for all the gifts God has given us.
To do so should come as naturally as breathing. Somehow in our materialistic culture, this attitude of thankfulness has been replaced either the endless drive to acquire more, at the expense of others, or a denial of God’s role in creation, and God’s intention for us to live in peace and justice, loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.
To conclude with another psalm verse: “O come let us sing unto the Lord, let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving.”
“You crown the earth with your goodness, O Lord.” So writes the psalmist.
As we mark both Harvest Thanksgiving and Back to Church Sunday, perhaps the link between welcoming people to our Christian fellowship, and the traditional Harvest Festival is the idea of people coming together to give thanks to God for everything He has provided for us.
Perhaps as we have grown in material well-being as a society, we have lost our sense of thankfulness, our sense of gratitude in the never ending quest for more wealth, and technological advances.
The idea of Back to Church Sunday started in England when Anglicans in Manchester realized they were dwindling in numbers, and had lost their focus on welcoming new members to their parishes.
Now the idea has spread throughout the world, and many denominations.
We need to come together to give thanks, at the Harvest, and indeed every Sunday because it is too easy to accept God’s gifts, without properly giving thanks, and having an attitude of gratitude.
In our Gospel reading the one leper who came back whole had not only been healed of his disfiguring disease, but had understood the importance of giving thanks to Jesus, the agent of his healing.
The other nine may have been physically healed, but their lack of response to Jesus showed that they were still not whole persons.
This story would have had quite an impact on Christians, since most still saw themselves as Jews. The reason: the one who returned to say thanks was a Samaritan. And he alone received Jesus’ blessing.
Samaritans and Jews were bitter enemies. They would have no dealings with each other. Yet Jesus pronounced the Samaritan as the one of the ten healed who was truly whole, and blessed him.
This was no coincidence. Jesus wanted the Jews to understand the salvation of God, the gifts of God are for all people.
The other lepers who were healed followed the Jewish law in going immediately to show themselves to the priest, as Jesus advised them.
But for Jesus, thankfulness is an integral part of real healing, real wholeness.
Lepers were outcasts in first century Galilee. If a leper was on the windward side of a healthy person, he was told stand at least 50 yards away.
Jesus is depicted throughout the Gospels as showing only love for Lepers, not fear or contempt. They were often the focus of his healing ministry.
Unlike some of the healing stories, Jesus does not touch the ten lepers, Luke reports they are healed “as they went.”
Not only is the Samaritan leper thankful, he takes action by turning back, glorifying God, and falling on his face giving thanks.
This humility; this attitude of thankfulness, is something we need more of as Christians today.
Rather than worrying about what’s wrong with our lives, we need to give thanks for our many blessings.
That is a challenge for all of us. We get so caught up in the details of our lives that we don’t take the time to give thanks to God, or members of our families or our friends.
An attitude of gratitude helps in every aspect of our lives. Sometimes we don’t realize how much expressing thanks really means.
Gratitude to God is part of living out our faith. It’s easy to fall into being a foxhole Christian—only coming to God when things are at their worst.
God is the source of our being. Without the fruits of the harvest we could not survive.
So we need to give thanks, and often, during good times and bad, for all the gifts God has given us.
To do so should come as naturally as breathing. Somehow in our materialistic culture, this attitude of thankfulness has been replaced either the endless drive to acquire more, at the expense of others, or a denial of God’s role in creation, and God’s intention for us to live in peace and justice, loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.
To conclude with another psalm verse: “O come let us sing unto the Lord, let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving.”
Sunday 18 September 2011
It's Just Not Fair
Homily Proper 25 Yr. B 2011
It’s just not fair.
That’s what those workers who had sweated through the heat of the day in the vineyard thought when the time came when all the day labourers were given their wages.
This guy must be nuts. After all he hired us and we work hard all day, yet we get the same pay as these other guys who have only worked a couple of hours—barely worked up a sweat.
Where’s the fairness in that?
And by the standards of our modern economic system, the grumbling workers would be right.
But this parable told by Jesus goes far beyond a dispute about paying casual workers.
Parables, as Jesus used them, are stories drawn from everyday life, but they usually have a twist, which forces us to think. It may surprise or shock us.
In a few weeks we’ll be hearing Bishop Dance introduce the parable of the Prodigal Son, which will be the subject of a six week special study throughout the Diocese.
In that parable, the elder son, like the workers have toiled all day in today’s parable, says “It’s just not fair” when he learns his father has welcomed his younger son back, after the younger son has squandered his share of the inheritance.
The elder brother has laboured long and hard for his father, yet this younger brother who has wasted his father’s inheritance, is welcomed back with a party.
In both cases, Jesus is challenging us, because we can identify with both the workers who have sweated all day, only to get the same pay as the Johnny-come-latelys, and the elder brother who has been loyal to his father, while the younger brother returned home in disgrace.
But we have to get beyond “it’s just not fair” and see what Jesus is really getting at in these parables.
In today’s gospel the grumbling workers are asked: “Are you envious because I am generous?”
Think about it. They were paid exactly as promised, a day’s wage, one denarius, enough for a family to live on. They weren’t cheated or shortchanged.
What they are worried about is others getting more than they deserve.
What Jesus is getting at is that God’s generosity, God’s grace is not something we earn, it is given to us.
God gave us this planet earth with all its bounty, for those who are good, and those who are bad. Natural disasters don’t discriminate on the basis how sinful we are.
Indeed Jesus uses this parable to describe the Kingdom of heaven because he knows his followers have difficulty understanding the idea of grace, given unconditionally and without merit.
The problem we have when we hear these parables is that we resent someone else’s “enough” because they worked less for it. They were the latecomers.
But God forgives us for our resentment, our blindness, and our greed.
God forgave the people of Israel in the story from the book of Exodus today when they grumbled about their time in the wilderness. They had been rescued from captivity and tyranny in Egypt.
Instead of punishing their lack of gratitude God provided them with food—manna and meat in the desert.
When it comes down to it, today’s Gospel lays down a larger challenge for us—no matter when they were asked to come to the vineyard to work, every person deserves a living wage, as do those who work for a minimum wage today. In the kingdom of God, no one goes to bed hungry. It is only fair.
So to link this with our world today, we see too often the idea of survival of the fittest, the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
Too often when cuts are made in government spending they affect most the people who are most disadvantaged.
We sometimes forget as Christians the radical generosity Jesus taught us, and instead get caught up, like the Pharisees, in a more pietistic approach to faith.
There is no easy answer to the challenge posed by this parable of the vineyard.
Jesus concludes with the enigmatic: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
Reversal of fortune is a frequent theme in the Gospels. Things are not as they appear. God does not act as we expect him to act.
That’s why far from being a story about labour relations, and whether there should be hourly pay for day labourers, this Gospel opens up the larger question of God’s grace and how we respond to it as Christians.
How do we lead grace filled lives, truly loving our neighbour, truly loving God?
