"Lovers in a Dangerous Time" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday February 20, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Luke 6:27-38

 

 

I need to confess that I struggled with this week’s bible reading.  The setting is Jesus’s sermon on the plain – this follows immediately after last week’s reading, and part of Jesus’s teaching the crowds about the great levelling of society.  And it begins with Jesus telling everyone who is listening to him:  “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

Love your enemy.  We are to want the best for people who don’t want the best for us.  But what if my enemy is blocking an international border?  What if my enemy is occupying the streets of the capital city?  What if my enemy wants to end all mandatory masking rules putting me or my child at risk?  What if my enemy is saying hate-filled things and waving racist flags?

 

I can also flip the narrative.  What if my enemy wants to inject my child with a vaccine that I’m not certain about?  What if my enemy is enforcing another Covid lockdown and my mental health isn’t going to survive yet another one.  What if my enemy seems to have had everything handed to them on a silver platter while I have to work my behind off just to keep my head above water?

 

Our world is so divided today, and the divisions are so deeply entrenched.  Neighbour is pitted against neighbour.  Families have been torn apart.  And into this, Jesus says that we are to love our enemies.

 

Surely Jesus didn’t mean this literally, not in the world that we are living in today?

 

If we were to love our enemies today, we would be putting ourselves at risk.  My enemy might be carrying a weapon.  The people with whom I agree might ostracize me for talking to those people.  What might this look like on a practical level?  Does this look like bringing meals to those blocking the border and praying for the people occupying the streets in Ottawa?

 

The stakes are high.  On one hand, loving my enemies is risky; on the other hand, Jesus tells me that I must love my enemies, do good to anyone who hates me, bless anyone who curses me, and pray for anyone who mistreats me.  What would be the consequences if I were to do this?  Deep love is deeply risky.

 

I’ve had a couple of songs running through my brain this week as I’ve pondered this commandment.  The first one is “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn (click here to hear a fabulous cover version by T. Thomason).  Loving someone is always a dangerous thing to do; loving someone is always a vulnerable thing to do.  In the words of the song, “When you’re lovers in a dangerous time / sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime.”

 

And love is what Jesus tells us to do.

 

As I thought about Jesus telling us to love our enemies, I thought about how many times the gospels tell us that Jesus ate a meal with tax collectors.  To the ordinary person living in the time and place of Jesus, tax collectors were the most reviled enemy of all.  Not only were they in the pocket of empire, collecting taxes on behalf of Rome, but they also earned their living by extortion – any money that they could collect above and beyond the regular tax rate would go straight into their pockets.

 

And instead of hating the tax collectors, instead of refusing to have anything to do with them, Jesus went to their houses and shared a meal with them.  He accepted their hospitality, food that was purchased with money extorted from their neighbours.  Jesus joined them at their table and ate their food and conversed with them.  And even worse, some of these tax collectors joined the group of his followers – people like Levi and Matthew and Zacchaeus.

 

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

 

This is hard, especially because I think that part of our calling as followers of Jesus is to point out and end injustice and oppression in the world.  How can we balance this prophetic call with the call to also love our enemies?

 

This is so hard, but it is what Jesus calls us to do.  If we hate those on the other side of the divides in our world, nothing will ever change.  The divisions will only become deeper.  Cycles of violence will continue.  It is only when someone steps up and is willing to be vulnerable, is willing to love instead of hate, that the cycle of violence can be broken.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., preaching on this commandment to love our enemies, once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”  Bruce Cockburn, writing “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” phrased it a bit differently:  “you gotta kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.”

 

It’s not easy, loving our enemies.  It’s easy to love the people we like.  It’s harder to love the people we feel neutral towards.  And it’s nearing impossible to love our enemies.  It would be a lot easier to hate those who hate us, and much more in keeping with the way that the world usually works; but Jesus calls us to a different path than the one the world offers.  We are to love our enemies and do good to everyone who hates us.

 

And Jesus did this right to the end of his own life.  Jesus died by crucifixion – by being nailed to a cross and left there to die through a combination of exposure and heart and lung failure, the breath literally squeezed out of him.  It is a horrible way to die.  By all rights, Jesus should have hated the people who did this to him.  But as he was being nailed to the cross, Jesus forgave the people who were doing this to him.  With his dying breath, he chose a path of love instead of a path of hatred.

 

I don’t have a nice and tidy conclusion to this sermon.  I can’t present you with an easy 5-step plan for loving our enemies then wrap it up and tie a bow around it.  Loving our enemies is hard, verging on the impossible.

