"What do King Herod, Covid-19, and the Grinch Have in Common?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday August 2, 2026
Scripture: Isaiah 40:3-5 and Matthew 2:11-18
Dr. Seuss Connection:  How the Grinch Stole Christmas

This year we are having a “Seussian Summer” – each week during the story for all ages, we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book, then pairing it with scripture to see what wisdom we might find within its pages.

I invite you to cast your mind back to the year 2020.  I’m sure that most of us have very vivid memories about how the world changed abruptly in March of that year – how we had to stop gathering together in-person, how we were able to form 2-houshold bubbles, and later on we were allowed to expand our contact circle to 10 people.

When I think of that year, one of my strongest memories is of how I continually had to figure out how to do things differently.  From livestreaming, to parking lot coffee hours, to daily check-ins on Facebook Live so that we could continue to pray together as a worshipping community – we did church very differently that year, and in the years that followed.

We also had to do Christmas differently that year.  I remember that you had to reserve your spot in church on Christmas Eve because there wasn’t room for everyone who would normally be here, to attend and still maintain physical distancing.  I also remember a conversation that lasted for weeks, figuring out how we were going to do the candles at the end of the service, because the last thing that we wanted people to do was to lift their masks at the same time and take a deep breath in to blow out the candles at the end of the service!

And when I was writing my Christmas letter that year – the letter that goes out every November to all of the families connected with our church, I drew on the story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  I dug out that letter this week, and this is part of what I wrote in November 2020:

And then, on Christmas morning, the Grinch pauses to listen for the grief and wailing that is sure to accompany the discovery that Christmas can’t happen that year.  But to his surprise, he hears the Whos begin to sing their Christmas songs, because nothing can stop Christmas from coming. 

I think that this is an important story for us to remember this year, as we celebrate Christmas in a time of Covid-19.  So many of the traditions that usually usher in the season – concerts and parties and gatherings of friends and families – aren’t going to be able to happen.  But just as the Grinch wasn’t able to stop Christmas from coming, Covid-19 won’t be able to stop Christmas from coming either.

There is nothing external to our faith that can block our faith or get in the way of it – not only because our faith is something that we hold in our hearts, but also because our faith belongs to God, and God is in control.

The reading that we heard from Matthew is part of the Christmas story, but it’s not the part of the story that we like to read on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day.  There are no shepherds, no manger, no stars, no grumpy innkeeper.  There is an angel though, a messenger from God, who warns Joseph and Mary that their lives and the life of their child is in danger, a messenger from God who warns them to flee.

And the story that follows is horrific.  A despotic king realizes that he has been tricked, and in his rage he orders that every child in the area of Bethlehem under the age of 2 be killed.  This isn’t the part of the story that we read as we sing Silent Night by the glow of candlelight.

Herod was someone with more earthly power than almost anyone in the world at that time, and he chose to use his power to cause harm rather than for good.  And Herod tried to stop God’s plan from unfolding, tried to murder God’s Word-Made-Flesh.  But just like the Grinch, and just like the Covid-19 virus, Herod wasn’t able to stop God.

That being said, I don’t want to minimize the horror of the story by saying that because Jesus lived, the murder of all of the other babies doesn’t matter.  No.  The murder of each one of those babies mattered to their parents and mattered to God.  I imagine God’s wail of grief echoing the wail of grief of the parents, weeping for their children and refusing to be consoled.

And yet even such a horror wasn’t able to stop God’s ultimate plan from unfolding.

Which, to me, offers some consolation, and some hope.  When I think about the world, and everything that is going on in the world today, there are so many reasons why I might give up hope.

Wars seem to be starting faster than they are ending.  The conflict in Ukraine was escalating this week, and peace talks in Iran have ended.

Oppression of 2SLGBTQIA+ people seems to be worsening in some parts of the world.

There seems to be increasing fear or suspicion of outsiders or anyone who might be considered different; as people are feeling free to be openly racist in so many places, including here in New Brunswick.

But when I look at all of the horrible, horrific things in the world today, I remind myself that there is nothing that can ever stop God’s plan for the world – nothing can stop God’s goodness and God’s love from unfolding.  Neither the Grinch nor Covid-19 were able to stop Christmas from coming back in 2020.  Herod wasn’t able to extinguish the Light of the World 2000 years ago.

And so even in our most painful moments, even when our fears threaten to drown out the light, we can trust that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overwhelm it.  We can trust that the longest night eventually gives way to the dawn.  We can trust that all empires eventually fall.  And we can trust that God’s reign will continue to unfold. 

