"What Field are We Going to Buy?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday September 25, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Jeremiah 32:1-15

 

 

On Sunday mornings, we usually follow the Revised Common Lectionary – this is a 3-year cycle of bible readings that are used across many different denominations around the world.  Each Sunday, they give you a reading from somewhere in the Old Testament, a Psalm reading, a reading from the Epistles, and a reading from one of the gospels.

 

This week, I was listening to my favourite lectionary podcast, The Pulpit Fiction Podcast, and when they came to the Jeremiah reading, they said, “let’s be honest, no one is going to be preaching on this passage this week.  After all, you’ve got a beloved parable with Lazarus and the rich man, and you’ve got a great stewardship passage in 1 Timothy.  And then you have Jeremiah with a real estate transaction outlined in tedious detail.  No one is going to preach Jeremiah this week!”

 

And listening to this, my first thought was “don’t go dissing my favourite passage!”  Back in my first semester at AST, in my Old Testament Foundations course, we each had to choose a 15-20 verse passage to work on for our final paper, and we could choose it from anywhere in the Old Testament, and I went straight for Jeremiah, chapter 32, where Jeremiah buys a field.

 

I love this story, but I admit that it doesn’t make any sense without the background of what is going on at this point in the story.

 

Jeremiah is in Jerusalem, and the time stamp at the beginning of the story – in the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah – this tells us exactly when it was happening.  And any reader coming to this story after the fact will know the historic significance of this date.

 

Ancient Israel was always a tiny country surrounded by superpowers.  In the time of Moses, they had been enslaved by the Egyptian empire.  Just as they established themselves in the promised land, they were surrounded by the Assyrian Empire.  This empire was replaced by the Babylonian Empire.  Once the Babylonian Empire fell, it was the Persian Empire, and then the Greek Empire, and by the time of Jesus, it was the Roman Empire who was in charge.

 

In the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah, the northern part of ancient Israel had fallen to the Assyrians a generation ago, and Jerusalem had been filled with refugees from the north.  Then the Babylonians had made their move and had taken over most of the southern part Ancient Israel, and they made their way to the very gates of the city of Jerusalem.

 

In the tenth year of the reign of King Zedekiah, the city of Jerusalem was filled with people who had fled their homes outside of the city, and the city itself was under siege.  Within a couple of months, the city was going to fall to the Babylonians, the temple which was considered to be the home of God was going to be destroyed, and any survivors were going to be carted off to exile in Babylon.  They were going to be without their homes, without their community, without their city, without their God.

 

Things were not good at this point in time.  So what does Jeremiah, the prophet do?  God has told him that things are bad now, but they are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better; but God has also told Jeremiah that things will eventually get better.  And Jeremiah trusts God.  And Jeremiah goes out and buys a field.  Jeremiah doesn’t say, “Yeah, God, I trust you and all, but let me go and prepare my home and my family for exile.”  Instead, in the middle of a siege and on the verge of exile, Jeremiah goes out and buys a piece of land.  He trusts that a time will come when he or his descendants will be able to use this land.

 

To me, this is an ultimate act of hope.  It isn’t just a thinking hope or a feeling hope, but a doing sort of hope.  When life is good, we don’t need hope, but it’s when things are at their absolute worst that hope says to us, no matter how bad things are right now, they are going to get better.  Even if things are going to get worse before they get better, they Will. Get. Better.

 

And for Jeremiah’s people, things did get better – the story did turn around – but it took a couple of generations for this to happen.  70 years after going into exile, the people were allowed to return to their land and rebuild their cities and rebuild the temple.  Jeremiah didn’t have a chance to use the field that he bought, but his descendants did.

 

In the Revised Common Lectionary, this fall, there is a thread of hope woven through the readings, and that is the thread that we are going to be following most weeks this fall, bouncing between the Old and the New Testaments.  I think that hope is something that our world desperately needs to hear at this moment in time, and not the airy-fairy wishful-thinking sort of hope, but the living, active sort of hope that Jeremiah demonstrates for us this week.