It’s just not fair.
That’s what those workers who had sweated through the heat of the day in the vineyard thought when the time came when all the day labourers were given their wages.
This guy must be nuts. After all he hired us and we work hard all day, yet we get the same pay as these other guys who have only worked a couple of hours—barely worked up a sweat.
Where’s the fairness in that?
And by the standards of our modern economic system, the grumbling workers would be right.
But this parable told by Jesus goes far beyond a dispute about paying casual workers.
Parables, as Jesus used them, are stories drawn from everyday life, but they usually have a twist, which forces us to think. It may surprise or shock us.
In a few weeks we’ll be hearing Bishop Dance introduce the parable of the Prodigal Son, which will be the subject of a six week special study throughout the Diocese.
In that parable, the elder son, like the workers have toiled all day in today’s parable, says “It’s just not fair” when he learns his father has welcomed his younger son back, after the younger son has squandered his share of the inheritance.
The elder brother has laboured long and hard for his father, yet this younger brother who has wasted his father’s inheritance, is welcomed back with a party.
In both cases, Jesus is challenging us, because we can identify with both the workers who have sweated all day, only to get the same pay as the Johnny-come-latelys, and the elder brother who has been loyal to his father, while the younger brother returned home in disgrace.
But we have to get beyond “it’s just not fair” and see what Jesus is really getting at in these parables.
In today’s gospel the grumbling workers are asked: “Are you envious because I am generous?”
Think about it. They were paid exactly as promised, a day’s wage, one denarius, enough for a family to live on. They weren’t cheated or shortchanged.
What they are worried about is others getting more than they deserve.
What Jesus is getting at is that God’s generosity, God’s grace is not something we earn, it is given to us.
God gave us this planet earth with all its bounty, for those who are good, and those who are bad. Natural disasters don’t discriminate on the basis how sinful we are.
Indeed Jesus uses this parable to describe the Kingdom of heaven because he knows his followers have difficulty understanding the idea of grace, given unconditionally and without merit.
The problem we have when we hear these parables is that we resent someone else’s “enough” because they worked less for it. They were the latecomers.
But God forgives us for our resentment, our blindness, and our greed.
God forgave the people of Israel in the story from the book of Exodus today when they grumbled about their time in the wilderness. They had been rescued from captivity and tyranny in Egypt.
Instead of punishing their lack of gratitude God provided them with food—manna and meat in the desert.
When it comes down to it, today’s Gospel lays down a larger challenge for us—no matter when they were asked to come to the vineyard to work, every person deserves a living wage, as do those who work for a minimum wage today. In the kingdom of God, no one goes to bed hungry. It is only fair.
So to link this with our world today, we see too often the idea of survival of the fittest, the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.
Too often when cuts are made in government spending they affect most the people who are most disadvantaged.
We sometimes forget as Christians the radical generosity Jesus taught us, and instead get caught up, like the Pharisees, in a more pietistic approach to faith.
There is no easy answer to the challenge posed by this parable of the vineyard.
Jesus concludes with the enigmatic: “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”
Reversal of fortune is a frequent theme in the Gospels. Things are not as they appear. God does not act as we expect him to act.
That’s why far from being a story about labour relations, and whether there should be hourly pay for day labourers, this Gospel opens up the larger question of God’s grace and how we respond to it as Christians.
How do we lead grace filled lives, truly loving our neighbour, truly loving God?
Sunday 11 September 2011
Celebrating the 400th Anniversary of King James Bible
KJV 400th Sept. 11, 2011
"The scholars who produced this masterpiece are mostly unknown and unremembered. But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world." Winston Churchill
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” “A leopard can not change its spots.” “A voice crying in the wilderness.”
These expressions and many others that are part of the English language have a common origin in the King James, or authorized version of the Bible.
This year 2011, we mark four hundred years since the landmark publication of this translation of the Bible. And while the King James translation is longer used as much it was, it remains the basis for other more contemporary translations.
And when we come to the most important times of our church year, the King James translation with its literary and poetic power, tells the story most vividly.
Since this is an anniversary, it is worth going back to that time—the 16th and 17th centuries—to look at how the translation came about, and why it turned out to be such a landmark, not only in our Christian faith as English speaking people, but in our language—the way we express ourselves.
You might have thought the earliest attempts to translate the Bible into English would have been heralded as a great step forward.
But William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in 1526—decades before King James, was banned. Tyndale fled England to complete his New Testament.
Thanks to Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press, copies were able to make it back to England. The Bishop of London ordered all copies seized and burned.
Tyndale lived on as an outlaw, but he was finally captured an imprisoned in Brussels, then executed by strangulation and burned at the stake by the Holy Roman Emperor.
You may wonder why Bible translation was regarded as subversive. At that time the church hierarchy of Rome, led by the Pope was facing the massive upheaval of the Reformation and the growth of Protestantism.
Translating the Bible would mean people could form their own interpretations of the Bible rather than simply accepting the interpretations of the clergy.
So translators such as Tyndale were regarded as heretical, as well as being subversive.
Tyndale had this to say to a scholar he was debating: “I defy the Pope and all his laws; if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth a plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.“
Tyndale may have been martyred, but his translation forms the basis for 90 per cent of the New testament King James version, including phrases such as: “Ye are the salt of the earth,” and “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
The strength of Tyndale’s work came from going beyond the later Latin translations, to the original Hebrew and Greek texts. Tyndale only managed to finish 14 of 39 Old Testament books.
The next translation was by Myles Coverdale, who produced the first complete English Bible and made extensive use of Tyndale’s work in 1535. It was Coverdale’s Bible which King Henry V111 had placed in each English parish church in 1539 when he led the English church away from Rome.
That only lasted four years before Parliament declared Bible reading illegal.
But the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 included Coverdale’s psalms and prescribed Bible readings for a whole year.
After decades more of religious ferment in 1607, 47 leading scholars of the church of England gathered at Westminster Abbey to plan the production of a more accurate translation of the Bible.
They were encouraged by King James, the first King of England and Scotland.
The work was done by six teams of translators who completed their work over three years before finalizing the text in 1610.
In 1611 King James Version of the Bible was published by the King’s Printer Robert Barker, bound for 12 shillings.
One of the goals of the King James translators was to reflect the theology of the Church of England. All the scholars were members of the Church of England, and all but one were clergy. The New Testament came from the original Greek. The Old Testament was from Hebrew text. The Apocryphal books were from Greek and Latin.
In 1662 when the Book of Common Prayer was revised , readings were added from the King James version, replacing Coverdale’s Bible translation.
Acceptance of the new King James translation was far from universal. For some time another English language European translation called the Geneva Bible was still popular.
Some scholars condemned the new version because of its rejection of word for word equivalence with the Hebrew and Greek.
By the next century, the authorized King James Version became the standard for the English speaking world, and it was until the last century the Revised Standard, then the New Revised Standard—the translation we now use, came into wide use, along with many other translations.