For God comes without ribbons!
God comes without tags!
God comes without packages,
boxes, or bags!
And when bad things happen,
we might puzzle some more,
til we think of something
we haven’t thought before.
For God came as a baby
to overturn kings,
to show us the way
and to give our hope wings.
For nothing – no nothing!
can blow out God’s light;
For God is in charge,
and will make all things right.

"My Days are Many Coloured, but God is Constant" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 12 and 19, 2026 – Flower Services
Scripture:  Psalm 27:1-14 and Romans 8:38-39
Dr. Seuss Connection:  My Many Colored Days

This year we are having a “Seussian Summer” – each week during the story for all ages, we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book, then pairing it with scripture to see what wisdom we might find within its pages.

I was a kid in the 80s, and I grew up in a family of readers in a house with lots of books, and when I was planning out this summer’s worship I thought that I knew my Dr. Seuss.  We had some of his books at home, others could be found at my grandparents’ cottage, and still others we borrowed from the library at one time or another.

But until this summer, I had never read My Many Colored Days.  In fact, even the title was unfamiliar to me before I started doing some research.  But when I finally got my hands on a copy, the pieces fell into place.  If you look here on the dedication page, you’ll see that it is Dr. Seuss’s wife, Audrey Geisel – Dr. Seuss’s real name was Theodore Geisel – but it was his wife Audrey who wrote the dedication:  “To Ted, who colored my days… and my life.”

And after that, I realized that while Dr. Seuss wrote the text in 1974, the book wasn’t published until 1996, 5 years after his death, and more than a decade after I was reading my way through the Dr. Seuss catalogue.  So I hadn’t just missed this book as a child – it hadn’t been published yet!

And that is one direction that I could go with this sermon for this year’s Flower Service.  I could talk about how the lives of the people we are remembering today made our lives more colourful, more vibrant, and how this is reflected in the vibrancy of the flowers we are using to build our bouquet of memories.

But instead, I want to talk about the message of the book itself.  It’s a fairly simple text.  There’s not really a story like the story we read last week in Green Eggs and Ham.  But it’s a book that reassures the children who are reading it, or listening to it being read, that we feel different things on different days, and that is OK.  And maybe that can be reassurance for the adults who read or listen to this book too.

Some days we feel excited.  Some days we feel down in the dumps.  Some days we feel a quiet contentment.  Some days we feel flat.  Sometimes our feelings can change from hour to hour, or even minute to minute.  And all of this is OK.

And if we were to bring together the message of My Many Colored Days with the scripture readings that we heard, I think that a new message can emerge.

Some of you know that I have many, many favourite scriptures, and Psalm 27 is close to the top of my list of favourites.  And the psalmist writes:
         The Lord is my light and my salvation,
                  whom shall I fear?
         The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
                  of whom shall I be afraid? …
         For God will hide me in their shelter
                  in the day of trouble;
         God will conceal me under the cover of their tent…
         Even if my father and mother forsake me,
                  the Lord will take me up.

The psalmist is confident in God’s help and in God’s protection.  Which is similar to the message we heard from the apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

If I were to re-write Paul in the spirit of Dr. Seuss’s Many Colored Days, I wonder if it would sound something like:

Not death, not life, not anything,
can steal the love of God our king.
When we are sad, when we are glad,
when we are still, when we are mad,
If we dance and if we sing,
if we fly up on a swing,
If we climb atop the hill,
then God – yes God – is with us still!

There is nothing that can ever separate us from God and from God’s love.  No matter what we are feeling, no matter what colour our day is, God’s love is with us always.  You are God’s beloved child, in all your multi-coloured beauty.  As we gather today to remember our loved ones, no matter how you are feeling – if you are feeling sad, if you are feeling mad, if you are feeling glad – no matter how you are feeling, God loves you.  And no matter how you feel tomorrow, God will love you.  And the next day.  And the day after that.  And the day after that too.

And so as we build our bouquet of memories, let us celebrate the vibrant, colourful lives we are remembering today.  And let us also embrace the rainbow spectrum of our own feelings, as we celebrate God’s presence in our lives not just today, but every day.

And may it be so.

Following this reflection, we built our Bouquet of Memories – flowers were added for the people in each church community who have died in the past year; then everyone had the opportunity to come forward and add a flower to the bouquet. Think of all of the memories and all of the love contained in each of these bouquets!

 

Westfield Bouquet / Bayswater-Summerville Bouquet / Long Reach Bouquet

"Green Eggs, Ham, and Wisdom" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday July 5, 2026
Scripture:  Isaiah 43:18-21 and Matthew 9:14-17
Dr. Seuss Connection:  Green Eggs and Ham

This year we are having a “Seussian Summer” – each week during the story for all ages, we will be reading a Dr. Seuss book, then pairing it with scripture to see what wisdom we might find within its pages.


