October 24, 2010
Pentecost 22
Joel 2:23-32
Luke 18:9-14
(prayer)
I want to invite you to use your imaginations this morning. But I am not asking you to stretch into fantasy (not that there is anything wrong with that), but I invite you to imagine the edges of reality.
//
As best as you can focus your thoughts on the smallest object you have ever seen with your naked eye. In your mind’s eye look at the detail on this object – is there texture? Is there colour? It is moving or static?
//
Now let your mind imagine something smaller – in fact try and focus on the smallest thing you can imagine, the smallest part of a thing. Let the chemical-physicist in you picture the very basis of matter itself. The inner space of molecules and atoms, the dynamism of electrons and protons and neutrons and the sub-sub-atomic particles that make up these once imagined smallest things. Have you got it?
Can you imagine God being aware of that same reality which you are focusing on? Can you imagine God understanding it even more fully than you can possibly imagine. God sees deeper and closer right to very heart of existence itself. Imagine that.
//
Okay shake that off. Now lets go the other way. Imagine the largest thing you can imagine. Go beyond the largest thing you have ever seen with your naked eye and let your mind go interstellar, let it go universal. Do you see the planets and solar systems and galaxies and galaxy clusters? Can you imagine all the way to the totality of the universe? Is your mind even open to what else might be out there?
//
Now can you imagine God being aware of that same reality which you are focusing on? Can you imagine God understanding it even more fully than you can possibly imagine. God sees further and more broadly right to very reaches of existence itself. Imagine that.
//
//
When you had that very small image in your mind, were you also mindful of where you were in relation to that speck. You were huge. Lost in the vastness beyond the tiny.
And when you were at the edge of the universe, could you see back to your life on this world. You were miniscule, lost amongst billions of brighter and larger realities.
//
Can you imagine that in that vast reality that is the spectrum from the very, very, very small to the massive “totality-of-all-that-is”, that God is present and aware?
//
Many modern theologians describe God as “panentheistic” – the assertion that God exists within all things and beyond all things at the same time. That the old debates of whether God is ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ are simply answered “yes”.
And how is this possible – well that possibility is part of the definition of God – it is that God is mystery beyond our understanding and knowable (to a degree) in how well we know ourselves, each other and the world/universe we live in.
//
This admittedly is a big God who I am talking about. And this is a risky God to get to know, because this God will challenge the walls and limits you want to put around people and ideas that you might prefer to stay out of God’s reach.
//
“I am so thankful God that I am not like that traitor over there – one who is betraying his own people by working with the empire to export resources out of our land to feed the lusts of Caesar in Rome. I do and say all of the right things, everyone can see that – so, focus your attention, O God, on me and not on that tax collector over there.”
To the Pharisee, God was simply not big enough to have room for the tax collector in the divine heart. I suspect that if we could catch ourselves in a moment of pure honesty, we can recall times when we have held the same attitude as this Pharisee from the story in Luke. Certainly, we have judged others as unworthy of our attention and I suspect that many (if not all of us) would have liked to assume that God agreed with us.
//
Inclusivity is one of the most challenging biblical concepts we deal with. And inclusivity is always related to a sense of worthiness. Is compassion, acceptance, respect deserved?
//
The prophet Joel lived through a time of drought. The traditional rains had been sparse for a season or two. The insect population had grow and strived on the stumped stalks of dry grain.
The passage Sherrill read today was written after a wonderful spring rain. It seemed to bring hope out of the dry ground and held the promise of great things to come.
It was a real experience in the here-and-now that Joel’s audience had longed for. They did have hope.
Joel used this time of shared hope to also speak of hope in God. Often times, the rains can seem fickle: bathing some fields and leaving others dry; and as they knew too well, sometimes the rains must be elsewhere, because they sure ain’t here. But every once and a while, you get one of those soaking rains that seem to stretch as far as one can imagine.
We have the advantage of satellite weather maps to be able to see these times more directly. We have all looked at those days where the rain clouds stretch from one corner of the province to another. Rain falling on all!
//
Well the days are surely coming, says the prophets, when God will rain down Spirit in everyone. Not just a few here and ignoring others. Not just the worthy or pious, but on all flesh – men, women, the young, the old, the slave, the free. All will imagine the vastness of God from the youngest boy to the oldest woman.
A socked in soaking rain, does not discriminate – everything gets wet. That’s the image of God’s outpouring that Joel is talking about. No one is left unaffected by the Spirit.
No one is left unaffected by the Spirit.
//
Centuries later, after Jesus’ crucifixion, a few of the disciples had had glimpses of resurrection, but only seven weeks later, at the spring harvest festival (known as the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost), they experienced a radical sense of inclusive community with a large group of total strangers. In spite of the obvious differences of language and nationality, they were able to find a common sense of Spirit. It was Peter who raised Joel’s old words of promise. We have been witnessing an outpouring of Spirit of Biblical proportions. God is literally raining over us.
Our women see visions;
our men clear their eyes.
With bold new decisions,
your people arise!
//
When God’s spirit indiscriminately pours out over us, we all get covered in the life giving rains. We all get wet – the old and the young, the Pharisees and the tax collectors, the men and the women, the worthy and the unworthy (how ever you define that).
//
Earlier this week, I was among four of us from St. David’s who attended the regular fall gathering of Yellowhead Presbytery (the regional body of the United Churches that includes Leduc). A main function of Presbyteries is to oversee and nurture and support the congregations within its bounds. Practically, since the members of the Presbytery is mostly the ministers and lay reps from the congregations, when the Presbytery visits with a congregation, it is usually people from one church working with another.
I have visited lots and lots of churches as a Presbytery rep over my 20-plus years in paid accountable ministry.