In many respects, the King James Version has had a tremendous impact on our faith and culture. It has contributed 257 expressions to our English language; more than Shakespeare.
The King James translation has also set the direction for other translations to follow.
It was the culmination of a critical period in the life of the church where—the Bible, which contains the stories of Creation, the Exodus, the history of the People of Israel, the life of Jesus and the birth of the Christian Church—is made accessible to ordinary people—and not just the preserve of the clergy and church establishment.
One of the challenges we face in our hectic modern lifestyle, with all its multi-media opportunities from television, radio and newspapers, to the internet and e-mail and Facebook, is taking the time to read and reflect on our sacred scriptures.
William Tyndale, Oxford and Cambridge educated, was willing to sacrifice his life to make the Bible accessible in English.
When I look at all the different Bible translations I have to make use of, I realize we are the beneficiaries of his work, and of others through these more than four centuries.
And it is fitting that Tyndale’s work is carried on by Tyndale Bible translators which is still translating the Bible into different languages as we speak.
"The scholars who produced this masterpiece are mostly unknown and unremembered. But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world." Winston Churchill
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “A House divided against itself cannot stand.” “A leopard can not change its spots.” “A voice crying in the wilderness.”
These expressions and many others that are part of the English language have a common origin in the King James, or authorized version of the Bible.
This year 2011, we mark four hundred years since the landmark publication of this translation of the Bible. And while the King James translation is longer used as much it was, it remains the basis for other more contemporary translations.
And when we come to the most important times of our church year, the King James translation with its literary and poetic power, tells the story most vividly.
Since this is an anniversary, it is worth going back to that time—the 16th and 17th centuries—to look at how the translation came about, and why it turned out to be such a landmark, not only in our Christian faith as English speaking people, but in our language—the way we express ourselves.
You might have thought the earliest attempts to translate the Bible into English would have been heralded as a great step forward.
But William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in 1526—decades before King James, was banned. Tyndale fled England to complete his New Testament.
Thanks to Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press, copies were able to make it back to England. The Bishop of London ordered all copies seized and burned.
Tyndale lived on as an outlaw, but he was finally captured an imprisoned in Brussels, then executed by strangulation and burned at the stake by the Holy Roman Emperor.
You may wonder why Bible translation was regarded as subversive. At that time the church hierarchy of Rome, led by the Pope was facing the massive upheaval of the Reformation and the growth of Protestantism.
Translating the Bible would mean people could form their own interpretations of the Bible rather than simply accepting the interpretations of the clergy.
So translators such as Tyndale were regarded as heretical, as well as being subversive.
Tyndale had this to say to a scholar he was debating: “I defy the Pope and all his laws; if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth a plough shall know more scripture than thou dost.“
Tyndale may have been martyred, but his translation forms the basis for 90 per cent of the New testament King James version, including phrases such as: “Ye are the salt of the earth,” and “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
The strength of Tyndale’s work came from going beyond the later Latin translations, to the original Hebrew and Greek texts. Tyndale only managed to finish 14 of 39 Old Testament books.
The next translation was by Myles Coverdale, who produced the first complete English Bible and made extensive use of Tyndale’s work in 1535. It was Coverdale’s Bible which King Henry V111 had placed in each English parish church in 1539 when he led the English church away from Rome.
That only lasted four years before Parliament declared Bible reading illegal.
But the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 included Coverdale’s psalms and prescribed Bible readings for a whole year.
After decades more of religious ferment in 1607, 47 leading scholars of the church of England gathered at Westminster Abbey to plan the production of a more accurate translation of the Bible.
They were encouraged by King James, the first King of England and Scotland.
The work was done by six teams of translators who completed their work over three years before finalizing the text in 1610.
In 1611 King James Version of the Bible was published by the King’s Printer Robert Barker, bound for 12 shillings.
One of the goals of the King James translators was to reflect the theology of the Church of England. All the scholars were members of the Church of England, and all but one were clergy. The New Testament came from the original Greek. The Old Testament was from Hebrew text. The Apocryphal books were from Greek and Latin.
In 1662 when the Book of Common Prayer was revised , readings were added from the King James version, replacing Coverdale’s Bible translation.
Acceptance of the new King James translation was far from universal. For some time another English language European translation called the Geneva Bible was still popular.
Some scholars condemned the new version because of its rejection of word for word equivalence with the Hebrew and Greek.
By the next century, the authorized King James Version became the standard for the English speaking world, and it was until the last century the Revised Standard, then the New Revised Standard—the translation we now use, came into wide use, along with many other translations.
In many respects, the King James Version has had a tremendous impact on our faith and culture. It has contributed 257 expressions to our English language; more than Shakespeare.
The King James translation has also set the direction for other translations to follow.
It was the culmination of a critical period in the life of the church where—the Bible, which contains the stories of Creation, the Exodus, the history of the People of Israel, the life of Jesus and the birth of the Christian Church—is made accessible to ordinary people—and not just the preserve of the clergy and church establishment.
One of the challenges we face in our hectic modern lifestyle, with all its multi-media opportunities from television, radio and newspapers, to the internet and e-mail and Facebook, is taking the time to read and reflect on our sacred scriptures.
William Tyndale, Oxford and Cambridge educated, was willing to sacrifice his life to make the Bible accessible in English.
When I look at all the different Bible translations I have to make use of, I realize we are the beneficiaries of his work, and of others through these more than four centuries.
And it is fitting that Tyndale’s work is carried on by Tyndale Bible translators which is still translating the Bible into different languages as we speak.
Sunday 4 September 2011
Would You Like to Come to Church with me?
Homily Sunday Sept. 4, 2011
You may have noticed our sign outside today says: “Soul Food, Served Here.” And it isn’t referring to our popular monthly suppers.
One of the best definitions I have heard of evangelism is: “one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.”
We Anglicans have not been known for our enthusiasm for evangelism. We’ve prided our selves on our excellent traditional worship— hymns, the prayer book and newer liturgies, and a rich parish life which has made the church an important part of many communities.
In the 50’s and 60’s when many new churches were built, and in times of growth before that, we just had to open a church and people flocked to come.
It was a different time—a time when a large number of Canadians attended worship frequently. When Sunday was a day of rest, and a day to worship God—not commerce or sports or entertainment.
Now while most Canadians are nominally Christian, church attendance has plunged over the past 30 years. Yet there are many more churches of different denominations, and ethnic churches to serve those who have come to Canada from other parts of the world.
In the culture Sunday is a time for busy two income families to rest, or play, or engage in sports.
It has always been a challenge to attract and retain young people. I came back to church at the age of 24 when I was asked to join the choir of All Saints Cathedral, Edmonton, with some friends. I hadn’t been a member of a parish since leaving home for university at age 18.
When I moved to Calgary I joined another choir, and was quickly invited not only to join the parish council, but take part in fundraising for an organ restoration. By the age of 30 I was serving as people’s warden. There were others in my age group.