 

Because when I look around the world, I see so many reasons to fall into despair.  I listen to CBC radio a lot, and on Wednesday I heard part of The Current in the morning.  The focus was on the war in Ukraine, and they played a clip from the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres speaking to the General Assembly.  Guterres said:

“Let’s have no illusions.  We are in rough seas.  A winter of global discontent is on the horizon.  A cost of living crisis is raging.  Trust is crumbling.  Inequalities are exploding.  And our planet is burning.  People are hurting, with the most vulnerable suffering the most.”

 

It's not a siege and exile, but between a war in Europe, 2 ½ years of global pandemic, out-of-control inflation, our country struggling to come to terms with our colonial past, and now a devastating hurricane on top of it all… the pain of the present moment, to me, has a lot of resonance with the pain of Jeremiah’s time and place.

 

Which means that the question I have to ask is – what is going to be our equivalent of buying a field?

 

Can we trust God when God promises us that even if things get worse before they get better, they will eventually get better?  Can we trust the Easter message that says that Good Friday doesn’t last forever but is always followed by resurrection?

 

And if so, how are we going to live out this hope?  What can we do right now to show to the world that we trust with every part of our being that things will turn around, even if, as it did for Jeremiah, it takes a couple of generations to do so?  What field are we going to buy?

 

 

 

“Meadow”

Ed Suominen on flickr

Used with Permission

 

"You've Been Served Notice" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday September 18, 2022

Scripture Reading:  Luke 16:1-13

 

 

I have to confess, I struggled with this week’s reading, and with what to say today.  It is a very challenging parable that Jesus tells here, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this – most of the scholars that I read in preparation began their work on this parable by commenting that it is one of the most difficult parables, if not the most difficult parable that Jesus told!

 

Some of Jesus’s parables are a “do like this” story – I think of the story of the Good Samaritan who stopped to help someone of a different religion, a different tribe, who was injured on the side of the road, and at the end, Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”  This week’s parable, with a dishonest manager cheating his wealthy manager, doesn’t seem to fit that pattern – should I go and do likewise by acquiring lots of wealth off the work of others, or should I go and do likewise by cheating my boss in order to feather my own nest?  That message doesn’t fit with what I know about Jesus what he taught

 

Jesus tells other parables that seem to teach us about who God is – here I’m thinking about the parable of the Lost Sons, or the Prodigal Son, where the father in the story welcomes home both of his wayward sons, forgiving them before they ask for forgiveness, and throwing a party in their honour.  If the father in the story can be this loving, how much more loving must God be?!  But again, today’s parable doesn’t feel like that sort of parable – would God be like the wealthy man, becoming wealthy off of the work of others, or is God like the cheating manager in the story?  It doesn’t quite fit.

 

So what could Jesus want to teach us through this puzzling story?

 

We begin with a wealthy man, and his manager – the one in charge of all of the property.  If Jesus were telling this parable to us today, I wonder who these characters would be.

 

Let’s begin with a faceless corporation – let’s say a bank – let’s call it the Bank of New Brunswick, or Brunswickbank for short.  (Disclaimer: characters in this story are fictional and are not based on real people living or dead!)  So Brunswickbank has branches all over the province, and in charge of the day-to-day operations of each branch is a branch manager.  The branch manager is responsible for acting on behalf of Brunswickbank within their own branch.

 

Anyways, word got back to the board of directors and CEO of Brunswickbank that one of their branch managers hadn’t been doing their job well.  In a time when most branches were making a 15% profit for the bank, this branch was only making 2% profit.  And so the branch manager was called before the board of directors and asked to account for what was going on.  She was told that she had 30 days to provide a detailed account of her work, and if she couldn’t account satisfactorily for the low profit margin, she was going to be let go.  After all, there were CEO salaries and shareholder profit that had to be satisfied!

 

And so what did this branch manager do when she got back to her own branch?  Did she call a staff meeting and say that there was going to have to be a lot of belt tightening in the coming days?  Did she let the most recent hire go?  Did she cut back on branch hours and cleaning services?

 

No – she didn’t do any of this.  Instead, when a family in the community who was really struggling after one parent had to leave work on disability came in to the branch to see if they could re-negotiate their mortgage, the branch manager brought them in to her office and cut the amount of their mortgage in half.  When a local charity came in to ask for a bank draft so that they could give their support to another family who was struggling, the bank manager waived all of the service charges.  When a local hockey team came in to see if the bank could sponsor their travel to a tournament, she signed the bank up as a full sponsor without giving it a second thought.

