July 31, 2016 - Give us This Day

Ecclesiastes, Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21

The fruit in the store right now is excellent, isn’t it? All the raspberries and blueberries and cherries? My dad really likes Black Forest Cherry Cake, and so I try to make him one for his birthday every February, but it’s really hard to find cherries in February. So I was thinking that this year I would get some and freeze them, and I imagine my family, come February, sitting down and really enjoying this beautiful cake with these wonderful cherries, the wonderful taste of summer when the winter is surrounding us. And of course, as I am thinking about this, I hear the gospel in my head, and Jesus saying, “You fool, says God, This very night your life is being demanded of you!” Ouch! And if that isn’t enough, we then have our first reading for today, from Ecclesiastes, saying, “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher. All is vanity.” Isn’t that a thing to say? That it’s foolish and vanity for me to think about freezing the cherries to be enjoyed later, just as the rich man in Jesus’ parable saved up his grain for a later date? That no matter how you spend your life, no matter what you do so that at the end of your life you can look back with happiness, “All the deeds that are done under the sun ... is vanity and a chasing after wind.” I’m thinking about only a few months from now, but the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Jesus, are thinking about our entire lives. Whether our deeds done under the sun include a lifetime of working for career success, or the intense sacrifice made to raising a good family, or the daily work of being a good Christian, all is vanity. None of it will make us happy when the time comes. All is vanity. It’s quite a kick, isn’t it?

It gets us, though, because it’s true. As the writer of Ecclesiastes notes, whom many have thought was King Solomon, no matter how hard we work at life, no matter what wisdom we might acquire in our lifetime, no matter what good we might do, our achievements don’t grant us enduring happiness. King Solomon knew that his great monuments and achievements would be taken over by someone else. His legacy would be passed on to the next generation, who might cherish it, but then again, might just as equally not. And we know this to be true. The values that we hold so dear in our lives, that we worked so hard and sacrificed to uphold, aren’t always as dear to the next generation. Indeed, the values that we ourselves hold weren’t necessarily the values that our grandparents held. Anyone who has ever had to go through boxes of papers after a parent or grandparent has died can tell you––what one generation treasured is often meaningless to the next. Vanity. And knowing this, it is true that looking back on a lifetime spent building up something in the hopes that it would bring us happiness at the end of our life, and then seeing that it is valued only by ourselves and no one else, well, our happiness disappears. Vanity. Even Jesus’ portrayal of God in the Gospel reading for today tells us that God thinks it is vanity as well. The rich man builds a barn to hold the extra grain for the future––akin to putting money away in a pension or RRSP, or putting energy into creating a legacy for future generations––and God calls him a fool. There is nothing we can do today that will guarantee our happiness in the future.

The reason it doesn’t guarantee happiness in the future is because there is nothing we can do to guarantee happiness at all. The writer of Ecclesiastes says, in the parts that we didn’t read this morning, that there is no difference between being righteous and wicked. He sees that “righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous,” and this, too, he calls vanity––meaninglessness. And we might rightly say that the writer of Ecclesiastes sounds very cynical. But, at the same time, we might also say that he is right. We do all die in the end, regardless of whether we have worked hard or been lazy, tried to be wise or made bad decisions our whole life, regardless of whether we have gone to church every Sunday or stayed at home, we all die. And before we die, whether we are righteous or wicked makes no difference to the events that occur in our lives. Solomon saw, and we see too: the wicked are successful, they are loved, they are well-fed and rested. And the righteous encounter hardship and suffering in life. Working hard, being wise, going to church - these things don’t stop tragedy from entering our lives. They don’t stop cancer or chronic pain, they don’t stop heartbreak or broken relationships, they don’t stop mental illness or even addiction, they don’t stop devastating car crashes or fires. The truth of the world seems to be that many things in our life are, from our perspective, completely random. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to them. We can try our best to live right, but we have very limited control over the circumstances in our lives, and so we have no way to arrange things to make us happy either today or when we die.

So how do we live, then? How do we live each day with meaning, when the events of our lives are random and we don’t know if they will get better or worse? How do we carry on knowing that everything is vanity and yet refusing to give in to despair or live lives of complete hedonism and self-centredeness? And how do we worship and thank God in the midst of it?

It’s interesting that our assigned reading from Ecclesiastes stops where it does. I have no idea why it ends at verse 23 and doesn’t continue to verse 24. Because verse 24 is important. It is so important that the writer of Ecclesiastes repeats it four times in the whole book. After listing all the things that are vanity, by saying that there is nothing on earth that we can do to bring ourselves happiness, he says, “There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from God who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” In the next chapter, he says, “I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live, moreover it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.” And again, later, “This is what I have seen to be good; it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us; for this is our lot.”

