"The Church Will Be Churching!" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 28, 2024
Scripture Reading:  Deuteronomy 18:15-20


I know that I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but I do love the book of Deuteronomy!  Our regular bible study people are now experts on the book of Deuteronomy, as we’ve been meandering our way through the Old Testament and spent part of last fall in Deuteronomy.

 

To set the scene:  the Ancient Israelite people had been slaves in Egypt until God called to Moses out of the burning bush telling him that he would be the one to lead the people to freedom.  Moses went to Pharoah and demanded, “Let my people go!” After a number of wonders that God worked through Moses, the people were able to escape; Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea so that the people could cross safely to the other side and escape the Egyptians who were hot on their heels; and then the people spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, learning to trust in God’s presence, learning to trust in God’s guidance, learning to trust in God’s provision.  Along the way, Moses climbed to the top of a mountain in the middle of the Sinai desert where God gave him the Law, beginning with the 10 Commandments.

 

Forty years, and a lot of adventures later, the people are perched on the banks of the Jordan River, about to cross over into the Promised Land – the land that God had promised to them and to their ancestors.  But before they cross, Moses stops the people and reminds them of everything that has happened since they left Egypt, and recites the whole law for them a second time, beginning with the 10 Commandments.

 

The punchline comes towards the end of the book – the part of the book that I especially love.  God, speaking through Moses pleads with the people.  “Look, I’ve showed you the way to life and blessings through following my commandments. Now choose life and abundance by following me – it’s right there in your grasp! Choose life!” 

 

(We’re going to stay in Deuteronomy today, but if you are curious about what happens next, and how long the people were able to do what God was asking of them, you can ask any of our regular bible study group!)

 

Now, with the part of Deuteronomy that we read today, we’re only about half way through Moses’s recitation of the law – we haven’t reached that exhortation to choose life yet. But Moses pauses for a moment to reflect on the current situation.

 

Keep in mind that Moses is 120 years old at this point, and he has been leading the people for more than 40 years.  God has also told him that he isn’t going to live long enough to cross the river into the Promised Land, so now that they are right on the banks of the Jordan River, he knows that his days are limited.  And in this section that we read today, Moses reassures the people that even when he is gone, God is going to raise up a new leader for them – God will raise up a new prophet for them from among their own people.  Not an outsider, but one of their own.  They won’t be left leader-less.

 

The lectionary that we follow gives us four readings for each week – one from the Old Testament, a Psalm, a reading from the Epistles or letters in the New Testament, and a reading from the Gospels.  And when I read through the options for today, and saw this passage for Deuteronomy, I thought to myself that this was the perfect reading for the Sunday before I begin my Sabbatical.

 

Because God is always raising up new leaders from with the people.  As I said in my Mid-Week Message on Wednesday, I am going away for 3 months with full confidence that Two Rivers Pastoral Charge will keep on churching while I’m gone. The church isn’t just about one person and what that one person does, but instead the church is about what all of us do, and about the shared leadership.

 

The church will continue to gather together to worship God. Different Lay Worship Leaders and clergy will lead worship. Our musicians will continue to lead the music.  The quilters will continue to quilt and the UCW will continue to prepare funeral lunches (though hopefully not too many). Ross will continue to encourage the church to share out of our abundance with Mission and Service; and Chris and the rest of Session will continue to pray for the church and nourish the spiritual life.  Bette, Anne, and the rest of the Church in the World Committee will remind the church to leave food in Ida’s Cupboard, and search out new opportunities in the world where we can serve our neighbours.

 

The church will keep on churching, because God is always raising up new leaders.  This is God’s church, and God will always equip us so that we can do the work of churching that God puts before us.

 

And so these words of Moses are a good ego-check for me this week, reminding me that it’s not all about me and re-assuring me that it’s not just OK to step back, but it’s good to step back for a time to rest, knowing that this is God’s church, and God’s got us.

 

And so I step away for three months, knowing that I will likely be a slightly different person when I return, shaped by my sabbath months; but also knowing that Two Rivers will also likely be slightly different then too, because this is a living church, and God is always raising up new leaders from among us to lead us in the new directions where God is calling us to follow.

