"The Love of the Saints" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday October 31, 2021

Scripture Reading:  Mark 12:28-34

 

 

Today is All Hallow’s Eve, the day before All Saints Day.  As I mentioned in my mid-week e-mail this past week, in the Celtic tradition, this time of year is a thin time – a time when the veil that separates the world that we can see from the world that we can’t see, this veil becomes a little bit thinner, and we might catch a glimpse of the mystery on the other side.

 

All Saints Day, tomorrow, is when the church remembers and celebrates all of the saints of the church who came before us.  In our Protestant tradition, we believe that everyone in the church is a saint – all of us have the Holy Spirit living in us, transforming us into Saints, into who God wants us to be.  Some of the saints we will be remembering tomorrow are famous saints, known around the world – Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, Saint Peter, Saint Clare, Saint Martha.  Other saints might be people who you knew personally – people who taught and guided you in your faith, people who mentored you in your faith, people who showed you, by their lives, how to live a life of faith.  I think of my Grandma when I think of the saints; or a beautiful woman from my church back in Thunder Bay, who was named Martha after Jesus’s friend; or, more recently, saints like Deanna Cosman and Ginny Shaw.  And then there are also all of the saints whose names aren’t known to us or the world, but whose names and lives are known to God.

 

And with All Saints Day tomorrow, I think that it’s very appropriate that our bible reading today is the one that we just heard, since this is not only one of my favourite passages in the bible, but it is also one of my favourite readings to preach on at funerals.

 

At this point in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and his disciples have made it all the way to Jerusalem. They have entered the city in the parade that we celebrate each year on Palm Sunday.  Jesus has overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple, and driven out the people who were selling the animals required for sacrifice at a significant mark-up.  He has been arguing with the temple leaders who seem to be trying to trap him.  He has been teaching the crowds as well as his disciples using very pointed parables that speak about the kingdom of God – about the sort of world that God wants.

 

It’s pretty safe to say that tensions are running pretty high at this point in the story.  Jesus likely knows that his life is in danger.

 

And so when one of the scribes asks Jesus, “What is the most important commandment of all?” Jesus takes the opportunity to summarize all of his teachings in one quotable sentence.  Everything that Jesus has been teaching, everything that Jesus has been doing, right from the beginning of his ministry back in Galilee, he summarizes for his listeners here.

 

The first part of his answer, it probably wasn’t a surprise for his listeners.  Jesus quotes from the Shema, the part of chapter 6 of Deuteronomy that, even today, is one of the most important prayers that our Jewish siblings pray.  Jesus said, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

 

This first part of Jesus’s answer probably wasn’t a surprise – this would be considered to be a fairly orthodox answer.  But maybe in the second part of Jesus’s answer, he might have surprised his listeners a bit.

 

After reciting part of the Shema, Jesus continues.  “There’s a second one too.  ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these two.”

 

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself” is from Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 18.  Leviticus is one of the books of Law in the Old Testament – part of the Torah, or Teachings.  If you were to read through all of chapter 19, this verse doesn’t immediately leap off the page.  Instead it is buried in a whole bunch of other laws.

 

But as you read through chapter 19 of Leviticus, you might start to notice a theme emerging.  All of the laws in this chapter have to do with living well together.  Laws like, “When you are harvesting your field, don’t harvest it right to the edge of the field so that people without food can glean from the edges.”  Laws like, “Don’t steal from one another, and don’t lie to each other.”  Laws like, “Don’t cheat your employees out of their wages.”  Laws like, “Don’t discriminate against people with disabilities.”  “Laws like, “Don’t exact vengeance on another person, or hold a grudge against another person.”  And then after all of these laws, there in the second half of verse 18, “In other words, love your neighbour as yourself.”

 

This answer of Jesus is sometimes called the “Double Love Commandment” – Love God with your whole self, and love your neighbour as yourself.  Or maybe it is a “Triple Love Commandment” instead – Love God, love your neighbour, love yourself.

 

Either way, I don’t think that you can separate the three loves.  You can’t love your neighbour as yourself unless you love yourself first.  We show our love for God by loving our neighbours.  They are all part of one commandment of love.