When it comes to the question of what gives us happiness in life, a deep contentment that comforts us when we are dying, Ecclesiastes gives us the answer. God gives us happiness. First, God gives us the basic elements of survival. God gives, to all of God’s creatures, what we need for eating and drinking. God gives us our daily bread. Which, as Luther points out in the Small Catechism, really means that God gives us everything. God gives us food, and good weather to grow the food, and an orderly government to ensure the food gets to us, and peace so that the roads aren’t disrupted with war, and neighbours to make the bread. We don’t make good weather, we don’t cause the sun to shine or the rain to fall. When it comes down to it, we can’t even provide the basic necessities of our own life. Only God does that. God gives us what we need for eating and drinking as a pure gift. To be enjoyed. To be happy over. 

And then God gives us the day to enjoy it. Luther himself commented that the point of the book of Ecclesiastes is to give us peace about today, without worrying about tomorrow. God opens our eyes in the morning not so that we will be faced with yet another dreary day, but so that we can revel in the joy of Creation. The Rocky Mountains, the vast prairie, the life-sustaining Bow river. Have you noticed the smell of clover everywhere this summer? God wakes us up and gives us the day simply so that we can enjoy it and go to sleep at night having had these moments of pure happiness. We didn’t put these things in the world––we couldn’t recreate them if we tried. They are God’s gift, and God gives us every today so that we might drink them in.

Now, God has a particular trick in play. One that ensures that we will find happiness in life, even though we are incapable of creating it ourselves. What is hard about the book of Ecclesiastes, and about life in general, is that we know that our happiness does not come from ourselves. Not from what we do, or how we think, or how we live. The richest person in the world experiences misery, and the poorest is somehow happy. But what is wonderful about the book of Ecclesiastes, and about life in general, is that our happiness is a gift from God. God gives us this: happiness, enjoyment, pleasure. And God gives it to us to be experienced now. We often have this idea that true happiness is only something to be enjoyed in the afterlife; that somehow if we are happy today we need to temper it, keep it down because this world is a vale of tears. But that is not the case. God gives us happiness today. Luther is very clear in his commentary on this book, “In this way, [the Christian] has joy in his toil here, and here in the midst of evils he enters into paradise.” We can’t work our way into happiness, we can’t worry our way into happiness, we can’t “righteous” our way into happiness. Happiness, that deep sense of contentment and joy, is a gift from God.

Which means two things. First, we are to stop worrying. Worrying is about the future. When we worry, or fret, or get anxious about something, we are replacing the goodness of today––God’s gift to us––with our own doubts about the future. Our worrying becomes our idol. When we are worried, end up living in all those ways Paul condemns in his letter to the Colossians for today. When we are worried we give in to fear, and we end up angry, full of wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language. But there is no need to behave in these ways because there is no need to worry. Luther said, in his explanation of the First Commandment, that “we are to fear, love, and trust only God.” When we worry, we are fearing that which is not God, and we are trusting only ourselves to fix it. So, do not worry. Let it go. God has already given you what you need for today.

The second thing is that instead of worrying, we can pray. Not that God will make things better for us, so that we can finally be happy. That is a prayer that tries to tell God what to do, a prayer that tries to take control of our lives. No. We pray that God will help us to be happy with the things we have already been given. (Now I understand that this can be a problem when we are living in situations of deep injustice, but that’s a problem for a different sermon.) We pray that God will give us a spirit of thankfulness, so that our eyes and our hearts might be open to the goodness that God gives us today. To the daily bread that God gives us––food, a house, clothes, good weather, good government, peace, friends, neighbours, good clergy, trustworthy police officers. We pray that God will make us aware in every moment of every day of the wonderful gifts we have been given, and that God will give us the happiness to enjoy it in that moment. And we thank God for doing so even before we have asked.

Now, it may very well be true that tonight my life is going to be demanded of me, and I might respond that Jesus never had a Black Forest Cherry Cake in the middle of February, but he is right. The writer of Ecclesiastes is right. We never know what tomorrow will bring. We never know whether we will be around to enjoy happiness in the future. So God gives us today to be happy. I will still freeze those cherries, but I will do so being happy that I have them today. Being grateful that God gives us such things as cherries and fruit, taking joy in them today. And when I lie on my deathbed, it is the memory of being happy over what God has given me this day, not over possible future happiness, that will make my life worthwhile. 

