Sunday, May 31, 2020

Pentecost - The Spirit of Peace and Justice

Acts 2:1-21; John 20:19-23

What does peace look like? I mean, the peace that Jesus sends through the Holy Spirit––what does it look like? Or feel like?

What comes immediately to my mind is the passage from Isaiah 11:6, “and the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid, and the calf and the lion, and a little child shall lead them.” And then I think of Psalm 23, or an of the shepherd images in the bible, and sheep grazing peacefully in the field, warm in the sunshine, safe from all enemies. And then there’s our Gospel reading, where Jesus talks about peace as a state of forgiveness––relationships restored, peace between peoples. Long-standing conflicts resolved, people previously at war standing arm-in-arm. When I imagine the peace of the Holy Spirit, that’s what I picture––calm, serene, restful. The Spirit of gentleness.

I would love that kind of peace in the world. Especially after watching the news yesterday, and seeing what is going on in the United States. And I want to say, it’s easy for us up in Canada to look down south of the border and shake our heads, and say oh, well, and shrug. But, as Christians, we ought not to be quite so dismissive. For one thing, those are people, just like you and I. They are our neighbours, whom God calls us to love and care for. The peaceful protestors out in the daytime, and even those destroying property after the sun goes down, they are fellow human beings, one with us in God’s eyes. The police officers who are continuing to use violent means––pepper spray, tear gas, vehicles as battering rams, knees on backs and throats, and the black men and women who are bearing that violence on their bodies, all of them are our neighbours, fellow humans, one with us in Christ. We cannot dismiss what is going on to the south of us. And, for another, we are not exempt in Canada from our own forms of racism, against indigenous people, and yes, even against people with different skin colour than our own. And so, seeing all of this, I yearn for the peace that Jesus promises to send through the Holy Spirit. The bringing together of all people from different places, with different languages, into one.

But I admit that I experience some unease when I hear the actual words from our reading from Acts. Peter says, quoting the prophet Joel, “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.” I love those verses. The Holy Spirit comes to all, regardless of status or age or gender. The Holy Spirit does not discriminate. This is why we have children’s Sunday, you know––because the Holy Spirit does not bless only those who have reached a certain age.

But those aren’t the verses that make me uneasy. What makes me uneasy is what comes after: “And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.”

Those are not descriptions of the kind of peace that we would want. These are not times where lions and lambs lie down peacefully. These are not times of warm sunshine in a field of flowers, or cool clean water to drink. This peace does not sound calm, or serene, or restful. This is a Spirit of upset, of tempest and earthquake.

And yet, to people whose lives have been misery, who have been trampled on and oppressed, who are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being assaulted, maybe these words do bring peace? This was the situation of those early Christians for whom the book of Acts was written. And the situation of those for whom the prophet Joel was writing. And the situation of black people in America, whose grandmothers and grandfathers still remember segregation and various states preventing black voters from registering and their young men being killed by white mobs for not crossing to the other side of the street when a white woman walked their way. This is not ancient history––this is less than 80 years ago. All around the world, actually, there are people whose lives are being made such a misery that Joel’s words of the day of the Lord being preceded by fire and blood and darkness, by the complete overturning of all the structures of the world, sound like the prelude to peace.

So which is it? Which does the Holy Spirit bring? Which verses embody what happens when the Holy Spirit is present? It is calm or is it destruction? Does the Spirit bring sunny meadows or burning cars?

I think it’s both. When the Holy Spirit is present, there is both justice and peace. There can’t be one without the other. Peace without justice is peace only for some. It is a fake peace, it is like smiling when you don’t mean it. Peace without justice is like leaving the room rather than continuing the argument, but the feelings still linger and poison the air. Peace without justice is like shunning someone––sure, the conflict has stopped, but there is no true reconciliation.

And justice without peace is justice only for some. It’s a fake justice, like one sibling getting sent to their room for something the other sibling did. Justice without peace is what happens when a government jails political prisoners. Justice without peace is like someone being forced to apologize when they don’t mean it. Again, sure, the conflict has stopped, but there is no true reconciliation.
True peace requires justice, and true justice leads to peace. This is very hard to accept. It is very hard to accept that the Spirit brings both. We usually tend to fall on one side or the other––it might be easier for us to accept justice, but not peace, or it might be easier for us to accept peace, but not justice. But that is not the new life that Jesus brings, that is not the vision that God has in mind for us. God wants more for us––God wants true peace and true justice for us, and so they must go hand in hand.