 

At this point, since she figured that her days in the bank were numbered anyways, she was going to do all of the good she could possibly do for her community while she was still in a position to do so.

 

When I think of the parable this way, it maybe starts to make a bit more sense.  I wonder if we do a disservice to the manager in Jesus’s parable by naming him as a “dishonest manager.”  When we look at this parable from the perspective of the wealthy boss, the manager is squandering his money; but if we were to flip the perspective and look at the story from the debtor who had his bill reduced from a hundred jugs of olive oil down to fifty, or the debtor who had his bill reduced from a hundred bushels of wheat down to eighty – if we take that perspective, then it becomes as story of unexpected generosity.

 

Reading and researching this parable this week, it was Cuban scholar Justo González who opened my eyes to this understanding of this parable.  He writes:  “[The] steward has not actually been fired yet, but is certainly on notice. In this regard, he is in a situation similar to all human beings, who for the present have a life, goods, talents, relations, and time to manage, but are also on notice of our firing.  We do not know when we will be dismissed from our temporary management of all these things, but dismissed we will be.  The present order is not permanent, and our authority over life, goods, and all the rest is only temporary.”  (Justo L. González. Luke. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 191.)

 

In other words, none of us is going to get out of here alive.  (That sounds way more ominous that I mean to sound.  I don’t mean that none of us will get out of this building alive – I mean to say that none of us will get out of life alive!)  In our life, we are stewards of what we have been given – we can choose how we use our money, how we use our time, how we use our skills – but this isn’t a permanent state.  Eventually it is going to come to an end.  As González writes, we are all on notice.

 

And so like the manager in the parable, we have a choice about how we are going to use this in-between time.  Are we going to use it to hoard more and more for ourselves; or are we going to use it to do as much good in the world as we can?

 

Jesus’s last line in the reading is, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

 

The original Greek is actually a bit more blunt at the end – a better translation might be you cannot be enslaved to both God and wealth.

 

For in the end, we do have to decide where our ultimate loyalties lie.  We have the opportunity to decide where we want to be enslaved, to choose who we want to serve.  Do we want to serve capitalism and wealth acquisition like the rich man in the parable or like Brunswickbank in my version of the parable?  Or do we want to serve God through loving and caring for all of God’s children like the manager?

 

For we are all on notice like the manager – we may not know just how long our period of notice is going to be – maybe we have 30 days, maybe we have a year, maybe we have 50 years – but eventually we are going to have to leave it all behind and step into our eternal home in the arms of love.

 

How are you going to spend your notice?

 

 

Rich and Poor, or, War and Peace

17th Century, Anonymous

Used with Permission

"God's Party" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday September 11, 2022

Church Picnic Sunday

Scripture:  Luke 15:1-10

 

 

There is a cartoon drawn by David Hayward, who goes by the handle, “Naked Pastor.”  It shows a sheep who has fallen over the edge of a cliff who is desperately clinging to the side.  The shepherd is walking towards the cliff, and the viewer can assume that he is going there to rescue the sheep who is in grave danger.  Behind the shepherd is a pen where the other sheep are safely kept behind a stone wall.  But the sheep are angrily glaring at the shepherd, and they are carrying signs that read, “All Sheep Matter.”

 

 

And while yes, I do agree with them that all sheep matter, the sheep who are safely inside the sheep pen aren’t in need of the shepherd’s attention at that particular moment.  If all sheep matter, then surely the sheep who has fallen over the edge of the cliff matters, the sheep who is in danger matters, and that is the sheep who is most in need of the shepherd’s attention at that moment in time.

 

Jesus liked to teach using parables or short stories; and while most of his parables seem like straightforward teaching stories on the surface, they are often very complex when you start digging just below the surface.  This parable reads very differently depending on whether you identify with the sheep who was in danger, whom the shepherd seeks out and brings to safety, or if you identify with the 99 sheep who are safely in the pen.

 

A story that seems simple on the surface can offer so many layers of meaning once you dive below the surface.