 

None of this would have been new to anyone listening to Jesus that day.  To the scribe who asked the question, and to anyone else familiar with the scriptures, Jesus was simply quoting from scripture.  To Jesus’s followers who had been watching him heal people and feed people and teach about God’s kin-dom, they would have recognized that these two commandments – love God with your whole being, and love your neighbour as yourself – these two commandments were the foundation of everything that Jesus has said and done.

 

It’s almost as if Jesus, knowing that his life is going to end soon, wanted to leave his followers with an easy-to-remember summary of everything that he had been teaching.  “Even if you don’t remember anything else, remember this.  Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbour as yourself.  It’s that simple.”

 

Circling back to where I began, I mentioned that this was one of my favourite readings to preach on at a funeral.  It is such an honour to be able to preside at the funeral of one of the saints, and reflect on how they lived their life loving God and loving their neighbours; how they spent their time on earth living out these commandments that Jesus teaches us are the most important commandments of all.

 

And wouldn’t the world be an amazing place indeed, if it could be said of everyone, after they died, that they lived their life loving God and loving their neighbour?

 

We usually end prayers, and I sometimes end sermons, with the word “Amen.”  This is a Hebrew-origin word that means something like, “so be it,” or “may it be so.”

 

And that is how I want to end this reflection – with a prayer that we and all of God’s saints might live our lives wholeheartedly loving God and loving our neighbours with all that we are.  May it be so.  May it be so.  So be it.  Amen.

 

 

“Meu Coracao / My Heart”

Amanda Vivian

Used with permission.

"Called to Serve" (sermon)

Sunday October 17, 2021

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Scripture:  Mark 10:35-45

 

 

This past summer when I was visiting my family, one of my nephews came up to me and asked, “Aunt Kate, will you do something for me?”  I replied, “Maybe.  What do you want me to do?”  He came back, “First, promise me that you are going to do it.”  You can probably guess where this was going – I was very reluctant to promise to do something without knowing what it was that I was promising to do!

 

When I read today’s bible story, this is where my mind went immediately.  Two of Jesus’s disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, the Sons of Thunder as they are named elsewhere – they come up to Jesus and say to him, “Hey man, could you do us a favour?”  And Jesus, just like Aunt Kate, replies, “Well, that depends.  What do you want me to do for you?”

 

It turns out that James and John wanted prime seats when Jesus came into his glory.  They trusted that Jesus was going to be glorified and they wanted to be right in the centre of it all, one of them on his right side and the other on his left side.  They wanted to be able to bask in the reflection of Jesus’s glory, and probably hoped that some of his power would rub off on them.

 

And Jesus, well, I can just see Jesus shaking his head at them.  “Don’t you get it yet?  Weren’t all of you just arguing a while back there on the road about who was the greatest?  Didn’t I tell you that greatness isn’t what you think it is?  Didn’t I already tell you that the people who are rejected by society, they are the ones who are the greatest in the kingdom of the One whom I call Father?”

 

Jesus ducks the question that James and John have asked him – it’s not within his power to decide who will be on his right and on his left.  But he turns to teach all of his disciples again, just what it means to be great.  Greatness isn’t about lording over other people.  Greatness isn’t about favouring people who happen to be on our side and oppressing or punishing those who aren’t.  Instead, true greatness is about serving other people – Jesus himself didn’t come so that other people could worship him and serve him and treat him like an Emperor; instead Jesus came so that he could serve the world.

 

I think that maybe Jesus’s disciples were looking for some sort of superhero leader that they could follow – someone like Superman, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Iron Man, or Captain Marvel.  I think that maybe James and John, by asking to be on Jesus’s left and right side, might have been hoping to take their place in history as the superhero’s sidekicks.

 

But God didn’t choose to become human as a superhero.

 

Instead, God chose to be born as a red-faced baby who cried and who wet his diaper and who needed to be rocked to sleep.  God chose to befriend ordinary people, and wept when his friend died.  And spoiler alert – God eventually ended up nailed to a cross, naked and vulnerable and abandoned.  There on the cross, he did have two others with him, one at his right side and one at his left, but it wasn’t James and John.  There, at the end of his life, Jesus was flanked on either side by two bandits who joined the crowds in mocking Jesus.