Now normally, I like to have something practical in my sermons, but I’m not exactly sure how to do that in this case. The gap between what God wants for us and what we want for ourselves seems too vast to cross in this case. But this is what I will say: if you yearn for justice, try working a bit for peace. Maybe there is a situation in your own life where you are bothered by injustice, where you feel oppressed or wrongly treated. In that situation, maybe the Holy Spirit is calling you to work for peace, as your path to justice. And if you yearn for peace, then try working for justice. Maybe people are around you are fighting, and you wish they would just stop. Maybe the news bothers you, maybe protests unsettle you, and you wish they would just be over and everybody would go home. In that situation, maybe the Holy Spirit is calling you to take steps towards acting for justice, to find out what is actually going on, to engage in the issue, maybe the Spirit is calling you to work for justice, as your path to peace.


We need both. We need those prophets whom the Spirit calls to speak and fight for justice. And we need those calm voices whom the Spirit calls to speak and plead for peace. When we pray, “Your will be done on earth as in heaven,” this is what we’re praying for. We’re praying for the Holy Spirit to bring peace and justice together. We’re praying for the wolf and the lamb to lie down together, and we’re praying for the blood and fire that precedes the day of the Lord. We’re praying to be filled with the Spirit of Jesus, who flipped tables in the Temple and died on the cross asking for forgiveness for those who put him there. And God will answer. The Holy Spirit will come. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday, May 24, 2020

Easter 7 - Children's Sunday - Praying

Acts 1:6-14; John 17:11

[This is a summary of the children's sermon conversation. It was preached by Pastor Daranne Harris for me.]

In Acts, Jesus leaves the disciples. They are alone, and so they go to an upper room where they are staying, and they spend time praying together.

What is praying?

  • Communicating with God
  • Letting God communicate with us

What are ways that people communicate?
  • Talking, sign language, singing, laughing, crying
  • Non-verbal--faces, hugs, dancing, writing and reading, drawing

What are ways people and God can communicate?
  • All the ways people communicate are ways God and us communicate
  • That's called prayer!

In Acts, the disciples prayed together. How can we pray together?
  • Aloud together (using our own words, or the Lord's Prayer)
  • Silently together (listening, reading prayers)
  • Being still together (sitting, kneeling, standing, holding hands)
  • Moving together (dancing, waving arms, rocking)

(Do we have to be together to pray together?
  • No! We can pray any time and any where, and God gathers us together.
  • God makes us one, just like Jesus said.
  • Of course, you can always call up anybody from church, especially me, and ask to pray together, and we always will.)

Why do we pray together?
  • The disciples prayed together because they felt lonely after Jesus left.
  • We pray together to feel God with us.
  • We pray together so others feel God with them.

God gave us lots of different ways to pray together so that we will never feel lonely, and so hat we will feel that God is always with us!

Thanks be to God for prayer! Amen!

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Easter 5 - God's Love for God's Other Children

John 14:1-14

Oh, the Gospel of John. Full of so much beauty, and so many memorable verses. “In the beginning was the Word...” “For God so loved the world....” “I am the good Shepherd...” and this, Jesus’ proclamation, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me.” Even those who have not grown up in the church can recite this one––it’s been recited throughout history. But, as I asked last week, with another of John’s verses, what does it mean?

It seems pretty obvious on the surface. Jesus is the way––the only way––to God. And, as a corollary, it seems to say that the only way that God loves us is through Jesus, particularly when the Gospel says later that the Father is shown in the Son, and the Son reveals the Father. It fits with what we heard last Sunday, that Jesus is the gate, the only way to enter the sheepfold. It certainly supports centuries of the church saying that Christians are the only ones who are walking the way, the only ones who are entering the proper sheepfold, and therefore the only ones who are recipients of God’s salvation.

But there’s a problem with this surface-level interpretation, not the least of which is that we are no longer quite so comfortable with asserting our Christian superiority. The big problem is in the Gospel of John itself: when Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” and when Jesus says, in the passage we read today, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.... In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” The problem is that when we look closely, the Gospel has a contradiction in it.

So what does this mean? How can Jesus say he is both the only way to God and that there are other sheep that do not belong to this fold? How can he say that belief in him is the only way to eternal life and say that there are actually many dwelling places that God has built?

So today is Mother’s Day. Before I had children, I had this idea that a mother is supposed to love all her children exactly the same. And, as I have siblings, as a child, I would be perplexed that my mother seemed to love us all in different ways. One of us would get a privilege, or a a punishment (they were called responsibilities), that the others didn’t. It was confusing, and a source of feelings of either superiority or inferiority, depending on the situation.

This is not to say that I doubted my mother’s love––I knew that she loved each of us equally, which is to say with all her heart. But what I didn’t understand, until I had to raise my own children, is that the way a mother loves each of her children depends on the child.