That just isn’t happening as much anymore. Young people –or people of any age who have drifted away--aren’t coming back to the church.
It’s certainly not just Canon Davis which has experienced this. As I’ve mentioned before, in my travels I’ve found many congregations struggling with attracting younger people, youth and children, and for that matter people of any age.
The universality of these experiences of the past 40 years is why our Diocese of Huron is embracing a program this year called Back to Church Sunday, which we will celebrate Sunday Sept. 25 along with Harvest Thanksgiving.
The idea started out in England seven years ago. It is based on a simple premise, if all of us invited a friend to church, and they accepted, we can double our congregation for one Sunday.
And once people come, there is a chance they will return. Indeed in the seven years the program has run, reports indicate more than 10 percent of those who came have returned.
Now that does sound simple. But there is some preparation.
First, we need to think of people to invite. They don’t have to be Anglicans. Just people who are not regular church attenders who might consider coming.
Next week we will provide invitation cards.
Now I’ll have to admit that like most Anglicans I haven’t been accustomed to inviting people to church. Perhaps that’s why this is a good idea.
Studies have proven that new church members come not through ads in the newspaper, or signs outside, though have to do those things, but personal invitation.
Think of who invited you to church for the first time as an adult. For me it was my first boss Ted, a hard-nosed magazine editor who sang in the choir at All Saints Cathedral.
Think of who God might be calling you to approach? A close friend? A member of a club you are in? A neighbour? A fellow golfer or gardener?
Then comes the hard part. Could you could say it out loud with me: “Would you like to come to church with me?”
There, that wasn’t so difficult.
We do have to pray for courage, not only to make the invitation, but to those we invite.
Provided the invitation is accepted your work isn’t over. One of the most difficult things for many of us is going into an unfamiliar environment.
So the Back to Church movement suggests you pick up your guest and bring them to church with you for the first time.
Then after the service invite them to join us in our Harvest Thanksgiving brunch.
Then follow up the first invitation by asking them to return the next Sunday. And give them a copy of our fall newsletter with special activities coming up.
Many of us were thrilled by having almost 150 people come for our 85th anniversary---including many who came from other parishes, and other former parishioners.
We hope, with God’s help, to swell our numbers again. If there is one thing which sums up this whole effort it is: Invite someone you know to something you love.”
It is appropriate that we are doing this at the same time as Harvest Thanksgiving. We are thankful not only for nature’s bounty, but for 85 years of mission and ministry in this place.
We recall our roots as a Sunday school mission in North Sarnia. And we pray for our Christian witness and community in 2011 and in the years to come.
You may have noticed our sign outside today says: “Soul Food, Served Here.” And it isn’t referring to our popular monthly suppers.
One of the best definitions I have heard of evangelism is: “one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.”
We Anglicans have not been known for our enthusiasm for evangelism. We’ve prided our selves on our excellent traditional worship— hymns, the prayer book and newer liturgies, and a rich parish life which has made the church an important part of many communities.
In the 50’s and 60’s when many new churches were built, and in times of growth before that, we just had to open a church and people flocked to come.
It was a different time—a time when a large number of Canadians attended worship frequently. When Sunday was a day of rest, and a day to worship God—not commerce or sports or entertainment.
Now while most Canadians are nominally Christian, church attendance has plunged over the past 30 years. Yet there are many more churches of different denominations, and ethnic churches to serve those who have come to Canada from other parts of the world.
In the culture Sunday is a time for busy two income families to rest, or play, or engage in sports.
It has always been a challenge to attract and retain young people. I came back to church at the age of 24 when I was asked to join the choir of All Saints Cathedral, Edmonton, with some friends. I hadn’t been a member of a parish since leaving home for university at age 18.
When I moved to Calgary I joined another choir, and was quickly invited not only to join the parish council, but take part in fundraising for an organ restoration. By the age of 30 I was serving as people’s warden. There were others in my age group.
That just isn’t happening as much anymore. Young people –or people of any age who have drifted away--aren’t coming back to the church.
It’s certainly not just Canon Davis which has experienced this. As I’ve mentioned before, in my travels I’ve found many congregations struggling with attracting younger people, youth and children, and for that matter people of any age.
The universality of these experiences of the past 40 years is why our Diocese of Huron is embracing a program this year called Back to Church Sunday, which we will celebrate Sunday Sept. 25 along with Harvest Thanksgiving.
The idea started out in England seven years ago. It is based on a simple premise, if all of us invited a friend to church, and they accepted, we can double our congregation for one Sunday.
And once people come, there is a chance they will return. Indeed in the seven years the program has run, reports indicate more than 10 percent of those who came have returned.
Now that does sound simple. But there is some preparation.
First, we need to think of people to invite. They don’t have to be Anglicans. Just people who are not regular church attenders who might consider coming.
Next week we will provide invitation cards.
Now I’ll have to admit that like most Anglicans I haven’t been accustomed to inviting people to church. Perhaps that’s why this is a good idea.
Studies have proven that new church members come not through ads in the newspaper, or signs outside, though have to do those things, but personal invitation.
Think of who invited you to church for the first time as an adult. For me it was my first boss Ted, a hard-nosed magazine editor who sang in the choir at All Saints Cathedral.
Think of who God might be calling you to approach? A close friend? A member of a club you are in? A neighbour? A fellow golfer or gardener?
Then comes the hard part. Could you could say it out loud with me: “Would you like to come to church with me?”
There, that wasn’t so difficult.
We do have to pray for courage, not only to make the invitation, but to those we invite.
Provided the invitation is accepted your work isn’t over. One of the most difficult things for many of us is going into an unfamiliar environment.
So the Back to Church movement suggests you pick up your guest and bring them to church with you for the first time.
Then after the service invite them to join us in our Harvest Thanksgiving brunch.
Then follow up the first invitation by asking them to return the next Sunday. And give them a copy of our fall newsletter with special activities coming up.
Many of us were thrilled by having almost 150 people come for our 85th anniversary---including many who came from other parishes, and other former parishioners.
We hope, with God’s help, to swell our numbers again. If there is one thing which sums up this whole effort it is: Invite someone you know to something you love.”
It is appropriate that we are doing this at the same time as Harvest Thanksgiving. We are thankful not only for nature’s bounty, but for 85 years of mission and ministry in this place.
We recall our roots as a Sunday school mission in North Sarnia. And we pray for our Christian witness and community in 2011 and in the years to come.
Sunday 28 August 2011
Celebrating Servant Leadership
Homily Proper 22 Yr. A 2011
I want to tell you a story today about leadership. It starts with an eight year old boy growing up in the Montreal area. The minister at the United Church he worshipped at, John Shearman, recalls him as a hyper-active kid, the kind who could barely sit still.
His dad was an elder, and served as Sunday school superintendent. His mother was a member of the ladies group, and taught the minister’s wife the art of smocking.
The young lad grew up as part of that church family, and was part of an active youth group called “the infusers.”
