thought of the day (not my own)

The British Isles are composed of four races of man

. . . the Scottish, who keep the sabbath--and everything else they can get their hands on.

. . . the Welsh, who pray on their knees--and on their neighbours.

. . . the Irish, who don't know what they want, but are willing to fight for it anyway.

. . . and the English, who consider themselves a race of self-made men, thereby relieving the Almighty of a terrible burden.

(I don't know who this should be attributed to; but it always makes me chuckle).

on butterflies (thoughts about hope)

My friend Gunfighter over at A Modern Warrior's Life just posted some of his thoughts about hope: what it is, what it means. I've been ruminating about hope as well, though I confess that my thoughts are a little more scattered.

"Hope" is such a...loaded...word in our society. Culturally, I think we sometimes conflate 'hope' with 'wish,' or 'desire,' or even 'want,' which leads to a host of problems as we come to grips with our lives and struggle with faith.

But I've been wondering about the myth of Pandora's box: Pandora finds a box that she is not supposed to open, but then succumbs to temptation and opens it, only to discover that she has unleashed upon the world a whole host of evil. The last thing left in the box is a butterfly, which is 'hope'.

Why was 'hope' in that box in the first place? The myth of Pandora's box is a theodical exercise -- it developed as an answer to the question of how did evil get into the world -- but I wonder if there's not a word of caution, as well. 'Hope' can be a tool of evil. The chancellor of the Third Reich hoped to have his perfect society. Long centuries of Christians - really, of all religions - have hoped to create their perfect world, usually at the expense of someone else. Unrestrained, wild hope can be used to justify great evil.

St Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church that three things abide in us and around us -- faith, hope, and love. That's at the end of chapter 13, where Paul concludes what most label as his 'great hymn of love', and true to form he tells the listener that the greatest of those three things is love. So do faith and hope fight it out for second place?

But back to Pandora for a minute: in the first version of the myth that I heard many years ago, Pandora left hope shut up inside the box -- it never got out, to run wild over the world. But later versions have it that the last thing to escape was hope. But which is it?

If hope is a mirror image of our own sense of self-worth or self-entitlement -- and then all that we hope for is that the world conforms to our selves, wants, and desires -- then may God help us all; hope is then indeed an evil thing.

But what can hope then be? If hope cannot be self-centred, then it must be other-centred; it must be guided by a kind of selfless love that admits our own selves often perversely seek our own self-destruction. Hope must be centred outside of our reality, seeking some greater understanding -- not to be understood, but to understand -- of this world and all that is in it. The good and the bad, evil and beautiful, life and death, all things that are beyond human understanding must then be somehow linked to hope. Hope then is rooted in a kind of whimpering faith that seeks something upon which to cling.

If hope, then, is a butterfly; faith is the flower upon which it rests and refreshes itself.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (I didn't say this first, folks). Faith feeds hope, keeps yearning alive, keeps hope from shrinking and putrefying into nothing less than shameless self-absorption. Faith is necessary to carry hope at times when hope along cannot be strength for the journey.

What then of love? How do faith and hope really relate to love?

Love is the great animating wind that brought the seed of the flower to ground, the breeze that pushed the butterfly along on its first trembling flight. It is unmeasurable, unmeasuring, the only thing it desires of people is know how to move around, along, and through them. Of those three, it is the greatest. It is respired, inspired; the last breath of one becomes the first of another. Neither hope, nor faith, can exist without love.

I live in hope. I am blessed with faith. But I am nothing without love.

for those who want to know...

Here's a bit of an update:

I have accepted a call to serve as minister to the people of St Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Spruce Grove, Alberta (just west of Edmonton). I'm seriously excited to begin doing the job I've spent almost a decade training for! I begin there on September 1, but we're moving to Spruce Grove at the end of this month.

My ordination will be at Hope Lutheran Church in Calgary, Ab. It will be on August 15, 2010 at 3 in the afternoon. For those on my email lists, your invited should beam into your inbox within the next week.

