Christmas Eve Sermon -- Merry Christmas!

It’s finally here – all the fluff and kerfuffle that comes with the season. If you haven’t already, maybe you’re about to go home and open the first present that sits under the tree. Just one tonight – the rest tomorrow.

Maybe your children are about to go to bed – what am I saying? – you’re about to try to coerce your

children or your grandchildren into their beds. Maybe you’re going to resort to bribery. I hope not threats. Hopefully, they’ll sleep long enough through the night that you can get a bit of rest before tomorrow. The big dinners, the big celebrations, the excitement. Christmas cards, Christmas letters…sometimes, don’t those Christmas letters just sound a little annoying?

Dear Friends, this year, we climbed Mt Everest, then went and holidayed at Maui. Out little boy Franky was handpicked by President Obama to create a universal education system, and our dear little Tracy was admitted into Queen’s University with a full scholarship. Such a little go-getter for a 13 year old!

Yeah, certainly Christmas has become the time when we can bask in the glow of a year well-spent.

But maybe that’s not you tonight.

One thing about Christmas is that it comes so soon after December 21, the day when there is only about seven hours of light, and 17 of darkness. Today’s slightly better, we’ve had about 7 hours and 5 minutes of daylight. But for many, tonight is the longest night.

The longest night spent in bed alone, remembering the past year and dreading the hours to come, hours when you spend every minute ticking off all those things you miss. Maybe it’s your spouse, a child, a parent, brother or sister. Maybe it’s the job you were told no longer needed you, and you spend the night panicking that the few toys under the tree won’t be acceptable to your kids who’ve gotten used to more.

Or maybe, there’s no tree, at all, and you’re here tonight longing for a present that is just for you, seeking some deeper meaning to this season that isn’t centered around getting more stuff.

One thing about Christmas, it can be as close to hell – as devastating a time as anything – as it can be close to heaven. It can be a time when our own darkness, our losses and mourning, all those fears and worries add up like bills that we’re going to get next month. And we can ill afford them, when the dark is long our night seems to be never-ending.

But a man named John knew that feeling. Knew what it was like to be buried in darkness, knew those long thoughts that keep us awake at night. So he wrote of a light, that can shine even in the midst of all that and that the dark cannot overcome. And that light John wrote about – even though he doesn’t name him in those first verses – was Jesus Christ.

We’re gathered tonight because of a birth – but also more. (We’re gathered here because Grandma said we had to, if we wanted dinner tomorrow.)

But there are other reasons we gather. We come together because for just this one night we can come together and remember something that we hold in common – our humanity. We think on all the joys and sorrows that make us who we are as a people, and we remember that one this night, on this longest night, God came to be with us. This little boy would come to be called Emmanuel, which means literally ‘God with us.” Not God above us, not God better than us, but God with us. And John was right. What came into being through that tiny baby was light.

That light is the light of all people – it shines in us, in our darkness – those things in our lives that drag us down, make us wonder if anything we do or if we are worth anything. But our darkness cannot overcome it – it’s why we call Jesus Christ “the light of the world”. We come in faith, seeking a part of Christmas – a part of the world -- that we think is hidden from view. But we find through John’s words that we have always had what we are seeking. We come seeking life, and find in faith that life has first found us.

Faith brings us here – faith that, in the midst of all this season and all that it has come to mean, our hearts are alive through Christ. This faith, as tiny or simple as it may be, that in the midst of all the darkness of our world a light shines, and that light is for us all.

draws you here tonight, I hope you have found it. Whatever sustains you in life, I hope you can bring it from this place. And if you have come seeking something to give you light in your darkness, I hope you find that that light was in you to begin with. Through faith in Christ – faith in one who was born just like us, a little tiny baby on this very night – I pray that you may have life, and that life has found you.

May this be so among us. Amen.

done.

I am finally done my last paper for this semester (see below).

I have been running non-stop since the beginning of August. I have put out around 300 pages of writing, and have read probably 12 thousand pages -- averaging 200 pages a night, most nights. I started classes a week after we lost the baby.

I'm going to take some time to grieve. I've earned it. And then I'm going to take some time to rejoice, in new things, new beginnings, new hopes, new dreams.

conflicted

So I'm pretty conflicted, here at the end of term. I have one paper left.

