Sunday, November 11, 2007, Grace and St. George’s
Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’ (Luke 20:38)
This morning I want to offer a few comments about remembrance and hope. These two things are important to today, of course, but they are also important to the faith which gathers us here week by week, year by year.
Today is a day of remembering. It’s not about remembering specific events, because there is no one alive today who can remember what it was like at Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele. In a few years more, a decade at the most, there won’t be anyone left alive who can remember what is like at Dieppe or what it felt like to be caught in the flak and searchlights over Germany. All we can do is remember the people who went before us to these terrible places. We can remember the people we knew – parents and grandparents – and we can remember the ones we didn’t know, the ones who are just names and strangers to us.
Why do we remember? The reasons are complex. We remember them because their lives were significant, and because the loss of their potential, so many who died so young, can never be fully appreciated. We remember them to do them honour, because they gave what Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address called “the last full measure of devotion”, paying the ultimate sacrifice for those they loved and for we who came after them. We remember them because it is our responsibility to remember them, because we owe them. If we decided to cancel November 11th and just forget about the past, we would be the less for it. Our society would somehow be diminished if we abandoned Remembrance Day.
These are good reasons to remember, to be sure, but I think the third and most important reason we remember is because of hope. We have the hope, again to quote Lincoln, that “these dead did not die in vain”. We have the hope that their deaths made the world a better place. We have the hope that peace and freedom are great gifts, to be defended if necessary, but never to be squandered or abandoned needlessly. We have the hope that we have learned from history, and that things will work out for the better. If we did not have hope, Remembrance Day would be a tragic event, nothing but the naming of victims, and history would be a trap that humans are forever caught in.
Christians are people called to remember and called to hope. God calls us to remember – to remember him and to remember that we are his people, and to remember the way God wants us to live. God also calls us to hope – the hope of Christ’s power and resurrection, the hope that we can change and that the world can change, and the hope that we will be saved. We believe in memory and hope because we believe that these things come from God. A God who created the world must surely remember everything and everyone in it, and a God who sends his son to save the world must surely have hope for the future. We see both these things clearly in today’s gospel.
In today’s reading from Luke, Jesus has finally reached Jerusalem. Not everyone agrees with his preaching and teaching, and not everyone agrees that Jesus is the Messiah, the one sent by God to save his people. A group called the Sadducces set out to challenge him. The Sadducces were Jews who did not believe in the resurrection. As far as they were concerned, once you die, that’s it. Game over. They challenge Jesus with the riddle of a woman who in turn marries seven brothers in accordance with a Jewish law called Levirate Marriage According to this law, if a man died, it was the brother’s duty to take his sister-in-law in marriage, and he was to name the firstborn after his deceased brother, “so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Deut 25:5-6).
The Sadducces I think are like people who go to a funeral and say, “Well, Joe’s dead, he was a good guy, but he’s gone and the best that we can do is remember him”. As far as they are concerned, the best we can hope for is to be remembered by having our name and our memory continue in our descendants, which is the purpose of Levirate Marriage. If God intended to do something as radical as raise people from the dead, he wouldn’t have given this law to his people. The women in the riddle wouldn’t have needed to remarry, because her first husband would be alive again on the day of resurrection. For the Sadduccees, God is either trapped in history or he has lost interest in it. Their God has set things up a certain way, cleaned his hands, and said “this is the way it’s supposed to be, muddle along as best you can.”
But as I said, we are people of hope because we believe that God isn’t finished with history. God isn’t content with the way things are. God will change things for the better. Jesus tells the Sadducees something that human categories like marriage will change in heaven, so their question is irrelevant. We will be changed into “angels and .. children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:37). We don’t really know what Jesus means by this. Certainly it tracks with what St. Paul says elsewhere about how human categories like gender, race, and social status will no longer count in God’s new creation (see Galatians 3:27-28), but other than noting this continuity I think it’s vain to speculate too much about what this might mean. All we can be sure of is that we will be made new, and made better.
Personally what I take comfort from is what Jesus goes on to say. “And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’” (Luke 20:37-38). Take a minute to let that sink in. God is talking about his memory. He is saying that in his eternal memory, all of us are alive – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the seven brothers of the woman in the riddle.
It would be like God saying to me “I am the God of Michael Peterson, and of his father Allan Peterson, and his father Arthur Peterson, and his father …”. Now I knew my father, but after his death I realized that there were many things about him I didn’t know and would never know. My grandfather Arthur was dead long before I was born, and I only new a few things about him. I have only the vaguest idea of who my great-grandfather knows, and likely never will never know more. I can try as best I can to pass what I know of them on to my children and, perhaps, my grandchildren, and give them the few mementos that my father left to me. But memories fade, stories are lost, and I have no guarantee that those to come will remember Arthur, or Allan, or Michael.
Likewise we who gather today face an impossible task. We can try to remember the dead of our wars as best we can. We can do wonderful things, like the project this year of giving each schoolchild who went to Vimy Ridge the name and details of a Canadian soldier who died in that war. We can talk to the veterans while they last, and capture their fading memories. We do the best that we can, but we know, as our hymn today reminds us, that “time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away”. Not so with the mind of God. We have the promise in the words of our gospel that God will not forget us.
Let me close by asking you to try, if you can, to let go of one image and replace it with another. Try to let go of the traditional image of God’s memory, the image of that big book at St. Peter’s desk where all of our misdoings and mistakes are kept for the day of judgment. Think instead of God remembering all of you that is important – who you loved, the best that you can be, your fondest hopes and greatest dreams, your most selfless moments. Think of God holding these things clearly in his mind, as clearly as your best and brightest memory of your childhood summers, and brighter still. Finally, think of God calling these memories forth on the day when he will recreate the world, creating you anew, as something angelic, a child of the resurrection. On that day none of us will be forgotten. We will be remembered, fully and gloriously, along with our grandparents and their grandparents and all the names on every cenotaph across this country and overseas, to stand with those in the graves marked “A Soldier Known Unto God”. For surely that is our best and brightest hope, that each of us is “known unto God”.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
Showing posts with label Sermons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sermons. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
A Sermon for Sunday, 22 July, 2007
A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday After Pentecost
Grace and St. George’s at St. Ansgar’s Lutheran Church, 22 July, 2007
I had the pleasure of preaching this at St. Ansgar's Lutheran Church (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada) last Sunday. This is the second year that our parishes (St. Ansgar's and Grace/St. George's) have gotten together for worship in the summer in the spirit of the Waterloo Declaration.
One of the great pleasures of summertime is visiting friends, and what better way is there to visit with friends than to eat with them? I am sure that the reason we Anglicans are back with you today is because of the wonderful ice cream you treated us to after the service last year! Today I want to talk about our gospel lesson and what it says about hospitality, our relationships to one another, and our relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ. Our gospel confronts us with the question, do put God first in our lives, or do we put ourselves first?
The other night friends dropped over for desert, which we enjoyed in the warm breeze on our deck. Our friends had brought their trademark ice-cream bar desert with carmel sauce, much to the delight of my teenage daughter. We offered a jello with fresh strawberries that my wife Kay and I had picked at Heemans last month. And of course, coffee. We had a wonderful evening, and our friends insisted we keep the ice cream (no argument from my daughter) while we insisted they take the remaining strawberries (only a token argument on our friends' part). Part of the pleasure of this exchange was the knowledge of how the care that went into the preparation of the food. Would the visit have gone as well if our friend hadn't worked in her kitchen, if we hadn't made the trip out to Heemans and spent an hour in the field, if I hadn't tidied the deck and put out extra chairs, and if my daughter hadn't set the table? We might have sat around for two hours over an empty table and chatted, but the visit would have been lacking in warmth and hospitality.