Thanks to everyone for your love and support. I -- and my family -- couldn't have done it without you!

hobbling along....

So...most people who know me will agree on one particular facet of my personality: I hate sitting still. I just can't. For me, unemployment is torturous, and holidays are frivolous, unless there's something for me to be doing.

Oh for sure, I can sit down with a good book and read...and read...and read. But in the midst of that reading I'll be moving, getting comfortable, and setting it down to go for a nice hour-long walk with my youngest in the stroller. I'm just that kind of person.

So when I thought about getting temporary employment till I received a call from a church, I automatically thought about getting a labor job. I like these kinds of jobs, where the only heavy lifting I do with with my knees and back (see? proper back care is essential) and not with my mind.

So I found a job, and I've been working at a lumber yard for about the last four or five weeks. It's a good job -- I enjoy the hours, and the people I work with. It's outside, and keeps me busy.

So on this past Tuesday, while I was at work, imagine my surpise when, stepping down carefully from a lift of lumber, I felt and heard a tremendous *crunch* in my right foot, and suddenly realized that said foot would not work to walk, or stand upon.

Aw, crap.

So I was hoping that I'd just twisted it or something, but working quickly to get my sock and boot off, I realized that whatever I'd done, I'd done exceedingly well: the arch of my right foot looked like I'd stuffed a couple of golf balls under the skin.

Aw poo.

So off I gimped to the emergency room of the local university hospital. Five hours later, I had a diagnoses: nothing broken, but I have either a)severely sprained or b)separated my plantar fascia, the group of tendons and ligaments that hold the bottom of your foot together. (I'm translating for the doctor, here, so any of you nurses who read this, apologies if my description is off)

So I've been on crutches since Tuesday. Which is torture. Sheer torture. And apparently, they're here for a week, at least.

But thank goodness for fast healing and a high pain threshold. I'm hoping to be back at work sooner, rather than later.

and I'll get some news on Sunday about a call. So all of you, wish me luck :)

take care of yourselves! (and recommend a book, if you'd like!)

June 13 2010 - Calvin GoForth Presbyterian Church

A good friend of mine once told me that, in his opinion, there was nothing more scary than righteousness.

When I tell that to people, usually one of their first responses is ‘huh’? We like righteousness – after all, so much of our religious language that we toss around is aimed at making certain the we know who is righteous, and who isn’t – who the ‘winners’ are, and the losers.

When I meet people for the first time outside of a church setting, they usually either know what goes on in the Christian church – our culture, if you will – or they don’t. If they don’t, I usually feel like I’ve gotten off lucky. If they do, sometimes I get trapped in horrid conversations from which there is no escape.

“How do I witness to my brother?”

“My nephew/neice/godchild/grandchild/friend is talking about converting to the [name whichever other denomination here] church. What can I tell them to convince them that they’re wrong?”

Certainly, Scripture uses a great deal of language of righteousness, but with a hitch – usually, it’s a righteousness that is an attribute of God, not of humans. We like to forget that we are not God in God’s place, and make all kinds of judgements.

But isn’t it interesting when we get choosy over who we vent our righteous indignation on? Marital infidelity is an easy target, especially when it’s the latest celebrity or sports star. We can make snide remarks over the headlines and feel safe in our insulated, cozy realities.

Yet in that reality, things are much different. How do we feel about the same behaviour in our friends? In our family? When it is our children who go astray, do we tut and tsk and judge as quickly?

We know we don’t.

And I don’t think we should. Because there’s a lot to be said for the kind of forgiveness that costs a lot.

Jesus tells the story about two debtors, both with large debts, and both of whom are forgiven. Who loves the forgiver more? Of course, the one of whom much was forgiven.

But we don’t always play it that well, at all. Jesus’ host certainly didn’t get it, as he watched horrified as a woman embarrassed herself and made the teacher unclean. She shouldn’t even have been there!

