blog updates

so there are a few blog updates today -- I've posted my sermons from the last few Sundays. My apologies for my tardiness -- here in Macintyre-land I've just had trouble motivating myself. One week it's +3 and sunny, and the next it's -43 (I wish I was kidding).

And I've been spending some time reflecting on what this 'pastor' thing really means. So look for a posting in the future.

blessings~

Epiphany 7

When we were in Saskatoon, Diana and I often attended services at a Lutheran church that was close to where we lived. To get there, we walked past a large ultra-conservative charismatic church that had its own school (the kind where women had to wear dresses and couldn’t hold office in the church aside from the music ministry or elementary Sunday school teachers), a Roman Catholic Church, and another large evangelical church. Now, before you think that we were walking five miles in the snow, uphill both ways, realize that our walk was maybe six or eight blocks.

But I loved reading the church signs that the churches had. One Sunday the Roman Catholic Church had a sign advertising a festival for its patron saint. The charismatic church sign then said “all saints are welcome” and the evangelical church sign said “you don’t need to be a saint to come here.”

Another Sunday in the middle of summer the Roman Catholic church posted a sign on its door warning worshippers that the air-conditioning unit had broken. The charismatic church sign said “there’s no air conditioning in hell” and the evangelical church sign said, “come in and cool down, our air conditioning is working.”

But my favourite church signs centred around the gospel lesson for today. One day the Roman Catholic church sign said “remember the Golden Rule,” the charismatic church sign read “Sermon Sunday: who are the enemies of Christians?” and the evangelical church sign read “Love your enemies; it confuses them and makes them uncomfortable.”

A journalist once asked the great Mahatma Gandhi what he thought about Christianity: “your Christ I like,” Gandhi replied, “but your Christians I can’t stand.” And you know what? He had a certain point. How many times have you defended your faith with the statement “we’re not like that!” or “those people in that church see things differently than we do.” As Christians, it seems that we fail deeply, and often, at being good representatives of our faith. Instead of focusing on living in community, we can shift our focus to ourselves.

It becomes very easy for us to imagine that we are solitary travellers on the road of the gospel, because our vision becomes very focused on what we perceive to be at the end of the road: God‘s kingdom.

Think of the last time you made a trip to say…drive to Calgary. When you can see the skyline of the city north of Airdrie, have you ever noticed that you stop paying attention to what’s going on around you? You become so focused on those big tall buildings that they begin to represent everything for you - the end of your journey.

But you don’t go to those buildings, do you? No, chances are you go to a tidy house in the suburbs or a nice hotel. You may never go near those big tall buildings that were your focus; but they remain your focus nonetheless. In the same way our passion -- our good and right desire -- for the kingdom of heaven can sometimes get in our way of understanding what Jesus means when he speaks directly to us. And we’re not alone in that.

Today’s gospel lesson continues the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew; telling the story of what life looks like the kingdom of God. For us, it takes four or five weeks to read; but for Jesus it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to speak. So far, after two thousand years of studying it, we’re still trying to unpack all that Jesus was saying.

There’s one thing that remains abundantly clear: as a moral teacher, Jesus doesn’t really fit the bill. You see, already Jesus assumes that the people he’s speaking to are moral people -- that they have a sense of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ -- but he also repeatedly emphasizes to them that mere morality is not worthy of the kingdom of heaven.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’…but I say to you, do not resist an evildoer.”

“You have heard that it was said ‘you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy‘…but I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you…for if you love those who love you, what reward to you have?”

Those two “you have heard that it was said…” are basic moral laws. One, you should right wrongs when you see them or when they are done to you, and two, that you should hang out with those people who are like you and avoid those who aren’t. They’re constants, repeated throughout just about every moral system.

Does Jesus make sense? Do you think that the crowd gathered around him is listening with delight? I don’t think so. In fact, I think that the disciples are completely mind-boggled about this entire business. What is the point in becoming a disciple of a great religious teacher if you can’t wave a bit of your own piety in everyone else’s face?

Because think for a moment where Jesus’ teaching is going to lead you. Have you ever heard of anyone who completely modelled this kind of behaviour? Sure you have - Jesus did, in the book of Acts, Stephen did, Paul did (eventually). And they all have something in common: what is it?

Let me give you a hint: they all died. Directly because of living out these words. Jesus likes morals and morality; I’m not for a minute going to say that he doesn’t. But what Christ knows is that morals and morality are not going to save you from hell. They will provide guidance, good ways of living your life, but they cannot save you. Because morality and hypocrisy are soul mates.