I’m going to let you in on a secret.  Did you know that we, humans, are not very good at change?  We like to do the things that we’ve always done, in the ways that we’ve always done them.  Even when there’s a better option out there, even when there’s a better way of doing things, we usually prefer to stick with the familiar.

I’m going to let you in on another secret.  Did you know that churches tend to be especially not good at change?  We like to sing the songs we know and love.  We like to do the same outreach projects that we’ve always done.  Some people even like to sit in the same pew week after week after week… and if you don’t believe me, ask me about the time, when I was still new to my church in Thunder Bay and I accidentally sat in Dianne’s pew.

Change is hard.  Inertia, or staying where you are is easy, but change is hard.  This is a law of physics:  “a body in a state of rest or motion will stay in that state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.”  Nothing changes, unless something causes it to change.

If you don’t believe me, you can ask, the protagonist of today’s story, Green Eggs and Ham.  He does not like green eggs and ham / he does not like them, Sam-I-am.  He has got it into his mind that he doesn’t like them, and nothing is going to make him change his mind.

Nothing, that is, except actually trying the green eggs and ham and discovering that they are quite delicious after all.  In the arc of the story, being compelled to actually try them, pestered by Sam-I-Am to actually try them, is the force that causes him to change, to veer from his path of green-eggs-and-ham dislike.

Sometimes in our lives, we need a nudge from God to try new things.  In Isaiah, the people had been in exile in Babylon – now there was a traumatic change if there ever was one – the destruction of their land and their homes by an invading army then being carried away against their will to exile in a foreign land.  You can hear the grief and the trauma in some of the writings from the early years of exile:  “By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down and there we wept.  How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

But God is a God of newness and new beginnings, and God helped the people to adapt to a new life and a new way of worshipping in a land that was far away from the temple that they were used to.  And two generations later, God is about to do another new thing.  God is going to work in the heart of King Cyrus, and the people are going to be allowed to return to their land.

But for the people who will return – I can imagine that this is a scary prospect.  After 70 years in exile, essentially everyone who is returning was born in Babylon, so they will be returning to a land that they have never seen with their own eyes, a land that their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had seen reduced to rubble.

Yet God nudges them forward and promises that this change is going to be OK – there will be rivers in the desert, and a pathway through the wilderness as they travel to this new-old land.  And maybe they will even discover in the end that they do, in fact, like green eggs and ham, I mean, the land of their ancestors.

Jesus also has some stuff to say about change and transformation and newness.  In fact, the story that is at the heart of our faith – the story of crucifixion and resurrection – is a story about becoming new, the story of moving from life into death and then moving from death into new life.  It’s not a story of resuscitation or keeping the old life going on life support – instead it is about an end to one thing so that something completely new can emerge.

I laugh at the image that Jesus shares about patching a cloak with new fabric that hasn’t been pre-shrunk before using it; and I laugh because I could share with you a picture of the first quilt I ever made, and after it had been used for many years I tried to patch it with some of the original fabric.  The only problem is that the quilt had been so faded by the sun that the same fabric that had been sitting in a cupboard all those years was a completely different colour!  Instead of trying to use the still-new fabric to patch the old, I should have used it to make something completely new.

I wonder what Jesus would have had to say to Sam-I-Am’s friend?  Probably something about setting aside his old dislike of green eggs and ham, and actually trying them, and allowing himself to be transformed by the experience!

So what is the wisdom of Dr. Seuss – and Jesus – for us today?  I think that maybe it has to do with opening ourselves up to newness – opening ourselves up to be transformed – rejecting the inertia of same-old same-old, and allowing the Holy Spirit to push us towards the new.  For God is a God of newness and new beginnings; and God is always doing a new thing in our hearts and in our lives.  And so rather than stubbornly staying with the old, why not jump in, feet-first, into whatever new things are placed before us, trusting that God is the one leading us there, and accompanying us all the way?

Say, I like new ways to be!
I do, I like them, Sam-You-Be!
And I will like them in a boat
And I will like them with a goat!
And I will like them in the rain
and in the dark and on a train,
and in a car and in a tree,
New things are good, so good you see!
I do so like new ways to be!
Thank you! Thank you, Sam-You-be!

 

 

Thank you, Dr. Seuss!

"Gifted, Called, and Sent" (sermon on the retirement of Elaine Elkin)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday June 14, 2026 – 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Reading:  Matthew 9:35-10:14


So Elaine – I promise you that this sermon isn’t going to be all about you.  Well, maybe a little bit about you, but mostly about God and about Jesus because that is what makes us a church!