I have heard almost single church describe themselves as welcoming. We’re no different here: look at the sign at the back with all of the name tags.
[Aside, you know it might not be a bad habit to re-claim to wear those more often. After all, we have a new student inter with us for a few months and no matter how outgoing and popular any of us is, we can’t possibly know everyone or expect that everyone knows us. If you don’t have one, there is a list to sign at the back to get one made by the office. But I digress ...]
Lots of churches want to known as welcoming. Any many churches try really hard to be. But as I have said a few times over the years on those presbytery visits, ‘if you want to have an open door policy, you’d better be ready for who ever comes in those doors.’
When the make up of a community changes, the whole group is affected. When new people come to a church, they are just welcomed into the community of faith that is already here, they change the very dynamics of that community because, they, too, bring a glimpse of the holy with them. If God is indeed in and through and around and beyond all of us, each new configuration of people brings a fresh insight into the width and length and breadth of God.
I know in the 70s and 80s when churches first began to be more sensitive to the inclusivity of language, when it comes to male and female words and imagery, it was a struggle for many people to imagine that their faith could hold all of that newness. But here we are 30, 40 years later still being drenched by the Spirit. God was big enough for us all.
That continues, even today, as other barriers to faith and community are challenged. I believe that God is big enough for us all.
Inclusivity is a gift because is shows us more of God that we could possibly experience on our own. If that gift remains a challenge, I encourage you to continue to imagine how vast the love God, which we celebrate and glimpse in the life of Jesus and the resurrected Christ, can be.
Thank God for the outpouring of Spirit that unites us all
Let us pray;
God, help us open ourselves to our innermost depths and to the far reaches of your love and influence. Hold us under the wonder of your Spirit. Amen.
#144MV “Like a Healing Stream”
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Sunday, October 17, 2010
TIME WILL TELL
October 17, 2010
Pentecost 21
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Luke 18:1-8
(prayer)
The scripture readings from the Hebrew Bible since the Labour Day weekend have helped us hear the story of the Babylonian Exile.
In the early 6th century BCE, the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah was conquered by an Empire across the eastern wildernesses. Jehoiachin was the new king of Judah; Ezekiel was a priest in the temple; Jeremiah was a renowned prophet living in Jerusalem at the time.
The Babylonians began by gain control of the countryside: forcing people off their land or at the very least plundering their produce and livestock. Then, in a calculated way, some of the key political and religious leaders were forced to leave Judah and travel to Babylon where they would have to live as refugees. Ezekiel and King Jehoiachin were among those exiles. The temple was pillaged of its riches.
The Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, appointed Jehoiachin’s uncle (known as Zedekiah) as a puppet king in Judah. Jeremiah, the prophet, remained among the people still in Jerusalem and he spoke his mind about what he saw as the evil of Zedekiah’s reign and the hope he held out for the people in exile.
Over the next decade or so, Judah became part of the Babylonian empire in practice if not in name. In a series of waves, more Judean people were exiled to Babylon (artisans, smiths and those able to fight in Babylon’s armies). Eventually, Zedekiah tried to regain power and autonomy for himself, but the Babylonians were having none of that, so they laid siege to Jerusalem until the people were starved out.
The nation of Hebrew was erased from the map during the 11th year of King Zedekiah’s reign. The grand temple built by King Solomon and much of the city’s other buildings, were burned to the ground; the once protective city walls were torn down.
Zedekiah was captured. For his treason to Babylon, he was forced to watch the execution of his sons before his eyes were put out and he, too, along with all of the remaining population of Jerusalem were sent into exile.
//
Two weeks ago, we sang along with the exiles in songs of lament and anger for what had happened to them.
Last week, we read a letter written by Jeremiah addressed to the first waves of exiles in Babylon. This was during those years of Zedekiah’s puppet leadership. The message was that the people were not to give up, but that they were make lives for themselves in Babylon. They were to let ‘that place’ be their home; they were to plant crops and raise families, so that the people of Judah would survive, even as the land of Judah was occupied.
Today, we heard Jeremiah’s hope. The days are surely coming... when the lands of Judah and Israel will again be planted by Hebrew people. I love the poetry Jeremiah uses here. It is not just wheat and flax that will be grown, but the seeds of humans and animals will also take root in the land.
The old language of covenant is used in a renewed way. Jeremiah makes reference to the liberation of the exodus during Moses’ time when the law took written form on tablets from the rock of Horeb, the holy mountain of the Sinai. But in these days that are surely coming, the law would be written anew, not on stones or paper, but engraved within the very hearts of the people.
They will be contracted to God at the level of feeling and emotion. The very essence of who the people were would be inseparable from a life consistent with God’s Torah. No one would have to preach or prophesy, because everyone (from the greatest to the least) would already know what they need to know.
Jeremiah was not speaking of a short-term hope – he was envisioning the long view. The day is not here, yet, but the days are surely coming; so stay alive (physically, emotionally, theologically) during this exile, because restoration and renewal are on their way.
Time will tell, Jeremiah was saying. A persistent, stubborn forward looking faith was needed.
//
Move ahead 600 years and Jesus teaches about persistence as well. The widow versus the judge: it is a mismatch - a man and a woman (an obvious legal and practical difference); a respected leader with power and a lonely widow dependant on the generosity of others to survive. Jesus doesn’t say so directly, but we can assume that the woman’s case was valid and just, but that her low station in life was bogging down her case.
But she is persistent and will not let the judge ignore her. He does rule in her favour, but openly admits that it has more to do with her nagging persistence than the merits of her case.