 

God didn’t become a superhero like Superman, who could have smashed the cross to pieces.  Instead, God chose to become mortal.  Vulnerable.  Human.

 

And Jesus says that to be human is a good thing.  To be gloriously, vulnerably human, with all of the messiness of joys and sorrows – this is who God created us to be.

 

We aren’t called to strive for greatness as the world defines greatness.  We aren’t called to become superhuman.  Instead, we are called to serve one another.  We are called to seek to put other people’s lives ahead of our own comfort.  We are called to walk each other home in our messy humanity, helping each other along the road.

 

When we claim to be followers of Jesus, then we are claiming to follow this nobody from Galilee who hung around with people on the margins and who ended up nailed to the cross.  When we choose to follow Jesus, then we are choosing to hang out with the same people whom Jesus hung out with, and we are choosing to embrace a life of service.  When we choose to follow Jesus, then we are choosing to follow him all of the way to the cross; we are choosing to embrace vulnerability rather than power; we are choosing to reject the things that the world values and embrace the love that Jesus lived.

 

I know that we’ve talked about embracing the cross this fall – our autumn readings really seem to be pointing us more towards Holy Week and Easter than Christmas!  But when we take up our cross, we are choosing not to turn our backs on suffering, we are choosing to turn our back on worldly power instead.  In some ways, maybe it does come full circle, because in taking up the cross, in embracing vulnerability and loving service, maybe we are preparing our hearts just a little bit more to receive the wonder of God being born as a baby at Christmas.

 

James and John, when they spring their question on Jesus, they assume that sitting at Jesus’s left and right mean that they will have more honour and power than they could ever imagine.  Even though Jesus has told his disciples several times that he is going to suffer and die, they still assume that Jesus is headed for earthly greatness.  They don’t realize that Jesus isn’t just going to shuffle the deck so that a different group, a different party ends up in charge – instead Jesus is totally flipping the world structures on their head so that service and greatness are the same thing.  It’s not that you are to serve now so that you can be great and powerful and important later on – true greatness is to be found right there in the middle of service.

 

I think that there have been so many lessons that the world has learned and continues to learn in this pandemic.  We have learned that the truly essential workers are the ones who previously weren’t valued by the world.  We have learned that our lives are more interconnected than we ever imagined, and our actions impact everyone around us.  We have learned that sometimes we need to embrace a little bit of discomfort – a mask over our mouth and nose, or a vaccine in the arm – in order to keep everyone around us safe – people we know and love, and people we may never meet.  When we do this, we are embracing the cross, we are embracing the life of service that Jesus calls us to, and we are living lives that are great in God’s kingdom.

 

And may the love that Jesus lived and taught grow and grow and grow, so that the whole world might live this love.  Amen.

 

 

Embracing the Cross, Embracing Service

Westfield United Church

"Don't Worry; Be Happy" (Thanksgiving Sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday October 10, 2021 – Thanksgiving Weekend

Scripture:  Matthew 6:25-33

 

 

Time for a Covid check-in.  How are you feeling these days?  How are you really feeling?  This is our second Covid Thanksgiving.  I can’t know how you are feeling unless you tell me, but as I scan through Facebook posts, I’ve noticed a couple of trends.

 

I’ve noticed a lot of anger – anger at the virus, anger at the government, anger at people who haven’t been vaccinated.  I’ve noticed a lot of grief – grief over plans that have had to be cancelled, grief over divisions within families, grief over celebrations and commemorations that have been delayed.  I’ve noticed a lot of anxiety – anxiety over not being able to make plans, anxiety over keeping self and loved ones healthy, generalized anxiety around trying to be human in the world today.

 

So I ask again – if you look deep into your heart, how are you feeling in this moment in time?

 

The reading that we heard this morning is part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount – the sermon that begins with the beatitudes – “Blessed are the poor in spirit” etcetera.  This is his first public sermon in the gospel of Matthew – his first opportunity to have his message heard by more than his closest followers.

 

And even though the crowds he was speaking to weren’t dealing with the Covid-19 virus, they were living with stress in their lives too.  Most of the people in the crowd were living a subsistence life – trying to catch enough fish or grow enough grain to feed their family, and hopefully have enough left over to pay their rent to the landlord who owned the fields or who owned the boats.  One bad fishing season, or a drought or a flood would be literally life-threatening.