 

There is a glimmer of good news though.  We don’t have to do it alone and solely by our own efforts.  The Holy Spirit, God working in the world, is working in each one of us, closer to us than our very breath.  And the Holy Spirit is also dwelling in those whom we name as our enemies.  That divine spark in us can recognize the divine spark in others, if we open ourselves up to allow that recognition to happen.  And when we collaborate with the Holy Spirit, the thing that seemed impossible can become possible.  And we will be able to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and pray for those who mistreat us.  We will be able to break the cycle of violence, we will be able to shift the narrative a little bit towards love, and we will maybe, just maybe, be able to lessen the divisions in the world today.

 

I mentioned earlier that I had a couple of songs running through my brain this week.  The first one was “Lovers in a Dangerous Time.”  Let me end this reflection with the other half of my brain’s soundtrack, this time coming from The Beatles.

 

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

 

May it be so.  Amen.

 

 

“Evan Solomon of CTV broadcasts from Ottawa on the Convoy Protest”

Photograph by Ross Dunn on Flickr

CC BY-SA 2.0

(A bit of the context for what is going on in Canada this weekend.)

"The Power to Heal" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday February 13, 2022 – 6^th Sunday After Epiphany

Scripture Reading:  Luke 6:17-26

 

 

One of the most famous parts of the bible comes from the Gospel of Matthew – the Sermon on the Mount. Now the Sermon on the Mount goes on for almost three full chapters, but it is the first 12 verses that are the most famous – the Beatitudes – the long list of blessings.

 

Today, we heard the Gospel of Luke’s version of the same teaching – definitely less famous than Matthew’s version, possibly because it makes us slightly uncomfortable to have the blessings paired with an equal but opposite list of woes.  We have “blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God”; but we also have “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”  We have “blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled,” paired with “woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.”  We have a blessing on those who weep, for they will laugh; and woe to those who are laughing now for they will mourn and weep.  And finally a blessing for those whoa re hated and excluded and reviled; and woe to everyone who is spoken well of.

 

And what is fascinating about Luke’s version of this sermon is that Jesus isn’t delivering it on a mountain the way he is in Matthew’s gospel – instead, Luke’s setting is on a plain, on a level place, on a wide open field.  There, on that level place, Jesus proclaims a great levelling where the poor and lowly will be lifted up, and the rich and mighty will be brought down.

 

As I read this passage this week, I was reminded of the song that Mary sings, back in chapter 1 of the Gospel of Luke – the one that beings with “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,” but then goes on to proclaim that the powerful have been brought down from their thrones, the lowly have been lifted up, the hungry have been filled with good things, and the rich have been sent away empty.

 

Mary originally sang this song when she found out that she was going to carry and give birth to and raise the son of God; and I wonder if she sang this song to Jesus as she carried him inside her body.  I wonder if she sang it to him as a lullaby when he was a baby.  I wonder if this song was the background to his childhood.  I wonder if Jesus was so surrounded by this teaching from his mother, this teaching of a great levelling, before he even had conscious thought, so that it became part of his own teaching.  The poor and lowly and hungry will be lifted up, and the rich and mighty and wasteful will be brought down from their places of power.

 

But what really fascinated me about this week’s reading was the lead-in to the blessings and the woes.  Jesus and his disciples have been up on a mountain, spending some time in prayer, and they come down the mountain onto the plain, where they are surrounded by a great multitude of people, a huge crowd.  And this huge crowd hasn’t come to this place to hear Jesus’s teaching – no, they’ve come here because of his reputation as a healer.  “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.”

 

There was a movie that came out a couple of years ago called The Healer.  I watched it because I was curious about it, since part of it was filmed on the campus of AST when I was a student there – the campus was frequently used as a movie set, and I remember that that this one involved converting one of the old buildings to a police station and there was a prop police car parked on campus for several weeks.

 

Anyways, in this movie, the main character discovers that he has inherited the family gift for healing, and while the plot focuses on medical healing – reviving the town priest after a heart attack, and healing a young girl from cancer.  But there are also examples of less tangible forms of healing – joy and hope and faith being restored.  And in the end, the main character has to embrace this gift that he has been given – the healing powers that he has to share with the world.  The closing credits tell the viewer that healers do exist, leaving the door open to how we can understand healing to be more than just curing someone.