Today's gospel, the visit of Jesus to the home of Martha and Mary, is often understood as a lesson urging us to be less busy and more quiet. The church has traditionally talked about business and quietness in terms of the Active Life, our normal lives in the world, and the Contemplative Life, which is chosen by monastics or by laypeople who chose to go on retreats or who try and find quiet times of prayer and meditation. Mary, who choses to spend time at Jesus' feet listening to his teaching, is often said to exemplify the Contemplative Life, while poor Martha who resents working alone in the kitchen, is said to embody the Active Life. This kind of reading ends with a simple moral, that we spend more quiet time in our prayer lives, like Mary, and less time with the matters of the world, like Martha.
The only problem with such a reading, I fear, is that it doesn't work, especially in churches. As I'm sure that Pastor Elina would agree with me, a successful church needs its Marthas. Our Marthas cater funeral lunches and organize choir practices and prepare bulletins and tend the church building and cook outreach dinners and do a hundred other things that allows a church's ministry to continue. Indeed, being a Martha is a valid ministry for many Christians. Without these people we pastors, who usually make very poor Marthas, would flounder. We depend on Marthas to make things happen and keep us organized.
By the same token, if my family and our guests had not acted as Marthas the other night, we would have had a pretty thin time of it. We might have gathered around an empty table for prayer and bible study, and no doubt the Holy Spirit would have come into our midst, but there would have been something lacking in our welcome and in our friendship. As you Lutherans know very well, God invented coffee and baking to get people to come to bible studies.
If we look at the first line of today's gospel I think we see it's theme stated quite clearly: "a woman named Martha welcomed [Jesus] into her home" (Lk 10:35). The word "welcome" is an important one in scripture, especially in Luke. You might remember that two weeks ago, we heard in Luke's gospel how Jesus sent out the seventy, and told them "Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you" (Lk 10:8). In such places and in such moments, Jesus tells his followers, "the kingdom of God has come near" (Lk 10:11). So clearly welcoming another person and caring for their needs is part of our relationship both to one another and to God. Many of our parishioners at Grace and St. George's learned the truth of this when we participated in the Out of the Cold meal program at St. John the Evangelist's church in London. So clearly we can't fault Martha for busying herself to welcome the Master.
Neither, I think, can we fault Mary, "who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying" (Lk 10:39), despite what her sister might say. What's interesting about this passage is not the description of what Jesus was saying (indeed, Luke does not report a single word of Jesus' teaching) but rather Luke's description of how Mary listens to it. As others have noted, Mary's posture is submissive in the best sense of the word, putting Jesus and his teaching above all else going on around her. Again, if we look back to Luke 10, Mary embodies the kind of faithful obedience that Jesus tells the seventy to look for. Jesus' instructions "say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you'" (Lk 10:9). Jesus knows that the kingdom of heaven can only come near when there are ears that want to hear and hearts that want to be changed. Hospitality, making someone welcome in the Lord’s name, thus come to stand for an openness to God's word and a willingness to place one's self entirely under the direction of God.
Meanwhile, we can imagine Martha banging her pots and stomping around in the kitchen, as angry cooks do, until she finally loses it to storm out and confront Jesus. Luke describers her as being "distracted by her many tasks". What does this mean? I know by some experience that when my wife is cooking she does not welcome being distracted. Typically she is concentrating on juggling three or four things at once so everything can finish cooking together. When I come in to the kitchen and say something inconsequential to distract her, she does not take it kindly! Somehow I don't think this is the kind of distraction that is bothering Martha. Martha lacks the submission to Christ, both physical and spiritual, that her sister is showing.
Have you ever heard the expression, "It's all about me?" Look at Martha's words to Jesus and you'll see that attitude on display. Look at how often she uses the first person pronoun: "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself ? Tell her then to help me" (Lk 10:40). Martha's words reveal her basic self-centeredness. She may call Jesus Lord but clearly her plans and her place in the house are more important than finding out what Jesus' plans and her place in his kingdom might be. There is a place for the first-person in prayer, but it should always be balanced with an awareness of God, as in the beloved prayer of St. Francis, “make me a channel of your peace”.
When our Lectionary works, it can work very well. Take a minute to think back to our second reading, from Colossians. What does Colossians say about this visitor who has come to dwell under the humble roof of Martha and Mary? St. Paul says this:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)
This is truly a portrait of Christ as the Alpha and Omega. How can Mary, or how can any of us, put ourselves first and still call ourselves followers of He who has “first place in everything” (Luke 10:18). And when we try, as best we can, to understand this incredible cosmic power that has come together as a human visitor, we have to wonder in gratitude at how gently he corrects Martha and opens her eyes to her “Me First” attitude.
“There is need of only one thing”, Jesus says. “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." What does Jesus mean by this? Let me return to St. Paul to answer this question. In Colossians Paul writes that Jesus has come to “reconcile all things” and “make peace” by rescuing us “ who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col 1:21). There are all sorts of “evil deeds” and some of them seem quite innocuous. Martha, angrily banging pots and pans in the kitchen, is a warning to all of us who put our own importance and our own just deserts ahead of what we owe to God. Jesus’ words to Martha are an act of reconciliation, drawing Martha out of her hostility and drawing her into the peace and presence of God.
We in our ordinary churches and in our humble homes are incredibly privileged to share these spaces with Jesus Christ, the Lord of Creation. He who has “first place in everything”, comes under our roofs, graciously wishing to know us and dwell with us. How will we know him and welcome him? It is not a question of praying more and working less. A church whose members wear out their knees in prayer but never bothers with hospitality and fellowship would be sadly lacking in its relationship with God because we would never experience God in life as it is meant to be lived, including laughter, friendship and rich deserts! At the same time, a church that delighted in social events, but whose members never bothered with prayer and bible study, also fails because it would be like a body without a head, never knowing the one in whose name it gathers. There is a time or us to be Marthas, and a time for us to be Marys, but always, always, we must ask ourselves, do we invite our Lord Jesus Christ to have first place in everything we do? May we always be churches that put God first, may we always be churches were our Lord is “pleased to dwell”.
Amen.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
Grace and St. George’s at St. Ansgar’s Lutheran Church, 22 July, 2007
Jesus Visits Martha and MaryNow as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’
Luke 10:38-42
I had the pleasure of preaching this at St. Ansgar's Lutheran Church (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada) last Sunday. This is the second year that our parishes (St. Ansgar's and Grace/St. George's) have gotten together for worship in the summer in the spirit of the Waterloo Declaration.
One of the great pleasures of summertime is visiting friends, and what better way is there to visit with friends than to eat with them? I am sure that the reason we Anglicans are back with you today is because of the wonderful ice cream you treated us to after the service last year! Today I want to talk about our gospel lesson and what it says about hospitality, our relationships to one another, and our relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ. Our gospel confronts us with the question, do put God first in our lives, or do we put ourselves first?
The other night friends dropped over for desert, which we enjoyed in the warm breeze on our deck. Our friends had brought their trademark ice-cream bar desert with carmel sauce, much to the delight of my teenage daughter. We offered a jello with fresh strawberries that my wife Kay and I had picked at Heemans last month. And of course, coffee. We had a wonderful evening, and our friends insisted we keep the ice cream (no argument from my daughter) while we insisted they take the remaining strawberries (only a token argument on our friends' part). Part of the pleasure of this exchange was the knowledge of how the care that went into the preparation of the food. Would the visit have gone as well if our friend hadn't worked in her kitchen, if we hadn't made the trip out to Heemans and spent an hour in the field, if I hadn't tidied the deck and put out extra chairs, and if my daughter hadn't set the table? We might have sat around for two hours over an empty table and chatted, but the visit would have been lacking in warmth and hospitality.
Today's gospel, the visit of Jesus to the home of Martha and Mary, is often understood as a lesson urging us to be less busy and more quiet. The church has traditionally talked about business and quietness in terms of the Active Life, our normal lives in the world, and the Contemplative Life, which is chosen by monastics or by laypeople who chose to go on retreats or who try and find quiet times of prayer and meditation. Mary, who choses to spend time at Jesus' feet listening to his teaching, is often said to exemplify the Contemplative Life, while poor Martha who resents working alone in the kitchen, is said to embody the Active Life. This kind of reading ends with a simple moral, that we spend more quiet time in our prayer lives, like Mary, and less time with the matters of the world, like Martha.