 

And may we all have the courage to say yes when God is calling!  Amen.

 

 

“Butterfly Jigsaw Puzzle Underway”

by Christchurch City Libraries on flickr

Used with Permission

Together, we are even more beautiful than when

we are apart!

"Call and Response" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 21, 2024
Scripture Reading:  Mark 1:14-20


This week I was talking to someone about growing up with my sisters in rural Ontario. We lived at the end of a dead-end road, and there were a lot of families with kids on the road. Even though I was one of the older kids, age didn’t really matter and we tended to run around as a pack, usually with our bicycles. This was in the day long before cell phones, so when it was time for us to come home, either for supper or at bedtime, Dad would stand in front of the house and blow his soccer coaching whistle. When we heard that whistle, we knew that it was time to go home. And because we were generally pretty good kids, when we heard that call, we went.  (In fact, the only time I ever remember our parents ever grounding any of us, it was when my sister didn’t come home when she heard the soccer whistle.)

Dad called, and we responded.

 

Which is a cute story, but it ties in with today’s bible reading where Jesus is calling his disciples. As I read this familiar story this year, I started wondering – which is more important, the call or the response?

 

Usually when I read this story, I think about the act of calling. Jesus called those first disciples to leave their nets behind and follow him.  Usually I think about Jesus coming across Simon and Andrew and James and John as they are fishing in the Sea of Galilee, looking them in the eye, calling them by name, and saying “Follow me.”

 

Usually when I read this story, I think about how God calls all of us, and how we need to have our hearts attuned to God.  Usually I think about the times when I have sensed God calling me to something new, whether that was the first time I sensed God’s presence, telling me that I am their beloved child, or whether it was when I began to sense that I was being called into ministry… which was less like a voice calling softly in the night and more like an annoying itch that wouldn’t go away.

 

But this year when I read this story, I also started wondering about what happens after the calling.  In the story from the bible, we read about how Simon and Andrew and James and John immediately leave their nets, their livelihood, and their families behind and follow after Jesus.  I started wondering if the response to God’s call isn’t at least as important as the calling itself.

 

What would have happened if these first disciples hadn’t left everything to follow Jesus?  They would go on to become Jesus’s inner circle and leaders in the very earliest church after Jesus’s death and resurrection.  These fisherpeople from the backwater of Galilee would go on to preach and to teach and to heal and to proclaim the good news of God’s love made known in Jesus to crowds of thousands.  In fact it is Simon who is later renamed Peter about whom Jesus would say, “Upon this rock that is you, I will build my church.” Would we have a church today if these four hadn’t responded to the call?

 

I also wonder if Jesus ever called people to follow him, and those people refused.  Even these four in today’s story would have every reason to refuse. After all, they are leaving behind not only their families but also their means of providing for their families in order to follow after this itinerant preacher.  How many people heard a similar call and then said no?  But these four, we are told, left everything behind and followed him.

 

I do think that the response is at least as important as the call.  (Just ask my sister who didn’t respond to the call of the whistle!)

 

Which brings us back to our own calling.  Each one of us is called by God. Just by virtue of the fact that you are here today, God has called you.  Maybe that call happened when you were too young to know, maybe it happened in such a gradual way that it crept up on you without you noticing, or maybe you can pinpoint the hour and the day when God called you by name, saying, “follow me.”

 

And I think that what all of us do with that calling is at least as important.  We are called to be the church, as the new creed reminds us.  We are called to be the church – to celebrate God’s presence; to live with respect in creation; to love and serve others; to seek justice and resist evil; to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.

 

Our calling, as disciples of Jesus, usually isn’t to sit back and say, “OK, I’ve been called, that’s all.” Instead, we are called to a living faith. We are called to let the Holy Spirit work in us, transforming us into who God created us to be; and we are called to let the Holy Spirit work through us as we live out the mission that God gives to us.

 

God nurtures us on the journey – nurturing us through the sacraments, nurturing us through being in community with each other, nurturing us through worship, nurturing us through the different spiritual practices.  And then, with bodies and spirits nourished, we leave our literal or metaphorical nets behind to follow Jesus on whatever exciting paths we are called to follow, individually or as a whole church.