 

They were also living under the oppression of the Roman Empire – a foreign nation who ruled through fear.  Don’t you dare rock the boat or you could end up nailed to a cross.

 

And to all of this, add the usual concerns of a world without access to modern medicine – a high infant mortality rate, a high childbirth mortality rate, and a high risk from communicable diseases like leprosy or polio or the ’flu.

 

And what does Jesus say to this crowd who is living with chronic stress?  He paraphrases the great poet, Bobby McFerrin and says, “Don’t worry; be happy.”

 

Jesus points to the birds flying overhead, and says, “Look at them!  They don’t worry about where their food is going to come from, and yet God always makes sure that they are fed.”

 

And Jesus points to the flowers growing in the field and says, “Look at them!  They don’t worry about what they are going to wear, but did you ever see anyone with clothing as gorgeous as God gives to them?”

 

It is challenging to hear this, because it sounds as though Jesus is brushing off their concerns.  After all, hunger was a very real risk to his congregation if their crops failed.

 

But there in the middle of all of that, I also think that Jesus offers a very profound bit of wisdom.  “Can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your span of life?”  Which cuts to the heart of things.  Worrying about the future doesn’t do anything to change the future – it just makes us uncomfortable in the present.  Worrying about whether or not I will be able to see my family at Christmas isn’t going to change whether or not I’m going to be able to see them, but it will keep me from enjoying Thanksgiving.  Worrying about what today’s Covid numbers are going to be isn’t going to do anything to change those numbers – all that it is going to do is raise my cortisol levels – raise my stress hormone levels – which, in the long run, isn’t good for my health.

 

I had this whole sermon written before I learned that today, October 10, is World Mental Health Day, so I want to pause here and say that mental health challenges are a real thing.  If your anxiety or your depression is something that isn’t going away; if you can’t control the worries that are running through your mind; if your anxiety and depression are interfering with your every-day life and what you are able to do, then it is good to get help.  Remember that Jesus was not only a teacher, he was also a healer.  Jesus wants all of us to be whole and well, and that includes our mental health.  You can love Jesus and see a counsellor at the same time.  You can love Jesus and take medication for your mental health at the same time.  It isn’t either-or.  God loves you and wants you to be healthy.

 

But getting back to today’s reading – we aren’t talking here about clinical anxiety – here we are talking about the niggling whatifs that can sometimes haunt our brains.  Because worrying about the future not only can’t change the future, but it also stops us from enjoying the present moment.

 

Which brings us to this present moment.  Thanksgiving weekend.  In the midst of all of the anger and grief and anxiety in the world, Thanksgiving weekend is a call for us to pause and to give thanks.  It is a call for us to look around us and give thanks for everything that we have, rather than lamenting the things that we don’t have.

 

As a group, let’s take a moment to name those things that we are grateful for – let’s take a moment to give thanks for them.  I’ll begin, but feel free to shout out your thank yous:

Thank you for this church.

Thank you for the fall colours.

Thank you for my family.

Thank you for music.

Thank you for sunshine and blue skies.

Thank you for good books to read.

…

 

Looking around and noticing all of the things that we have to be thankful for grounds us in the present moment.  When we are giving thanks for the things that we have, for the things that we have been given, we aren’t able to be anxious for the future.

 

Jesus reminds us that just as God is present with the birds flying overhead, and just as God is present with the flowers growing in the field, God is present with you and with me and with all people.  God is closer to you than your very breath.  You are embraced by God’s loving presence, within and around you.  There is nowhere that you can go where God is not, and nothing that you can do that can separate you from God’s love.

 

God doesn’t want you to worry about the future – God wants to you be fully present to the present moment, resting in the love that is all around you.  And once you find yourself in that love, the only possible response is to give thanks.  Amen.

 

“Trumpet Lily Golden Splendour”

(Used with permission.)