The only problem with such a reading, I fear, is that it doesn't work, especially in churches. As I'm sure that Pastor Elina would agree with me, a successful church needs its Marthas. Our Marthas cater funeral lunches and organize choir practices and prepare bulletins and tend the church building and cook outreach dinners and do a hundred other things that allows a church's ministry to continue. Indeed, being a Martha is a valid ministry for many Christians. Without these people we pastors, who usually make very poor Marthas, would flounder. We depend on Marthas to make things happen and keep us organized.
By the same token, if my family and our guests had not acted as Marthas the other night, we would have had a pretty thin time of it. We might have gathered around an empty table for prayer and bible study, and no doubt the Holy Spirit would have come into our midst, but there would have been something lacking in our welcome and in our friendship. As you Lutherans know very well, God invented coffee and baking to get people to come to bible studies.
If we look at the first line of today's gospel I think we see it's theme stated quite clearly: "a woman named Martha welcomed [Jesus] into her home" (Lk 10:35). The word "welcome" is an important one in scripture, especially in Luke. You might remember that two weeks ago, we heard in Luke's gospel how Jesus sent out the seventy, and told them "Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you" (Lk 10:8). In such places and in such moments, Jesus tells his followers, "the kingdom of God has come near" (Lk 10:11). So clearly welcoming another person and caring for their needs is part of our relationship both to one another and to God. Many of our parishioners at Grace and St. George's learned the truth of this when we participated in the Out of the Cold meal program at St. John the Evangelist's church in London. So clearly we can't fault Martha for busying herself to welcome the Master.
Neither, I think, can we fault Mary, "who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying" (Lk 10:39), despite what her sister might say. What's interesting about this passage is not the description of what Jesus was saying (indeed, Luke does not report a single word of Jesus' teaching) but rather Luke's description of how Mary listens to it. As others have noted, Mary's posture is submissive in the best sense of the word, putting Jesus and his teaching above all else going on around her. Again, if we look back to Luke 10, Mary embodies the kind of faithful obedience that Jesus tells the seventy to look for. Jesus' instructions "say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you'" (Lk 10:9). Jesus knows that the kingdom of heaven can only come near when there are ears that want to hear and hearts that want to be changed. Hospitality, making someone welcome in the Lord’s name, thus come to stand for an openness to God's word and a willingness to place one's self entirely under the direction of God.
Meanwhile, we can imagine Martha banging her pots and stomping around in the kitchen, as angry cooks do, until she finally loses it to storm out and confront Jesus. Luke describers her as being "distracted by her many tasks". What does this mean? I know by some experience that when my wife is cooking she does not welcome being distracted. Typically she is concentrating on juggling three or four things at once so everything can finish cooking together. When I come in to the kitchen and say something inconsequential to distract her, she does not take it kindly! Somehow I don't think this is the kind of distraction that is bothering Martha. Martha lacks the submission to Christ, both physical and spiritual, that her sister is showing.
Have you ever heard the expression, "It's all about me?" Look at Martha's words to Jesus and you'll see that attitude on display. Look at how often she uses the first person pronoun: "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself ? Tell her then to help me" (Lk 10:40). Martha's words reveal her basic self-centeredness. She may call Jesus Lord but clearly her plans and her place in the house are more important than finding out what Jesus' plans and her place in his kingdom might be. There is a place for the first-person in prayer, but it should always be balanced with an awareness of God, as in the beloved prayer of St. Francis, “make me a channel of your peace”.
When our Lectionary works, it can work very well. Take a minute to think back to our second reading, from Colossians. What does Colossians say about this visitor who has come to dwell under the humble roof of Martha and Mary? St. Paul says this:
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)
This is truly a portrait of Christ as the Alpha and Omega. How can Mary, or how can any of us, put ourselves first and still call ourselves followers of He who has “first place in everything” (Luke 10:18). And when we try, as best we can, to understand this incredible cosmic power that has come together as a human visitor, we have to wonder in gratitude at how gently he corrects Martha and opens her eyes to her “Me First” attitude.
“There is need of only one thing”, Jesus says. “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." What does Jesus mean by this? Let me return to St. Paul to answer this question. In Colossians Paul writes that Jesus has come to “reconcile all things” and “make peace” by rescuing us “ who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col 1:21). There are all sorts of “evil deeds” and some of them seem quite innocuous. Martha, angrily banging pots and pans in the kitchen, is a warning to all of us who put our own importance and our own just deserts ahead of what we owe to God. Jesus’ words to Martha are an act of reconciliation, drawing Martha out of her hostility and drawing her into the peace and presence of God.
We in our ordinary churches and in our humble homes are incredibly privileged to share these spaces with Jesus Christ, the Lord of Creation. He who has “first place in everything”, comes under our roofs, graciously wishing to know us and dwell with us. How will we know him and welcome him? It is not a question of praying more and working less. A church whose members wear out their knees in prayer but never bothers with hospitality and fellowship would be sadly lacking in its relationship with God because we would never experience God in life as it is meant to be lived, including laughter, friendship and rich deserts! At the same time, a church that delighted in social events, but whose members never bothered with prayer and bible study, also fails because it would be like a body without a head, never knowing the one in whose name it gathers. There is a time or us to be Marthas, and a time for us to be Marys, but always, always, we must ask ourselves, do we invite our Lord Jesus Christ to have first place in everything we do? May we always be churches that put God first, may we always be churches were our Lord is “pleased to dwell”.
Amen.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
A Sermon for Sunday, July 15th, 2007
A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
Grace and St. George’s, 15 July, 2007
I love preaching on the parable of the Good Samaritan, though as with any well-beloved text, it can be hard to approach it with fresh eyes, or to find ways for it to be heard with fresh ears. I owe two of the illustrations in this sermon to one of the great preachers, Thomas G. Long.
Have you ever heard of Wesley Autrey? He is a fifty-year old construction worker in New York City. One day this January of this year, he was on a subway platform with his two young daughters when a man beside him had a seizure and fell onto the tracks. Down the tracks were the lights of a train coming into the station. As Autrey said later, “I had to make a split decision”. So Wesley Autrey jumped down, and covered the man’s body, pressing him down into a one-foot trough between the tracks. Five cars passed over them, with so little clearance that the train left grease on Autrey’s knit cap. Neither man was injured, though the man with the seizure was taken to hospital and Autrey visited him there before going to work.
People like Wesley Autrey don’t come along everyday, but when they do, the question is always asked of them, why would take such risks to help a stranger?. When Autrey was asked this question, he told the media, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” Autrey may not think he’s a hero, but I think that most of us would say that he is one.
Forget about jumping in front of subway trains for a moment. The fact is that many of us do far less when the risks are far less. Why is it that more people don’t give blood, when the only cost is some discomfort and an hour or less of our time? Why don’t more people take the time and spend the money to learn CPR or First Aid? Why don’t more people stop to help a stranded motorist? Would young people give time for community service if the school system did not require it of them? The phenomenon of altruism, helping another person when there is no advantage or reward at stake, is such that psychologists have devoted considerable effort to try and understand it. It’s interesting that these psychologists often use the word “samaritanism” interchangeable with “altruism”, and their results show that Good Samaritans can be as rare today as they were when Jesus first told this parable two thousand years ago.
In 1973 two psychologists did a famous study involving theological students at Princeton Seminary. Some students were asked to go to another building to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Some students were told they had lots of time, others were told that they had to hurry between buildings. What the students did not know what that the study’s organizers had arranged for a man to lie in their path, not moving except for some coughs and groans.
How do you think these future ministers did in putting these words of Jesus into action? As you might expect, it depended on how much time the students had. The ones who had time to spare were more likely to stop and help, but those who had little time were far less likely to help. One student even stepped over the man’s body on his way to give his talk on the Good Samaritan. The organizers of the study concluded that people are far less likely to help others when there is a cost to them and they have to make a sacrifice. Other studies, done in airports on or on trains, also show what we might expect, that not everyone has it in them to be a Good Samaritan, even when it requires far less heroism than was showed by Wesley Autrey.
Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan for the benefit of a man who wants to live a godly and pious life. This man knows that God wants him to love his neighbour as much as he loves himself, but he only has one question. What exactly does that word neighbour mean? Are there exceptions? The parable gives a clear answer. If a Samaritan, whose people had no love for Jews and vice versa, could help a Jew from Jerusalem when the Jew’s own holy men would not, then there are no exceptions. Everyone is a neighbour. Anyone in need is a neighbour. Jesus ends the parable by telling the man to put it into practice. “Go and do likewise”.
The preacher Tom Long offers us some helpful advice on how to hear this familiar story with new ears. He notes that this parable is often understood as a moral example. Jesus talks about the Samaritan, and says “He cared for someone in need; I want you to imitate him. Go and do likewise." There are two problems with this approach. First, as we saw with Wesley Autrey, being a Good Samaritan is hard, which is why there are so few of them. Second, if Jesus was just giving a moral example about being helpful to strangers, why did he put all the Samaritan stuff in there? Why are the first two men pillars of the Jewish community, while the man who actually helps is a despised foreigner? As Long reminds us, the story is rather like a Christian pastor and a policeman ignoring an injured person, while a person from Al Qaeda stops and helps.
Clearly Jesus is making the point that our religious beliefs and practices do not automatically make us better people. A case in point came to my mind after Jeremy Robson and I (both history geeks) were talking about Ontario’s black communities that were founded by refugees from the underground railway. As you know, one of these communities was Wilberforce, near Clandeboye, an area known for its staunch Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. As you know, these communities had no love for one another in the 1800s, but one thing they had in common was a dislike of these black refugees. Jeremy was telling me that the whites were worried about their property values and required their new black neighbours to plant gardens and erect picket fences, with the unexpected result that the black homes often looked better than those of whites.
Clearly this example of religous people behaving badly, and others one could think of (religious sanction of killing of Tutsis in Rwanda, pro-apartheid preachers in South Africa, some white churches during the Civil Rights era in the US) show that Good Samaritanism goes against our grain as human beings. Our innate weakness, our human sin, prevents us from simply taking a moral example to heart. Tom Long points out that the story of the Good Samaritan is told BY the ultimate Good Samaritan. Jesus, himself an outcast, despised by those who should know better. Jesus knows how wounded we are by sin and by our hostility to God, and by taking us into his crucified arms, he restores us.
Some psychologists think that we are most likely to be altruistic, to be generous, when people are generous to us. In other words, being a good samaritan is not something we can pull out of ourselves by sheer moral willpower, but rather it comes from some kindness that we have ourselves received. As Christians we understand this idea because we have received the ultimate kindness of Christ’s love to us. Jesus does not ask that we be good, he merely asks us to receive his goodness and let it flow through us to our neighbour.
When I think of Christians who show this in action I think of people like Mother Theresa, but I also think of those who I can more readily understand and pattern myself on. I think of my friend Nancy, who teaches ESL to Moslem immigrants in her London neighbourhood. Now Nancy is a bible-quoting evangelical, and some Anglicans might call her a fundamentalist, but Nancy does not try to convert the women she teaches. She just helps them because she knows that they are her neighbours. I think of the different churches who run the meal program at St. John the Evangelist in London, or my fellow board members and the volunteers at the Ailsa Craig Food Bank, and I thank God that they know who their neighbours are. So let us thank God that we do not have to choose who are neighbours are, because Jesus did not choose who he would die for. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, to the end that all who believed in him might not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Let me finish today with these beautiful words of prayer from Tom Long:
O God,
When we are honest about ourselves, we know that we do not choose in our own strength to do what is right. We talk a good game about right and wrong, but we do not have the wisdom or the power in ourselves to be righteous. We lie helpless on the side of the road, and even our best moral instincts pass us by on the other side. Come to us, O God, come to us again in Jesus Christ. Lift us out of our brokenness and take us to the place of healing. Prone to wander, Lord, we feel it, prone to leave the God we love; Here's my heart, O take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above. Amen.
Grace and St. George’s, 15 July, 2007
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’
But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’
(Luke 10:25-37)
I love preaching on the parable of the Good Samaritan, though as with any well-beloved text, it can be hard to approach it with fresh eyes, or to find ways for it to be heard with fresh ears. I owe two of the illustrations in this sermon to one of the great preachers, Thomas G. Long.
Have you ever heard of Wesley Autrey? He is a fifty-year old construction worker in New York City. One day this January of this year, he was on a subway platform with his two young daughters when a man beside him had a seizure and fell onto the tracks. Down the tracks were the lights of a train coming into the station. As Autrey said later, “I had to make a split decision”. So Wesley Autrey jumped down, and covered the man’s body, pressing him down into a one-foot trough between the tracks. Five cars passed over them, with so little clearance that the train left grease on Autrey’s knit cap. Neither man was injured, though the man with the seizure was taken to hospital and Autrey visited him there before going to work.
People like Wesley Autrey don’t come along everyday, but when they do, the question is always asked of them, why would take such risks to help a stranger?. When Autrey was asked this question, he told the media, “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.” Autrey may not think he’s a hero, but I think that most of us would say that he is one.
Forget about jumping in front of subway trains for a moment. The fact is that many of us do far less when the risks are far less. Why is it that more people don’t give blood, when the only cost is some discomfort and an hour or less of our time? Why don’t more people take the time and spend the money to learn CPR or First Aid? Why don’t more people stop to help a stranded motorist? Would young people give time for community service if the school system did not require it of them? The phenomenon of altruism, helping another person when there is no advantage or reward at stake, is such that psychologists have devoted considerable effort to try and understand it. It’s interesting that these psychologists often use the word “samaritanism” interchangeable with “altruism”, and their results show that Good Samaritans can be as rare today as they were when Jesus first told this parable two thousand years ago.
In 1973 two psychologists did a famous study involving theological students at Princeton Seminary. Some students were asked to go to another building to give a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Some students were told they had lots of time, others were told that they had to hurry between buildings. What the students did not know what that the study’s organizers had arranged for a man to lie in their path, not moving except for some coughs and groans.
How do you think these future ministers did in putting these words of Jesus into action? As you might expect, it depended on how much time the students had. The ones who had time to spare were more likely to stop and help, but those who had little time were far less likely to help. One student even stepped over the man’s body on his way to give his talk on the Good Samaritan. The organizers of the study concluded that people are far less likely to help others when there is a cost to them and they have to make a sacrifice. Other studies, done in airports on or on trains, also show what we might expect, that not everyone has it in them to be a Good Samaritan, even when it requires far less heroism than was showed by Wesley Autrey.
Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan for the benefit of a man who wants to live a godly and pious life. This man knows that God wants him to love his neighbour as much as he loves himself, but he only has one question. What exactly does that word neighbour mean? Are there exceptions? The parable gives a clear answer. If a Samaritan, whose people had no love for Jews and vice versa, could help a Jew from Jerusalem when the Jew’s own holy men would not, then there are no exceptions. Everyone is a neighbour. Anyone in need is a neighbour. Jesus ends the parable by telling the man to put it into practice. “Go and do likewise”.
The preacher Tom Long offers us some helpful advice on how to hear this familiar story with new ears. He notes that this parable is often understood as a moral example. Jesus talks about the Samaritan, and says “He cared for someone in need; I want you to imitate him. Go and do likewise." There are two problems with this approach. First, as we saw with Wesley Autrey, being a Good Samaritan is hard, which is why there are so few of them. Second, if Jesus was just giving a moral example about being helpful to strangers, why did he put all the Samaritan stuff in there? Why are the first two men pillars of the Jewish community, while the man who actually helps is a despised foreigner? As Long reminds us, the story is rather like a Christian pastor and a policeman ignoring an injured person, while a person from Al Qaeda stops and helps.