The parable is part of some teaching on prayer. The message seems to be if an unjust judge is affected by persistent demands for justice, how much more can we expect from God who is the most just of all judges. Jesus teaches that God does hear the people’s cries for justice and will respond justly and quickly: the delay will not be long. Time will tell.
If the parable ended there, I admit that I would not be very comfortable with it. I do not finding myself among those who believe that we have a vending-machine kind of God. If we plug in the right amount of quarters and loonies and press the right buttons at the right times, God will automatically give us what we want.
An unfortunate reading of this passage can result in an assumption that more prayer will force God to act in our behalf. My mind and my experience has seen and reflected on miraculous turns of events that have be enveloped in attitudes of prayer. I can’t say that prayer makes no difference. I have simply seen too many times when prayers have not forced God to do what I (or others) want to have happen. I just can’t believe that it is as simple as putting together a jigsaw puzzle of piety.
In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins playing CS Lewis says: “I don’t pray to change God. I pray because I have to. I pray because I can’t help myself. Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes me.” That seems to be closer to what makes sense to me.
Fortunately we are not forced to interpret this passage to mean that we can make God do what we want simply by praying long and hard enough: Luke has that final summary teaching of Jesus at the end of the passage to make us think that the message is really about faith, not about how to prayer or how often. It’s one of those cliff-hanger [what do you think?] questions.
“And yet… when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth.”
It is faith that is to be persistent. Can people believe that God cares, even when we don’t get the instant responses we expect to our prayers? Do we have the will to keep that kind of faith?
//
In the context of the whole parable, perhaps we are being invited to have faith enough so that justice will prevail. We are being invited to consider that that the very essence of God is justice and compassion and ‘we’ are called to be agents of the love and fairness shown in and through Jesus.
//
Wouldn’t this world be a much better place if people of faith approached our relationships with others with unwavering compassion and a sense of fairness for all? We would not allow systems of greed to acquire wealth on the backs of the weak or misfortunate. We would be persistent in our efforts to ensure that each person was valued for who they were: a beloved child of God – that discrimination in all of its obvious and subtle forms would be challenged and named as un-holy and unacceptable.
It’s not like the voices for justice have been silent. And we have witnessed steady progress; particularly within the last 100 years. In our part of the world, we have seen virtually attempt to limit equality turned upside down bringing us a real taste of that old Christian hope that within the loving community Jesus strove for, there is no distinction between people. Paul, in his letter to the Galations, spoke in the language of the obvious divisions of the mid-first century and say there was no longer male or female, no longer slave or free, jew nor greek. The spirit of that hope has kept voices of justice crying to ensure that other divisions, like that of race or religion or sexual orientation or nationality are not used to deny people the equality and dignity we all have earned and deserve as children of God.
We have witnessed progress and change. Ant yet our persistence is still required. The rash of recent suicides of young gay youth has to remind us that justice is not only about changing laws but changing attitudes. Bullying and teasing and taunting seldom draw much attention until something tragic happens. And so we need to have the persistence of Jesus’ parable-widow; we need to keep up the pressure until it is no longer acceptable to treat someone with less than the full God given dignity we all deserve.
There is a lot of work to do. Within our global family, besides obvious examples of racism and homophobia, in too many corners of our globe, women are treated as sub-human, less than property; slavery even still exists as people are forced into indentured service. Some of these practices are rooted old cultural and religious traditions. Those roots are deep for some people – the kind of progressive dignity I am preaching about sounds too radical for them.
//
Can we believe that the big changes in attitude which are needed are possible?
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find [that kind of] faith on the earth?”
//
Being a disciple of Jesus, being a person of God is not a one-time event. It is a progressive calling, an on-going, dynamic vocation. Clearly, we have not found the ability to change the world in an instant; we have not discovered the undeniable mountain moving faith. But mountains can move – maybe if it is one bolder at a time.
The exiles needed to ‘settle’ for Babylon and a hope that a restoration to Judah would come. The Biblical history tells us that it was seven decades before that began to happen. Only the youngest of original exiles, would have been able to see the entire time of captivity from start to finish and return to Judah as the most senior of elders.
Time exists beyond any one of us and it endures any one life. But faith can transcend time, when hope is heart-felt and passed on.
We all made promises of that kind of faith with Claire and her family this morning [baptism].
In just a couple of weeks it will be November 1st: All Saints’ Day – the day set aside on the Christian calendar to honour all of the faithful people who have helped us get where we now are. We are recipients of wonderful blessings from those who have journeyed the road of faith before us. And we have new roads to traverse that will further benefit humankind and the world we all share.
‘Time will tell’ if that kind of faith can be found on the earth.
Let us pray:
Patient God;
Prepare us to do what you call us to do. When we are faint of heart and our faith grows dim, enlighten us with hope and perseverance, so that we never give up on your vision of justice. Amen.
#675VU “Will Your Anchor Hold?”
Pentecost 21
Jeremiah 31:27-34
Luke 18:1-8
(prayer)
The scripture readings from the Hebrew Bible since the Labour Day weekend have helped us hear the story of the Babylonian Exile.
In the early 6th century BCE, the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah was conquered by an Empire across the eastern wildernesses. Jehoiachin was the new king of Judah; Ezekiel was a priest in the temple; Jeremiah was a renowned prophet living in Jerusalem at the time.
The Babylonians began by gain control of the countryside: forcing people off their land or at the very least plundering their produce and livestock. Then, in a calculated way, some of the key political and religious leaders were forced to leave Judah and travel to Babylon where they would have to live as refugees. Ezekiel and King Jehoiachin were among those exiles. The temple was pillaged of its riches.
The Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, appointed Jehoiachin’s uncle (known as Zedekiah) as a puppet king in Judah. Jeremiah, the prophet, remained among the people still in Jerusalem and he spoke his mind about what he saw as the evil of Zedekiah’s reign and the hope he held out for the people in exile.
Over the next decade or so, Judah became part of the Babylonian empire in practice if not in name. In a series of waves, more Judean people were exiled to Babylon (artisans, smiths and those able to fight in Babylon’s armies). Eventually, Zedekiah tried to regain power and autonomy for himself, but the Babylonians were having none of that, so they laid siege to Jerusalem until the people were starved out.
The nation of Hebrew was erased from the map during the 11th year of King Zedekiah’s reign. The grand temple built by King Solomon and much of the city’s other buildings, were burned to the ground; the once protective city walls were torn down.
Zedekiah was captured. For his treason to Babylon, he was forced to watch the execution of his sons before his eyes were put out and he, too, along with all of the remaining population of Jerusalem were sent into exile.
//
Two weeks ago, we sang along with the exiles in songs of lament and anger for what had happened to them.
Last week, we read a letter written by Jeremiah addressed to the first waves of exiles in Babylon. This was during those years of Zedekiah’s puppet leadership. The message was that the people were not to give up, but that they were make lives for themselves in Babylon. They were to let ‘that place’ be their home; they were to plant crops and raise families, so that the people of Judah would survive, even as the land of Judah was occupied.
Today, we heard Jeremiah’s hope. The days are surely coming... when the lands of Judah and Israel will again be planted by Hebrew people. I love the poetry Jeremiah uses here. It is not just wheat and flax that will be grown, but the seeds of humans and animals will also take root in the land.
The old language of covenant is used in a renewed way. Jeremiah makes reference to the liberation of the exodus during Moses’ time when the law took written form on tablets from the rock of Horeb, the holy mountain of the Sinai. But in these days that are surely coming, the law would be written anew, not on stones or paper, but engraved within the very hearts of the people.
They will be contracted to God at the level of feeling and emotion. The very essence of who the people were would be inseparable from a life consistent with God’s Torah. No one would have to preach or prophesy, because everyone (from the greatest to the least) would already know what they need to know.
Jeremiah was not speaking of a short-term hope – he was envisioning the long view. The day is not here, yet, but the days are surely coming; so stay alive (physically, emotionally, theologically) during this exile, because restoration and renewal are on their way.
Time will tell, Jeremiah was saying. A persistent, stubborn forward looking faith was needed.
//
Move ahead 600 years and Jesus teaches about persistence as well. The widow versus the judge: it is a mismatch - a man and a woman (an obvious legal and practical difference); a respected leader with power and a lonely widow dependant on the generosity of others to survive. Jesus doesn’t say so directly, but we can assume that the woman’s case was valid and just, but that her low station in life was bogging down her case.
But she is persistent and will not let the judge ignore her. He does rule in her favour, but openly admits that it has more to do with her nagging persistence than the merits of her case.
The parable is part of some teaching on prayer. The message seems to be if an unjust judge is affected by persistent demands for justice, how much more can we expect from God who is the most just of all judges. Jesus teaches that God does hear the people’s cries for justice and will respond justly and quickly: the delay will not be long. Time will tell.
If the parable ended there, I admit that I would not be very comfortable with it. I do not finding myself among those who believe that we have a vending-machine kind of God. If we plug in the right amount of quarters and loonies and press the right buttons at the right times, God will automatically give us what we want.
An unfortunate reading of this passage can result in an assumption that more prayer will force God to act in our behalf. My mind and my experience has seen and reflected on miraculous turns of events that have be enveloped in attitudes of prayer. I can’t say that prayer makes no difference. I have simply seen too many times when prayers have not forced God to do what I (or others) want to have happen. I just can’t believe that it is as simple as putting together a jigsaw puzzle of piety.
In the 1993 movie Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins playing CS Lewis says: “I don’t pray to change God. I pray because I have to. I pray because I can’t help myself. Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes me.” That seems to be closer to what makes sense to me.
Fortunately we are not forced to interpret this passage to mean that we can make God do what we want simply by praying long and hard enough: Luke has that final summary teaching of Jesus at the end of the passage to make us think that the message is really about faith, not about how to prayer or how often. It’s one of those cliff-hanger [what do you think?] questions.
“And yet… when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth.”
It is faith that is to be persistent. Can people believe that God cares, even when we don’t get the instant responses we expect to our prayers? Do we have the will to keep that kind of faith?
//
In the context of the whole parable, perhaps we are being invited to have faith enough so that justice will prevail. We are being invited to consider that that the very essence of God is justice and compassion and ‘we’ are called to be agents of the love and fairness shown in and through Jesus.
//
Wouldn’t this world be a much better place if people of faith approached our relationships with others with unwavering compassion and a sense of fairness for all? We would not allow systems of greed to acquire wealth on the backs of the weak or misfortunate. We would be persistent in our efforts to ensure that each person was valued for who they were: a beloved child of God – that discrimination in all of its obvious and subtle forms would be challenged and named as un-holy and unacceptable.
It’s not like the voices for justice have been silent. And we have witnessed steady progress; particularly within the last 100 years. In our part of the world, we have seen virtually attempt to limit equality turned upside down bringing us a real taste of that old Christian hope that within the loving community Jesus strove for, there is no distinction between people. Paul, in his letter to the Galations, spoke in the language of the obvious divisions of the mid-first century and say there was no longer male or female, no longer slave or free, jew nor greek. The spirit of that hope has kept voices of justice crying to ensure that other divisions, like that of race or religion or sexual orientation or nationality are not used to deny people the equality and dignity we all have earned and deserve as children of God.