In the story about Jesus that we heard this morning, we’re about half-way through Jesus’s ministry in the gospel of Matthew.  Jesus called his disciples way back in the earlier chapters; and ever since then, they’ve listened to Jesus teach the crowds, and have received some private teachings too.  They have watched Jesus heal people they encountered along the way – healing people from leprosy and from loneliness, healing people who were paralysed and people in pain. They have seen Jesus perform miracles – calming the wind and the waves when a storm came up at sea, and even raising a young girl from the dead.

And now Jesus is sending his disciples out to try their hand at ministry.  They aren’t done their learning yet – they are going to come back to Jesus’s mobile classroom later to learn more of what he is about, so this moment is almost like a placement for student teachers to try teaching in a classroom, or a placement for student doctors to see what it is like in a hospital, or a placement for student ministers to practice the skills and presence of ministry.  Jesus sends his disciples out to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons, and proclaim the good news, saying that the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

Jesus doesn’t keep his ministry to himself – he empowers his disciples to do the same as he has been doing, and sends them in to the world to do it.  They don’t always get it right – in other places in the story, we see them coming back to Jesus, saying, “We tried, but this demon is just too stubborn,” and then Jesus takes them by the hand and shows them, “This is where you went wrong, this is what you have to do instead.”

But the disciples, faithful to their teacher, do the best with the task that they are given.

And I think that the same has been true in every era of the church, across time and across space.  The ministry isn’t the ministry of one person, or of a small group of people – the ministry belongs to all of us.  No one person has all of the gifts and skills to do all of the ministry – no one in the past 2000 years has been Jesus!  But if we each take the gifts and the skills that we have been given, and coordinate them so that we are working together… well, then, together we form the whole body of Christ and we can be Christ’s presence in the world, and we can do Christ’s ministry in the world.  But it depends on each one of us.

Here’s where I get to put Elaine on the spot.  For 11 years, Elaine contributed her gifts to the ministry of our church – her gift of compassionate listening, her gift of organization, her gift of communication, her gift of administration.  Because she shared her gifts with the church, our collective ministry was stronger.  She’s not off the hook now that she is retired though, as she is still gifted by God, just as all of us are gifted by God, but now she has a chance to use her gifts in different ways.

Not all of us are Elaine, but we each have different gifts and play different roles in the ministry of the church.  Some people have the gift for inviting and making people feel welcome.  Some people have the gift of music.  Some people have the gift of writing cards and making phone calls to help people feel connected.  (Westfield folks – if you feel that this is one of your gifts, talk to me or to Chris!)  Some people have the gift of gardening and working the land and growing food to feed hungry people.  Some people have the gift of cooking that food.  Some people have organizational gifts, or public speaking gifts, or the gift of recognizing the gifts of others.  My list could go on!

And your gifts, no matter what they are, are essential for the ministry of the church, because the ministry isn’t the ministry of one person, but it is the ministry of all of us together.  You don’t have to be perfect or prepared – I doubt that Jesus’s disciples felt fully prepared as he sent them out on their own – you just have to be called and be willing to go.

Together we are the church; we are the literal body of Christ in the world today.  All of us – the Elaines, the Bertis and Joans, the Chrises, the Daniels, the Margarets, the Karols, the Kathys, the Roxannes… All of us together make up the church, each with our own unique place in the overall ministry, for God gifts to us what we need.

We are sent out into the world to be agents of God’s love, and then we come together to worship and to be nurtured and strengthened by the bread and the cup.  And then we are sent out to serve again.

We are the church.  The ministry is ours to do together.  And may we have the strength and courage so to do.  Amen.

 

 

Sent out in Peace to be the church

Photo Credit:  K. Jones

"What Does it Mean to Be Human?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday June 7, 2026 – 2^nd Sunday After Pentecost
Scripture Reading:  Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

What does it mean to be human?  What makes us human?  How are we different than, say, a robot powered by AI?  These are some of the existential questions that I like to ponder, but they are also questions that have been in the front of my brain in the past week or so.

What makes us human, and what defines our worth as humans?

If you were to listen to politicians, you might get the impression that it is paying taxes that makes us human, that makes us matter.  Politicians of every party like to refer to us as “taxpayers.”  “Elect us, and we’ll make the standard of living better for all taxpayers.”  “Canadian taxpayers have been telling me that these are the issues that are important to them.”  “Our taxpayers deserve better.”

That doesn’t work for me though.  What about people who don’t pay taxes, either because they are too young, or who are unemployed, or who are underemployed?  Do they not count?