The name meant all of life was to be infused with the holy spirit and the energy of the Gospel.
The young man’s father taught a Sunday night youth Bible in Hudson, Quebec.
Yesterday that young lad was remembered in a state funeral in Toronto. Jack Layton---whose father Robert was a member of Brian Mulroney’s cabinet, and whose ancestors had served in the Union Nationale provincial government in Quebec and were among the fathers of Confederation---died much too young of cancer.
But while he struggled with the disease, he demonstrated the kind of leadership, we heard about today in scripture.
Jesus says if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
This describes a kind of servant leadership that we need more of in our world today.
Moses led his people out of Egypt, and through the wilderness, but he never saw the promised land.
St. Paul likewise travelled the Mediterranean world, suffering persecution and shipwrecks to preach the Gospel. Yet he never lived to see the church grow and prosper. It was still a tiny persecuted minority when Paul died a martyr in Rome. But he had laid the basis for its growth during his epic mission to the Mediterranean world.
In Jack Layton’s last letter to Canadians he concluded with these words I’m sure you have heard often this week but bear repeating: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful, and optimistic, and we’ll change the world.”
That is spiritual message—a message of faith. Compare it to some scripture passages:
*”There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18)
* Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice and be kind to one another, tender hearted and forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:31-32)
“Suffering produce endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4)
Jack was a member of Bloor Street United in Toronto, and may have not been involved in a that congregation’s life in recent years due to his political career as a national party leader, but his actions and his words are testimony to his faith.
His causes have often been unpopular—support for AIDS sufferers and the homeless and the gay community in the 80’s before those causes were embraced by mainstream society.
That has always been so for Christians who follow the teaching of the Gospel. Jesus taught us to care for the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized.
It’s not an easy Gospel to live out. We are talking about self-denial, taking up our cross, undergoing suffering if necessary in the pursuit of our mission in life.
It’s much easier to follow what has been termed the prosperity gospel—and believe that if we behave well, we will be rewarded by God with riches. That kind of thinking—wrong headed in my view—is prevalent in parts of the Christian church—particularly in North America.
I think that kind of thinking would be offensive to Jesus.
It comes down to leadership. We as Christians need to practice what we preach. That’s what Paul was saying when he wrote to the Romans.
“Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them….”
This past week as Canadians remembered Jack Layton, they were affirming those qualities exemplified in his leadership.
Perhaps what made the tribute reach out beyond his own party is the yearning among all of us for more civility in our political life, more caring, more servant leadership, and more concern for justice and the common good.
Our faith, our spirituality can’t be separated from the rest of life. We may not all agree, and certainly most of the time do not agree, on many political issues.
But our faith can lead us to support leadership which is unselfish, passionate and caring. We need to pray for our leaders because in this complex world it matters so much that public spirited people offer themselves for leadership.
The 24 hours news cycle has resulted in many becoming cynical about politicians, but the outpouring of love and respect after the untimely death of the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition reminds us that we want to have trust in our leaders. We want to believe they care for us.
Prayer for the Nation p. 678 BAS
I want to tell you a story today about leadership. It starts with an eight year old boy growing up in the Montreal area. The minister at the United Church he worshipped at, John Shearman, recalls him as a hyper-active kid, the kind who could barely sit still.
His dad was an elder, and served as Sunday school superintendent. His mother was a member of the ladies group, and taught the minister’s wife the art of smocking.
The young lad grew up as part of that church family, and was part of an active youth group called “the infusers.”
The name meant all of life was to be infused with the holy spirit and the energy of the Gospel.
The young man’s father taught a Sunday night youth Bible in Hudson, Quebec.
Yesterday that young lad was remembered in a state funeral in Toronto. Jack Layton---whose father Robert was a member of Brian Mulroney’s cabinet, and whose ancestors had served in the Union Nationale provincial government in Quebec and were among the fathers of Confederation---died much too young of cancer.
But while he struggled with the disease, he demonstrated the kind of leadership, we heard about today in scripture.
Jesus says if any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
This describes a kind of servant leadership that we need more of in our world today.
Moses led his people out of Egypt, and through the wilderness, but he never saw the promised land.
St. Paul likewise travelled the Mediterranean world, suffering persecution and shipwrecks to preach the Gospel. Yet he never lived to see the church grow and prosper. It was still a tiny persecuted minority when Paul died a martyr in Rome. But he had laid the basis for its growth during his epic mission to the Mediterranean world.
In Jack Layton’s last letter to Canadians he concluded with these words I’m sure you have heard often this week but bear repeating: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful, and optimistic, and we’ll change the world.”
That is spiritual message—a message of faith. Compare it to some scripture passages:
*”There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18)
* Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice and be kind to one another, tender hearted and forgiving one another” (Ephesians 4:31-32)
“Suffering produce endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:3-4)
Jack was a member of Bloor Street United in Toronto, and may have not been involved in a that congregation’s life in recent years due to his political career as a national party leader, but his actions and his words are testimony to his faith.
His causes have often been unpopular—support for AIDS sufferers and the homeless and the gay community in the 80’s before those causes were embraced by mainstream society.
That has always been so for Christians who follow the teaching of the Gospel. Jesus taught us to care for the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized.
It’s not an easy Gospel to live out. We are talking about self-denial, taking up our cross, undergoing suffering if necessary in the pursuit of our mission in life.
It’s much easier to follow what has been termed the prosperity gospel—and believe that if we behave well, we will be rewarded by God with riches. That kind of thinking—wrong headed in my view—is prevalent in parts of the Christian church—particularly in North America.
I think that kind of thinking would be offensive to Jesus.
It comes down to leadership. We as Christians need to practice what we preach. That’s what Paul was saying when he wrote to the Romans.
“Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse them….”
This past week as Canadians remembered Jack Layton, they were affirming those qualities exemplified in his leadership.
Perhaps what made the tribute reach out beyond his own party is the yearning among all of us for more civility in our political life, more caring, more servant leadership, and more concern for justice and the common good.
Our faith, our spirituality can’t be separated from the rest of life. We may not all agree, and certainly most of the time do not agree, on many political issues.
But our faith can lead us to support leadership which is unselfish, passionate and caring. We need to pray for our leaders because in this complex world it matters so much that public spirited people offer themselves for leadership.
The 24 hours news cycle has resulted in many becoming cynical about politicians, but the outpouring of love and respect after the untimely death of the leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition reminds us that we want to have trust in our leaders. We want to believe they care for us.
Prayer for the Nation p. 678 BAS
Monday 22 August 2011
Who Do You Say That I Am?
Homily Aug. 21/11 Proper 21 Yr. A
When I was a newspaper or magazine writer there would sometimes come a time when after researching a story and interviewing many people that I’d have difficulty knowing where to start—how to capture what my readers would be interested in.
This was particularly true when I went to write about my experiences in foreign countries visiting churches and mission groups there.