 

Let’s leave the movie and jump back to Jesus healing people there on the plain.  Jesus is healing people, and then all of a sudden launches into his teaching about blessings and woes, his teaching about the great levelling of society.  And I have to wonder if these two parts of our reading today are connected.  I wonder if Jesus is teaching these blessings and woes as an example of healing on a societal level.  Society can be healed when the playing field is levelled – when people who have been pushed down because of racism or poverty or their gender or their sexual orientation; when people who have been pushed down are raised up; and when people who have had privilege because of our language or education or skin colour or nationality are willing to share our privilege with others, to give some of our privilege away, when we are willing to make space for others.  Then healing can happen.

 

We’ve been talking this winter about how we, as the church, are called to be the Body of Christ; and part of our calling is to take part in Christ’s work of healing.  Sometimes this healing might look like physical healing – I know that we have nurses and lab techs and other medical professionals in our congregations.  But sometimes that healing takes other forms, like correcting injustices, and bringing joy, and like we talked about earlier with St. Valentine, reminding people that they are loved.

 

In a couple of minutes, we are going to be gathering around the communion table – a communion table that in this time of Covid is so big that it stretches into each one of our homes this morning – and I think that this simple meal of bread and wine can be part of the healing ministry of the church.  We practice an open table where everyone is invited to the feast – no matter what you think you have done, or what you think you haven’t done, you are welcome at this table.  And through the bread and the wine we are reminded that we are loved.  And through the bread and the wine we are strengthened for the journey we are on.  And through the bread and the wine, our hope is nurtured, as we trust that a time is coming when the whole world will be well fed.

 

And so my prayer for all of us today is that we might find the healing that we seek, but also that we might be strengthened, as the church, to be a healing presence in the world.  May we, as the church, become more and more like Jesus so that power can go out of us to heal the world.  Amen.

 

 

“jesus heals”

Dan Germain

CC BY-SA 2.0

"Catching or Inviting?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

February 6, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Luke 5:1-11

 

 

Let’s talk about Peter for a moment… or Simon Peter as he is called in today’s bible reading.  Peter is probably the best known of Jesus’s disciples, and today’s story is the first time we get to meet him.  He’s a fisherman, fishing in the Sea of Galilee, and by the end of today’s story he’s left everything behind him in order to follow Jesus.  Later on, we’ll see that he becomes part of Jesus’s inner circle, along with James and John.  The three of them will go up the mountain with Jesus and see him transfigured or transformed – they will see God’s holiness shining out of Jesus.  Peter will also be the first person who names Jesus as the Messiah, but when he objects to Jesus’s teaching that he is going to suffer and die, Jesus famously says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” At the last supper before Jesus’s arrest, Peter will recklessly promise to stand by Jesus no matter what the future brings, but then after witnessing Jesus’s arrest, Peter will deny knowing Jesus three times before the rooster crows and he will weep bitterly when he realized what he has done.  After Jesus’s resurrection, Peter is going to be one of the first disciples to rush to the empty tomb, and he will also be among the first to encounter the risen Christ.  And then if we carry on to the book of Acts, we will get to see Peter, who started his life as a fisherman in the backwater of Galilee, preaching to crowds of thousands of people, and becoming a leader in the earliest church.

 

But in today’s reading, we have Peter meeting Jesus for the first time.  At this point in Jesus’s story, he has been baptized by John in the Jordan River; he then spent 40 days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil; he preached publicly for the first time in his hometown of Nazareth where he was at first well-received, but then the people tried to run him off the edge of a cliff. Since then, he has been traveling in the area around the Sea of Galilee, teaching in the synagogues and healing people.

 

Now Simon Peter was a fisherman who spent his nights in a boat out on the Sea of Galilee trying to catch enough fish to pay the exorbitant tax rate demanded by the Roman Empire, with hopefully enough fish left over to feed his family.  Maybe he had had an opportunity to hear Jesus teach, maybe he had witnessed one of the healings, or maybe he was only aware of Jesus’s reputation.

 

Today’s story begins with Peter, beside his boat on the shore of the lake, washing his nets after a full night of fishing, which had resulted in a catch of nothing. There were going to be empty bellies that day in his house.  Then down to the lake comes Jesus, followed by a huge crowd of people wanting to hear what he had to say. There were so many people that that the only way Jesus could possibly be heard was to go a little way out in a boat and speak to the crowds on the shore.  And so he climbs into Peter’s boat and asks Peter to push out a little ways.