On one hand, some part of my subconscious is hinting that a 20-page paper analysing "the relationship between justification and sanctification in terms of one's self-identity" is not the reason I came to Seminary.

And yet, a far deeper part, the part that has been molded and shaped and transformed by the ministry of my teachers, and studies, and all those to whom I'm come to know in my role as 'pastor,' I also know that this question in many ways reaches to the heart of what the proclamation of the Word is.

Because if we are justified by the Word of God, and all that God speaks as Word is holy, then we are already sanctified in God's word, because the Word is truth. It is this holy word that breaks down doors, throws open the shutters of fear, shatters the bolts of legalism and phariseeism, and frees us to be the people we were created to be.

Created in the image of God, forming the Body of Christ in whom we live, and move, and have our very being. We are justified by God's grace, as a gift -- and because that gift comes as God's prevenient grace we can never be more sanctified than we already are; because the Word spoken over us at baptism has brought us to the table. Our sanctification -- our holiness -- will be complete when we rest at the banquet feast that has no ending, in the presence of our Redeemer, in whose presence all things are holy, and whole.

John 1:3

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

Thirteen Sonnets, 1
I have been stone, dust of speace, sea, and sphere:
flamed in the supernova before man
or manmade gods made claim to have shaped me.
I have always been, will always be, I
am a pinch of earth compressed in the span
of a snail-shell: galaxies' energy,
the centre of the sun, the arch of sky.
I became all that all things ever can.
I will be here: I have always been here.
Buddha had to walk upon me: my snows
were not so kind, my ice was sharp as grass.
Upon me, even Christ encountered fear:
the nails were mine, the mallet mine, the blows
were mine. I grew the tree that grew the Cross.

- Michael Hartnett, from A Book of Uncommon Prayer, Theo Dorgan, Editor.

Remembrance Homily

Memory is a funny thing. We take it for granted so much, don’t we – we remember how to drive our cars, we remember how to follow the familiar routes in our houses, so much so that we could walk them blindfolded. We get so frustrated when we can’t remember the grocery list we scribbled down in the morning when we get to the store at 4 in the afternoon.

If you’ve worked in a people-intensive occupation, you know the panic and muck that builds up in your brain when you suddenly realize that you have to remember the name of 8 people you met and spent some time with a year before. You know they’re going to be disappointed if you can’t remember their names. So you wrack your brain trying to will their names to float through your grey matter. Doesn’t always work, though. Maybe doesn’t even often work.

Memory can make us relive every moment of stupid adolescent stunt with all the same emotions, as if we were actually there again. A familiar scent worn by a loved one can help us recollect favorite memories – or can curse us, when we can’t remember what they even looked like, past vague descriptions. In the middle to late 19^th century mortuary photography – the final posing of the deceased (children, spouses, criminals) – became popular as a way of immortalizing that person at their final moments, as if they had just closed their eyes in sleep.

But memory can also haunt us, and hound us to the ends of the earth. We have lost generations of young men, who have come back from Wars so haunted by the images of what they have seen that their brains are incapable of processing anything else. I once worked with a man just a few years older than I was – he was a bouncer in a bar, worked his way up to management, and he loved the lifestyle. The pounding music, throngs of people, the casual violence that he wore like a glove.

I asked him once, why he liked it so much. He replied that he had been a soldier, part of the UN peacekeeping force to Rwanda, except as he wryly observed to me, that was more like trying to keep pieces of people together, rather than a political peace. Having been ordered, under the threat of full military law, to stand still while he watched the aftermath of women and children being executed, had so deeply scarred him that the only thing he cared to do at night was stay awake. In sleep, the nightmares came.

But you know, we have clinical terms for stuff like that now. In the American Civil War, it was called Soldier’s Spirit. In WWI, Shell Shock. WWII, the term ‘combat fatigue’ was coined to describe it. My grandfather, along with tens of thousands of other young infantrymen, probably had another term for it, one that’s not repeatable from the pulpit. Nowadays we call it PTSD: post traumatic stress disorder. Treatable by drugs, counseling, therapy. As a society, we can file it away, forget about it.