Yet Jesus accepts her ministrations. But not in a way that gives him power over her. He doesn’t exploit her condition, doesn’t bargain with her. He simply tells her, “your sins have been forgiven.”

What my friend meant when he said that there was nothing more scary than righteousness is that there is no faster way of destroying relationships and alienating ourselves from others than by focusing on our own self-perception of righteousness – what we think we’re doing right.

This is what Paul is talking about in Galatians 2:17: but if, if our endeavour to be justified in Christ, we too were found to be sinners, is Christ then a servant of sin? This is always a dilemma to Paul, because the pull be judge of others is so strong, especially since he has such a keen awareness of just how much more he knows than others.

But Paul’s point is that having Christ’s forgiveness doesn’t free us to make comparisons of others with ourselves. Instead, it should mute us, makes us so aware of our own shortcomings and desperate need for grace that we would never judge another by any standard. Because if, after we receive the grace of Christ, we use that grace to judge others – who is ‘saved’ and who is not – we are rejecting that grace in favour of law.

We are trying to be God, in God’s place.

And that’s where we get trapped. Our lives, once forgiven, are not meant to be weights on one side of a scale, tipping over to one side when others are judged by our own holiness, or righteousness. They’re beacons, illuminating the pathway that we all follow in the name of Jesus Christ, letting others see who we are, when Christ is in us.

Amen.

Sunday June 6, 2010 - St Matthew's Lutheran Church, Spruce Grove, AB

The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. (Luke 7:15)

I like the sound of that, don’t you? And Jesus gave him to his mother. It’s a happy ending to this selection from the gospel of Luke – a mother, widowed, now grieving the loss of her only child – her only son, especially, has him restored to her.

The stories of Jesus raising the dead have long provided material for discussion from all kinds of people. In the early church, the ability to raise the dead was seen as the sign of highest holiness that a person could attain. In the latter years of the nineteenth century, the movement arose that began to discount everything miraculous that happened in the bible – healings, feedings, exorcisms, but most of all, the raising of the dead. Scholar poured over the texts, and countless other reasons were presented: the people weren’t actually dead; they were sleeping, comatose, pretending. The same claims were extended to the resurrection of Christ, as well, that Jesus wasn’t actually dead when he was carried down from the cross; he had fainted, or was dead, but had a twin brother that no one knew about who then began to act in this place.

The idea, the possibility of the dead being raised is an idea that lingers very closely to all of our hearts. The thought that Jesus really would “give us back” a loved one who has died is sometimes the only hope that can keep us going.

Back a number of years ago, I knew a family, in which the father had taken very ill. Now, this wasn’t a particularly ‘churchy’ family – they didn’t go to church, except Christmas and sometimes Easter – and were not involved in anything that hinted of religion.

But shortly after a very grim prognosis, the father’s illness dissipated, then disappeared entirely. The rest of a family made a very public show – they threw a party – at which they proclaimed the ‘miracle’ of his recovery told anyone who would listen that “they kept the faith, and God healed him.” I remember thinking at the time, but what would have happened if he’d died? That family still didn’t become members of a church community, still didn’t act any differently. But they still talked about the father’s recovery as if they’d done something particularly well, and his recovery had simply been their due.

And I remember also a couple that I met when I was a student in a clinical pastoral education program, basically a student chaplain at a hospital in Saskatoon. Wonderful couple. Tremendous faith – sang hymns together in his room, I came in once or twice and interrupted her reading the bible to him. The bible had been given them on their wedding day, they told me, and they’d read from it nightly since then. 37 years.

He’d been admitted to hospital for a fairly simply surgery – a benign cyst on his neck that needed to be removed. Very simple. Should have been in and out, a couple of days of soreness, and that’s it.

But that wasn’t it. An infection – hospitals, it seems, are very dirty places to be sick – that very quickly went out of control. Isolation ward. Immobility. Intubation. Intensive care. Palliative care. His larynx and part of his throat were removed in hopes of stopping the infection; his once-strong voice was silenced forever.