Capitalism gives us another option for defining worth or human-ness.  Under the capitalist-consumerist system that we live in, the more that we spend, the more worthy we are as humans.  Loyalty points or loyalty status rewards those who buy more.  YouTube and TikTok videos attempt to make us jealous of the lifestyles of the creators, and you too can have that lifestyle if only you buy these products that we are promoting.  Give us your email address so that we can send you opportunities to spend more.  I shop, therefore I am.

But do we really want to be defined by our possessions, by what we buy, by what we spend?  To me, consumerism makes us less human, not more, because we are defining ourselves not by our human-ness but by our bank account and our credit card.

Social media tells us yet another story – who we are is what we post.  The pictures and videos that show the highlights of our lives, passed through the filter of our phones; the memes and articles we choose to share; who we follow and who follows us – Social media tells us that this is who we are as we live out our lives online.

But am I more than what I post?  It’s a bit of a joke, but like all jokes it contains a kernel of truth – if something hasn’t been shared on Facebook, has it really happened at all?

What does it mean to be human?  How do we define our worth as humans?

I heard a beautiful interview this week on CBC radio with actress and comedian Andrea Martin, and she told a story about taking her 10-year-old granddaughter to meet an actor-friend.  She told her granddaughter that she should prepare some questions that she wanted to ask the actor, and no, they couldn’t all be about the time that this actor had worked with Leonardo DiCaprio!  They had a lovely dinner in a restaurant together, and her granddaughter asked insightful questions, and listened to the answers, and asked follow-up questions.

And when they got on the subway to go home after the dinner, Andrea Martin looked around the subway car, and every single person on the car, except she and her granddaughter, every person was staring down at a cell phone.  She told her granddaughter:  you want to grow up to be the person that you were at the dinner table this evening, not like the other people on this subway.

It was the connection with another human that made her granddaughter more human that evening.

In the story from the gospel of Matthew that we heard this morning, we have three beautiful stories of Jesus helping people to become more human.

The third of the stories is probably the most obvious.  A young girl is raised back to life.  She goes from being a former-human to being human-once-again.  Jesus gives her the gift of breath, the gift of a heartbeat, and she is restored to her family.

The story that comes before that one – the story of a woman who was healed after 12 years of hemorrhaging – there are a couple of layers of restored humanity here.  There is the physical healing that happens – her human body is made more whole.  But I think that maybe the more important healing that happens, the healing that may not be obvious from the story, is that she is restored to her community.

You see, for 12 years this woman would have been an outcast from her people.  The hemorrhage that she was suffering from would have made her ritually unclean, and because the bleeding was ongoing, there was nothing that could make her ritually clean again.  And this ritual uncleanness would have meant that no one could be near her, no one could touch her, otherwise they would be made ritually unclean too.  For 12 years, this unnamed woman hasn’t been fully human, because she hasn’t been able to be in relationship with other humans.  And I believe that part of what makes us human, like for Andrea Martin’s granddaughter, is our connection with other humans.

The first story in that reading from Matthew was the story of Jesus calling the tax collector named Matthew.  I think that there might be a couple of layers of becoming more fully human in this story too.

First of all, as you may have heard me or other preachers say in the past, tax collectors weren’t exactly beloved in the time and place of Jesus.  They were colluding with the oppressive Roman Empire, collecting money from their neighbours, sometimes like squeezing blood from a stone.  And so they generally didn’t have very robust social lives, rejected by their family members and neighbours for what they chose to do.  And by choosing to dine with Matthew, Jesus is restoring Matthew to the humanity of community and relationship.  Matthew is no longer alone.

But I think that there is another layer to Matthew’s restored humanity.  As a tax collector, like the politicians I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, Matthew has learned to value people based only on what they give.  A rich man who can pay more taxes is more valuable than a poor widow who has to be squeezed to get just the smallest coin.

Jesus can see this dehumanizing attitude in Matthew, and chooses to call him anyways.  “Follow me, and I will show you a different way.”  Matthew gets up and follows Jesus, and he is going to see a different way of being human – a way where the first are last and the last are first, a way where love is the most important value of all, a way of relationship and community and care.

So here we have three stories of people that Jesus healed so that they could be more human, healed in the places where relationships and community and love had been broken.

A couple of weeks ago, Pope Leo released his first encyclical since he was chosen to be pope a year ago.  You are excused if you missed this news, but it was all over my social media feeds in the past couple of weeks, and was a hot topic of conversation when I was in class in Toronto.  An encyclical is a circulating letter that popes write – not addressed to any one person, but addressed to the church as a whole, teaching about how Roman Catholic doctrine can be interpreted in the context of the time in which it is written.