We have witnessed progress and change. Ant yet our persistence is still required. The rash of recent suicides of young gay youth has to remind us that justice is not only about changing laws but changing attitudes. Bullying and teasing and taunting seldom draw much attention until something tragic happens. And so we need to have the persistence of Jesus’ parable-widow; we need to keep up the pressure until it is no longer acceptable to treat someone with less than the full God given dignity we all deserve.
There is a lot of work to do. Within our global family, besides obvious examples of racism and homophobia, in too many corners of our globe, women are treated as sub-human, less than property; slavery even still exists as people are forced into indentured service. Some of these practices are rooted old cultural and religious traditions. Those roots are deep for some people – the kind of progressive dignity I am preaching about sounds too radical for them.
//
Can we believe that the big changes in attitude which are needed are possible?
“When the Son of Man comes, will he find [that kind of] faith on the earth?”
//
Being a disciple of Jesus, being a person of God is not a one-time event. It is a progressive calling, an on-going, dynamic vocation. Clearly, we have not found the ability to change the world in an instant; we have not discovered the undeniable mountain moving faith. But mountains can move – maybe if it is one bolder at a time.
The exiles needed to ‘settle’ for Babylon and a hope that a restoration to Judah would come. The Biblical history tells us that it was seven decades before that began to happen. Only the youngest of original exiles, would have been able to see the entire time of captivity from start to finish and return to Judah as the most senior of elders.
Time exists beyond any one of us and it endures any one life. But faith can transcend time, when hope is heart-felt and passed on.
We all made promises of that kind of faith with Claire and her family this morning [baptism].
In just a couple of weeks it will be November 1st: All Saints’ Day – the day set aside on the Christian calendar to honour all of the faithful people who have helped us get where we now are. We are recipients of wonderful blessings from those who have journeyed the road of faith before us. And we have new roads to traverse that will further benefit humankind and the world we all share.
‘Time will tell’ if that kind of faith can be found on the earth.
Let us pray:
Patient God;
Prepare us to do what you call us to do. When we are faint of heart and our faith grows dim, enlighten us with hope and perseverance, so that we never give up on your vision of justice. Amen.
#675VU “Will Your Anchor Hold?”
Sunday, October 3, 2010
DIGGING DEEP MYSTERY
October 3, 2010
Pentecost 19
Psalm 137
Luke 17:5-10
(prayer)
By ... the wa...ters, the wa...ters of Babylon;
Whether it’s that traditional Israeli melody or Boney M’s disco version:
By the rivers of Babylon;
where we sat down;
Or even my own feeble attempt at song-writing almost thirty years ago:
My river cries a tear,
songs of home don’t reach my ear.
The notes they play amongst the trees,
Their melody won’t set me free.
The 137th Psalm begs to be sung. After all, it is a psalm about the painful result of being forced to sing folk songs, which simply reminded the exiled Judeans how far they were from home as they sat by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Babylon.
However, I have yet to see a musical version of Psalm 137 (including my own) which included the final verses of the Psalm. Boney M didn’t sing ...
By the rivers of Babylon,
We plot our revenge,
We’ll take your kids,
And bust in their heads!
I guess it’s just easier to pretend that the psalm ends at verse 6, instead of verse 9.
//
Today, the Lectionary invites us to look at some hard scripture passages to hear.
Anguish and Anger are the themes of Psalm 137 – cries of lament and cries for revenge.
And what about the example Jesus used to make the point that there were obligations to being a disciple. He is completely complicit with the institution of slavery. “Look, no slave would expect any reward or appreciation for simply doing the jobs their owners demand. Disciples are like worthless slaves: just do what you’re supposed to do, don’t ask for any reward!”
//
It would have been nice if Jesus had spoken against slavery.
But in all fairness, it did take the rest of us almost 2000 more years to get to that point – and we still have places in our world where slavery – or near slavery – is accepted and expected.
Here’s a hard question: if we say that slavery is immoral and Jesus is complicit with slavery, are Jesus’ ethics out of whack?
//
This is a perfect example of the dangers of a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. In fact, passages like those in Luke 17 were used to justify the slave trade for centuries.
The simple fact of the matter is in the Biblical era (before and after Jesus’ time), in the context of empire politics, the institution of slavery was so culturally entrenched that there was no coherent movement challenging it.
//
If we get stuck on the hard, uncomfortable part of some of our Bible passages, we may miss out on some deeper mystery that can be relevant in our time and worldview, which is so different from Jesus’ time in the first century AD or the Babylonian exile in the mid-500s BC. That might take some digging.
//
Let’s look at the surface of the Luke passage: the disciples ask Jesus, to “increase their faith.” And Jesus responds by telling them, they barely have any faith, not even a mustard seed’s worth. And furthermore, they shouldn’t be asking to be rewarded in any way (even thanked) for what they are doing because they are only doing their duty.
Now, these two parts of the passage don’t necessarily go directly together when we think about when these words might have been actually said to Jesus’ disciples. Matthew has a parallel to the first part about mustard seed faith, but the slave-section is found only in Luke. This tells us that they weren’t always told together in the early church communities. Even so, whatever their original context, Luke has chosen to join them and that tells us something about what Luke wanted the early church readers to get from these teachings.
I find it interesting to speculate what might be behind the apostle’s request to “increase our faith”. A desire to learn shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, should it? I doubt if that was the intent of the request that Jesus would have responded so harshly.
And so I wonder ... Did they think they had mastered all they had learned already and were in need of something more? Or were they asking for a quick painless upgrade: “Jesus, you do the work for us, just (magically) give us greater faith.” I’m sure they would love the power implied in a faith that could uproot trees with only a word.