Throughout all of this, I stopped by about every other day to see how they were. As you would expect, I prayed with them – after all, what else do chaplains do? But I always asked them what they would like to pray for.

At the beginning, it was nothing less than total, complete recovery. They were not going to accept anything else from God. They were faithful. God was good. End of story.

Then, they asked for healing, then for patience. Then for mercy. At last, for peace. Jesus, it seemed, was not inclined to give back a husband.

So what is it with the bible and healing? Why in two stories today do we read and hear about Jesus raising someone’s son from the dead? If this is such a central place in our faith, why don’t we do it all the time?

Like all stories in scripture, though, there is a meaning beneath the obvious of these stories, a meaning that has a great deal to do with how Jesus comes to our lives in general, and doesn’t just raise a few particular people from the dead.

The societies in which Jesus and Elijah lived were very similar. Both were kinship-oriented: your social standing was based on your family; it’s size, it’s influence, in particularly the number of sons that you had. The society was dominated by men; women were at best, property, and at worst, chattel.

For those two widows to lose their sons, meant that they lost their lives, as well. With no male members of their families to provide for them, and no husband, they were now homeless, destitute, and without hope.

When God restored their sons, they received not just their children back – but their whole, entire lives. Their futures, their hope. In a very real, physical way, both women received their salvation from God.

But at the same time, both these stories still sting those people who lost loved ones, especially children, at any time. Suffering and loss remain two irreversible realities in our lives today. Even though we are materially blessed, money doesn’t make the death of someone we love any easier to bear. We want them back, now, and preferably with a signed explanation of why God would choose them.

But sometimes I think that’s a flaw in how we perceive our relationships. We don’t own the people we love – though when they die, we often take it personally, as an affront. But even as Christians, we miss one fairly crucial aspect of our own religious heritage – we are a religion born out of death. We believe – we confess -- that God died. That one particular idea made Christianity the laughingstock of ancient Rome; the idea that God could be frail enough to die, especially on a cross – that was laughable. It was ludicrous

But then why did Christianity keep growing?

In the early years of the church, wild rumours circulated about this strange group of Jews and Gentiles who followed this “Jesus”. People said that the early Christians were cannibals – that they ate the flesh and the blood of someone. But some of the rumours were truly wild: that once someone wanted to be a member of this religion, they were killed, then raised from the dead.

But yet we still do that. God still raises the dead, because every person here who is baptized has been raised. Baptism is not a gentle sprinkling with a few drops of water for a good picture: it is the sacrament by which we are joined with Christ in his death, so that we may share in his resurrection.

In our baptism – in everyone’s baptism, God gives us everything: live, hope, and truth. In the words of our liturgy, “child of God, you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ, forever” – those are not empty promises. They are spoken in truth.

As a parent, I found my children’s baptisms to be surprisingly hard, because they were, to me, stark reminders that I had invited my children into a world of sorrow and suffering, of joy and pain, of sickness and health – but most of all, a world of death. But also a world into which Christ promises us that death is not the final end.

We trust that promise each time we bring our shattered lives, our broken hearts, our anger, our depression, our deepest

hurts to the table of the Lord and hear His sure and certain words: "This is my body and this is my blood given and shed for you!"

We are people made of clay. Life is breathed into us through our relationships – with each other, and with God. God, who promises to sustain us through this life is the same one who will greet us in the life to come – when all things on this world are ended, and we come to experience the kingdom of God that is within all us – formed in our baptism, nurtured through the Lord’s Supper, and sustained in our own Christian community.

Let us pray: Lord Christ, you came into the world as one of us, and suffered as we do. As we go through the trials of life, help us to realize that you are with us at all times and in all things; that we have no secrets from you; and that your loving grace enfolds us for eternity. In the security of your embrace we pray.