When we are lying on our deathbeds, as we all will, pondering over our lives, it will be the deep gratefulness for the ordinary moments that comfort us the most, moments that God has given us in order to gift us with great happiness. The moment the sun shines through the clouds. The moment a baby lifts up his voice. The moment we catch a sweet smell on the air. The moment a friend’s hand rests in ours. This moment. These are moments of life. Of God’s life. These moments are God’s gifts to us, to be enjoyed and cherished and treasured until the end. Thanks be to God. Amen.

July 3, 2016 - The Church as the Start Line

Galatians 6:1-16
Luke 10:1-11

One of the most frequently asked questions in the church today, and when I say church I mean the church at large, seems to be, “Why are churches emptying?” The question sometimes takes different forms: “Why don’t people come to church anymore?” “Where are all the young people?” “What programs can we start to get people to come to church?” “What’s the matter with people these days?” or, alternately, “What did we do wrong in the past that people don’t come anymore?”  There are all kinds of books and articles offering suggestions on how to fix the problem, seminars and workshops, seminary classes and leadership training events. It’s clear that the church at large is going through a crisis––shrinking congregations and dwindling memberships. Fewer and fewer people are participating in the life of what we call the institutional church. 

It’s anxiety-provoking. We try to ignore the unease that comes every Sunday when we walk into a church and joke, “I better sit down before my seat is taken,” but it’s there. We tell ourselves that we’re comforted by the familiar faces and the old hymns and liturgy, and we most certainly are, but sometimes we turn to that comfort to dull the pain we experience when we see Sunday morning attendance shrinking. I suspect that in our hearts, we worry that the kingdom of God is very far right now––far from the church and far from the world––and we wonder if somehow empty churches are a sign of our failure to bring that kingdom closer.

Our reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians this morning has a verse for the particular situation we find ourselves in. “You reap whatever you sow.” It’s a very troublesome verse––full of foreboding. And there are some who see the empty churches today as proof of that verse. They argue that churches focused on the wrong seeds––on moral living instead of restoring God’s kingdom of justice. Or on programs instead of spirituality. Or on the quantity of Christians rather than the quality of Christians. There are some who see the empty churches as fields that produced a thin harvest because bad seed was planted. And in some ways I think they are right. In the past, congregations have emphasized moral living over fighting for justice. We’ve focused on programs instead of prayer. We’ve celebrated the numbers of baptisms and confirmations and new members every month, but never celebrated the *depth* of faith of the remaining few. We have, too often, sown very thin and very superficial seed.

But what if the churches are empty for a completely different reason? What if the reason the churches are becoming empty now is because we are right now reaping the harvest of a lifetime of sowing the seed of true discipleship? Discipleship means following Christ in all that he does––walking the road that Christ did, and doing what he tells us to do. And in our reading from the Gospel of Luke this morning, we hear Jesus telling his disciples to go out. He sends them out to greet everyone they encounter with peace, to heal them of their ills, and to proclaim to all that the kingdom of God has come near to them. Those who follow Christ––Christians, in other words––are told to live out their Christian lives by going out to tell the world that God is in our midst and by taking steps, through peace and healing, to make it so.

So how do we reconcile empty churches with the belief that, as Jesus proclaims, the harvest is plentiful?

Well, have you ever been at the starting line of a race, like a marathon? If you haven’t, maybe you can imagine it with me. Just before the race starts, the start line is full of people––there is lots of nervous energy, people are excited to be gathering and to run the race together, and as the numbers at the start line grow and grow the atmosphere becomes charged with an electric positivity. And then the starting pistol fires and those who are there to watch start cheering and clapping and yelling for their racers as they all surge forward. 

But then what? As the racers make their way down the road, those who are there cheering find that the mass of people is gone. There’s only a handful left at the start line. It’s kind of empty and sad, actually. One minute the start line is full of energy, and the next its lonely. It would be weird, of course, if the start line was still full of people once the race started. But it would be a very weird race if the starting pistol went and all the racers continued to hang around the start line. That would defeat the whole point of gathering at the start line to begin with.

I want to suggest that this is how we think about the churches. Churches are a place for nurturing disciples. It’s where we plant and grow the seeds of the Christian life. But the Christian life is a life of going out––of being sent out by Jesus to be in the world, to proclaim God’s love as we travel through various communities. What I’m suggesting here is that the Christian life is like a marathon––we gather together at the start line, where we receive our energy packs and our water for the race, and then we begin our marathon. We leave the start line and make our way through neighbourhoods and communities, until we finally reach the finish line. 