Clearly Jesus is making the point that our religious beliefs and practices do not automatically make us better people. A case in point came to my mind after Jeremy Robson and I (both history geeks) were talking about Ontario’s black communities that were founded by refugees from the underground railway. As you know, one of these communities was Wilberforce, near Clandeboye, an area known for its staunch Roman Catholic and Protestant communities. As you know, these communities had no love for one another in the 1800s, but one thing they had in common was a dislike of these black refugees. Jeremy was telling me that the whites were worried about their property values and required their new black neighbours to plant gardens and erect picket fences, with the unexpected result that the black homes often looked better than those of whites.
Clearly this example of religous people behaving badly, and others one could think of (religious sanction of killing of Tutsis in Rwanda, pro-apartheid preachers in South Africa, some white churches during the Civil Rights era in the US) show that Good Samaritanism goes against our grain as human beings. Our innate weakness, our human sin, prevents us from simply taking a moral example to heart. Tom Long points out that the story of the Good Samaritan is told BY the ultimate Good Samaritan. Jesus, himself an outcast, despised by those who should know better. Jesus knows how wounded we are by sin and by our hostility to God, and by taking us into his crucified arms, he restores us.
Some psychologists think that we are most likely to be altruistic, to be generous, when people are generous to us. In other words, being a good samaritan is not something we can pull out of ourselves by sheer moral willpower, but rather it comes from some kindness that we have ourselves received. As Christians we understand this idea because we have received the ultimate kindness of Christ’s love to us. Jesus does not ask that we be good, he merely asks us to receive his goodness and let it flow through us to our neighbour.
When I think of Christians who show this in action I think of people like Mother Theresa, but I also think of those who I can more readily understand and pattern myself on. I think of my friend Nancy, who teaches ESL to Moslem immigrants in her London neighbourhood. Now Nancy is a bible-quoting evangelical, and some Anglicans might call her a fundamentalist, but Nancy does not try to convert the women she teaches. She just helps them because she knows that they are her neighbours. I think of the different churches who run the meal program at St. John the Evangelist in London, or my fellow board members and the volunteers at the Ailsa Craig Food Bank, and I thank God that they know who their neighbours are. So let us thank God that we do not have to choose who are neighbours are, because Jesus did not choose who he would die for. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, to the end that all who believed in him might not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Let me finish today with these beautiful words of prayer from Tom Long:
O God,
When we are honest about ourselves, we know that we do not choose in our own strength to do what is right. We talk a good game about right and wrong, but we do not have the wisdom or the power in ourselves to be righteous. We lie helpless on the side of the road, and even our best moral instincts pass us by on the other side. Come to us, O God, come to us again in Jesus Christ. Lift us out of our brokenness and take us to the place of healing. Prone to wander, Lord, we feel it, prone to leave the God we love; Here's my heart, O take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above. Amen.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
A Sermon for Canada Day
Sunday fell on July 1st this year, Canada Day. Every church signboard around here had a "God Bless Canada" message or expressed a similar patriotic sentiment. While the Revised Common Lectionary used Luke 9:51-62 as the text, I felt the need to say something about the national holiday, though something of Luke creeps in. Perhaps the sermon betrays my sympathy for the Lutheran practice of banning national flags from the sanctuary; at the very least, I hope it resists the trap of falling into folk/volk religion (God Bless Our Land). I didn't get any comment at all on this one from the parishioners, the usual small group, mostly elderly, who form the summer congregation here.
A Sermon for Canada Day
Grace and St. George’s, 1 July, 2007
Some of you may be fans of the TV show "Little Mosque on the Prairie". If you don’t know it, the show is set in a small prairie town where a group of Islamic Canadians start a mosque in the basement of the local Anglican Church. The show is a comedy, but it says some important things about how our country has changed. By showing us how the two the two groups, the Islamic immigrants and the town’s Anglo-Canadian residents, overcome their prejudices to live together, the show challenges our perceptions and stereotypes. The premise of a mosque renting the basement of a church also asks us to think about how different religions relate to one another in our multicultural and multi-faith country.
Today the Lord’s Day and Canada Day coincide, and I hope you’ll find it appropriate, therefore, if I use this homily to offer some reflections on the day. As we rightly take time in our worship today to thank God for this country of Canada, it’s also good for us to ask ourselves some questions. How we might be called to think of ourselves as Canadians AND as Christians? Are the two one and the same, or are there times when our faith, our love of God, might take precedence over our nationality, our love of country? Do we live in a Christian nation, and is it right to want Canada to be a Christian nation?
Whatever we might say in answer to these questions, I think we can start by saying that we are blessed to live here. Yes, the taxes are high, our governments never seem to do enough for us, and not everything works as well as it should. However, when we consider what we do have, our complaints seem to dwindle in size to mere grumbles. We are blessed with a richness of resources. We are blessed to live in peace with our neighbour. Our standard of living is high. We have more schooling, more health care, safer cities, longer life expectancies and more opportunities than billions of people enjoy around the globe.
In my work with the Army Reserve I sometimes talk to soldiers returning from unpleasant places, and they always say how grateful they are to be home. One soldier, newly home from Sierra Leone in Africa, spoke for them all when he said to me, "My tour was a real eye opener for what we take for granted here in Canada". Of course, being Canadian, he didn’t tell me this in a bragging way, but in the quiet, matter of fact way that most Canadians use when we speak about our country. At sporting events we don’t sing the national anthem loudly (sometimes not at all) but I am sure that everyone in a crowd, whether they sing O Canada or not, would agree that Canada as a country is blessed.
Was it just luck that we happened to be born in this place at this time in history or was there some purpose to it? If God has truly blessed us, as I think he has, what does he expect of us in return? How does God want us to use these blessings? Does God want Canada to be a Christian country?
When you got your bulletin this morning, you also got a Canada Day bookmark which is a very kind gift from our Member of Parliament, the Rt. Hon. Bev Shipley. I notice on the bookmark that Mr. Shipley talks about the "Scriptural Foundation on which our country was founded". I’m not sure I understand exactly what he means by "scriptural foundation", but I think he means that Canada was once a Christian country, and our laws were based on Jewish and Christian values, such as the Ten Commandments. Even if we can’t precisely define the scriptural foundations of Canada, people seem to have a sense that our Canada is losing its identity as a Christian country, whether it be the withdrawal of prayer from public schools or recent changes to our marriage laws. The question is, how should Christians react to these changes?
One response is to try and lobby our politicians to stop or reverse these changes. For example, I occasionally get calls from Christian groups that want my help to protect the traditional legal definition of marriage between a man and a woman. As they see it, the government was wrong to allow same-sex marriage and it is the right of churches in a democracy to argue for a return to Christian values.
When I get these calls, however, something holds me back from saying yes, sign me up for your lobby campaign, and my reluctance has nothing to do with my views on marriage. What holds me back is the Moslems in the basement. Let’s pretend that we had a mosque in the basement of our church (and while we’re at it, let’s pretend that we have a basement). If I want laws that are friendly to Christians, don’t the Moslems in the basement have a right to ask for laws that are friendly to their faith? Whose children get to pray in school? What about other religions, or atheists? Where are their rights in all of this?
If we look back in history, we find that in the first three centuries of the church, Christians had no interest in passing laws that were Christian-friendly. For much of its history the official religion of the Roman Empire was not Christian, and often the Empire was hostile to Christians. Instead of lobbying for pro-Christian laws, Christians had the much more difficult job of being faithful to Christ in their families, in their workplaces, and in their churches. They wanted their friends and neighbours to become Christian, but they did it by persuasion and by making their lives wholesome and positive examples of God’s goodness. They lived by Jesus’ command to his disciples to be "salt and light": "In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:13-16).
It’s harder to be good Christians when it’s all up to us, without any help from laws or governments. The same is true of the disciples in today’s gospel. After a village has ignored Jesus, the disciples want Jesus to "command fire to come down from heaven and consume them" (Luke 9:54), but they are disappointed. Luke tersely says that Jesus "rebuked them". We don’t know what exactly Jesus said to them, but my guess is he might have gone like this. "My message is one of love", Jesus might have told them. "If I enforce that message with fire from heaven, how can it still be a message of love?" Instead of enforcing the kingdom of God with force, Jesus trusts in the power or words of love. "Go and proclaim the kingdom of God", Jesus tells the disciples. Jesus asks the same of us.