 

"It is not good for the Human to be alone" (Sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday October 3 – World Communion Sunday

Reading:  Genesis 2:18-24

 

 

The bible story that we just heard – you may be most familiar with it as a wedding reading.  And I’m not surprised by that.  After all, the narrator of the book of Genesis has structured the story that way, telling us about how the original human was alone, so God created all of the other animals, but none of them was a suitable partner for the human, so eventually when the first human was sleeping, God divided the human in half and created partners.  Then the narrator ends with, “And that is why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

 

I can almost picture this story being told around a campfire, with a grandparent saying to their grandchildren, “Oh, so you want to know why people leave their homes when they get married.  Let me tell you a story about the first human, and how God created an equal partner for them.  Well, it happened like this.  The Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’”

 

Which might work very well in some partnerships, in some marriages, but it is less appropriate in others.  We know today that not all marriages, not all life partnerships are between a man and a woman; and if this story is interpreted as saying that “the bible says that only a man and a woman are allowed to find their life partner in each other,” then we can cause great harm to a great many people.

 

Even our understanding of gender is different today than it was in the past – we know that “male” and “female” aren’t the only genders – we know that gender is a beautiful spectrum rather than only two options.  If we interpret this story as teaching us that there are only two genders and they are perfect opposites of one another, or that only a cis-gender man and a cis-gender woman can complete each other, again, we can cause much harm to many people.

 

And a third challenge with interpreting this passage as a perfect description of marriage comes if you continue to read your way through the book of Genesis.  Almost every family that you encounter in the book of Genesis involves polygamy.  You don’t have one man and one woman completing each other – instead you have many people coming together to form a family unit.  So the interpretation of this passage as a description of the only way to do marriage isn’t even consistent with the book that it’s found in.

 

So… what can we do with this story that we find in the bible?  It is a troublesome story if we take it to mean the one and only way to describe marriage, and the thing that we all should aim for.  So what can we do with this story instead?

 

I would suggest that we go back to the beginning.  This is a story that begins with one human, and by the end of the story there are two humans.  The human is no longer alone.

 

Most translations struggle to capture the nuances of the original Hebrew.  The nouns naming these humans shift throughout the story.  The original human is not a man, in terms of being a male human being.  His name, adam, is related to adamah, the dust that he was created out of.  Maybe instead of Adam, we might better name this human Dusty.  My Old Testament professor at AST liked to name this human as the Earthling, a human created out of humus or earth.  This was not a gendered being, but rather this first Earthling contained all genders.

 

It is only when the Earthling is divided in half that genders begin to appear, and the Hebrew names for them begin to change.  The adam has become ish and ishshah.  Two genders at first, but I can imagine other genders emerging in subsequent generations from this first human who contained all genders within themself.

 

And God said, “it is not good for the human to be alone.”  We are created for community.  We are created for one another.  If we are hermits, we can’t flourish, we can’t fully be who God created us to be.

 

And whether we find our community in marriage or life partnership, whether we find our community in families of different sizes and structures, whether we find our community in a found or chosen family, whether we find our community in our church family, whether we find our community in community groups – when we find our people, when we are no longer alone, then we can be who God created us to be, and flourish with one another even as we support others in their flourishing.

 

One of the biggest challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic has been community.  How can we be in community with one another when we can’t be in the same place as each other?  We have had to find so many creative ways to build and strengthen community in the past year – and I do believe that creativity is one of the gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to us.  We have been empowered to build community through outdoor gatherings, through virtual gatherings, through the comments section in Facebook live videos, through phone calls, through physically distanced gatherings and social bubbles.

 

Along with all of the outpouring of creativity though, the past year and a half has taught us, maybe more than we ever knew before, that we need community.  We need each other.

 

And today, on World Communion Sunday, we have an opportunity to remember that our church community stretches far beyond the walls of this church, far beyond the borders of this community, far beyond the United Church of Canada, far beyond even the limits of our worship livestream.  Today we remember that we are in community with followers of Jesus in every corner of the world.  When we gather at the communion table today, we remember that the table stretches to every corner of the world.  We remember that we are sharing the bread and the cup with people of every language and culture. We remember that God’s beloved community includes people of all times and all places.  We remember that we are in community with, in communion with so many more people than we could ever meet in a lifetime.

 

It is not good for us to be alone, so God has given us the gift of community.  And for that, let us thank God with our whole beings.  Amen.

 

 

Adam and Eve in the Garden – Creation

Songea Cathedral, Tanzania

Used with Permission