Sunday, May 22, 2022

Easter 6 - Do not let your hearts be troubled

 Acts 16:9-15; Rev 21:10, 22–22:5; John 14:23-29

“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

I wish it were that easy. As much as I try not to “let” it happen, my heart is troubled. A year ago, as part of my work with the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, I did a deep dive into the membership numbers of our denomination, along with looking at the numbers of pastors, and the numbers of congregations. I knew all these numbers were going down—we all know that, but I wanted how much exactly. And here’s what I found.

From 2015 to 2020, so pre-pandemic, in the four western Synods of the ELCIC—BC, Alberta and the Territories, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba––the number of ELCIC members declined by 3.5% year over year. And math being what it is, the total loss of members for that time period was over one third. We shrunk by a third in just five years.

But membership doesn’t tell us everything, so I looked at actual attendance numbers. Across the four Synods, attendance dropped by 54%. And remember, this is pre-pandemic. I’ve been sitting with these numbers for a year, and they still shock and trouble me.

Now what was interesting, and this is just a side note, is that the number of pastors declined at the same rate as the number of members. But the number of congregations basically stayed the same. It turns out that we don’t have a shortage of pastors, we have a surplus of congregations. Congregations themselves are getting thinner and thinner, but not closing, and so the same number of pastors are still needed, even though the number of actual people they serve is fewer. It feels like a shortage of pastors, because of how many congregations don’t have one, but the ratio of pastors to ELCIC members is actually constant. Not that that is any comfort to members of those individual congregations that don’t have one.

So, like I said, my heart is troubled, and here comes Jesus saying, don’t let it be troubled, I’m giving you peace, it’s all good. I know he’s right, but gosh it still feels hard. I yearn for that peace, but the reality is staring me in the face, and I find Jesus’ words hard to follow.

What I really want is what we hear about in this week’s reading from Revelation. Right on the heels of last week’s beautiful vision of no more crying or mourning or death, we have this glorious promise of the city of Christ, where the trees with twelve fruit means there is no more hunger, the river through the middle means there is no thirst, and open gates because of no night means that there are no wild animals or brigands to threaten the city dwellers. Everyone is at peace, their bodies are at peace, and their spirits are at peace. God comes down to be with them, Christ lives in their midst, and their hearts are not troubled by anything.

That’s what I want. I think that’s what we all want. We want that city, with Christ as its center, to come down and be among us. And it may be that I lack imagination, but it is hard for me to believe this will happen, for real. I don’t know how to hold the reality we live in with this vision that is promised.

When one of my kids was little, like four years old, they asked me, “Mommy, how can Jesus be on the moon and in my heart at the same time?” And I was like, what? And they said, “Jesus is everywhere, so Jesus is on the moon. And Jesus is also in my heart. How?” And I remember being very grateful to their Christian preschool, for making real for them both that Jesus is everywhere and Jesus is in their heart.

I wonder, in this time when our hearts are troubled, if perhaps we might think of the city of the Lamb as in Revelation coming down to dwell, not on earth per se, but in our hearts. Might we imagine, and even believe, that the glorious city of God, with everything necessary to feed and water our spirits, to protect us from clouds of despair so that our hearts can remain open to those around us, and to give us a peace despite our troubles, will come down and even is right now coming down into our hearts?

It seems to me that in these troubling times, when Jesus tells us not to let our hearts be troubled, he isn’t telling us to ignore or deny that times are troubling. Instead, perhaps he is calling us to let him come into our hearts, bringing his peace—God’s peace—with him, to be there in the centre of our troubled hearts. He is calling us to let him in, not as a denial of the seriousness of the situations we find ourselves in, not so we can go around saying, “everything is fine!”, but so that he can face our troubles with us, so he can nourish us and give us strength to live with them, so that he can protect us from being overwhelmed by them. “My peace I give to you, I do not give as the world gives.”