 

The parable of the lost sheep is the first in a series of 3 parables that Jesus tells.  We heard the story of the lost sheep and the lost coin today, and they are followed immediately by the story of the lost son… you may know that one better with the handle of the Prodigal Son.  In all three of these parables, something is lost.  In all three of these parables, something is found.  And all three of these parables end with a celebration, end with a party.

 

Often, if you want to understand what Jesus is trying to teach with his parables, it is helpful to look at the context.  Who is Jesus telling these stories to, and why is he telling them?

 

 Jesus had gathered a group of outsiders around him – people who weren’t part of the in-crowd; people who weren’t part of polite society; people who didn’t live strictly according to the laws given by God to Moses as interpreted by generations of teachers.  This group of outsiders listened to Jesus’s teaching.  They shared meals with Jesus.  This group of outsiders were insiders in Jesus’s world.  And the scribes and the Pharisees – the people who sought closeness with God through carefully obeying all of God’s commandments – they thought that this wasn’t right.  Why should Jesus eat with “those” people?  Is their sin contagious? Is it going to rub off on Jesus?

 

But all through the gospels, Jesus never follows society’s expected pattern of us-and-them.  He doesn’t put up borders and walls.  There were Pharisees among his followers.  There were women among his followers.  There were rich people and poor people among his followers.  Anyone could be a part of Jesus’s crowd.

 

And as Jesus tells these three stories, these three parables, I think that he is asking the question – who is invited to God’s feast?  The religious officials were questioning who Jesus was eating with, and so each of the three stories that he tells ends with a party, with a celebration, with a feast.  A lost sheep is recovered, and the shepherd calls together his friends and neighbours to rejoice with him.  A lost coin is recovered, and the women calls together her friends and neighbours to rejoice with her.  A lost son returns home, and the fatted calf is butchered and the whole household and neighbours come together to celebrate.

 

The party can’t begin until everyone is present.  The party doesn’t begin until all 100 sheep are present.  The party doesn’t begin until the lost coin has been found.  And while it is a bit more ambiguous in the third story, I don’t think that the party can truly begin until both brothers are restored to the family.

 

God’s feast – God’s banquet – God’s party requires ALL of God’s children to be present in order for it to be truly celebratory.  The party can’t begin until all of the sheep are gathered together, until all of the coins are back in the wallet, until all of the wandering children are safely home.  And then let the celebrations begin.

 

Whether you identify with the sheep who wandered away from the rest of the community; whether you identify with the coin that was separated from the rest through no fault of your own; whether you identify with the sheep safely within the fold as the shepherd goes out searching; or whether you identify with the shepherd or with the woman, working tirelessly to bring about reunion and reconciliation…. let the party begin, and let us make sure that no one is excluded or left out or forgotten or left behind.  Let the party begin, because God is with us, God loves all of God’s children, and when we are together, celebration is the order of the day!  Amen!

"Creator God, You Gave us Life" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge

Sunday September 4, 2022

Scripture:  John 4:1-15

 

 

One of my favourite bands is U2 – yes, I was in high school and university in the 90s, and that is reflected in my musical taste! And one of my favourite U2 songs is called “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”  The song opens with these words:

I have climbed highest mountains

I have run through the fields

Only to be with you

I have run

I have crawled

I have scaled these city walls

Only to be with you

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

 

And later on, the song ends with:

I believe in the kingdom come

Then all the colours will bleed into one

But yes, I’m still running

You broke the bonds

And you loosed the chains

Carried the cross

Of my shame

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for

 

This is a song of searching – a song of longing.  The singer never reveals what it is that he is looking for, only that he hasn’t found it yet.  When I listen to this song, I wonder if the singer even knows fully what it is that he is searching for, but he knows that he will recognize it when he finds it.

 

And I find it a deeply hopeful song, even though singer’s longings haven’t been fulfilled yet.  It’s that word “still” in the title and in the chorus.  I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.  The search is ongoing and the singer hasn’t given up.  I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.  The singer will keep on searching, trusting that those deep longings will be filled some day.

 

Every time I listen to this song (usually in my car and singing along), my heart is filled with the ache of longing and with the ache of hope.

 

Selah.