One of the blessings of Canada is precisely our virtue of tolerance. Tolerance is the glue that holds our country together, that allows us to work and live with Canadians of other faiths, or of no faiths. We can’t call down fire on one another when we disagree – that way led to Rwanda and Bosnia. We always need to work and strive and pray for a country where the immigrants are welcomed and encouraged to bring the best of who they are, understanding that their new identities as Canadians include the responsibility of tolerance. Hatred and prejudice is not welcome in their luggage, and it should be shunned by we who welcome them.
As Christians in Canada, our culture of tolerance to all races and religions poses problems that the first Christian settlers and founders could not have envisioned. It seems clear to me that we can’t call ourselves a Christian country any more. Your grandchildren will go to school and work with the sons and daughters from around the world. Our challenge, in our families, in our churches, and in our Sunday Schools, is to teach our children to be Christians and Canadians. They will need to learn the Bible, learn to pray, and learn to live as Christians so that they in their turn can go and proclaim the kingdom of God with love and gentleness, but with a firm conviction in the faith of their baptism.
By loving God and loving one another, sharing the good things that God has given to our country, we can all live in gratitude for our blessings. We are truly blessed to live in Canada – may we always want to share those blessings, so that our country is salt and light to the world. Amen.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
A Sermon for Canada Day
Grace and St. George’s, 1 July, 2007
Some of you may be fans of the TV show "Little Mosque on the Prairie". If you don’t know it, the show is set in a small prairie town where a group of Islamic Canadians start a mosque in the basement of the local Anglican Church. The show is a comedy, but it says some important things about how our country has changed. By showing us how the two the two groups, the Islamic immigrants and the town’s Anglo-Canadian residents, overcome their prejudices to live together, the show challenges our perceptions and stereotypes. The premise of a mosque renting the basement of a church also asks us to think about how different religions relate to one another in our multicultural and multi-faith country.
Today the Lord’s Day and Canada Day coincide, and I hope you’ll find it appropriate, therefore, if I use this homily to offer some reflections on the day. As we rightly take time in our worship today to thank God for this country of Canada, it’s also good for us to ask ourselves some questions. How we might be called to think of ourselves as Canadians AND as Christians? Are the two one and the same, or are there times when our faith, our love of God, might take precedence over our nationality, our love of country? Do we live in a Christian nation, and is it right to want Canada to be a Christian nation?
Whatever we might say in answer to these questions, I think we can start by saying that we are blessed to live here. Yes, the taxes are high, our governments never seem to do enough for us, and not everything works as well as it should. However, when we consider what we do have, our complaints seem to dwindle in size to mere grumbles. We are blessed with a richness of resources. We are blessed to live in peace with our neighbour. Our standard of living is high. We have more schooling, more health care, safer cities, longer life expectancies and more opportunities than billions of people enjoy around the globe.
In my work with the Army Reserve I sometimes talk to soldiers returning from unpleasant places, and they always say how grateful they are to be home. One soldier, newly home from Sierra Leone in Africa, spoke for them all when he said to me, "My tour was a real eye opener for what we take for granted here in Canada". Of course, being Canadian, he didn’t tell me this in a bragging way, but in the quiet, matter of fact way that most Canadians use when we speak about our country. At sporting events we don’t sing the national anthem loudly (sometimes not at all) but I am sure that everyone in a crowd, whether they sing O Canada or not, would agree that Canada as a country is blessed.
Was it just luck that we happened to be born in this place at this time in history or was there some purpose to it? If God has truly blessed us, as I think he has, what does he expect of us in return? How does God want us to use these blessings? Does God want Canada to be a Christian country?
When you got your bulletin this morning, you also got a Canada Day bookmark which is a very kind gift from our Member of Parliament, the Rt. Hon. Bev Shipley. I notice on the bookmark that Mr. Shipley talks about the "Scriptural Foundation on which our country was founded". I’m not sure I understand exactly what he means by "scriptural foundation", but I think he means that Canada was once a Christian country, and our laws were based on Jewish and Christian values, such as the Ten Commandments. Even if we can’t precisely define the scriptural foundations of Canada, people seem to have a sense that our Canada is losing its identity as a Christian country, whether it be the withdrawal of prayer from public schools or recent changes to our marriage laws. The question is, how should Christians react to these changes?
One response is to try and lobby our politicians to stop or reverse these changes. For example, I occasionally get calls from Christian groups that want my help to protect the traditional legal definition of marriage between a man and a woman. As they see it, the government was wrong to allow same-sex marriage and it is the right of churches in a democracy to argue for a return to Christian values.
When I get these calls, however, something holds me back from saying yes, sign me up for your lobby campaign, and my reluctance has nothing to do with my views on marriage. What holds me back is the Moslems in the basement. Let’s pretend that we had a mosque in the basement of our church (and while we’re at it, let’s pretend that we have a basement). If I want laws that are friendly to Christians, don’t the Moslems in the basement have a right to ask for laws that are friendly to their faith? Whose children get to pray in school? What about other religions, or atheists? Where are their rights in all of this?
If we look back in history, we find that in the first three centuries of the church, Christians had no interest in passing laws that were Christian-friendly. For much of its history the official religion of the Roman Empire was not Christian, and often the Empire was hostile to Christians. Instead of lobbying for pro-Christian laws, Christians had the much more difficult job of being faithful to Christ in their families, in their workplaces, and in their churches. They wanted their friends and neighbours to become Christian, but they did it by persuasion and by making their lives wholesome and positive examples of God’s goodness. They lived by Jesus’ command to his disciples to be "salt and light": "In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:13-16).
It’s harder to be good Christians when it’s all up to us, without any help from laws or governments. The same is true of the disciples in today’s gospel. After a village has ignored Jesus, the disciples want Jesus to "command fire to come down from heaven and consume them" (Luke 9:54), but they are disappointed. Luke tersely says that Jesus "rebuked them". We don’t know what exactly Jesus said to them, but my guess is he might have gone like this. "My message is one of love", Jesus might have told them. "If I enforce that message with fire from heaven, how can it still be a message of love?" Instead of enforcing the kingdom of God with force, Jesus trusts in the power or words of love. "Go and proclaim the kingdom of God", Jesus tells the disciples. Jesus asks the same of us.
One of the blessings of Canada is precisely our virtue of tolerance. Tolerance is the glue that holds our country together, that allows us to work and live with Canadians of other faiths, or of no faiths. We can’t call down fire on one another when we disagree – that way led to Rwanda and Bosnia. We always need to work and strive and pray for a country where the immigrants are welcomed and encouraged to bring the best of who they are, understanding that their new identities as Canadians include the responsibility of tolerance. Hatred and prejudice is not welcome in their luggage, and it should be shunned by we who welcome them.
As Christians in Canada, our culture of tolerance to all races and religions poses problems that the first Christian settlers and founders could not have envisioned. It seems clear to me that we can’t call ourselves a Christian country any more. Your grandchildren will go to school and work with the sons and daughters from around the world. Our challenge, in our families, in our churches, and in our Sunday Schools, is to teach our children to be Christians and Canadians. They will need to learn the Bible, learn to pray, and learn to live as Christians so that they in their turn can go and proclaim the kingdom of God with love and gentleness, but with a firm conviction in the faith of their baptism.
By loving God and loving one another, sharing the good things that God has given to our country, we can all live in gratitude for our blessings. We are truly blessed to live in Canada – may we always want to share those blessings, so that our country is salt and light to the world. Amen.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
A Sermon for a Country Cemetery Decoration Day
Decoration days are a custom that I only discovered after coming to rural Middlesex County as a pastor. Medway Cemetery is about 15 km north of London, Ontario. The cemetery board takes turns asking local clergy to speak.
After getting the invitation I came across Joseph Bottum's excellent essay "Death and Politics" in the June/July issue of First Things and stole some of his ideas. I'm always aware of our tendency to fall into ancestor worship at these sorts of gatherings, and I hope Bottum saved me from that trap.