You see, each child has different needs for love. Some children need a snuggly, cuddly kind of love, with lots of reassurance and hugs. Other kids find being hugged to be too much, and they need more of a challenging kind of love, that encourages them to take risks and go out on their own. Some kids thrive under a quiet, soft love, while other kids need a loud, boisterous love. Some kids do well with gentle cautions, while others only learn what they need to know the hard way. Misreading what a child needs can mean that the love a mother shows is not felt by her child––quite the opposite. Love is not one size fits all. It is one of the challenges of motherhood to figure out what kind of love each child needs, and then to give that to them, and then, as the child grows and their needs change, to respond appropriately. 

This is also true of us in our relationship with God and the love we need from God. Probably one of the worst assumptions anyone can make is that we all relate to God the same way, and that we all need the same things from God. We all need to be loved by God, but how we need that love to take shape is different for each of us. Some of us need God to comfort us, like a mother comforts her child when things are scary. Some of us need a challenging God, who encourages us to take risks on behalf of our neighbours, who pushes us to fight for justice. Some of us need God to be vulnerable with us, to love us by sharing our suffering, while others of us need God to be the mighty protector, taking control of our lives in times of crisis. I would even guess that most of us, throughout the course of our lives, have needed all of these things from God at various times. There is a reason Scripture describes God as both merciful and mighty, as both judging and forgiving, as both nurturing and awe-inspiring. 

Like a good mother, like “the best mother in the whole world,” God loves each of us in exactly the way we need. When we need a protecting God, that is how God loves us. When we need a challenging God, that is how God loves us. God doesn’t always love us the way we want, mind you, but God always loves us the way we need. When we say that God is love, this is what we mean. The problem comes, though, when we believe that the way we need love is the way that everyone else should need it, too. The problem comes when we proclaim that our need is everyone else’s need, when we assume that God loves each of God’s children in exactly the same way. 

And so we come back to the Gospel reading for today. When this Gospel was written, it was for a very specific group of God’s children, who had very specific needs for God’s love. The original audience of this Gospel was Christians who were gathered together, most probably in Ephesus, which is in modern-day Turkey, at least fifty years after Jesus’ death. It’s highly unlikely that any of them would have known Jesus personally, or that any of them would have experienced worshipping as Jews at the Temple in Jerusalem. The best guess of biblical scholars is that they were a community of non-Jewish Christians who were being told by those outside their community that they could not be loved or saved by God because they were not part of the covenant God made with Moses at Sinai. In other words, they were not Jews, and they would not be saved, because they did not have the love of God’s covenant through Torah.

And so Jesus’ message of love is to these non-Jewish Christians, to reassure them that they don’t need to be loved through Torah to be saved by the love of God. Jesus is telling them that they can rely on God’s love through Jesus. They don’t need to look elsewhere. Jesus is telling them that God loves them in a way that is particular to what they need, which is through Christ, who suffices as their way, and their truth, and their life.

But while this was Jesus’ message to this particular group of Christians, it doesn’t mean that this message is meant for all of God’s children everywhere. Again, a good mother doesn’t love each of her children the same way, or show that love in the same way. We, as Christians, need the love of God that we experience through Christ. But that is not necessarily the case for those who aren’t Christian. It’s certainly not the case for Jews, whom God continues to love through Torah. After the horror of the Holocaust, Christians finally realized that Christ is not the way, the truth, and the life for Jews. Quite the opposite. God does not show love to them the same God shows love to us. And perhaps this is true for people of other religions, or no religion, as well. The love we need is not the love they need, but they are God’s children, too. And so perhaps God shows love for them differently than God shows love for us.


So how can we say this? How do we know this is true? Well, there are those other verses in the Gospel of John––Jesus has other sheep, and God’s house has many dwellings. But other than that, we don’t know. I could be wrong. But I do know that a good mother loves her children the way each one needs, and God’s love for all of God’s children is deeper than even the best mother’s love. God loves us Christians through Christ. Nothing else will work for us. Christ is the way, the truth, and the life––for Christians. As for those who are not Christian, who need God’s love in a different way? Well, it’s not a child’s place to tell their mother how she should love her other children. We know that God is full of love for all of God’s Creation, and that God will not turn aside or abandon those who are not of Christ’s fold, just as God has not abandoned us. And so we say, Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday, May 03, 2020

Easter 4 - What is Abundant Life?

John 10:10

What makes for an abundant life? Jesus says to his disciples, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” In other places in this Gospel, he talks about coming so that people may have eternal life, and in this Easter season, we talk a lot about resurrection life, and about Easter life, and about new life. It sounds simple, it sounds wonderful, it’s what we need to hear right now. But what is life? What is this thing that Jesus promises in abundance? What does he mean?

Well, we could start with a medical definition of life––life is when our heart is still beating, our brain is still operating, our lungs are still breathing. Those seem to be pretty standard baselines. 
But already we’re in murky waters––what about people who are brain-dead, where these things are all happening but only because there are machines helping. If a machine is breathing for someone, is that life? Is that abundant life? What about people who are able to breathe on their own, whose bodies are functioning well, but who are at the most extreme spectrum of dementia? Who can’t talk or recognize the loved ones who come to them? Is that life? Is that abundant life?