Sometimes there just seemed to be so much to tell, yet so little space, and where to start?
In a way that’s how I feel approaching preaching this morning. Today’s Gospel isn’t one of the miracle stories of Jesus. It doesn’t involve healing. It isn’t a parable. It isn’t a confrontation with Roman or Jewish authorities.
Instead Jesus is talking to his disciples and, as usual, asking questions.
Who do you say that I Am? he asks.
While driving yesterday, I saw this as a sermon text on several church signs.
The task for the preacher is at once simple, and daunting.
Perhaps more books have been written on Jesus than on any other person in history. And they have all tried to answer that question.
What can I offer . After all it was only ten years ago—August 19, 2001, that I was ordained as a Deacon in the Church by the Right Reverend Barry Hollowell, the sixth Bishop of Calgary, at a service at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Toronto.
A few months later I was ordained priest at my first parish, St. Cyprian’s Didsbury.
So I don’t profess to be a theologian, or expert. But I was called to ministry after almost half a century as a lay person in the Anglican Church of Canada, having completed theological studies and the candidacy process of the church.
With that call comes the humbling task of reflecting weekly on the scriptures during this sermon time, usually through our three year lectionary.
I see part of this task as helping you to understand the Biblical context of our readings, and reflect on what they might mean for our lives.
It means asking questions, like who do you say Jesus is.
Because unlike the fundamentalist Christians, we Anglicans have always believed in interpreting scripture, through reason and tradition—the so called three legged stool.
One of the dangers of approaching our Christian faith, as well as other faiths, is to engage in a literal reading of the sacred text—the Bible, or the Quran.
Our scriptures are inspired by God, but reading them in the plain sense of the words just doesn’t work. The text is a mixture of allegory, poetry, prophecy, vision and story.
So when Jesus asks Who do you say that I am, he isn’t asking for a twelve point description of things we must believe about him---he wants us to respond with God given faith, as Peter did—You are the messiah, the Son of the Living God.
But we can’t stop there. Jesus can’t be pigeon holed. Think of all the terms used to refer to Jesus: Redeemer, Friend, Brother, Lover, Saviour, Healer, Teacher, Rabbi, Prophet, Preacher. The list could go on.
All are true. But none holds all the truth.
Naming Jesus is , like naming and defining ourselves as followers of Jesus, is a process of learning and growing, moving from doubt to belief, from call to action.
Ours is not intended to be a passive faith, a consumer faith, a faith based on unthinking formulas.
We have to see our scriptures not as the fundamentalists have—a closed book with cut and dried answers, but as a living text which helps us learn more about God, and ourselves, through the inspiration of those who created those texts so many years ago.
Who do you say that I am? It’s a question we need to always be asking about Jesus as we respond to the needs of our families, our communities, our nation and our world.
When I visited a vacation bible school at St. John in the Wilderness this week to help out with music, most of the counselors were wearing bracelets—WWJD. What would Jesus do.
That question—along with Who do you say that I am? -- is one we need to think about. Because our answers help define our lives as individual Christians, and as members of a Christian community.
You’ll notice when Jesus asks the disciples people say the son of Man is---and that’s how he referred to himself—they answer John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah—all prophets.
Then comes that little word, but. “But Who do you say that I am.”
And that’s when Peter, the brave one, at least at this point, makes his declaration.
And that question still must be asked today, as it has for generations: “But, who do you say that I am?”
When I was a newspaper or magazine writer there would sometimes come a time when after researching a story and interviewing many people that I’d have difficulty knowing where to start—how to capture what my readers would be interested in.
This was particularly true when I went to write about my experiences in foreign countries visiting churches and mission groups there.
Sometimes there just seemed to be so much to tell, yet so little space, and where to start?
In a way that’s how I feel approaching preaching this morning. Today’s Gospel isn’t one of the miracle stories of Jesus. It doesn’t involve healing. It isn’t a parable. It isn’t a confrontation with Roman or Jewish authorities.
Instead Jesus is talking to his disciples and, as usual, asking questions.
Who do you say that I Am? he asks.
While driving yesterday, I saw this as a sermon text on several church signs.
The task for the preacher is at once simple, and daunting.
Perhaps more books have been written on Jesus than on any other person in history. And they have all tried to answer that question.
What can I offer . After all it was only ten years ago—August 19, 2001, that I was ordained as a Deacon in the Church by the Right Reverend Barry Hollowell, the sixth Bishop of Calgary, at a service at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Toronto.
A few months later I was ordained priest at my first parish, St. Cyprian’s Didsbury.
So I don’t profess to be a theologian, or expert. But I was called to ministry after almost half a century as a lay person in the Anglican Church of Canada, having completed theological studies and the candidacy process of the church.
With that call comes the humbling task of reflecting weekly on the scriptures during this sermon time, usually through our three year lectionary.
I see part of this task as helping you to understand the Biblical context of our readings, and reflect on what they might mean for our lives.
It means asking questions, like who do you say Jesus is.
Because unlike the fundamentalist Christians, we Anglicans have always believed in interpreting scripture, through reason and tradition—the so called three legged stool.
One of the dangers of approaching our Christian faith, as well as other faiths, is to engage in a literal reading of the sacred text—the Bible, or the Quran.
Our scriptures are inspired by God, but reading them in the plain sense of the words just doesn’t work. The text is a mixture of allegory, poetry, prophecy, vision and story.
So when Jesus asks Who do you say that I am, he isn’t asking for a twelve point description of things we must believe about him---he wants us to respond with God given faith, as Peter did—You are the messiah, the Son of the Living God.
But we can’t stop there. Jesus can’t be pigeon holed. Think of all the terms used to refer to Jesus: Redeemer, Friend, Brother, Lover, Saviour, Healer, Teacher, Rabbi, Prophet, Preacher. The list could go on.
All are true. But none holds all the truth.
Naming Jesus is , like naming and defining ourselves as followers of Jesus, is a process of learning and growing, moving from doubt to belief, from call to action.
Ours is not intended to be a passive faith, a consumer faith, a faith based on unthinking formulas.
We have to see our scriptures not as the fundamentalists have—a closed book with cut and dried answers, but as a living text which helps us learn more about God, and ourselves, through the inspiration of those who created those texts so many years ago.
Who do you say that I am? It’s a question we need to always be asking about Jesus as we respond to the needs of our families, our communities, our nation and our world.
When I visited a vacation bible school at St. John in the Wilderness this week to help out with music, most of the counselors were wearing bracelets—WWJD. What would Jesus do.
That question—along with Who do you say that I am? -- is one we need to think about. Because our answers help define our lives as individual Christians, and as members of a Christian community.
You’ll notice when Jesus asks the disciples people say the son of Man is---and that’s how he referred to himself—they answer John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah—all prophets.
Then comes that little word, but. “But Who do you say that I am.”
And that’s when Peter, the brave one, at least at this point, makes his declaration.