And I think that this encyclical has a great deal of wisdom, even for those of us who aren’t Roman Catholic.  It is titled “Magnifica Humanitas” – I don’t speak Latin, but I’m told that this translates as “Magnificent Humanity” – with a subtitle, “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the time of Artificial Intelligence.”

He opens by talking about the context of today, and the role of technology.  He acknowledges all of the good that technology has brought to the world, improving the living conditions for so many. Remember that even something as simple as a shovel was new technology once upon a time!  Technology is value-neutral – in its own, it isn’t evil.  But then he goes on to talk about the harm that technology has caused when the user doesn’t intend it for the good.

He sets out his argument in the very opening paragraph:

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.

And then towards the end of his introduction, Pope Leo comes to the point that connects with the stories we read today:

In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.

What does it mean to be human?  What makes us different than a robot powered by Artificial So-Called Intelligence?

AI can never be human.  AI can never be in a genuine reciprocal relationship.  AI can never feel love.  AI can never know God or be known by God.  But we can.

What makes us human?  I believe that it is our ability to create, as we are made in the image of the Creator.  We create music, we create art, we create a meal to share with a friend, we create gardens, we create poetry and novels and essays, we create quilts and blankets and buildings.

What makes us human?  I believe that it is our ability to love; to love one another and Jesus loves us; to love God, to love all of our neighbours, to love all of creation on God’s behalf.

What makes us human?  I believe that it is because we are guided and transformed by the Holy Spirit, transformed more and more into the Body of Christ, the literal presence of Christ in this time and in this place.

You are loved by God – loved deeply in the essence of your human-ness. God wants you to be as human as you can possibly be – loving and connecting with other people, living in community, and in relationship with the people in your lives, and always finding ways to help other people be more fully human too.  Just as Jesus reached out to the three people in today’s story, Jesus is reaching out to you too, longing to restore you to your full humanity.

And may it be so.  Amen.

 

 

Image Credit:  ThaQeLa on flickr
Used with Permission

"Angels, Nostalgia, and Dangling Feet" (An Ascension Sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday May 17, 2026 – 7^th Sunday in Easter (Ascension Sunday)
Scripture:  Acts 1:6-14

Jesus’s ascension into heaven is a story that comes around every year.  It’s not one of the big flashy church holidays like Easter or Christmas or Pentecost.  It doesn’t even fall on a Sunday – technically last Thursday was the Feast of the Ascension.  But it is part of the story of Jesus, and it bridges the gap between Easter and Pentecost.

Easter is a season in the church year – one that stretches on for 50 days, or 7 full week.  Today is the last Sunday in the season of Easter, but Easter doesn’t end until next Saturday.  And I love how long the season of Easter is.  The 40 days of Lent can feel like a slog, in a season of contemplation and repentance and continual turning back to God and extinguishing our candles as we move into the shadows.  But then we get 50 days to celebrate the joy and the hope of Easter before the year asks us to move on to the next exciting festival.

But 40 days into the season of Easter – it’s always on the Thursday between the 6^th and 7^th Sundays of Easter – we encounter the curious story of Jesus ascending into heaven to return to be with the one whom he calls Father.

It is a strange and holy moment of transition, equivalent to his birth at Christmas, his death on Good Friday, his resurrection on Easter - a moment of transitioning from one way of being to another.  And holy moments can be hard to translate into words or into images.  Jesus’s disciples were there to witness Jesus’s ascension, yet it hasn’t become a core story to our faith the way that the resurrection has.  In my Mid-Week Message last week, I said that the strangeness of this story often gets translated into art as pictures of Jesus’s feet dangling down from a cloud.

 

“The Ascension of Christ”
Hans Süss von Kulmbach, 1513
Public Domain

 But I actually think that the story of the resurrection is just as strange, or maybe even more so.  Have you even noticed, though, that there is no witness to the resurrection of Jesus.  His disciples see his dead body being laid in the tomb.  They witness the tomb being sealed shut.  But then the next thing that they see is the empty tomb.  No-one witness the moment when Jesus’s body goes from being dead to being resurrected.  I also sometimes wonder – if there had been witnesses to the resurrection, would Easter art be equally as strange as Ascension art?  Paintings of Easter usually focus on Jesus’s lifeless body lying in the tomb, or of the empty tomb, or of the already-resurrected Christ meeting with his disciples.  When artists try to depict the moment of resurrection, they usually turn to very abstract art to try and convey the holiness of the moment.  And here with the ascension, we have Jesus’s dangling feet.

Anyways, all of this to say that the Ascension is a key story in Jesus’s life, but one that we usually don’t usually linger on.  But it’s a story that we read every year, and every time I turn to a familiar story, I like to ask myself, “What detail in this story is jumping out to me this time?”