 

I wonder what Peter was thinking in this moment.  Maybe he was excited to have a front row seat to Jesus’s teaching.  Maybe he was glad to have a chance to help Jesus out.  Maybe he was just tired after a full night of fishing, and frustrated because he hadn’t caught anything, and he would really just rather get home and go to bed.

 

But no matter how he was feeling, he did what Jesus asked him to do; and after teaching for a while, before heading back to shore, Jesus tells Peter to drop the nets one more time.

 

Now here is where I can really empathize with Peter.  To all of you who have ever been a professional, or someone who is knowledgeable in your field – to all of you nurses and teachers and accountants and lab techs and paramedics and carpenters – how does it feel when someone who has nothing to do with your field of expertise comes into your workplace and tries to tell you how to do your job?

 

Peter is the expert fisherman here in the boat.  He’s fished all night and caught nothing.  Now, in the middle of the day, this isn’t time right time for catching fish.  And here’s this carpenter from an inland village who has come along and is now telling Peter how to fish.

 

To me, one of the most amazing parts of this story is that Peter actually does what Jesus tells him to do.  Peter say, “OK Jesus, we’ve worked all night and caught nothing; but if you say so, I will let down the nets.”  I can’t help wondering if Peter accompanied these words with an eye roll.

 

And wouldn’t you know it – when Peter and his crew haul the nets back, they are so full that the nets begin to tear and the boat begins to sink.

 

I think that maybe this is the moment that Peter realizes that he’s not dealing with any ordinary carpenter from Nazareth.  He falls down at Jesus’s feet in awe, and paraphrases Garth and Wayne from Wayne’s World, “I’m not worthy.  I’m not worthy.”

 

And full of awe and wonder, Peter, along with his partners James and John, the sons of Zebedee, leave everything behind – boats, nets, families – and they follow Jesus.

 

Jesus uses language that would be familiar to them – instead of catching fish they are going to be catching people.  I know that I’ve suggested before that if Peter, James, and John had been farmers rather than fishermen, maybe Jesus would have used different words – you are going to be harvesting people rather than wheat – but fishing is the language that they speak, and so Jesus tells them that they are going to be catching people.

 

But when I read the story this year, I really started wondering about this image of “catching” people, and I started wondering if this is really the best image for what we are called to do.

 

The thing about catching fish or catching people is that it is a very passive activity on the part of the one being caught.  In fact, the one being caught may be actively trying to escape the one doing the catching.  And is this really how we want to be carrying out the mission that we are called to?

 

For I thing that we all, like Peter, James, and John, are called to a mission as we follow Jesus.  As we follow Jesus, we are given an opportunity to invite others to join us there.

 

One of my professors at AST, Dr. Alyda Faber, likes to talk about “Theological F-Words” – words that are part of our faith vocabulary, but words that make us uncomfortable to hear or to say – words that we might whisper under our breath rather than saying them out loud.  And I wonder if “evangelism” is sometimes one of those Theological F-words.

 

We’re not going to “win more souls for Jesus” by casting out a fishing line and pulling people in even as they struggle to get away – that strategy has been tried time and time again with disastrous consequences.  Just think of the Residential Schools here in Canada.

 

But the root of our English word “evangelism” comes from the Greek “euangelion” which simply means “good news.”  Evangelism, at its heart, means simply sharing good news with someone else.

 

And that doesn’t usually look like a fishing line or fishing net approach, catching someone and reeling them in.  Instead, it is much more likely to look like listening deeply to someone and offering to pray for them.  It is much more likely to look like living a life that is so full of love and joy that other people want what you have.  It is much more likely to look like someone asking how you manage to cope with the stresses of life and you sharing with them about how your faith journey strengthens you.

 

And just as Peter didn’t cause the miraculous catch that day in the boat – he just trusted in Jesus and did what Jesus told him to do – we don’t need to worry about our “catch” either.  We trust in Jesus, we can share and invite, but it is the Holy Spirit who opens hearts to receive the message.

 

I do believe that Jesus has called all of us to follow; and I also believe that as we follow, we are given opportunities in our lives to share the good news with others and invite them to join us.

 

We aren’t catching fish to feed our families or to earn our fortune – instead we are inviting others to join us as together we can be a beloved community that loves each other and supports each other, a community that is authentically human together, as together we try to fumble our way along this path that Jesus shows to us.

 

And so instead of being sent out into the world to “catch,” I believe that we are sent out into the world to share, and to invite, and most of all, to love.  And may the Holy Spirit guide us on that way.  Amen.

 

 

“Miracle Catch”

Mike Moyers

Used with Permission