And that question still must be asked today, as it has for generations: “But, who do you say that I am?”
Monday 15 August 2011
Encountering the "other"
Homily Proper 20 Yr. A 2011
Have you ever been so weary all you want is a place to rest where no-one will disturb you, and relax?
Call it a retreat, a vacation, a respite….it fulfills a basic human need to refresh or regroup.
Throughout scripture there are references to Jesus seeking some solitude to pray, to gain strength for what must have been an exhausting life as an itinerant preacher, healer and teacher.
But there were always demands wherever he travelled, even on the outskirts of Israel, north of Palestine in the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And since we believe Jesus was a human being, he must have sometimes lost his patience. And this appears to be what has happened in this story.
The Canaanite woman comes and begs for Jesus help because her daughter is tormented by a demon.
First Jesus doesn’t answer her at all—a snub which might have been expected between a Jewish man and a Canaanite woman, because Canaanites were treated as second class citizens, reviled and hated by Jews.
The disciples urge Jesus to send the woman away.
But instead Jesus tries to explain: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
In other words, the mission of Jesus, at least for now, is for the Jews alone.
But she kneels before him: Lord help me. How often in the Gospels do we see this response of faith followed with a healing.
But in this case Jesus responds with what can be seen as an insult, a put down: Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.”
Dogs were not held in the high esteem at that time that they are now. After all, it’s clear to Coline and I that Wally runs the rectory.
But then dogs were seen as unclean.
This passage has proved difficult for Biblical commentators and preachers over the years.
After all we preach a doctrine that says Jesus without sin.
But even in the Gospel narratives we have Jesus showing anger, frustration, despair at different times. Could he not have shared in some of the prejudices of his own time.
Isn’t there a possibility he was weary and just wanted to end this brief encounter.
Also puzzling is the end of this brief encounter, where it appears this unnamed woman gets the best of Jesus, which is rare in any Gospel encounters.
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
This bold, but respectful retort is amazing.
Jesus is used to tripping up the leading Jewish authorities, scribes, and Pharisees. Yet he is matched by one of society’s lowliest members, a Gentile woman, of a hated minority.
And in response, Jesus displays his willingness to change in response to the woman’s faith and courage, Jesus heals her daughter.
What does this story mean for us?
If Jesus can learn to deal with prejudices of his day, surely we can learn to treat better those who like the Canaanite woman would be “the other” in our society.
In Canada that means we have to look at how we treat Native people, and other visible minorities. How do we treat people with other religious backgrounds.
We are all children of God, and it is in how we treat our neighbours that we demonstrate our love of God.
We must be prepared to have our eyes opened to the needs and gifts of others, as Jesus was in this story.
The worst thing is to try and separate ourselves as Christians into a “holy” club, feeling we are better than others.
Jesus met the world, albeit sometimes reluctantly, when he was weary and needed a rest. His followers came from the outcasts of society---poor, women, Gentiles.
The people most hostile to his message were the leaders of Israel, the religious authorities, the wealthy.
Part of our challenge in the church is that the church has become part of the establishment in many countries. It has lost its edge. It doesn’t reach out sufficiently to “the other.”
Let us pray that following the example of Jesus we can learn from our encounters with people who are "the other" and recognize in them our common humanity.
Have you ever been so weary all you want is a place to rest where no-one will disturb you, and relax?
Call it a retreat, a vacation, a respite….it fulfills a basic human need to refresh or regroup.
Throughout scripture there are references to Jesus seeking some solitude to pray, to gain strength for what must have been an exhausting life as an itinerant preacher, healer and teacher.
But there were always demands wherever he travelled, even on the outskirts of Israel, north of Palestine in the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And since we believe Jesus was a human being, he must have sometimes lost his patience. And this appears to be what has happened in this story.
The Canaanite woman comes and begs for Jesus help because her daughter is tormented by a demon.
First Jesus doesn’t answer her at all—a snub which might have been expected between a Jewish man and a Canaanite woman, because Canaanites were treated as second class citizens, reviled and hated by Jews.
The disciples urge Jesus to send the woman away.
But instead Jesus tries to explain: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
In other words, the mission of Jesus, at least for now, is for the Jews alone.
But she kneels before him: Lord help me. How often in the Gospels do we see this response of faith followed with a healing.
But in this case Jesus responds with what can be seen as an insult, a put down: Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs.”
Dogs were not held in the high esteem at that time that they are now. After all, it’s clear to Coline and I that Wally runs the rectory.
But then dogs were seen as unclean.
This passage has proved difficult for Biblical commentators and preachers over the years.
After all we preach a doctrine that says Jesus without sin.
But even in the Gospel narratives we have Jesus showing anger, frustration, despair at different times. Could he not have shared in some of the prejudices of his own time.
Isn’t there a possibility he was weary and just wanted to end this brief encounter.
Also puzzling is the end of this brief encounter, where it appears this unnamed woman gets the best of Jesus, which is rare in any Gospel encounters.
“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
This bold, but respectful retort is amazing.
Jesus is used to tripping up the leading Jewish authorities, scribes, and Pharisees. Yet he is matched by one of society’s lowliest members, a Gentile woman, of a hated minority.
And in response, Jesus displays his willingness to change in response to the woman’s faith and courage, Jesus heals her daughter.
What does this story mean for us?
If Jesus can learn to deal with prejudices of his day, surely we can learn to treat better those who like the Canaanite woman would be “the other” in our society.
In Canada that means we have to look at how we treat Native people, and other visible minorities. How do we treat people with other religious backgrounds.
We are all children of God, and it is in how we treat our neighbours that we demonstrate our love of God.
We must be prepared to have our eyes opened to the needs and gifts of others, as Jesus was in this story.
The worst thing is to try and separate ourselves as Christians into a “holy” club, feeling we are better than others.
Jesus met the world, albeit sometimes reluctantly, when he was weary and needed a rest. His followers came from the outcasts of society---poor, women, Gentiles.
The people most hostile to his message were the leaders of Israel, the religious authorities, the wealthy.
Part of our challenge in the church is that the church has become part of the establishment in many countries. It has lost its edge. It doesn’t reach out sufficiently to “the other.”
Let us pray that following the example of Jesus we can learn from our encounters with people who are "the other" and recognize in them our common humanity.
Sunday 7 August 2011
From Fear to Hope
Homily August 7/11 Yr. A Proper 14
Every time the stock markets tumble, like they did this past week because of economic uncertainty south of the border and in Europe, fear dominates our public square.
And with the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, it is hard not to be influenced by the climate of fear which strikes at times like these.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear of natural disaster. Fear for survival.
All those fears are part of our human condition. They were certainly present on that stormy night described in Matthew as the disciples left Jesus to pray and went out in the boat. There they were in the midst of an unexpected storm, and they kept getting further from land.
Suddenly in the middle of the night, they caught a glimpse of a figure amidst the waves.
They were terrified. They thought Jesus was still on the mountain top. They thought it was a ghost.