This week, the detail that jumped out at me were the angels in the story.  Or were they angels?  They actually aren’t identified – the author of Acts only names them as “two men in white robes” standing next to the disciples.  But I think that this might be the case for a lot of the angels who appear in the bible.

Sometimes the angels are definitely named as angels.  The heavenly choir that appeared to the shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus – they were definitely angels.  The angel who appeared to Mary and invited her to carry, birth, and raise God’s son – again, explicitly named as an angel.

But do you remember the story in the Old Testament of Jacob wrestling an angel on the banks of the river, trying to win a blessing?  That angel was only ever named as a man.

Going back even further, Sarah and Abraham saw three men standing outside their tent, and welcomed them and fed them, and it was only later that they realized that they had been entertaining angels.

Even when you look at the resurrection stories from the four gospels, and who was at or in the empty tomb when the disciples showed up on Easter morning, the accounts don’t agree with each other. in Matthew, he is named as an angel, a being dressed in white with a face like lightning.  But in Mark, sitting in the tomb was a young man in a white robe who tells the women not to be afraid.  In Luke there are two men standing there in gleaming bright clothing. And in John, we are back to two angels named as angels, sitting where Jesus’s body was.

But taking all of this together, I’m fairly confident with naming the two men in white robes standing next to the disciples after they have watched Jesus be carried away – I’m fairly confident with naming them as angels.

And angels, at the core of their being, are messengers from God and bringers of good news.  So what good news do they have for the disciples in this moment?  Their message is “Stop standing here, staring up into the heavens. Get yourselves back to Jerusalem, the way Jesus told you to do!”  Which is a strange bit of good news to go with a story that is always strange.

But then I think about those disciples who were standing there.  They had been with Jesus through his life and had witnessed his ministry.  They were the first ones to hear the parables he told and had front row seats to see his miracles.  But then they had been through the utter devastation and grief of watching their beloved teacher and friend arrested and tortured and murdered by the state.  Two days later though, they encountered the empty tomb, and once they were able to overcome their fear, they have just had 40 days, once more in the presence of their beloved.  But now they have just seen him carried away on a cloud, back to the fullness of the presence of God.

And I can totally understand their inclination to stay there staring at the sky, focused on the place where he has just disappeared.  I can even imagine them choosing to stay there, setting up a picnic lunch, remembering Jesus as they broke the bread and poured out the wine.  I can picture them reminiscing about the good old days, and re-telling the parables that Jesus has taught them, every so often glancing back up at the sky to see if Jesus is going to float back down, “Just kidding – did you really think I was gone?!”

But then those messengers from God, those two angels show up, and basically tell them to get on with things.  Don’t stand here looking up at the sky; get back to Jerusalem just as Jesus told you to do.

I think that maybe God saw that the disciples risked getting stuck there, that they were at risk of spending so much time reminiscing and looking backwards that they might forget that they had to keep on moving forward.  If they had stayed there staring at the sky and watching for Jesus’s feet to come back, they would have missed everything that comes next.  Ten days later is going to be Pentecost – if they were out in the field staring at the sky, then they would have missed that whole event where the Holy Spirit shows up with a rush of mighty wind and tongues of fire, and the ability to speak in different languages to reach all of the people.  They would have missed the opportunity to be the church moving forward if they were stuck looking at the sky feeling nostalgic for what used to be.

Sometimes I wonder if we in the church need a visitation of angels like these two – a message to stop lingering in the past, a message to stop staring at Jesus’s feet up there in the sky; a message to instead move into the future with excitement and anticipation.  Churches – and I’m not necessarily talking about our churches specifically, but churches in general tend to be very good at nostalgia, very good at remembering the good old days.  But we don’t want to get stuck staring at the sky, visions of former Sunday Schools, visions of past events and gatherings, filling the clouds where Jesus’s feet used to be.  Because if we get stuck there, then we’ll miss our Pentecost moment – that moment that catapults us into the future.  We can’t be the church that God is calling us to be if we are stuck reminiscing about the church that we were ten years ago, or thirty years ago, or fifty years ago.

And even if this might be a hard message to hear, the message of the angels is good news.  Don’t stand there staring up at the sky where Jesus’s feet used to be.  Get on with life, keep moving forwards, for Pentecost is coming!

And so today, as we prepare to celebrate Pentecost next week, let’s wave goodbye to the space where Jesus’s feet used to be, and let’s start dreaming about where God is calling us next.  Let’s intentionally release the burdens of the past that are weighing us down, so that we can dance our way into Pentecost; for the future that God has planned for us can be much more vibrant than the echoes of the past, if only we have the courage to be the dreamers who will lead us there.

And may it be so.  Amen.