The churches––the congregations––are the start line. The place where we receive the body and blood of Christ and the waters of baptism that give us the energy to start our marathon. And as we continue along our Christian journey, we leave behind the start line and travel through various towns and communities, sharing God’s message, until we reach the finish line.

And if this is the case, that congregations are the start line, and not the location of the actual marathon, then of course the churches are emptying. Just as it would very weird to have all the runners still at the start line long after the race had started, it would actually be very weird to have the church still full of Christians after Jesus has already told us go out. In other words, the fact that the churches are empty is proof that we have done a very good job of equipping Christians to run out into the world and share the message of Christ’s love.

What if empty churches are actually proof that we reap whatever we sow? Decades ago, the church taught its young people that the heart of being a Christian is to live out the belief that we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, that we are to serve the world in love, that God has come to gather everyone as God’s children. That is the seed that was planted. And now, at harvest time, we have Christians who are well on their way, who are out in the communities and neighbourhoods, who are way ahead of us now, serving the world in love, treating one another as God’s beloved children. The churches are empty because we are supposed to be empty. Just as the start line is empty once the runners have begun their race, the churches are empty once Christians have begun their Christian mission. Long ago, in the history of this congregation, the young people of St. John were taught that Jesus sent them out into the world, to live out God’s love. And that’s where they are. Out there, busy living God’s love in the world. Not here, at the start line with those of us who are here to cheer them on.

I believe this because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen this church “on the road,” as it were. The church “out there” is alive and well. It’s alive in Alberta, in our Synod, where young people go to Lutheran camps instead of churches on Sunday morning. It’s alive in our Synod’s campus ministries, where university students go to evening suppers and hear that God loves them, and then sleep in on Sunday mornings. The church is alive in the seminaries, where students training to be psychotherapists and social workers and counsellors––not pastors––are learning how the Holy Spirit is healing the world through their work.

I’ve seen it in other places, too. There’s a particular image this week that struck me, that convinces me that Christians are bringing the kingdom of God near, out on the road. Last week was the funeral in Orlando for Drew Leinonen, who was engaged to be married to his boyfriend, both of whom were shot and killed at the nightclub shooting the week before. And members of Westboro Baptist Church showed up, screaming and shouting at those attending the funeral, holding signs that God hates gays (only the word they used wasn’t quite so acceptable) and that Drew would burn in hell. Can you imagine going to the funeral of someone you care about and having people scream at you as you enter the church that the one you are grieving is going to burn in eternal flames? The hate and violence they exuded was demonic.

But others showed up as well, wearing giant white wings that extended out from their arms, and they lined the walkway for those going into the Catholic church for the funeral so that the Westboro Baptists were blocked from view behind their giant fabric wings. And then, so that the funeral attendees wouldn’t hear the screams of hate, these angels sang Amazing Grace. And their voices were so strong and so many that all the church-goers heard was Amazing Grace. All they saw were God’s angels, and all they heard was God’s love. These angels were Christians out there, Christians on the road. Sent to bring words of peace, and to offer healing in times of suffering. These angels were signs of God’s kingdom come near.

What if the churches are empty because Christians are out there––in the world? At camps, on university campuses, working in food banks, working as therapists and social workers, standing with the oppressed and marginalized, walking as allies alongside those who have been assaulted. What if the churches are empty because the world out there is filling up with Christians who have been sent out by Christ to proclaim, “Peace to this house!”, to heal those who are suffering, and to proclaim, in these acts, that the kingdom of God has come near?

This isn’t to say, of course, that those of us who are still in the churches are somehow not being good disciples. Christ did not send every single one of his followers out. Only seventy. Not everyone is sent out to run the race. Not all of us are equipped to run. Some of us are called to remain at the start line, to cheer on the runners. To encourage them when they’re getting weak by reminding them how far they’ve gone. Some of us are already at the finish line, welcoming the runners as they collapse at the end of their race. And some of us are still lacing up our shoes, stretching our muscles, getting ready to walk, rather than the run.

But whether Christ calls you to remain at the start line, cheering on those who are out there where Christ has sent them, or whether you’re still getting ready to run at your own pace, take heart. Why are the churches emptying? Because they were never supposed to stay full. A church that was once full but is now empty can be a sign of success––a sign that those who were once in it have been sent out to live in the world, not to remain at the start line. A sign that Christ has appointed those within it to go out, and that even now, they are doing so, proclaiming peace, healing suffering, and, with God, transforming the world so that the kingdom of God will no longer be just near, but here. Thanks be to God. Amen.