 

For the call is just the beginning, but it is the response that opens up new horizons to us – ones that we might never have imagined traveling before!

 

And may God give us the courage to answer the call with a resounding “yes”! Amen.

 

 

“The First Two Disciples”

by JESUS MAFA

Used with Permission

"Turning Towards God" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 14, 2024 (The Baptism of Jesus)
Scripture:  Mark 1:1-11


I have a confession to make. I have to confess that on Thursday afternoon I wrote a sermon for today, and when it was three quarters written, I said to Elaine that what I had written was boring and I couldn’t figure out how to end it. Baptism itself is endlessly exciting, but talking about it isn’t necessarily. And this got me thinking about baptism, and what is baptism, and I remembered my Worship Foundations class at AST, and how, in the week when we were going to be talking about sacraments, our professor began the class by reading a passage from a novel to us. And so I thought that is what I might do this morning, instead of the boring sermon that I wrote on Thursday.

 

The novel is Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, and it written from the perspective of an elderly retired Congregationalist minister who, nearing his own death, is telling his life’s story to his son. I will also mention that not only is the narrator a minister, but his father was as well. The part that I am going to read to you comes from close to the beginning of the novel, when he is talking about his childhood.

 

“We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behaviour considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats. They were dusty little barn cats just steady on their legs, the kind of waifish creatures that live their anonymous lives keeping the mice down and have no interest in humans at all, except to avoid them. But the animals all seem to start out sociable, so we were always pleased to find new kittens prowling out of whatever cranny their mother had tried to hide them in, as ready to play as we were. It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll’s dress – there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unswaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full Trinitarian formula.

 

“Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks, one and then another. We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a good deal. So finally I asked my father in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it. He replied that the Sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. That wasn’t really an answer to my question. We did respect the Sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until I was ordained.

 

“Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into fairly respectable house cats. Louisa took a yellow one. She still had it when we were married. The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell. She called her cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead. It disappeared finally. I suspect it got caught stealing rabbits, a sin to which it was much given, Christian cat that we knew it to be, stiff-jointed as it was by that time. One of the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle. He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not. He told us no effect at all could be achieved by our methods, and we could not prove him wrong. Our Soapy mut be a distant relative.

 

“I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time. I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out. Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing. You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position. It’s a thing people expect of you.”[1]

 

I love this passage now, even more than I did the first time I heard it, almost 9 years ago, and not just for the humour in the image of those children by the creek with the kittens and the mama cat desperate to retrieve her babies. I love how it describes baptism as a blessing, baptism as the power of acknowledging the sacredness that is already present.

 

I don’t think that baptism is either a beginning or an ending – instead I see baptism as a pivot-point, or as a moment of turning. One of the biblical scholars I listened to this week talked about how baptism is a turning towards God, who is always turned towards us.[2]  Baptism doesn’t make God love us more – God’s love is always there, but instead, with our baptism, we turn towards and acknowledge that ever-present love.

 

We read about this with Jesus’s baptism. This happens right at the very beginning of his ministry – he is turning towards God and accepting the calling that had always been there.  And the same is true with our baptism – whether you were baptized as a baby or as an adult, at your baptism, promises were made by you or by your parents or guardians, turning your life towards God.

 

If you were with us last week, either in-person or online, we talked about all of the different ways that God communicates with us, and baptism is one of those ways. At each and every baptism, we turn towards God, and God says, just as God said at Jesus’s baptism, “You are my child, my beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

 

May each one of us know in our hearts, that this is true. Amen.

 

 

 

---

[1] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Toronto: Harper Collins, 2004, ebook.

[2] https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/baptismchristb

"God is Still Speaking" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 7, 2024 (Epiphany Sunday)
Scripture – Matthew 2:1-12


Last year, in the season of Lent, we started sharing our God Sightings at the beginning of our worship services.  Our theme during Lent last year was encountering Jesus – we read stories from the bible each week about people who had a life-changing encounter with Jesus; we gathered on Wednesday evenings for a time of meditation where we might encounter the still small voice of God in the silence; and at the start of each worship service, we started sharing with each other the times in the week when we had noticed God at work in the world, or when we were especially aware of God’s presence.