//
The second part of Luke’s narrative seems to lean toward my first speculation – that the apostles felt in need of something more than they had. That hard language about the worthiness of slaves could be implying that the disciples were not necessarily making the full use of the faith they already had.
When I think of this passage like that, I can see a positive spin on the hard language – you don’t need to ask for more faith, you have more capabilities inside you that you have not fully explored yet.
Maybe, after a little bit of digging, it is fair to say that Jesus expects his followers to not hold back (or ask for quick, easy, painless fixes) but to put all of their faith and effort into the gospel which they share. That is the cost and the duty of choosing discipleship.
//
As many of you know, I am a football dad, with two young players in our family now: one in high school and one playing peewee football. Did you see the footage of the San Francisco area game where the coaches from the two teams started fighting with each other?
And hey, we live in Canada, we’ve all seen (or heard) examples of the out of control, hockey-parent.
I’m a non-repentant sports fan, but as the years have passed, I have given up most my fanaticism (the strikes and lockouts, the Pocklington moving the Oilers fiascos and the last half decade of Eskimo and Oiler seasons have given me perspective). I still enjoy the games; I believe in the life lessons of personal discipline, teamwork and sportsmanship; I love to watch “my” team play well and win, but losing sleep over a loss or a bad play or wanting to yell at the ref or attack a parent or coach – that’s not me anymore, if it ever was.
But I also know that there are still seed of obsessive behaviour within me and I certainly see it amongst some of the more “intense” fellow parents on the sidelines. As a team director a couple of years ago, I had to move quickly to calm down a parent as she was hurling a blue streak of insults at a 14 player on the opposing team.
I have seen the anger, the intensity, the desire for retribution or revenge. When rationality is able to re-enter the situation, there are very few who would say that acting on those hard emotions was justified. I don’t like it, but I understand it.
In the same way, as I try to get down to why the author of Psalm 137 needed to express those thoughts of revenge.
The exiles were pawns in the games of empires. Judah has the hard luck of being located at the centre of three continents. The paths between Europe, Asia and Africa meet in Judah. Empires are built on the ability to move armies and wealth around. Judah was a victim of this reality of conquest.
It wasn’t their fault that they were exiled. Someone else was to blame for their hardship. The just thing to happen would be for those others to suffer as they had.
There is an ironic truth in the common saying that “misery loves company”. For some reason, we are better able to endure difficult times, if others have to go through it with us. And there is even an odd satisfaction when the ones who cause the suffering are forced endure some suffering of their own; Indian mystics would call that simply part of Karma: the cycles of cause and effect – an English language proverb says, “what goes around comes around”.
In the hard experience of suffering, the Judeans hope for the cycle to come around for their captors who treat them harshly (we might say, ‘as less than human’).
Although it was only about a century earlier that Judah had held back, while its neighbour to the north (Israel) was similarly overrun by the Assyrians, the psalmist wished for calamity to come to their south-eastern neighbour Edom, for the Edmoites support of the Babylonian invasion and conquest of Judah.
//
It tormented the Judean people to have to sing the joyous songs of home in this land of exile. And we do well not to ignore that this torment fuelled anger as well as sadness; revenge as well as lament. The songs not only brought tears of regret to their eyes but revenge-filled visions of innocent Babylonian babies suffering and dying as payment for the Judean’s exile.
If we are able to dig deeper than our disgust with the violent desires, we might be able to understand the depth of the impact of the loss of identity being experienced by the exile.
As we uncover the historical context of this period in Hebrew history, we can recall that some four-plus centuries earlier, there was unity and prosperity for the people under the reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Israel was the dominant power in the region, while, they never gathered an empire as vast as the Assyrians or Babylonians would, they expanded their borders farther than any other time in their history. David established and built Jerusalem, as the centre of power and religion. During Solomon’s reign, a permanent stone temple was built to replace the canvas and wood tent tabernacle that had served as the centre of Hebrew worship since the time of Moses.
Even in the divisive years following Solomon’s death (where the nation was split in two with different rulers, different places and practices of worship: Israel in the north and Judah in the south), there was a sense of purpose and growing invincibility of the people and their way of life. As I noted before the northern kingdom got their lesson in humility in 721 BC when Samaria fell to the Assyrians. From the southern perspective, this was more evidence that they had been right all along, that God was really on their side. There is some speculation among biblical scholars that Judah must have made some kind of pact with the Assyrians to not help Israel in exchange for keeping their autonomy. If that was the case, the Babylonians weren’t going to honour that deal when they became the dominant region power in the 6th century.
When Judah fell, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, when the temple was looted and left in ruins, more than rocks came crashing down. The people had lost their identity. Weren’t they God’s favoured people? Hadn’t several hundreds of years’ history been testament to that?
There is a line in Psalm 137 that says:
“how can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land (v4)?
I suspect that the deeper meaning here was not just that based on homesickness, but a crisis of faith. Does God exist for us in Babylon? There was a theology that had developed that God physically dwelled within the temple; could God even exist now that the temple was in ruins? A prophet of the time, Ezekiel even had a comforting vision where he witnessed the Spirit of God rise up out of the rubble of Jerusalem and physically move to Babylon. I don’t think the psalmist felt the same was as Ezekiel.
‘How can we sing the LORD’s song’, might mean, ‘what’s the point in singing the LORD’s song anymore.’
//
Both of today’s scripture passages give us a glimpse at a difficult prospect of faith. Have we reached a point where a deeper connection to the source of our faith is no longer possible?
Do we long to have our faith increased by some outside influence, because we feel stuck and lacking where we are -or- do we feel that the foundations of what we thought we believed have been taken away from us and we aren’t sure what is certain anymore?