In the US right now, the national debt is become the huge moral issue of the day. “How can Obama run the debt up so high? It’s immoral and unchristian!” And you know what? They have a certain point: running up a debt so high that it will take 5000 years to pay off is never a good idea.

But the same people who are protesting the immorality of Obama’s spending on health care and education are the same people who supported his predecessor when he picked two wars, cut taxes for the rich and doubled the national debt.

As one commentator in the States put it, “it seems that every pure moral claim is mixed with hypocrisy.” That shouldn’t surprise anyone - when it’s you who is claiming an eye or a tooth when you’ve been wronged it’s easy to being righteous; but when you’re the person from whom the eye or tooth has been claimed the issue may not seem so cut-and-dried.

Someone comes among you preaching sedition and blasphemy, threatening to overturn your centuries-old model of faith and religious life. What do you do? Morally, you remove the sickness, like a surgeon excising a tumour. But as you’re doing it, you’re also killing the Saviour of the world.

Liturgically, we confess that duplicity every Sunday: “we have fallen short of the life you desire for us” or, more traditionally put: “we confess we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.” Morality - which is how we respond to sin by moving away from it and putting it farther from us-- is not equal to God’s response, which is to wipe sin away entirely.

The last verse of today’s gospel lesson is directly responsible for my own desire to study the Greek language during my undergrad years. “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Jesus says, and it appears to us like Jesus is saying that’s it’s a perfectly fine and reasonable expectation that we should be - not try to be, not strive to be, but that we SHOULD BE - just like God.

But the interesting thing about language is that it changes with time and use. In our culture now, perfect means ‘without blemish’ or ‘flawless’. The Greek word that is used here means “complete” or “finished”. We are not flawless, but in God’s world we are complete. We are not called to artificial smoothness but to wholeness - to holiness - for no other reason than Christ calls us to be.

We are called to love our enemies -- whomever they may be -- as a reminder that God loves all of creation, that God alone is sovereign and God alone is the source of all mercy.

Jesus speaks to us out of the knowledge that the law cannot provide salvation for us; but only the gospel gives salvation. And certainly, the law can guide us or drive us to the gospel - to the person of Jesus Christ and his suffering, death, and resurrection -- but it can never be the means of our salvation.

That’s part of the reason why Jesus always carries the law to the most extreme examples of which he can think - so that his listeners (and us) can understand that worrying about our own worthiness or unworthiness is not a fruitful task.

But rather, Christ seeks to help us understand that all things in our lives come from God: good and bad, just and unjust. Human beings can be great moral teachers, but as Paul reminds us “let no one boast about human leaders…for all things are yours.”

So remember, when you are aware of the ways that you fail to live perfectly, when that little devil on your shoulder reminds you of all the stinging things that you’ve done in life…that none of it matters. Not life or death or present or future - for all those things are part of who you are, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

And the next time that you are speaking with someone about your faith, and they bring before you their negative experience in a church, you can look at them, and honestly say to them - you’re right. We’re not perfect, and we know we can’t be. But still, we all belong to Christ.

In that way, you will proclaim the kingdom of God, and be complete.

And it saves us having to buy a bigger church sign.

Let the people of God say amen.

Epiphany 6

So where does it “get” you today? What part of Jesus’ words today sting your heart?

This is not one of those “in-the-original-Greek-it’s-different” texts. Jesus has been speaking with the group about kingdom life – what life is like in the kingdom of God. It’s a place where the meek, the mourning, the weak and the wishy-washy are blessed.

It’s a place that blows away the expectations of those who want to find the ‘deserving’ people there. Yet not in a good way - in the gospel lesson today Jesus takes ‘deserving’ to a whole new level, one that lays out exactly what God wants from us.

And it’s an impossible expectation. If there’s one thing Jesus doesn’t do, it’s leave things at a halfway point. To those who would argue that “by grace we are saved after all we can do ourselves,” Jesus ups the ante. If you look at someone with hate, you commit murder. If you look at someone with lust, you commit adultery. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. If you arm causes you to sin, cut it off.

They are hard words. Words that sound foreign to ears that are raised in a culture of personal-driven success and steeped in the doctrine of a God whose love is pointless, whose relationship is dependent upon ones own personal choice.

Today, Jesus tells us the deepest matters of God’s own heart, and there is nothing we can do to avoid the inescapable fact that no matter how much we can be affirming to ourselves, we still fall short of the goal set for us by our creator.

We know we should not murder, but we still hate, despise, and argue with each other. We are willing to kill relationships with others, to maintain our own self-righteousness.