But it was Jesus: “Take heart, It is I,” he says. “Don’t be afraid.”
Those words echo through the ages to us as we live amidst the storms of life. Our faith is the way we are able to carry on, and overcome our fears.
This story can be viewed on many levels. It represents God with us in the storms of life.
We can also see the church as a boat, riding on the waves, with our faith in God giving us the strength to sail on and return to a safe harbour.
We can also see this whole story as a teaching about discipleship.
The disciples are challenged by the storms of persecution—opposition from the Pharisees, the Jewish religious authorities, soon to be joined by the Roman authorities. But inspired by Jesus, Peter makes a leap of faith, leaving the boat to walk on water.
He starts sinking and has doubts. But the story concludes with Jesus rescuing him and the disciples recognizing Jesus as the Son of God.
This movement from fear, to faith, then doubt, then worship expresses the complexity of the relationship we see between Jesus and his disciples in the Gospel.
It’s a complexity that makes the Gospels speak not only for the early Christians of those first few centuries, but for us now.
Fear is part of our lives. But we can’t let it take over our lives.
Jesus says: “Be not afraid.” That doesn’t mean there won’t be difficulties in our lives.
Hope can overcome fear. In the psalms the writers place their hopes in God in times of adversity.
Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that nothing can separate us from the love of God: not hardship, distress, persecution, famine, peril, death, powers, rulers. None of these can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
The antidote to the fears of the world, is faith, hope and love.
We profess that faith and that hope in our closing prayer in the Book of Alternative Services drawn from the Letter to the Ephesians: “Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
I am constantly humbled by the courage of those I care for in the midst of adversity. I think of Fran Skelton who so calmly and fearlessly faced suffering during the last years of her life, and particularly in her final struggle with cancer.
She never gave up hope. But she also faced death at peace.
Hope amid the storms of life. Faith amid the uncertainty of our age. Love amid the evil and strife in the world.
These are all part of our Christian journey. Hope must prevail over fear.
Getting back to fear over the US economic crisis, perhaps what is needed is for lawmakers in the US to step back and look at spending and what values it reflects.
Thousands of American clergy declared their opposition to the current strategy adopted by Congress in a campaign titled: “What would Jesus cut?”
Would Jesus cut a bloated defense budget which consumes 800 billion dollars a year? Or would Jesus cut--food stamps, education, medical care?
The real solution is if the United States taxed its citizens at the level of other countries including Canada, there would be no financial crisis.
South of the border the rich have never done better, and the poor never worse. And the middle class is shrinking away in a race to the bottom with low paid jobs for those able to find any work at all.
In the face of fear of economic collapse, the Christian response is to ask what our faith requires for the common good, for all the people, not just the rich. That is a consistent theme through the scriptures.
The bounty of the earth is for all to share. Jesus does not support survival of the fittest, but care for the poor, the disadvantaged.
And so rather than buy into the fear mongering about the US debt crisis, we should turn our attention to the unfolding humanitarian disaster unfolding in Africa, where a famine—the worst since the mid 1980’s, threatens 11 million people.
As Anglicans, we can give through the Primate’s Fund and donations will be matched by the Canadian government until mid-September.
Every time the stock markets tumble, like they did this past week because of economic uncertainty south of the border and in Europe, fear dominates our public square.
And with the internet and the 24 hour news cycle, it is hard not to be influenced by the climate of fear which strikes at times like these.
Fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear of natural disaster. Fear for survival.
All those fears are part of our human condition. They were certainly present on that stormy night described in Matthew as the disciples left Jesus to pray and went out in the boat. There they were in the midst of an unexpected storm, and they kept getting further from land.
Suddenly in the middle of the night, they caught a glimpse of a figure amidst the waves.
They were terrified. They thought Jesus was still on the mountain top. They thought it was a ghost.
But it was Jesus: “Take heart, It is I,” he says. “Don’t be afraid.”
Those words echo through the ages to us as we live amidst the storms of life. Our faith is the way we are able to carry on, and overcome our fears.
This story can be viewed on many levels. It represents God with us in the storms of life.
We can also see the church as a boat, riding on the waves, with our faith in God giving us the strength to sail on and return to a safe harbour.
We can also see this whole story as a teaching about discipleship.
The disciples are challenged by the storms of persecution—opposition from the Pharisees, the Jewish religious authorities, soon to be joined by the Roman authorities. But inspired by Jesus, Peter makes a leap of faith, leaving the boat to walk on water.
He starts sinking and has doubts. But the story concludes with Jesus rescuing him and the disciples recognizing Jesus as the Son of God.
This movement from fear, to faith, then doubt, then worship expresses the complexity of the relationship we see between Jesus and his disciples in the Gospel.
It’s a complexity that makes the Gospels speak not only for the early Christians of those first few centuries, but for us now.
Fear is part of our lives. But we can’t let it take over our lives.
Jesus says: “Be not afraid.” That doesn’t mean there won’t be difficulties in our lives.
Hope can overcome fear. In the psalms the writers place their hopes in God in times of adversity.
Paul writes in his letter to the Romans that nothing can separate us from the love of God: not hardship, distress, persecution, famine, peril, death, powers, rulers. None of these can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
The antidote to the fears of the world, is faith, hope and love.
We profess that faith and that hope in our closing prayer in the Book of Alternative Services drawn from the Letter to the Ephesians: “Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
I am constantly humbled by the courage of those I care for in the midst of adversity. I think of Fran Skelton who so calmly and fearlessly faced suffering during the last years of her life, and particularly in her final struggle with cancer.
She never gave up hope. But she also faced death at peace.
Hope amid the storms of life. Faith amid the uncertainty of our age. Love amid the evil and strife in the world.
These are all part of our Christian journey. Hope must prevail over fear.
Getting back to fear over the US economic crisis, perhaps what is needed is for lawmakers in the US to step back and look at spending and what values it reflects.
Thousands of American clergy declared their opposition to the current strategy adopted by Congress in a campaign titled: “What would Jesus cut?”
Would Jesus cut a bloated defense budget which consumes 800 billion dollars a year? Or would Jesus cut--food stamps, education, medical care?
The real solution is if the United States taxed its citizens at the level of other countries including Canada, there would be no financial crisis.
South of the border the rich have never done better, and the poor never worse. And the middle class is shrinking away in a race to the bottom with low paid jobs for those able to find any work at all.
In the face of fear of economic collapse, the Christian response is to ask what our faith requires for the common good, for all the people, not just the rich. That is a consistent theme through the scriptures.
The bounty of the earth is for all to share. Jesus does not support survival of the fittest, but care for the poor, the disadvantaged.
And so rather than buy into the fear mongering about the US debt crisis, we should turn our attention to the unfolding humanitarian disaster unfolding in Africa, where a famine—the worst since the mid 1980’s, threatens 11 million people.
As Anglicans, we can give through the Primate’s Fund and donations will be matched by the Canadian government until mid-September.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)