The cemetery is small and beautiful, well-shaded and with two sounds bounded by a creek. Bless them, the organizers had a sound system so I could be heard by a long semi-circle of folks in lawnchairs.
I have to say that I envy people like you who have roots. Some of who know me may have heard me say that I grew up in an army family, so we moved frequently when I was a kid. Even after he left the army my dad was never that interested in putting down roots for very long. Perhaps my father didn’t need roots because he was the son of immigrants, but as for myself, I’ve always envied folks who could come to places like this and say "These are my people, this is my place".
One of the things that puzzles me about our world today is that fewer and fewer people seem to need roots. People don’t seem to need community like our ancestors did. Clubs, service groups, even bowling leagues are in decline as people choose alternate friendships and groups on the internet. One of the things that fascinates me is the growing popularity of "green funerals" where there is no service, no marked grave, nothing to show that a person ever was. It leaves one to wonder, if people can vanish without a trace, how will we know who they were, what they did, and what they stood for? If a society can forget the generations that went before us, how will we know what values those past generations stood for, and what we owe to them?
The people who are buried in cemeteries such as this were not famous or celebrities, but we know something of who they were and we know what they stood for. We know that they believed in hard work, that they carved farms out of the bush and broke the land and built towns. We know that they believed in families. They cared for their aged parents and grandparents and laid them to rest. All too often they laid they had to bury their own children. They carved the names of parents and children on these stones because they were worth remembering, and they set aside plots for the end of their own days. When they in their turn were laid to rest, the passed on their farms and businesses to their children, along with their love and wisdom. They gave us land to tend, and they gave us their graves to tend.
Tending these graves and these cemeteries is not just a job for a few members of a board. It’s a responsibility that we all share. Tending a grave and caring for a cemetery is a very real way of saying that we take seriously the values and responsibilities that we inherit from those who have gone before us. The cemetery is one of the glues that holds a society together. It reminds us of what we have been given from the past, and what we will have to pass on one day.
Let me end by speaking about one more thing that cemeteries remind us of. Why is it as children that we were frightened of these places, especially at night? Why are some adults still afraid of cemeteries, even of peaceful beautiful places like this one? They are frightened, I think, because these places remind us that we are not immune to death. Perhaps one of the attractions of those anonymous "green" funerals that I mentioned earlier is that they leave nothing behind to scare us. We don’t like to dwell on death, which is why we’ve moved from the family bedroom and the front parlour to the hospital and the funeral home, and done our best to banish it from view. Come to a place like this, however, and you can’t look around without being reminded that we are not immortal, that we, too, have an end to our days. As the old Anglican Book of Common Prayer reminds us, "in the midst of life, we are in death".
Our ancestors knew this, but they did not despair and they did not deny this reality. Our ancestors had hope. They created these churchyards as a sign of hope and comfort. See this place and remember it, they seem to say, because God sees it and God will remember it. The cemetery is a reminder that God knows everything, including the names and the resting places of those who have gone before us, and he will not forget them. As the Psalm says, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints" (Ps 116:15). Our ancestors knew that the resurrection of Jesus was not a random event, but it was only the first resurrection. Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that "For as in Adam all die, thus also in Christ all shall be made alive (1 Cor 15:22). The cemetery is not only a place of rest, but it’s a place of expectation, a kind of waiting room for those who trust that God will open these graves and waken these dead, and they, being faithful, will have nothing to fear from God’s judgement.
The word "gospel" is from a Greek word meaning "good news". For gospel people who have inherited the faith of our fathers (and of our mothers), the cemetery is a place of good news. The cemetery tells us that we need not fear death, because nothing can separate us from the love of God. The cemetery reminds us that the ordinary names on these tombstones -- names that are well-known to us and faded names of people known only to God -- are written in God’s book of life, and these people will be called to take their place in heaven on the last day. That was the hope that sustained our ancestors in their last days, and like all other good things from the past that they have given us, they pass this hope on to us. May we who gather here today share and live that hope, showing that hope to a world that, having no hope, wants to forget death.
After getting the invitation I came across Joseph Bottum's excellent essay "Death and Politics" in the June/July issue of First Things and stole some of his ideas. I'm always aware of our tendency to fall into ancestor worship at these sorts of gatherings, and I hope Bottum saved me from that trap.
The cemetery is small and beautiful, well-shaded and with two sounds bounded by a creek. Bless them, the organizers had a sound system so I could be heard by a long semi-circle of folks in lawnchairs.
A Talk for the Medway Cemetery Decoration Day
24 June, 2007
In my three years here as a pastor I’ve been asked to attend several cemetery services and decoration days, and of course we have our own in my parish of St. George’s every July. I confess however that I didn’t know much about this cemetery before George Nixon invited me to come, but I’ve learned something about the importance of these places. I know that many of you who come to these services have two or more generations of family and ancestors laid to rest here. In cemeteries throughout this part of the county I’ve seen the same names – names like Robson, Hodgins, O’Neil, and Telfer – names of the living, names of the dead. I’ve met folks who no longer live here but who come back to these services because, like you, they have roots here.
24 June, 2007
In my three years here as a pastor I’ve been asked to attend several cemetery services and decoration days, and of course we have our own in my parish of St. George’s every July. I confess however that I didn’t know much about this cemetery before George Nixon invited me to come, but I’ve learned something about the importance of these places. I know that many of you who come to these services have two or more generations of family and ancestors laid to rest here. In cemeteries throughout this part of the county I’ve seen the same names – names like Robson, Hodgins, O’Neil, and Telfer – names of the living, names of the dead. I’ve met folks who no longer live here but who come back to these services because, like you, they have roots here.
I have to say that I envy people like you who have roots. Some of who know me may have heard me say that I grew up in an army family, so we moved frequently when I was a kid. Even after he left the army my dad was never that interested in putting down roots for very long. Perhaps my father didn’t need roots because he was the son of immigrants, but as for myself, I’ve always envied folks who could come to places like this and say "These are my people, this is my place".
One of the things that puzzles me about our world today is that fewer and fewer people seem to need roots. People don’t seem to need community like our ancestors did. Clubs, service groups, even bowling leagues are in decline as people choose alternate friendships and groups on the internet. One of the things that fascinates me is the growing popularity of "green funerals" where there is no service, no marked grave, nothing to show that a person ever was. It leaves one to wonder, if people can vanish without a trace, how will we know who they were, what they did, and what they stood for? If a society can forget the generations that went before us, how will we know what values those past generations stood for, and what we owe to them?
The people who are buried in cemeteries such as this were not famous or celebrities, but we know something of who they were and we know what they stood for. We know that they believed in hard work, that they carved farms out of the bush and broke the land and built towns. We know that they believed in families. They cared for their aged parents and grandparents and laid them to rest. All too often they laid they had to bury their own children. They carved the names of parents and children on these stones because they were worth remembering, and they set aside plots for the end of their own days. When they in their turn were laid to rest, the passed on their farms and businesses to their children, along with their love and wisdom. They gave us land to tend, and they gave us their graves to tend.
Tending these graves and these cemeteries is not just a job for a few members of a board. It’s a responsibility that we all share. Tending a grave and caring for a cemetery is a very real way of saying that we take seriously the values and responsibilities that we inherit from those who have gone before us. The cemetery is one of the glues that holds a society together. It reminds us of what we have been given from the past, and what we will have to pass on one day.
Let me end by speaking about one more thing that cemeteries remind us of. Why is it as children that we were frightened of these places, especially at night? Why are some adults still afraid of cemeteries, even of peaceful beautiful places like this one? They are frightened, I think, because these places remind us that we are not immune to death. Perhaps one of the attractions of those anonymous "green" funerals that I mentioned earlier is that they leave nothing behind to scare us. We don’t like to dwell on death, which is why we’ve moved from the family bedroom and the front parlour to the hospital and the funeral home, and done our best to banish it from view. Come to a place like this, however, and you can’t look around without being reminded that we are not immortal, that we, too, have an end to our days. As the old Anglican Book of Common Prayer reminds us, "in the midst of life, we are in death".