We know we should not commit adultery, but we still disrespect others and treat them as less than fully human.

Today, we find that our hearts and God’s heart are mutually exclusive.

God listens to our hearts and knows that even if we can keep from swearing falsely, we are still willing to manipulate others with our words, to lead others astray by what we say, to let our words be meaningless rather than let our yes mean yes and our no mean no.

The diagnosis: our hearts are diseased, unhealthy, disheartened.

And so, in God’s mercy, God gives us law. In the teaching of Jesus, this is law that will not let our hearts fall short of loving as God would have us love. It is law that would have us love in a way that care for others and world Gdo made, as we say in our baptismal promises.

And it is law that ultimately convicts us, because what it demands of us, we cannot do. There’s no way around it. The law always kills – it kills what is bad in us, and it does that by showing us God’s love.

And here again the law shows us God’s love, by showing us our failing and driving us into the arms of our merciful God. St. Augustine put it this way: “The law was given for this purpose: to make you, being great, little; to show that you do not have in yourself the strength to attain righteousness, and for you, thus helpless, unworthy, and destitute, to flee to grace.” The grace of God is there, offered for us. We need only to stop rejecting it.

Moses, the old preacher, sits on the side of a mountain overlooking the Promised Land. He’s old, he’s tired. He’s tired of mediating petty wars and empty hearts. He’s tired of combating the forces of idolatry, idleness, and irateness that abide much more fully in the Israelite congregation than does any genuine love.

But the old preacher still has breath for one last sermon, and so he begins to preach the same message that he has time after time.

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.”

Life or death, Moses says, is a choice.

But it’s not just a ‘today I’ve decided to follow Jesus’ choice. It’s a choice that his congregation will make and re-make every day in their hearts, surrounded by hundreds of other gods and idols demanding their service. It’s a tough choice.

“If you keep the laws, ordinances, and commandments of the Lord your God, you shall live…if you turn your hearts away, you will perish.”

These are tough words. But is what Moses says any different – in fact, are they any harsher that what Jesus says? Not at all.

Yet we want Jesus to be gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild. We want Jesus to be the exemplary not just of the God of love, but the God of our kind of love, the kind our culture thrives on: shallow, fleeting, not demanding of oneself, empty and easy to please.

In the past, in an effort to separate the dichotomy between the Old Testament and the New, some people claimed that the ‘God of the Old Testament” was a god of wrath, while “the God of the New Testament” was a God of love.

In an effort to keep their own hearts from God, they created two gods; one whom they could stomach and control, and one whom they could abandon.

And Christ stands before us with bleeding hands and heart and cries out “is THIS what I died for?”

God is a god of love; a love so fierce and all-encompassing that it created the world, called God’s people back unto God and kept God stubbornly insistent on mercy, even to the point of death. The law, given to the chosen people, pointed towards God’s love.

The law reveals to us God’s heart; it reveals God’s stubborn insistence to be merciful to us even when our own nature rejects and rebels against God. You know the rest of the story after Moses finishes his sermon today. Do the Israelites actually do what God asks of them through Moses?

No. But time and time again, God reaches for the chosen people. Grafts all of humanity onto the Tree of Life, and fulfills the law in Jesus Christ. As Jesus said in last week’s lesson, “I came not to abolish but to fulfill the law.” Faith in Christ, letting our hearts be as the heart of Christ, let us hear the rhythm of God’s heart.

Discovering our failure to love as God loves is not then a cause for despair. No – it is a call back to God, into the arms of God, who loves and strengthens us, and sends us out to love again; bids us love more fully, more perfectly, because although showing perfect love is impossible for us, nothing is impossible with God.

Do we make a choice to follow God? Absolutely. We choose a hundred ways every day whether or not to follow God, or follow our own desires. We choose life, which fulfills and strengthens, or we choose death, which destroys relationships and shows our faith to be nothing. But still God reaches for us. Still God loves us; still God is willing to go to the cross for us, so that we might choose life again.

Choose life, beloved. Put your trust in the heart of God, and accept the love that was given to you on the cross of Jesus Christ – a love that through dying, lives eternally. Let the law kill your own self, and the love of Christ will raise you again.

Let the people of God say amen.

Epiphany 5

When I sat down to write my sermon this week, I actually had to check the forecast before I could really begin, because I needed to know the chances of being tarred and feathered for talking about spring if today’s forecast called for -40.

Since it only called for -20, I’ll take my chances. So let me talk to you about spring.