Amen.

eerie experience

I'm not much for ghosts. What happens to people after they die is, I think, mostly between them and God. I've read lots of ghost stories, and sometimes thought that I've felt a ghost -- spectre, spook, whichever -- before. But I had an experience today that set what's left of my hair on edge.

I went out to do pulpit supply at a rural two-point charge south of the city. The weather today is (for lack of a better word) apocalyptic. Driving rain, wind gusting up over 100km/hr and the whole nine yards. Basically, spring in Saskatchewan.

We got to the first parish, 10 miles from the nearest town, about a half hour early. Like most rural churches, it sits on a parcel of land with its graveyard, far away from the nearest farmhouse. When we first pulled up I couldn't believe the church was open -- badly in need of paint, long grass in the yard, and buffetted by the howling wind.

Well, the co-Director being pregnant and all, she needed to use the bathroom, so we tried the front door of the church (locked), and then drove around the side of the church to a covered staircase that led to the basement. The coDirector got out, tried the handle, and told me it was locked.

A few minutes later the wind was getting even worse, and as I watched the clouds swirling overhead I began to think that being in a Pontiac Montana in the middle of a potential tornado was a bad thing. So I went down the staircase to see if I could find a way in. I found the same handle the coDirector tried was unlocked.

So we went in -- the power was on, which surprised me a little bit, but least we had heat and light in the basement of the little church. We got the boys in and set up with a couple of toys each so they were satisfied, and then I collected books, and bible, and went up the stairs to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary itself was beautiful. Built in 1917, it has had very little in the way of renovations. I love old, old rural church buildings -- their layout is practical, yet still deeply respectful of the faith and belief of the generations who have given their lives to its service.

As I walked in through up the aisle, I could hear the wind and rain beating against the side of the church, and hear the creaking of the old steeple as it swayed. But I felt comfortable, and I could visualize the crowds that filled that old church when it was first built -- Scandinavian immigrants, scrubbed clean from a week in the fields, dressed in homespun and calico, come to church on Sunday to worship God and receive the Sacraments from their pastor. It was a good place.

It's my custom, when I walk into a new church, to always come in from the back. If I know what the congregation sees, then I can know where I need to stand in order to be best seen. I walked up to the altar, bowed my head for a minute to give thanks for a safe journey, and walked up to admire the incredible frontspiece of the altar. Hand-carved and hand-painted, it was the accumulated work of years of an incredible craftsman. Then, I turned and stepped into the pulpit.

Then, my hair stood up on end, and I felt chilled even though the heat was on, and working; it was like someone had dropped an ice cube down my back, and I knew -- just knew -- that I was being checked out by someone for whom that pulpit meant a great deal. I felt like I was being watched very closely, even to the point where thought to myself "boy, I'm glad I slipped my collar tab in before I came into the building."

And normally, if there's no one around and it's my first time in a new pulpit, I'll read out John 1:1, just to get a sense of the acoustics. This time however, I didn't. I found myself saying, just quietly as I would to someone standing behind my shoulder, "this is fine. I'll treat it well. Thank you for letting me be here."

And just as quickly, my sense of being considered was gone.

I found it interesting, though, that when the few members of the congregation who braved the elements to come to church did arrive, a couple of them made of the point of telling me that I didn't have to use the pulpit "if you don't want to...we're a pretty casual group."

There was such a small group that I decided not to preach from the pulpit, but instead to use the small portable lectern. When I mentioned that to a member of the congregation, he walked up to the front and moved it for me -- off the altar dias, and down on to the floor of the church. I led the service, and preached from there.

And I found myself doing the oddest thing. Because there were so few people, they all sat on the same side of the church, within the first five pews.

But I found myself preaching to the middle pews of the opposite side of the church. Without thinking about it. I still felt that icy chill a few times during the service, though no longer behind me.

I have never meant the dismissal of the congregation -- go, in peace, and serve the Lord -- quite as much as I did today.

Like I said said, it was an eerie experience, the feeling of preaching to a congregation that contained someone -- something -- that I couldn't see.

What do you think?