 

And then when we came to the end of Lent, we had a conversation at Session about how much people appreciated this opportunity to share, and so we have continued with this practice in the months since.  And from my perspective at least, it has been beautiful to see the variety of encounters that have been shared, and the depths of those encounters.  Collectively, we have spotted God moving and working in the world in too many ways to count.

 

Occasionally, someone will begin to share their God Sighting along the lines of, “Well… it’s not really a sighting, but this is how and when I was aware of God’s presence this week.”  And that’s perfectly alright! God communicates with us through all of our senses.  (And maybe we need to come up with a different name for it than “God Sightings” so that we aren’t privileging one sense over the others.  I’m also trying to be careful not to talk about God speaking to us, because that might limit God’s voice to only our sense of hearing!)

 

God created us with all of our senses; and God communicates with us through all of our senses.  If you think just about the sacraments – in baptism we see and hear the water being poured, and then we feel the water as it trickles down our forehead.  And in communion, we see the bread being broken, we see and hear the wine being poured, we feel the piece of bread as we hold it in our hands, and we smell and taste the bread and the juice as we eat it.  Through the sacraments, God uses all of our senses to tell us, “I love you.”

 

And it’s the same with our God sightings – sometimes we witness with our eyes an act of love so profound that we know that God is a part of it. Sometimes we hear God speaking through the voice of another person, nudging us in a new direction. Sometimes we feel the weight of God’s love when we are feeling sad or anxious and a friend wraps us in a hug. Sometimes we can smell God’s presence and the fulfilment of hope when the first rain begins to fall after a dry spell. Sometimes we can taste God’s presence at a potluck when family and community join together, like at the one we had last Sunday.

 

In the story that we read at Epiphany, the story of the wise ones following a star to visit Jesus, we find God communicating in a couple of different ways.  The obvious one here is the star – the magi came from the east to Jerusalem asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage”; and later on we read that the star stopped over the place where the child was.  The magi were astronomers and astrologers, people who studied the stars in the night sky, along with the meaning that those stars brought. They were foreigners, coming from some unnamed country east of Jerusalem, and wouldn’t have been followers of the God of the Jewish people, and yet this God chose to speak to them, to call them using a language that they would understand – the appearance of a new star in the sky.

 

And then we read about God communicating through the religious leaders of Jerusalem – people who had studied the scriptures, the law and the prophets.  When King Herod asks where the Messiah, the Anointed One, was to be born, they were able to quote the prophet Micah, who spoke of a leader coming from Bethlehem in the land of Judah. God communicates and gives direction through the scriptures. (Now what Herod did with this communication is a sermon for another day!)

 

And we also see God communicating through dreams. After the wise ones have offered their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to Jesus, they don’t do as Herod had asked them to do, they don’t return to Jerusalem with directions about how to find the infant king. Instead, God warns them in a dream that Herod’s intentions are not good, and they find another route back to their home in the east… one that will bypass Jerusalem.

 

God is communicating with the people in so many different ways in the story, but in order for the message to be heard, the people have to be alert to perceive God.  If those magi hadn’t spent years studying the night sky, if they hadn’t been diligent in scanning the stars, they wouldn’t have noticed a new star when it appeared. And later on, if they hadn’t trusted that God might speak through their dreams, they might have brushed an odd dream off as a bad bowl of lentil stew before bed.

 

And isn’t it the same with us?  When we practice being alert to God’s presence in the world, we are much more likely to notice God’s presence. And so something like sharing our God sightings every Sunday, or asking ourselves every night at bedtime, “Where did I notice God today?” – these sorts of practices exercise our muscles of noticing.  And when we are practiced in looking for the presence of the divine around us, then epiphanies, or Aha moments of insight or recognition… they become second nature to us.

 

For God is still communicating with us each and every day – speaking to us, revealing their divine presence to us, embracing us in love. And may all of our senses be open to perceive this. Amen.