So let’s take the opportunity right now, for the next few minutes, to open our hearts to let Jesus come in. Now, I know this isn’t very Lutheran, we prefer to let Christ come into our heads, not so much into our hearts, that’s more of a Pentecostal or Pietist thing to do, but I think we can try. So I’m going to invite you to sit up straight, shoulders back, chin up, (and of course, you don’t have to do this if it’s too much). Wherever you are, whether you’re at home or here in the church, go ahead and just kind of settle into that position. And if you’re at home, you are more than welcome to get down and lie on the floor. (You can do that here in church too if you want, why not?) And now I invite you to take a big breath in and out. And as you breathe out imagine the troubles in your heart just settling down, calming down, and then breathe Christ in. And we’re going to sit here for a moment. And remember that we’re all doing this together, and we’re imagining the beautiful city of God, with Christ in its center coming into our hearts. And Christ is filling up our hearts, and shining so brightly that there is no more night, and feeding all those tiny pockets that are yearning for peace, and Christ is building up some protection against hopelessness, and despair, and evil, so that they can’t enter. With every breath in, just keep imagining your heart opening up and Christ coming in.

If you feel at peace, even for a small moment, know that this is the peace of Christ, the peace that passes all understanding. This is the peace that Jesus gives to you, that Jesus leaves with you.

And if you didn’t feel any peace, that’s okay. I invite to keep trying, every day this week, even just five minutes a day, wherever you find yourself (maybe not in your car waiting for a red light to change), but really anywhere, and let Christ into your heart, and eventually, sooner or later, he will come. This I believe.

The peace of Christ doesn’t mean we deny the reality we live in. But this peace does let us live with the facts of our reality without being troubled. Which frees us to act in hope and trust to create a new future. I’ll remind you, since we are in Easter, that resurrection life never looks like the old life… Christ’s future that we are acting for is not going to look like what it did before, we are never going back to pre-pandemic times or to the good old days … but again, do not let your hearts be troubled by that. Because Christ is here, in the heart of every person here and at home, and Christ will bring us through this moment to the next, and the next, and the next. But we don’t have to wait for the glory of Christ to be revealed, it is revealed now, in our hearts, and it is also real. Thanks be to God, amen.
   

Sunday, May 15, 2022

Easter 5 - Creation’s Visions of Resurrection

Easter 5 - Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
Advent Lutheran Church, Calgary

What visions we are given today from Scripture! In this fifth Sunday of Easter, when we are over a month past that glorious Easter Sunday, it’s a blessing to be reminded, once again, of the new life that Christ’s resurrection has inaugurated. To be reminded, as the visionary of the book of Revelation says, that “God will dwell with [us] and be with [us] and wipe every tear from [our] eyes,” that “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” And to be reassured, through the story in Acts, that God gave Peter a vision of radical inclusion through Jesus Christ and the blessing of the Holy Spirit on all peoples, a continuation of the miracle at Pentecost. And even in our Scripture from the Gospel of John, to hear Jesus, who knows that Judas is about to betray him, continuing to proclaim that love is the way, and that this love is the glory of God. All together, our Scripture readings remind us that resurrection life is real, and that God calls us to live and love in that resurrection world.

It’s inspiring. But I confess that it has been hard to live into this resurrection world. I read the stories from Acts and think, Where is my vision? Where is my voice from heaven? I receive the words from our second reading, the wonderful words about death being no more, and I think, “How long, O Lord?” The vision in Revelation was given when the Christian church was being persecuted by Roman Emperors, but that was almost 2,000 years ago - we are still waiting for God’s city to come down among us. In just this year alone, it seems we have moved even farther away from “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” than ever: more Canadians are dying from fentanyl poisoning than ever before; the medical journal The Lancet estimates that we are approaching 20 million COVID deaths (Volume 399: Issue 10334); American legislators are rolling back women’s rights to decide what to do with their own reproductive systems, nevermind attempting to criminalize people like myself, who actively support our transgendered children; more than fifty percent of Ukrainians have been displaced in just two months by Russian invaders; murderous white supremacy is on the rise as the people of Buffalo, NY experienced just yesterday, and, of course, there is the ever-increasing concern of climate change and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s April assessment that we have already blown past restricting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius and are well on our way to blowing past restricting it to only 3 degrees. 