I said back in October that my favourite day of the year is the first day in fall when you step out of your house and your breath mists the air, and you hear the crunch of leaves under your boots and everything smells so crisp. I love that day.

But my second favourite day of the year is the first day that I can step outside and smell ‘spring’. And this past Friday, when I stepped out of our little house to come to the office, that’s what I smelled. What does ‘spring’ smell like, you ask?

It smells like salt. Salt, and light.

What does light smell like? Well, I don’t know. But it’s funny how humans can remember places as smells. Every time I come into the church alone, I walk into the sanctuary here, and I watch the silent pews, and I smell what to me will always be the house of God – the smell of wood, of wax, and of prayer. What does prayer smell like? Well, I can’t bottle it, but maybe it smells like the distilled essence of hope.

And on that first ‘salt and light’ day, I smell the salt in the air as the water on the road dissolves the salt spread to stop ice from forming, and the light I smell just comes from the world being warmed as the sun shines it light on all that was dormant, and dead.

Salt, and light. New life from old, precious things from things we thought long dead.

Jesus sits near the top of a mountain and looks at the crowd gathered around him. He’s blessed them all; the meek, the mourning, the hungry; his words have been for them. But then he does something…different.

“You are the salt of the world,” Jesus says. “But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can it be restored? It is thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

There’s a lot to be said about those words, and certainly a lot of moral commentary has been made about them in the past – I received a book in the mail a couple of years ago that urged me to be part of a ‘revival of salt’ – a call to a Christian life; whatever that was, before the country lost its salt and was trampled underfoot.

But that got me thinking. Which is always a dangerous proposition, I know. How does salt ‘lose’ its saltiness? Salt is made of two essential elements – sodium, and chloride. It can’t lose its saltiness.

My mom has had a fancy salt and pepper set that’s sat in the china cabinet since before I can remember. A couple of years ago, while setting up for a family dinner I snuck a deviled egg from the tray, put a little pepper on it, and popped it in my mouth. But you know what? No pepper taste. So I sprinkled some on my hand and gave it a taste. It didn’t taste like anything. Turns out that pepper will lose its flavour. But salt…salt always tastes like salt.

It’s like light. A bushel basket is like a wicker basket – not very tightly woven. So, even if you put a candle under a basket (and I think Jesus is just as mystified as to why you’d do that), in a dark room it would still give off light. Jesus doesn’t say “blows it out,” he talks about hiding it.

There’s a good story there, I think. Jesus tells us that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill. Indeed, Jesus reminds us that not one letter of all those laws in the Torah – all 613 of them – will pass away until all this around us has, too.

The law will not pass away until heaven and earth – light and salt – have passed away. The gospel of Jesus Christ – the good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ – fills heaven and earth. It is salt and light, something essential, something pure.

But Jesus tells us that if we have more faith in the law, the belief that we have to do something for that salvation, can weigh the gospel down. It’s like the bushel basket put over the candle, or salt that’s cut with chalk. It can make the words of hope seem a little dim.

Salt and light never lose their essential characteristics. They are both always exactly what they are meant to be – but we can interfere with them. We can put a basket over a light. We can ‘cut’ salt with anything. In the same way, our faith, the great gift from God that defines our Christian life, can become stale. It can be lost under a burden of anger, or fatigue, it can take a back seat to our own interests and wants. In our own human tendency to seek out what makes ourselves righteous, we run into the danger of putting our faith in the law – in our works – to make us right with God.

In Egypt right now there is more political strife and unrest. Probably about a month ago there was a story in the news about Christians being killed when their church was bombed after worship. In North America, and particularly in the United States, there is talk of legislating against the Muslim faith, and of course every time a new mosque is built, there’s going to be a group of (and I use the term loosely) Christians protesting against it.

But I read a story this week that gave me a great deal of hope; an assurance that no matter what happens there is still hope. In the midst of all the violence and protests, groups of Christians are forming human shields to protect – not to protest – groups of Muslims at prayer.

Let your light shine…

We may be far more aware of how we have grown stale and hidden whatever light we once thought we had. We may feel dull from anxiety and stress, in danger of being snuffed out or trampled underfoot. In naming us salt and light, Jesus is not making a simple statement of the obvious, but is bestowing an affirmation from a loving and creative God. Jesus is expressing God's faith in our acceptance of God's gift of grace—grace that empowers us to love one other. God's grace alone frees us to serve; it alone brings real joy.

"Let your light so shine," we say, and we hand the newly baptized or parent a candle, a miniature pillar of fire. It is the light of Christ—shining before we receive it—that will never be snuffed out.

Let the people of God say amen.