I think, the generation that’s going to come home from this war is going to face the exact same reaction that soldiers have experienced upon coming home since war became the hobby of governments. “Don’t say too much. Let the memory of this fade, because people don’t want to think about it, now that it’s over.” And they won’t. Because they’re soldiers. And soldiers follow orders.

As a people, our memory is very short. We don’t like to think of the ‘bad’ too often; we want to sweep it under the rug. That’s an old, old story that’s been repeated often, even as we read about our Savior.

The writer of the Letter of the Hebrews was, I sometimes think, the conscience of a people who wanted to twist the sacrifice of Jesus for their own gain. At times the writer argues like there’s some twisting of Christ’s words going on in his culture that he can’t stand. But some people stood to gain.

I can guess at what that gain was – priestly power, authority over others who ‘knew less’ than they did. The same reasons people sensationalize events now. So the writer to the Hebrews took the time to remind his readers – and listeners – what it was that was so important.

Christ died, once, for all, for the whole world. There is no one, not one single man, woman, child, that Christ did not die for. Christ bore the penalty for their sins – death, not just physical death, but the death of the soul – and then conquered it by His resurrection. He will come again, to save those who wait for Him.

Yet we forget that, too often. But the good news is that Jesus won’t forget, no matter what we do; we are not forgotten. No one is.

But as this is Remembrance Sunday our own history bears witness to the fact that too often, we do want Jesus to choose between His children. As Robert Runcie said, those who dare to interpret God’s will must never Him as an asset for one nation of group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.

Nationalism is the belief that one’s own country is better than all others, and that domination is the prerogative of that nation.

Let me give that an illustration. There are all kinds of people around us. Rich people, poor people, skinny people, fat people, hungry people, full people. We all give our pennies to the treasury, out of love and obedience to God.

But some people begin to notice that if hold one penny back, then they have one penny they wouldn’t otherwise have kept. Besides, they’re still putting in lots of pennies, supporting the poor, the widows, the orphans. But pretty soon, they’re holding back 8 or 9 pennies out of every ten, only one goes to the treasury. It feels good – powerful – to have more pennies than anyone. And then they look around and notice – others have more pennies. Suddenly, their pile of pennies doesn’t look so big. But if they talk to their neighbor, who has also been keeping pennies out, they can form a group that’s more powerful than just that one other individual.

And pretty soon, they’re fighting each other for their pennies. But of course, by then, they’ve realized that the treasury holds far more pennies than they’ll ever have. So they figure out a way to get the pennies from the hands of those who’ll contribute all they have. Because by now, the treasury has become competition to them, and they don’t want that. They want everyone’s pennies. And people are willing to give all they have, all that they have to live, to the hoarders, instead of to the treasury.

And the stink of this is, it’s not the hoarders who pay the price. It’s not the people who make the hoarders the recipients of all their pennies; they’re fairly well rewarded. It’s the people who still honour the treasury – what is good, what is right, what is necessary – who pay the price, because to the hoarders, they are expendable.

Lest we forget. Lest we forget that the cost of war is borne by the soldiers, sailors, and air corps who have stood for – fallen for – and still stand for what is good and decent. It is borne by their mothers, their families, their friends. It is borne by us; we, who will grow old. Let us not forget that ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ who bear the cost of peace, and that is our responsibility to strive for it, pray for it, and to not despair in its seeming absence.

Let us not forget that to Christ, there is no one who is expendable, no one who is forgotten, no one who is unknown, no one who is left behind.

Let us remember that is the will of our Creator to hold all of creation in a single peace, and that on the last day at the sound of the last trumpet the dead in Christ will rise and the sea will give up her dead and at last, there will be peace. And no mothers will cry and no families will be torn apart, because all of creation will be joined together in praise of the Creator.

And that day, the guns will be silent, forever. Amen.

I'm still here....

and slowly slogging through things. I have a really heavy course load this semester, in exchange for a much lighter one next semester.

Six classes + work from one intensive in August (done!) + senior dossier + parenthood = one tired young man.

But I got contact lenses, so I really look tired now! Yay!
(actually I'm really loving not wearing my glasses all the time).

too funny!

(click to enlarge)

"Pass with Reservations"

My mark on internship. Not from my supervisor. From the faculty of my institution.

I'm really disappointed and frustrated right now. But off to find a counsellor, because that's the concern.