Our ancestors knew this, but they did not despair and they did not deny this reality. Our ancestors had hope. They created these churchyards as a sign of hope and comfort. See this place and remember it, they seem to say, because God sees it and God will remember it. The cemetery is a reminder that God knows everything, including the names and the resting places of those who have gone before us, and he will not forget them. As the Psalm says, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints" (Ps 116:15). Our ancestors knew that the resurrection of Jesus was not a random event, but it was only the first resurrection. Saint Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that "For as in Adam all die, thus also in Christ all shall be made alive (1 Cor 15:22). The cemetery is not only a place of rest, but it’s a place of expectation, a kind of waiting room for those who trust that God will open these graves and waken these dead, and they, being faithful, will have nothing to fear from God’s judgement.
The word "gospel" is from a Greek word meaning "good news". For gospel people who have inherited the faith of our fathers (and of our mothers), the cemetery is a place of good news. The cemetery tells us that we need not fear death, because nothing can separate us from the love of God. The cemetery reminds us that the ordinary names on these tombstones -- names that are well-known to us and faded names of people known only to God -- are written in God’s book of life, and these people will be called to take their place in heaven on the last day. That was the hope that sustained our ancestors in their last days, and like all other good things from the past that they have given us, they pass this hope on to us. May we who gather here today share and live that hope, showing that hope to a world that, having no hope, wants to forget death.
Sermon for Sunday, June 24th
From the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) gospel for Sunday, 24 June.
A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday After Pentecost C
Grace and St. George’s, June 24, 2007
The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him. (Luke 8:38-39)
Why did Jesus cross the lake? To get to the other side, of course. And it wasn’t an easy business. To properly understand today’s gospel, we need to remind ourselves of what Jesus went through to get to the other shore:
Why did Jesus cross the lake? To get to the other side, of course. And it wasn’t an easy business. To properly understand today’s gospel, we need to remind ourselves of what Jesus went through to get to the other shore:
One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side of the lake.’ So they put out, and while they were sailing he fell asleep. A gale swept down on the lake, and the boat was filling with water, and they were in danger. They went to him and woke him up, shouting, ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ And he woke up and rebuked the wind and the raging waves; they ceased, and there was a calm. He said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ They were afraid and amazed, and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him?’ (Luke 8:22-25)
So today’s gospel really begins with a long and dangerous journey across open water in a small boat, a journey no sailor would take lightly. Even for Jesus, who had power over "the winds and the water", this was not a simple boat trip, because he was going somewhere no Jew would normally go. The people on the far side were gentiles, non-Jews and therefore people to be avoided. Even the name of the place, "country of the Gerasenes", simply means "land of the foreigners". For Jesus to cross over to foreign parts was like a western film where the hero saddles up and crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico, or heads out into Indian country. In the films, these scenes tell us that the hero is set on something serious, and probably dangerous. Clearly Jesus is set on something serious to go through a storm to get to the badlands. So why did Jesus cross the lake? Because he knew that an outcast on the other side needed him.
Years ago the software company I worked for brought its staff down to Los Angeles for a big conference. The reward was a trip out to Universal Studios, which they’d rented for a late-night party after the tourists had gone home. Free rides, free bars, free cigars – we were to be pampered. We boarded air-conditioned buses and climbed up into the dark Hollywood hills. From my window I noticed fires lit under one overpass, and in the light of the flames I could see dozens of people milling about. Is that a movie shoot? I asked the person beside me, who knew LA better than I did. No, he said, those are just homeless people. They live out here.
I remember thinking, what would happen if our bus broke down here, if our two groups were somehow forced together. Us, prosperous salesmen in our khaki dockers, golf shirts, leather loafers and cellphones, and them, the shadow people, burning trash in oil drums. How would we see each other? What would we say to each other? Would we be safe? It was a frightening thought.
The people on the far shore who knew the possessed man were clearly frightened of him. They had tried everything – arresting him, locking him up, even putting him in chains, but it was never enough. Perhaps it was easier having him out in the wilds, among the graves where the dead would not complain. We no longer think in terms of demonic possession, but the homeless, the mentally ill and unstable, they are still frightening. We prefer to keep them out of sight and out of mind whenever possible. When we do see them, our instinct is to kind of mentally cross ourselves and say "there but for the grace of God go I".
Perhaps the most frightening thing about the possessed man is not the demons but the simply and sinister mention that he was "a man of the city who had demons" (Lk 8:27). A "man of the city" means that this guys wasn’t always a naked madman living amongst the dead. Once he was a member of society, maybe with a house and wife and kids and a job. Once he was, well, once he was like one of us. But then the demons came.
Do you have to believe in demons to accept or understand this story? Well, it depends on what sort of demons you believe in. Perhaps not the supernatural kind like the ones from the Exorcist films, and not demons with names like Legion. But how about the kind from the farmhouse and the suburb and the office, the demons with names like Casino and Internet Pornography, or Depression or Eating Disorder. Those are pretty familiar demons. You probably know someone who had a good life until the demons came along and took it away, leaving a person you barely recognize anymore.
A friend called me last week to talk about his sister, an alcoholic who is so ill that she’s been caught drinking suntan lotion or tearing open those little packets of handi-wipes to suck on the wet tissue. She’s lost her nursing job, lost all interest in her appearance and hygeine, and hides from her family, who despair of her. As my friend told me, "I can see my family at her funeral, walking away from her grave. And then he asked me what words of comfort I might have for him.
Frankly I’m not sure I served my friend very well, because any words of comfort I tried to dredge up seemed pretty small in comparison with the size of his despair and his sister’s problem. But over the last week, as I’ve lived with today’s gospel, it seems obvious to me that my friend’s sister is like the possessed man, a lost person living in the land of dead, possessed by her demons. So I guess I would tell my friend this.
I would tell him that the Saviour who crossed an open lake in a tiny boat, who broke every rule to go to the badlands because he was interested in one outcast, and so that same Saviour is going to be just as interested in his sister. I would tell him that the Saviour who had the power to still the storm is a Saviour to be reckoned with. I would tell him that even the devils of hell knew they were beaten by this Saviour and gave up without a fight. And I would tell my friend that this Saviour has the power to help his sister, and to help all of us with our own addictions.
These are big things to say, big promises to make, and they make us uneasy. It’s tempting for us to walk away from them. But I would note that there are people in the story who are also frightened by it. Why do the people want Jesus to leave? It has more to do than their lost income because of all those lost pigs. I think Jesus himself frightens them, because they can’t accept that one man can do such things. To believe that Jesus can have this sort of power is just too challenging, and so they ask him to leave. I think that when we balk at the promises of our faith, when we doubt that "at the name of Jesus every knee will bow", then we run the risk of being like the people in this story. We don’t know how or when Jesus will help someone like my friend’s sister, but we must never stop praying in faith that he will help such people, that nothing and no one is beyond the power of God to help them.
Finally, there is the possessed man himself. He wants to travel with Jesus but he is told to stay and tell everyone who Jesus is and what Jesus did for him. It couldn’t have been an easy assignment. He was healed, back in his right frame of mind, but he had to live with all those people who used to be scared of him. We don’t know what became of him, but we perhaps we can see a bit of ourselves in him. Perhaps you and I were once healed or made clean by Jesus, and now have the chance to tell people that good news, even if it makes them uncomfortable, even if it’s not fashionable to be a Christian in some circles. But this story reminds us that Jesus doesn’t want us to be silent. And if we were once healed or restored by God in some way, how can we not want the same for all others, even the ones who frighten or disturb us, the ones we prefer to ignore.
Jesus wants all of us, you and I and my friend’s sister and the shadow-people under bridges and up in the hills. He has the power to call us together and restore us all, and maybe he will do so, one day when we stop saying "There but for the grace of God go I" and we say instead "Here, by the grace of God, are we all". Amen.
©Michael Peterson+ 2007
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