Under the layers of these readings today, I believe is a deeper mystery – ultimately, we all long to have an identity that gives us purpose to life – and we long for God to love us and support us and be with us as we struggle.
//
My initial instinct was to finish this sermon right there - end with questions and mystery. But the pastor in me also holds hope in the midst of questioning, and so I want to add...
If the only words we had to go by were these two scripture passages suggested for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in year C, we might feel as lost as a demoralized exile or a worthless slave; but we have other voices, other experiences that have been passed on to us.
The history of the Bible notes that, although extremely challenging, the Hebrew people came through the exile with a faith in God intact. There were changes to practices and dogmas, but faith endured.
Jesus’ disciples would be left fearful and ready to run on the Sabbath that followed Jesus’ crucifixion, but within days, they were risking ridicule and arrest/death themselves proclaiming that the essence of who Jesus was and his vision of how God and humanity can intersect did not die on the cross. Things were going to be different, there was a challenge of a new inclusivity that would rock the church over its first few decades, but faith endured.
So dig deep; find the faith, hope and compassion that endures.
Let us pray,
God,
Be with us, even when we have little time for you. Amen.
Pentecost 19
Psalm 137
Luke 17:5-10
(prayer)
By ... the wa...ters, the wa...ters of Babylon;
Whether it’s that traditional Israeli melody or Boney M’s disco version:
By the rivers of Babylon;
where we sat down;
Or even my own feeble attempt at song-writing almost thirty years ago:
My river cries a tear,
songs of home don’t reach my ear.
The notes they play amongst the trees,
Their melody won’t set me free.
The 137th Psalm begs to be sung. After all, it is a psalm about the painful result of being forced to sing folk songs, which simply reminded the exiled Judeans how far they were from home as they sat by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Babylon.
However, I have yet to see a musical version of Psalm 137 (including my own) which included the final verses of the Psalm. Boney M didn’t sing ...
By the rivers of Babylon,
We plot our revenge,
We’ll take your kids,
And bust in their heads!
I guess it’s just easier to pretend that the psalm ends at verse 6, instead of verse 9.
//
Today, the Lectionary invites us to look at some hard scripture passages to hear.
Anguish and Anger are the themes of Psalm 137 – cries of lament and cries for revenge.
And what about the example Jesus used to make the point that there were obligations to being a disciple. He is completely complicit with the institution of slavery. “Look, no slave would expect any reward or appreciation for simply doing the jobs their owners demand. Disciples are like worthless slaves: just do what you’re supposed to do, don’t ask for any reward!”
//
It would have been nice if Jesus had spoken against slavery.
But in all fairness, it did take the rest of us almost 2000 more years to get to that point – and we still have places in our world where slavery – or near slavery – is accepted and expected.
Here’s a hard question: if we say that slavery is immoral and Jesus is complicit with slavery, are Jesus’ ethics out of whack?
//
This is a perfect example of the dangers of a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. In fact, passages like those in Luke 17 were used to justify the slave trade for centuries.
The simple fact of the matter is in the Biblical era (before and after Jesus’ time), in the context of empire politics, the institution of slavery was so culturally entrenched that there was no coherent movement challenging it.
//
If we get stuck on the hard, uncomfortable part of some of our Bible passages, we may miss out on some deeper mystery that can be relevant in our time and worldview, which is so different from Jesus’ time in the first century AD or the Babylonian exile in the mid-500s BC. That might take some digging.
//
Let’s look at the surface of the Luke passage: the disciples ask Jesus, to “increase their faith.” And Jesus responds by telling them, they barely have any faith, not even a mustard seed’s worth. And furthermore, they shouldn’t be asking to be rewarded in any way (even thanked) for what they are doing because they are only doing their duty.
Now, these two parts of the passage don’t necessarily go directly together when we think about when these words might have been actually said to Jesus’ disciples. Matthew has a parallel to the first part about mustard seed faith, but the slave-section is found only in Luke. This tells us that they weren’t always told together in the early church communities. Even so, whatever their original context, Luke has chosen to join them and that tells us something about what Luke wanted the early church readers to get from these teachings.
I find it interesting to speculate what might be behind the apostle’s request to “increase our faith”. A desire to learn shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, should it? I doubt if that was the intent of the request that Jesus would have responded so harshly.
And so I wonder ... Did they think they had mastered all they had learned already and were in need of something more? Or were they asking for a quick painless upgrade: “Jesus, you do the work for us, just (magically) give us greater faith.” I’m sure they would love the power implied in a faith that could uproot trees with only a word.
//
The second part of Luke’s narrative seems to lean toward my first speculation – that the apostles felt in need of something more than they had. That hard language about the worthiness of slaves could be implying that the disciples were not necessarily making the full use of the faith they already had.
When I think of this passage like that, I can see a positive spin on the hard language – you don’t need to ask for more faith, you have more capabilities inside you that you have not fully explored yet.
Maybe, after a little bit of digging, it is fair to say that Jesus expects his followers to not hold back (or ask for quick, easy, painless fixes) but to put all of their faith and effort into the gospel which they share. That is the cost and the duty of choosing discipleship.
//
As many of you know, I am a football dad, with two young players in our family now: one in high school and one playing peewee football. Did you see the footage of the San Francisco area game where the coaches from the two teams started fighting with each other?
And hey, we live in Canada, we’ve all seen (or heard) examples of the out of control, hockey-parent.
I’m a non-repentant sports fan, but as the years have passed, I have given up most my fanaticism (the strikes and lockouts, the Pocklington moving the Oilers fiascos and the last half decade of Eskimo and Oiler seasons have given me perspective). I still enjoy the games; I believe in the life lessons of personal discipline, teamwork and sportsmanship; I love to watch “my” team play well and win, but losing sleep over a loss or a bad play or wanting to yell at the ref or attack a parent or coach – that’s not me anymore, if it ever was.