Ode to a Computer.

Well, not really an ode. More like a story.

This is a story about a stalwart, erstwhile companion of mine. The one functional piece of equipment that few students or pastors do without -- a laptop computer. I know pastors who can dial up NASA with their computers and still don't know the names of the 12 minor prophets. These people annoy me.

They especially annoy me when I meet them somewhere, and they fire up their shiny, new, light-as-a-feather MacBook and look over at what I'm packing. Then, their eyes bug up out of their heads and they begin to laugh. At my computer. It doesn't matter that while they were burning out their retinas D-and-D'ing through their undergraduate degrees I was busting ass and knuckles as a nightclub bouncer. It suddenly doesn't matter that my two strong healthy children immediately put their poor irradiated testes to shame in an awesome display of virility (hang on, I'm leading up to something....)

All that matters is that my laptop was new -- NEW -- in 2000. Maybe early 2001. HP Pavilion NP1510 (or something like that).

(snort, giggle.)

Yes, my trusty typepad came fully equipped top-of-the-line the year I graduated high school. Windows Millenium Edition.

(chuckle, guffaw.)

It has an amazing 700-something megahertz processor. It has a whopping 9 gig hard drive.

(knee slap, wipe eyes.)

It also weighs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18 pounds when it, cables, and cards are added into my bag for a presentation.

Now, I mean, it's not that bad. My older brother -- who bought it used before me -- updated it to Windows XP and for all I know did whatever voodoo he does with computers and linked it directly to the ISS. I haven't the foggiest clue.

What I do know is that this (big) little computer has saved my butt. Fighting off some depression when I was finishing my undergrad, I couldn't -- read "could.absolutely.not" -- sit down at my desktop computer and do any work. So I coerced my brother into selling it to me. Against his better judgement.

"It's slow," he said. "Actually, it's worse than slow. It's decrepit. If it was a little old lady, Boy scouts wouldn't even help it across the street. They'd call an ambulance."

"And," he said, "it's ugly. Actually, it's worse than ugly. The letters on its keys are rubbing off. The screen has a couple of weak spots. It's so ugly that if it was a kid at school, its parents would have to ask someone to bully it just so it'd get the attention."

But I persisted, and one day brought it home in a fancy case with all its wordly belongings. And put it right to work. I bought it in about February, I think, and by the end of May it had over 50 000 words of my original work in its little memory banks.

That (big) little computer was the best money I ever spent. On it went the first pictures of my son. Its wallpaper has almost continuously been some picture of my family. Except once, when before a presentation a fellow student pointed out that while a booby shot of my wife was fine for my computer, I probably shouldn't share it with others. That little computer was all that I brought with me to Saskatoon when I came here to start my MDiv.

(ooooooh baby!)

And it worked exceptionally well, its key features being that it was small and portable. I could, and did, work at the kitchen table, in the chair beside the crib as I watched our baby sleep, and in bed as I watched my beloved sleep. I had a little desk that was variously in the bedroom, baby's room, and living room (which was the sum total of rooms in our apartment, except for the bathroom and laundry room), but it was rarely there.

I bought a flash drive, which almost doubled my hard drive space. It was a heady experience. Suddenly, there was a home for my thousands of baby pictures! I basked in the glory of a slightly faster computer.

Then my dad came to visit. My dad is the original techie. My brother gets it from him; I'm fairly certain that my dad, somewhere, has the same computer they launched Sputnik with. We were having a wonderful visit, then somehow things got off kilter.

He spied something lurking in the corner of our living room. He looked at it the same way he'd look at a pile of pornography featuring sexual acts with sheep.

"WHAT," he said, "IS THAT?"

I explained to him that that was my computer. He looked for a moment like he could not, in fact, believe that I had sprung from his loins. Genetics and appearance indicating otherwise, he resigned himself to the fact that his youngest son and heir was, in fact, a complete ignoramus when it came to the finer points of computer ownership.

My biologist dad looked at me like I'd just told him I was a young-earth creationist. He extended a hand over my shoulders in a gesture not unlike a doctor offering up a hopeful course of treatment. "We'll see what we can about that, son," he told me.