 

Outline of the Magi (and their camel)
from the Live Nativity in December

2023 in Books

I've just looked back at last year's reading summary, and I'm relieved to announce that this year was a much better reading year. (And I managed to keep my reading spreadsheet up-to-date this year, so there will be some stats at the end of this post!)

First up, my favourite reads of the year - not in order of favouritism, but in the order I read them in!

Killers of a Certain Age (Deanna Raybourn)

I have probably recommended this book more than any other this year. Take a group of "women of a certain age" but make them trained killers. And then have them retiring, and trying to avoid being eliminated by their former employer. Such a fun book!

Fayne (Ann-Marie MacDonald)

This book was so good that it got its own book review blog post. At almost 1000 pages, it still felt too short. Seriously - everyone needs to read this book!

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton)

I loved Beaton's earlier works/comics, and this was a full-length graphic novel. I read it just before it was a contestant on Canada Reads, and I was cheering for it all the way. The images enhanced the story being told, which made it a story that couldn't have been told as well in any other way. And it is a story that has stuck with me in the months since I read it.

The Book of Longings (Sue Monk Kidd)

Another book that made me look at the world differently. An imagined story of Jesus's life (sacred imagination being one of the things that I like to draw on when preaching), this is the story told from the perspective of Jesus's wife.

Care Of (Ivan Coyote)

This is a book mostly of letters that the author wrote in the early months of the pandemic, responding to letters that they had received (with original letters and the responses shared with permission of the letter writers). Coyote is such a strong writer and storyteller that this book gave me a deep insight into their own mind and heart, as well as capturing the zeitgeist of the early pandemic months.

Run Towards the Danger (Sarah Polley)

I listened to this book as an audiobook, read by the author, and loved it - it was very hard to hit the stop button, so I ended up listening to it over just a couple of days. It is a series of long-form essays, each addressing a different challenging situation she has had to face in her life - from stage fright, to scoliosis, to losing her mother, to being assaulted by a well-known former CBC radio host, to being a child TV star. I'm sure that this is a great read, but I think that I got even more out of it by hearing the powerful words in the author's own voice.

Bonus Entry:  The Crossing Places (Elly Griffiths)... along with the subsequent books in the series (so far I've read The Janus Stone, The House at Sea's End, and A Room Full of Bones)

This is a new-to-me mystery series - I was gifted the first two books in a Secret Santa exchange a few years ago, and finally got around to reading them this year (and promptly wondered what had taken me so long). Fortunately I've been able to access the rest of the series through the library, and I've been making my way through them. I still have lots to go! An archeology professor, a police detective, the desolate Norfolk coast, and some well-drawn secondary characters make these books a fun place to visit.

And now for some stats, because stats are always fun (and if I'm keeping a spreadsheet of my reading, I should be allowed to do something with the data!).

Number of Books Read in 2023:  37

Fiction:  24
Non-Fiction:  13

Books I Purchased:  12
Library Books:  20
Borrowed:  3
Gifted:  2

Paper Books:  20
E-Books:  15
Audiobooks:  2

Books by Non-White Authors:  7
Books by White Authors:  30

Books with Racial Diversity:  20
Books with an All-White World:  11
(The remaining 6 books were non-fiction books with no characters.)

Books by LGBTQ+ Authors:  4
Non-Queer Authors:  33
(To the best of my ability to determine.)

Books with Explicitly Queer Characters:  13
Books with no Queer Characters:  18
(The remaining 6 books were non-fiction books with no characters.)

Books by Female Authors:  29
Books by Male Authors:  6
Books by Non-Binary Authors:  2

Books by Canadian Authors:  14
Books by non-Canadian Authors:  23

And all of the books I read this year, except one, were first-time reads. (My one re-read was Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth.)

And that was my 2023 in books! I'm going to re-set my spreadsheet and get ready to track my 2024 reading. I don't set reading goals or targets - my reading tends to go with what I want to read. But if I were to set some aspirations for 2024:
- Read 52 books (ie one a week). Since I am going to be on Sabbatical for 3 months, this might be the year that it happens!
- Read more queer authors.
- Get through some of the books I've already purchased rather than buying new books. (And continuing to support the library!)

I wish all of you lots of lovely reading in the year ahead.