But I also know that there are still seed of obsessive behaviour within me and I certainly see it amongst some of the more “intense” fellow parents on the sidelines. As a team director a couple of years ago, I had to move quickly to calm down a parent as she was hurling a blue streak of insults at a 14 player on the opposing team.
I have seen the anger, the intensity, the desire for retribution or revenge. When rationality is able to re-enter the situation, there are very few who would say that acting on those hard emotions was justified. I don’t like it, but I understand it.
In the same way, as I try to get down to why the author of Psalm 137 needed to express those thoughts of revenge.
The exiles were pawns in the games of empires. Judah has the hard luck of being located at the centre of three continents. The paths between Europe, Asia and Africa meet in Judah. Empires are built on the ability to move armies and wealth around. Judah was a victim of this reality of conquest.
It wasn’t their fault that they were exiled. Someone else was to blame for their hardship. The just thing to happen would be for those others to suffer as they had.
There is an ironic truth in the common saying that “misery loves company”. For some reason, we are better able to endure difficult times, if others have to go through it with us. And there is even an odd satisfaction when the ones who cause the suffering are forced endure some suffering of their own; Indian mystics would call that simply part of Karma: the cycles of cause and effect – an English language proverb says, “what goes around comes around”.
In the hard experience of suffering, the Judeans hope for the cycle to come around for their captors who treat them harshly (we might say, ‘as less than human’).
Although it was only about a century earlier that Judah had held back, while its neighbour to the north (Israel) was similarly overrun by the Assyrians, the psalmist wished for calamity to come to their south-eastern neighbour Edom, for the Edmoites support of the Babylonian invasion and conquest of Judah.
//
It tormented the Judean people to have to sing the joyous songs of home in this land of exile. And we do well not to ignore that this torment fuelled anger as well as sadness; revenge as well as lament. The songs not only brought tears of regret to their eyes but revenge-filled visions of innocent Babylonian babies suffering and dying as payment for the Judean’s exile.
If we are able to dig deeper than our disgust with the violent desires, we might be able to understand the depth of the impact of the loss of identity being experienced by the exile.
As we uncover the historical context of this period in Hebrew history, we can recall that some four-plus centuries earlier, there was unity and prosperity for the people under the reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Israel was the dominant power in the region, while, they never gathered an empire as vast as the Assyrians or Babylonians would, they expanded their borders farther than any other time in their history. David established and built Jerusalem, as the centre of power and religion. During Solomon’s reign, a permanent stone temple was built to replace the canvas and wood tent tabernacle that had served as the centre of Hebrew worship since the time of Moses.
Even in the divisive years following Solomon’s death (where the nation was split in two with different rulers, different places and practices of worship: Israel in the north and Judah in the south), there was a sense of purpose and growing invincibility of the people and their way of life. As I noted before the northern kingdom got their lesson in humility in 721 BC when Samaria fell to the Assyrians. From the southern perspective, this was more evidence that they had been right all along, that God was really on their side. There is some speculation among biblical scholars that Judah must have made some kind of pact with the Assyrians to not help Israel in exchange for keeping their autonomy. If that was the case, the Babylonians weren’t going to honour that deal when they became the dominant region power in the 6th century.
When Judah fell, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, when the temple was looted and left in ruins, more than rocks came crashing down. The people had lost their identity. Weren’t they God’s favoured people? Hadn’t several hundreds of years’ history been testament to that?
There is a line in Psalm 137 that says:
“how can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land (v4)?
I suspect that the deeper meaning here was not just that based on homesickness, but a crisis of faith. Does God exist for us in Babylon? There was a theology that had developed that God physically dwelled within the temple; could God even exist now that the temple was in ruins? A prophet of the time, Ezekiel even had a comforting vision where he witnessed the Spirit of God rise up out of the rubble of Jerusalem and physically move to Babylon. I don’t think the psalmist felt the same was as Ezekiel.
‘How can we sing the LORD’s song’, might mean, ‘what’s the point in singing the LORD’s song anymore.’
//
Both of today’s scripture passages give us a glimpse at a difficult prospect of faith. Have we reached a point where a deeper connection to the source of our faith is no longer possible?
Do we long to have our faith increased by some outside influence, because we feel stuck and lacking where we are -or- do we feel that the foundations of what we thought we believed have been taken away from us and we aren’t sure what is certain anymore?
Under the layers of these readings today, I believe is a deeper mystery – ultimately, we all long to have an identity that gives us purpose to life – and we long for God to love us and support us and be with us as we struggle.
//
My initial instinct was to finish this sermon right there - end with questions and mystery. But the pastor in me also holds hope in the midst of questioning, and so I want to add...
If the only words we had to go by were these two scripture passages suggested for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in year C, we might feel as lost as a demoralized exile or a worthless slave; but we have other voices, other experiences that have been passed on to us.
The history of the Bible notes that, although extremely challenging, the Hebrew people came through the exile with a faith in God intact. There were changes to practices and dogmas, but faith endured.
Jesus’ disciples would be left fearful and ready to run on the Sabbath that followed Jesus’ crucifixion, but within days, they were risking ridicule and arrest/death themselves proclaiming that the essence of who Jesus was and his vision of how God and humanity can intersect did not die on the cross. Things were going to be different, there was a challenge of a new inclusivity that would rock the church over its first few decades, but faith endured.
So dig deep; find the faith, hope and compassion that endures.
Let us pray,
God,
Be with us, even when we have little time for you. Amen.
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