Sure enough, by his next visit, he'd upgraded his own computer. Now, I've seen this computer. This computer bears as much kinship to my laptop as I do to the entire pantheon of Rhodes scholars. They share a kind of basic computer-ly shape; that's it. But he brought me his 'old' computer.

Three times the processor speed. Twenty times the harddrive space. I was now current. My old laptop was placed into its case and languished until such time as it was needed to be the platform for a presentation at class.

Then I began my congregational internship in Calgary, and found myself in need of a computer. There, on my desk, my old laptop sat proudly.

Well, somewhat proudly. 15-year-old confirmation students would bring their friends from school to gawk at it: "my mom told me we used to have a computer like this" they would whisper to each other, before whipping out their iPods and taking pictures of it for posterity.

And then back for my senior year of Seminary. I've been feeling a little low, lately, and I found myself experience some...well, let's call it envy. Get the sin right. Laptop envy.

I've been watching shiny new netbooks come around the Sem. I see them on the bus. Nice. So, I thought I'd get one. Did get one. Little 2.3 pound package with more computing power than my lumping desktop at home.

Twenty minutes outside of the freakin' box and two keys broke. Two keys broke! What was that all about? So I spent part of the night on my old laptop, looking for other possibilities, and returned the offending piece of plastic the next day. Would I like to replace it? they asked. Hah! Replace it? Replace what? Certainly, not my old laptop. Does one replace a Monet with some garish postmodernist? Does one replace a 1945 Willys Military Special with some gawdoffal 2010 Grand Liberty Cherokee froufroufrafra that brews your Starbucks as you drive? I don't THINK so.

So my old laptop is back at the top of its food chain. Yes, it's old. Yes, it's ugly. But its keys are tenacious, even if not easily readable. 9 years combined of undergraduate and Masters studies quickly dispelled me of the need to look at the keyboard when I type. It's been dropped. Toddlers have used it to stand upon to reach a book in the bookshelf, and it lived to tell the tale.

To some people, it's just a computer, to be replaced as necessary. But to me, that laptop is a witness, a small piece of stability -- in my world of constant moving and changing.

If offered, I'll accept a newer one. But never a replacement.

and the last ones....

time at the bookshelf is time well spent.

especially with bigger brothers :)

and our angels, sleepy after a busy morning.

more updates

excavating.

gramma reads a story

small finger paint mishap

and lastly, we need a bigger dinosaur.

more updates

Boy2 has taken to waring a bib when he can find one, just in case someone comes by with noms.













and The Boy is looking so grown up!



And lastly, some fun in the pool.

picture updates!

Boy2 relaxing. I tend to put more pictures up of The Boy for some reason, so we've been trying to get Boy 2 more often. Here he is checking out some morning cartoons.













and chillaxin' on the floor.















The Boys quickly divided the new rug into your side/my side.













and just up from a nap.

no new posts....

sorry, too tired for the moment. Every time I sit down at my desk the mound of reading and papers leaps out at me.

Sermon for Sunday Sept. 6 (Clearwater/Zion Lutheran Parish, Kyle, SK)

Text: James 2:1-17; Mark 7: 24-37

Grace to you, and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

“…so faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

I come from the small town of Vulcan, Alberta. I have seen, voluntarily or otherwise, just about every Star Trek™ movie and TV show out there. My favourite lines come from the TV show.

Captain Kirk: “I take the odds are against us and the situation is grim.”

and, of course, Dr McCoy: “He’s dead, Jim.”

In fact, they may be my favourite lines because they’re the only two that I can readily remember; the rest have been deeply buried in my subconscious so that I have no recollection of them. But those two stick.

It’s interesting how some things like that stick in our minds, isn’t it? I can remember when my wife first told me we were expecting our first child. Three months after we were married. An hour before I had to write a 3-hour final exam for an archaeology course. Don’t remember a blessed thing about the exam. Remember where I was, how I was standing, where I was when I woke up…that sort of thing.

And you probably have the same sort of memories. Lines of dialogue from TV shows and movies, family snippets. Your most treasured – or your most hated – memory may be of the last words you spoke to a loved one before they died.

These things stick in our minds and in our heads like prairie mud, tracked into the house. We can scrub at them, try to wipe them out, but they’re still there.