"Spiritual Curiosity" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday May 10 – 6^th Sunday of Easter
Scripture Readings:  Acts 17:22-29 and John 14:15-21

This week, as I was driving to a meeting in Rothesay, I heard an interview with author Yann Martel.  He is probably best known for his book, Life of Pi, but he was being interviewed about his newest book called Son of Nobody.  Part-way through the interview he started talking about faith, and though he speaks of himself as someone with no specific religious faith - he talked about growing up in a world post-silent revolution where religion was actively discouraged at home and within his family - and yet he had some very interesting things to say about spiritual curiosity.

The whole interview was fascinating, and he has a lot to say about art and writing and faith, but then towards the end he says:

“Why, in an age of computers and vaccinations, do some people still have faith in these un-provable entities called gods?  But I’ve switched around 180 degrees in my thinking, and I don’t see the point of acting like a computer. Yes, I still disdain organized religion, but the quest for the divine, this idea that there’s more than just this material reality that surrounds us – it’s not a question of finding the answer, but why don’t you at least ask the question that there might be something beyond this?

“And once you start exploring that question of what might be beyond the rational, while still using the rational, you can still use your computer to analyze the sayings of Jesus, there’s nothing wrong with using rationality, but use it to go beyond the rational.  Because we’re not computers…  You want to make those leaps of faith, not that are violent, not that hurt anyone, but why not believe in those things if they make life more of a dance than a shuffle.  So my faith now is why wouldn’t I believe that there is more than all this

“I find that very act of faith, that leap, that investigation into the beyond, completely transforms the today. It makes it easier to let go, it makes an aspirational kind of life easier.  It is easier to be loving in a framework where love actually matters.”

*****

Because I heard this interview on Wednesday afternoon, as I was pondering today’s sermon, my brain connected it right away with the reading we heard from Acts this morning.  Yann Martel might have been the perfect audience for the Apostle Paul as he was speaking in Athens!

Paul has been on a couple of preaching tours around the Mediterranean, finding openings to tell people about Jesus.  Usually the first place he would go in any city was the synagogue – after all, Jesus was Jewish, Paul himself was Jewish, and both of them were interpreting the Jewish scriptures.  And that is what Paul did when he arrived in Athens, just before the story that _____ read for us today.

But in Athens, after visiting the synagogue and speaking with the Jewish community there, Paul goes out into the public square and takes an opportunity to preach to the non-Jewish residents of Athens, and that is the story that we heard.

And Paul begins by commending the people of Athens for their spiritual curiosity.  He talks about all of the statues to different gods that he has seen around the city, including a statue to an unknown God.

And into this context of a pantheon of gods, Paul tells them about the God that he worships.  He never tells them that they are wrong, but is rather presenting his God as another option.

And in contrast to an unknown God, Paul tells the people that the God that he worships is a very present God.  The God that Paul worships isn’t a statue, but is present in every place and in every time.  The God that Paul worships created everything in the universe.  To borrow Yann Martel’s language, this Divine Being is who is behind the material reality that surrounds us.

But not only that, the God who created the material world chose to become part of the material world in the person of Jesus.  God didn’t just create the world and walk away – God became present in the world.  On Christmas morning, I shared the image from author C. S. Lewis that it is as if an artist paints a landscape, then finds a way to step into the painting and become part of what they created.

And even though Jesus lived 2000 years ago, and died, and was resurrected, and then ascended into heaven, God is still very present with us by the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is God working in every atom of creation, in every person, in every rock, in every tree, drawing us all into the dance of God.

And so today, I invite you to embrace your spiritual curiosity.  I invite you to look beyond the material world and embrace the quest for what is in and through and beyond the material world that we see around us.  For God is very present, if only our senses are tuned in to notice.

God is present in the bread and the cup that we will share in a few minutes – every crumb of the bread and every drop of the juice is God saying to us, “I love you.”

God is present in all of the love that we share with one another and with the people in our lives.

God is present when we make an offering to help another, whether we are offering our time, our talents, or our treasure.

God is present when the sunlight sparkles on the water of the river.  God is present when the bird sings on the branch of the tree.  God is present when a piece of music speaks to our heart.  God is present when space is created so that those without a voice can be heard.

We aren’t computers.  We aren’t robots.  We aren’t driven by artificial so-called-intelligence.  We are living, breathing human beings, created in the image of God and given life by the divine breath.

And so let us embrace our spiritual curiosity!  Let us keep our hearts open to perceive that which is beyond the mechanical and material, and let us keep our hearts open to love.

And may it be so.  Amen.

 

 

“Cloud of Unknowing”
Kelly Latimore
Used with Permission.