I suspect that as I ask these questions, you are already beginning to form answers in your mind. And I suspect that even as you do, you may be having second thoughts about your first reactions. The difficult thing about the question of ‘what is life’ is that there is no universal answer to this question. Each of us answers it in our own way, based on how we have lived our own lives up to now, and even now, our answers might change.

It’s an important question though, because our answers shape how we live right now. We are actually experiencing this. Everyone has their own opinion on what life is, and on what kind of life is the best life to live, and now that we are collectively choosing to limit our lives for the sake of others, we are having to figure out what those limitations should be. What do we need to live, and what makes life worth living? What makes life abundant? What is essential, and what is extra?

Some things are obvious––food is essential. Shelter is essential. I think we have rediscovered that relationships and companionship are essential. I think we can agree on all these things. But what about personal freedom? Is getting outdoors essential? What about a functioning economy? Or meaningful work? Is music? Is art? Are any of these things essential? Would we risk our biological life––our physical life––for them? Do they give us abundant life? These aren’t rhetorical questions, and once again, we are back to each of us having our own answers. It’s just that now, we have to make real-life decisions based on them that impact not only ourselves but those around us, and we don’t all agree.

We don’t all agree and there are lots of people trying to tell us what the answer should be and promising that if we follow their advice, we will experience abundant life. Some people promise that opening up the economy will give us all new life. Others promise that staying closed is the only way forward. Some people promise that herd immunity will give the whole community true life. Others promise that universal testing and vaccinations are the only way. I like to believe that each group has very sincere reasons for promising what they do, and that each really does believe that they are right. And so the question becomes, who do we trust? Whose promises are reliable? Whom do we allow to shape how we live right now?

This is really what it’s about. It’s not about whether or not we can agree on what is life, it’s about whom we trust to give us that life, whose promise we trust about how to achieve that life, whatever that life might turn out to be. I don’t think we can ever come to an agreement on the definition of what life is, never mind what abundant life is. I don’t think we can come to an agreement because I don’t think there is one single answer. What life is for me, will not be the same as what it is for someone else. I got life this weekend from sitting on the roof of our deck and taking it apart. That’s not life for everyone. I could promise you that doing the same would give you life, but I would be making a lot of assumptions about what gives you life.

So, if you don’t trust me, who do you trust to give you life, whatever that life might be? Who do you allow to shape the way you live right now? Well, as Christians, we trust the one for whom we are named, Jesus Christ. We trust the one who says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” even if we don’t know exactly what that means. We trust the Son sent by the Father who created the world and started life. We trust the One who sent the Son, who delivered God’s people from slavery in Egypt, who worked through Elijah and through Jesus to raise the dead, who brought the people back from exile, who sent the Spirit upon Jesus at his baptism, who raised him from the dead. We trust the One who knew us in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139), who sent the Holy Spirit to us at our own baptism, and who has been with us every minute of our lives. We trust God––Father, Son, and Holy Spirit––because we have seen God deliver on these promises of life, and we have experienced that life, however momentarily, for ourselves. We don’t know exactly what the promised life looks like, but we do know exactly who the promise-giver is.

Of course, there are certain things that Jesus said and did that tell us a lot about what kind of life he is promising. We know that, in the Gospel of John, his first miracle was to attend a wedding and turn the plain water into good wine. So there is definitely something there about the quality of life being important.

We also know that Jesus’ second miracle was to bring back from the dead the child of a royal official, one of Herod’s lackeys. So we know that there is definitely something there about life being for everyone, for our enemies as well as our friends.

We know that the life Jesus promises is eternal, it is life that comes after death, Jesus does not promise there is no death. This is hard when we’re enjoying the life we have, but it’s also a gift when we realize that death is inevitable. There is something after this.

And, we know that the life that Jesus promises is for all. It’s for the community––it’s not just for the rich, or the privileged, or even the deserving. It’s for each of us and for all of us. The life that Jesus promises is not life for some at the cost of others. It does not require compromise. It is, somehow, through the mercy and might of God, for all. Good life, abundant life, eternal life, for enemy and friend alike.


And so, knowing that, it turns out that we do have an idea about makes for an abundant life. We live so that life might be good, for ourselves and for others. We love our neighbours as ourselves. We live believing that this life is not all we have, that there is more to come. We live trusting in the promise that Easter is real, because we live trusting the promise-giver himself. We trust the One who laid down his life for ours, we trust the One who was himself raised to new life, we trust the One who sends the Holy Spirit to us. We trust the One, Jesus Christ, who said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Thanks be to God. Amen.