In the same way, one line from the letter of James sticks in the collective mind of Christianity. As it is too often misquoted: “faith without works is dead.”

And the assembled Lutheran congregation mumbles to itself: that’s not right. We’re saved by grace, not by works.

And some other, deeper, more primitive impulse adds to that: but we do need to live right.

That is the Law overriding the Good News of Jesus Christ. One impulse is to reject any means of behaving that makes us right with God; the second corrective impulse is bred into us through school and years of living in society: but we need to behave ‘right’ or we will be punished.

Now, Martin Luther hated the Letter of James. In fact, ‘hate,’ may be too frilly a word to describe Luther’s feelings for the letter; he called it the ‘gospel of straw,’ good as a firestarter or bedding for cattle, but not for Scripture. I think that Luther was wrong, but I understand his objection to the letter: he felt that it would be too easy for people to get wrong idea about how God works in our lives. About that, he was correct.

Because really, it’s far, far easier to judge people according to what they do than who they are. We do it all the time in society, really – the rich person on TV is accorded and almost godlike status, whereas the farm wife beside us is all too often ignored. The person who’s rich has obviously done good for themselves – but how to you measure the contribution of a farm wife?

Well, you don’t. Most of us can’t measure that high. And if we try, they’re often better shots than us.

It’s very easy to get lost in the world of judgment. A great deal of Christianity focuses on judgment, and certainly you’ll find no argument from me that in the End, we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. But then our vision gets a little clouded. Because beside each of us, inside each of us, is a little doctor who stands beside our sin-filled hearts and pronounces us dead.

“He’s dead, Jim.” Endlessly. Over and over, in each of us. We are dead in sin, no matter what we do. As James points out: “whoever keeps the law but fails at one point has become accountable for all it.” – we are all, no matter how hard we try, sinners who cannot by our doing attain the righteousness or the salvation of God. We could try to live in bubbles, to keep the bad and ugly stuff of the world at bay, but we fail. Yet we still try.

It was to this that James wrote to the congregation. “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them: ‘go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet does not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” Jesus called the disciples to be engaged in the world, to be covered in the muck and the mess of life, to immerse their sinful hearts in the river of humanity in order that they could see what it would mean to be truly in relationship with people.

As a wise man once said, “Jesus did not come to show us how to become divine. Christ came so that we may know what it means to be truly human.”

Truly human.

A well-known celebrity was in town for a couple of days. He’d come to look at the wooly mammoth; maybe a little bit of fishing down at Diefenbaker. But he’s here, in town. And he’s told the people that he’s staying with that he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.

But of course, that’s not going to happen. Soon the whole town is buzzing with the gossip. “He’s here! He’s there! Did you see him?” But everyone tenuously respects his privacy. Everyone except, that is, the one person in town that everyone hopes he doesn’t see.

She’s ragged and dirty. No one really remembers how she came here, or who with. But she’s got a kid. Pretty sickly, the one at school who’s classmates take delight in pointing out that her clothes used to be theirs. The kid who’s teased at lunch because her sandwich is two slices of bread and half an apple. This is the family that a teacher or community worker slips a little extra to when no one’s looking.

People invent a myth about respecting her privacy when the one thing that poor, desperate creature needs is community.

So one day the celebrity is outside of the hotel when she comes walking towards him. He’s with his entourage: a few strong men try to block her way; across the street a few people from the town see her moving and try to get to her before she has a chance to embarrass you all.

But she’s at his feet in a flash. “Please, sir, my child needs your help.” And all those people around her start trying to bodily move her, apologizing for her, condemning her.

Where are you in this story? I saw almost this exact thing happen, once, when I was a teen and Ralph Klein came to visit my school. A person who’d lost everything to Ralph’s education and social assistance cuts stood up and started yelling during his address. Afterwards, I heard a member of the town council say apologetically to Klein, “don’t worry, they’re not from here. We’re not like that.”

No, in fact, we’re something worse.

I think James wrote his letter because he saw how easily Paul’s good theology corrupted people into becoming baseless, judgmental hypocrites who, secure in their own salvation, then sought to prevent others from attaining the same. So he wrote to the congregation to remind them of that works are evidence of their faith, that a simple stated empty belief left very short change in the empty stomaches and closets of the needy.