One of these things is hard enough to live with, but when we take all of them together, along with those things that weigh on our hearts that I haven’t even mentioned, and it becomes difficult, if not almost impossible, to wait with genuine hope for the resurrection kingdom to come. And we don’t even need to be following the latest news on any of these issues to feel exhausted by this period of waiting for the Lord. Across the world, there is a general feeling of hopelessness about the future. Maybe you’ve noticed an increase in societal anxiety, polarization, divisiveness? Or maybe the opposite - an increase in cynicism, apathy, exhaustion? These are two sides of the same coin—these are two different manifestations of hopelessness. If you have noticed in yourself a tendency towards grumpiness, or exhaustion, know that you are not alone. This is what hopelessness can feel like, this is what it can feel like when we lost hope that the resurrection world will be a reality for us.

And today we have these Scriptures calling us to live in hope, and more than that, to live as if our hope is real, no matter how long the time between that moment in Acts two thousand years ago and that moment when the new heaven and new earth will finally arrive in fullness. And I confess that while I do find them inspiring, there are many times in these past few years when I have found that gap between two thousand years ago and the fulfillment of the vision in Revelation really hard to live in. The Word of God remains the most important revelation of God that we have, but the written words are not always as alive for us as they were for those twenty centuries ago.

I have been reading and learning a lot about Christian Indigenous theologies over the last two years, particularly about how our Indigenous siblings receive the Word of God and understand God to reveal God’s self to them. One of the most helpful things I have learned is that Indigenous people believe that God is revealed not only through the stories in Scripture but also through the world around us, through Creation. The animals, the plants, the rivers, even the rocks reveal God to us, because they, too, are made in the image of God. They, too, are recipients of God’s Holy Spirit, proclaiming as much to us about the resurrection world as our Bible does.

And so this spring, I have been looking to nature, to the plants and animals that share this Treaty 7 territory with us, to experience the resurrection of Christ in the here and now. And here is the vision that I have been given, the blessings of the Holy Spirit that I see flowing upon us all as we wait:
I see that the grass is pushing its tiny blades of green through last year’s straw. I see that the trees are sending out their tiny leaves to receive the sun’s rays. When I drove back from Saskatchewan last week, I saw that baby cows are wobbling though the stubbly fields next to their moms. (Yes, I know they’re called calves, but ‘baby cows’ sounds cuter.) I see that the prairie sage in my garden has tripled in number from what I planted last year. And these plants and animals are saying to me, “We will continue to live and to grow, despite what the climate change reports predict about life ten years from now. We will continue to live and to grow in this moment, with this spring that God has given us.” I see them moving into spring trusting that these next few months will unfold as God has intended them to.

I see the little kindergarten children running out of their classroom to clamber on the school playground behind my house, and I hear them laughing and shouting with joy. I don’t know any of them personally, but I have seen their bodies grow from those awkward and timid September days to smooth and confident almost-Grade-1 bodies six months later. And their lengthening, strengthening muscles and bones say to me, “We will continue to grow and strengthen, despite the continuing and even worsening COVID pandemic. We will continue to laugh and rejoice in this sunny day that God has given us.”

I feel the sunshine getting warmer and the days getting longer as the earth continues its yearly circling through the solar system and continues its daily turning on our wobbling axis. I saw pictures from the new JW Space Telescope of galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies, saturated with stars and presumably planets. I saw just this week an actual picture of the centre of our galaxy, of the supermassive black hole, and was reminded that the Milky Way, created by the Word of God that was in the beginning and is now and ever will be, is over 13 billion years old. And these metereological and cosmological wonders say to me, “God’s ongoing acts of creation and new life have continued for billions upon billions of years, and will continue, despite the death and war you humans wreak on one another. We will continue to give birth to new stars and new planets and new life in this cosmic moment that God has given us.”

God continues to give us visions and experiences of the living Word in the here and now, in addition to the visions we receive from Scripture. Indigenous theologians are teaching us that God gives us the living Word, the experience of the resurrection life of Christ, in this very moment, in the world around us. God has not ceased bringing new life to us, it just looks different than what we expect, as all resurrection life does. 

God continues giving us, as God gave to Peter in Acts and as God gave to the writer of the book of Revelation, ever new visions and experiences of resurrection, not to deny the pain and death in our world, but to proclaim that this pain and death is not the end. We will not be stuck with it forever. And as we wait, inspired and refreshed again by these new visions, we can indeed act for life and newness and resurrection for all of Creation, we can indeed live with hope, because we—and all of creation—have been and still are the recipients of God’s new life. Thanks be to God, Amen.