 

A woman is longing – what for, she doesn’t know.  She has been ostracized by her community because of her family circumstances – have you heard that she has had five husbands, and now she is living with a man that she isn’t married to?  To escape her neighbours’ accusing stares and words whispered behind her back, she goes to the well at noon to draw her water – at noon when all sensible people are resting in the shade from the heat of the sun.

 

When she gets to the well, there is a strange man there.  Women in her culture don’t have anything to do with men, unless it is her father or her husband or her son.  And not only is he a strange man, but he is from another tribe, another faith; and everyone knows that Samaritans and Jews don’t have anything to do with one another.

 

She tries to hide from him, but if she returns to her house now, she’ll have to come back to the well later on when all of her gossiping neighbours are there.  So she keeps her face turned away from the stranger and goes to the well to draw her water.

 

But he isn’t content to let her draw her water in peace.  He breaks all of the cultural taboos of gender and ethnicity and religion, and he asks her to give him some water to drink.

 

She takes a step back.  She asks him, “Why are you asking this of me.”

 

And he gives a most puzzling answer:  “You don’t know who I am. If you knew who I am, you would be asking me for the gift of living water.”

 

She is confused, but at the same time his words stir up a deep longing in her.  He continues:  “Everyone who drinks water from the well will eventually be thirsty again; but the person who drinks the water that I can give will never be thirsty again.”

 

He continues to speak to her:  “The water that I give will become to those who drink it a spring of water that bubbles up into eternal life.”

 

The woman didn’t know the longing that she carried deep within her until he spoke, and now she knows that for her whole life, she has been craving this living water – the thing that will satisfy the ache deep inside her.  What this person can give to her – this person who dares to transgress the borders that the world puts up – the water that he can give to her will satisfy the thirst that she has carried her whole life, without ever recognizing that she was thirsty.

 

Selah.

 

You have probably noticed that I’m dancing around this week’s hymn, “Creator God, You Gave Us Life.”  I love this hymn deeply – I was one of the people who voted for it back in the spring.  The thing is, the words of this hymn are beautiful poetry, and my fear this week is that if I start analyzing the words to it and parsing out the meaning behind the words, then I will become like an English teacher (and apologies to all of the English teachers out there), analyzing a poem to death and robbing it of all of its beauty and mystery and poetry.

 

I think that it is a hymn of longing – a hymn about our search to comprehend the mystery.

 

When I was talking to Bertis this week about today’s service, I realized that the word “comprehend” is a slippery word.  Comprehend can mean to understand, but that isn’t how I understand its meaning in this song.  We comprehend the mystery – we perceive the mystery, we take in the mystery, we grasp the mystery, but we can never fully understand the mystery.  Mystery will always be mysterious.

 

Selah.

 

It has been a couple of months since our last celebration of communion – next week at the picnic we will celebrate communion – and the communion meal is a time when, together, we comprehend the mystery.  We dare to approach the Holy.  We perceive the mystery of God’s love without any hope of ever understanding it.  We take in the mystery of how the Creator of All chooses to convey love through the ordinary-ness of bread and juice.  We hear the voice of Jesus saying to each of us, “This is my body, given for you.”  We allow the overwhelming love of the Divine roll over and through us.  We comprehend the mystery without any hope of ever understanding the mystery.

 

Selah.

 

I think that we spend our whole lives searching for God, longing for the Divine, craving to be drawn into Mystery.  But it seems to me that when we try to look directly at God, we can’t see anything – the eyes of our heart are blinded.  Maybe there is some wisdom in the ancient tradition that no one can look directly at God and at God’s holiness and live.

 

But when we search for God sideways; when we try to look at God slant, then maybe, just maybe we might catch glimpses of God out of the corner of our eyes.  And it is through poetry, through music, through art, through the sacraments, through stories, through the book of creation, through all of the love in the world – these are the things that give us glimpses of the Holy Mystery that is Divine Love.

 

And may all of us seek this Mystery, and may all of us be gifted with glimpses of the Divine, without ever hoping to understand it.  Amen.

 

 

"The Magnetic Field Along the Galactic Plane"

This image shows the interaction between interstellar dust

in the Milky Way and the structure of our Galaxy’s

magnetic field.

 

© ESA/Planck Collaboration. Acknowledgment: M.-A. Miville-Deschênes, CNRS – Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris-XI, Orsay, France

 

Used with Permission.