Because one of Christianity’s great cultural sins – from the very beginning – is complacency. The desire to sit back and congratulate ourselves, to observe others in their struggles and say to ourselves, well, thank you God that that’s not me, instead of walking where Christ did, with them, and offering them our own hands.

We have made distinctions between ourselves, between the right and the wrong, between the righteous and sinners. But we forget so easily, and with such disastrous consequence, that if we are righteous then we have no need for the great physician.

Because he came to call not the righteous - but sinners, instead.

And yes to quote Captain Kirk, in this world the odds are against us and the situation is grim. We live surrounded by the myth of competition and competence – a legacy of eugenics and a twist of the ideas of Darwin that turn our own human community into a bloody war to see who comes first. Our own churches tear at their own community in a competition to see who’s the most right, or the most faithful, or the most holy.

But we stand with Christ. When Jesus is for us, who can be against us? Well, ourselves, for one. Maybe one of the problems with our faith comes from living at the foot of the cross, where our eyes are looking up at that Cross, remembering that for us – each and every one of us – Christ died. Yet in doing so, we miss an important point – that Christ is looking down, and seeing all of those crumbled around us. If we look where Christ sees we will see what Christ sees: frail, broken humanity, stressed by so much and in such dire need of grace that we ache for his touch.

And then our eyes will see what Christ sees, and our hands will become those of Christ: broken, bleeding, beset by own frailties, but reaching out for those who are in such desperate need.

For we are sinners, this is true. But we are also the beloved and justified, the redeemed of the Lord, free to go and serve our neighbour in gladness. Faith sets us free to serve one another, to love one another, as Christ loved us.

May this be so among us. Amen.

Happy Anniversary!

To my beautiful wife, my everlasting companion.


Thanks for sharing your life with me :)


I love you, lots.

Happy Birthday!

Today, The Boy turned 3! What a wonderful three years it's been -- being a father is the greatest privilege and joy I could ever have.

I love you, son.




The Boy's first present of the day: a package from friends in Calgary that had, among other things, a dinosaur puzzle!




And then we went to the river to catch minnows















And had an ice cream cake



And lots of old friends came over to help him celebrate. Yay presents!








Thanks everyone, for making it such a special day.

O boy.

O boy, o boy, o boy.

I really hope you enjoyed those nice pictures of Boy2, because they're going to look mighty different from now on.

He climbed a chair to reach a toy. I said 'no,' and put the toy out of reach. He lunged for the toy, grabbed the toy, and then triumphantly held it up to show me how smart he was, and how dumb I was.

Yes, I am dumb.

Because he'd kicked the chair out from the table, and when he tried to get down, he fell. And broke one of his front teeth.

Three hours at the emerg dentist later, and he is now officially missing a bicuspid. Mind you, this is not the one he chipped two weeks ago trying to get ahead of everybody on a walk. This was the other one.

So now, in a few months, he can sing "all I want for Christmas is my one front tooth."

That is, provided he doesn't bonk any more.

last bunch of pictures.

Who thought you couldn't ride the elephants at the Zoo?













Oofda (introduced below) and The Boy take a break.














The Boy and Unkit sharing a movement.














Amma and the CoDirector with The Boy at his early birthday party. His b'day is August 26, for those who're wondering.

and more pictures

The Boy hanging out at the Zoo.



















the boys with very special friends of our from Calgary, Trackgirl, Smiles, and Oofda.















G'ma and Gr'pa came out for Gr'pa's birthday on July 4. Happy birthday!


G'ma and Gr'pa. G'ma's hiding, but we found her anways.

more pictures

Boy2 exploring his new surroundings in S'toon.

















The Boy doing the same thing.














A nap in the midst of the chaos of moving. Boy2 is getting so big!















The Boy and the CoDirector at his early birthday party at Amma's house.

more pictures

Boy2 at the Zoo on his favourite perch in the whole wide world.













The gang at the Zoo. Behind the CoDirector, Boy2 is holding the hands of some very special friends from Calgary, Smiles and Trackgirl. (apologies for posting your pictures!) (but don't think I won't do it any more...)













Trackgirl, The Boy, and the CoDirector.












On the balconey at our old place in Calgary. The Boy is not too enthusiastic about moving.