"I Didn't Believe in Ghosts Until"

I didn’t believe in ghosts until

            my cat sat on the arm of the sofa,

            gaze fixed on empty space,

            ears pointed forward like satellite dishes,

            whiskers twitching,

            but nothing to see

                        at least not to my eyes;

            but nothing to hear

                        at least not to my ears.

 

I didn’t believe in ghosts until

            I was alone in the office

            and a sound reached my ears

            like voices in the distance

            laughing and talking.

I went down to the basement,

            calling out to see who was there,

            but there was no one to be found,

                        at least not to my eyes

 

I didn’t believe in ghosts until

            I was walking home in the dark

            and heard footsteps crunching

                        in the dry leaves beside me.

            I stopped,

                        and the footsteps stopped,

            and the scent of a familiar perfume

                        from decades ago

                                    reached my nose,

            and waves of love radiated out

                        from the empty air.

 

I didn’t believe in ghosts until

            I met the memory of my past self

                        in a box of keepsakes long unopened.

            I met myself who was

                        in forgotten journals

                        in forgotten photos

                        in a forgotten mix tape.

            I reached out to myself

                        and gave myself a hug,

                        and promised myself:

                        It Gets Better.

 

"How Do You Receive a Blessing?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 19, 2025
Scripture:  Genesis 32:22-31


To me, this story about Jacob that we read this morning has almost a cinematic feel to it.  There probably isn’t enough story there to turn it into a feature length movie… unless you are Peter Jackson who managed to turn a single novel, The Hobbit, into three movies.  But I can see this story about Jacob working well as a short film.

So let’s start with our casting.  Our main character here is Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebekah, grandson of Sarah and Abraham.  Jacob, who was the husband of the sisters Leah and Rachel (yes, both at the same time), and consort of his wife’s slaves Bilhah and Zilpah.  Jacob who was the father of twelve sons and one daughter.

I think that we would probably have to cast a conventionally handsome actor in the role of Jacob, but we wouldn’t want a muscley action hero type actor.  Jacob tended to get by on his wits rather than on his physical strength.

Jacob was more than just a bit of a trickster.  You might remember that when he was younger and his father was dying, he tricked his older brother Esau out of their father’s blessing.  In fact, this complicated relationship between the brothers goes right back to their birth – they were twins, and when they were born, Jacob, the second-born, came out of the womb holding on to Esau’s heel, almost like he was trying to pull his elder brother back, and pulling himself into the first-born position.

So Jacob is a trickster, but when you carry on with his story, the trickster gets tricked by his father-in-law.  When Jacob fell in love with Rachel and asked to marry her, the condition was that he would give seven years’ labour to her father in exchange for his bride. But then seven years later, at the wedding, her father tricked the groom by covering Rachel’s elder sister Leah’s head with the veil and presenting her as Rachel. And so Jacob was tricked into giving his father-in-law seven more years of labour in order to be allowed to marry Rachel.

But don’t worry too much about him – you can’t keep a trickster down for long, and shortly before today’s story, Jacob turned the tables on his father-in-law.  He was in charge of his father-in-law’s livestock, and used his trickery to make sure that his flock ended up with the largest and strongest sheep, while his father-in-law ended up with the weak and sickly lambs.  And then when his wives’ brothers clued in that their father was being tricked, Jacob made plans to move his whole family, all of those wives and children, back to his homeland.  But Jacob didn’t wait for his father-in-law to catch him, but snuck them all away without saying goodbye.

And now Jacob, our hero – or maybe anti-hero – is on his way back to his homeland, back to encounter his brother Esau, with whom he didn’t part on the friendliest of terms, after he had robbed Esau of his birthright.

So back to casting.  For Jacob, like I said, we probably want someone who is conventionally handsome, but not a big buff action-hero type.  I’m thinking someone like Benedict Cumberbatch or Ryan Reynolds.

His family – his wives and children – they all have minor roles in our film. At the beginning of the story, Jacob helps them all across the river to go on ahead of him, but he remains behind for the night.  So I don’t think that we need to spend a lot of time casting them.

But our other main character in our story is this shadowy figure that Jacob meets that night on the shores of the River Jabbok.  Did you notice that we are given very few clues as to the identity of this figure?  Jacob had been praying to God in the scene just before our story, praying to be saved from his brother’s justifiable anger; and at the end of our story, he names this place by the river Peniel, meaning “face of God.”  So we might assume that the figure that Jacob encounters by the river is God.  But in the flow of the story itself, this figure is only named as a man.  Not God, not an angel, but a man.  No name, no description, other than the fact that this being is strong enough to dislocate Jacob’s hip, something that usually takes the force of a car accident to achieve.

In making our film, I think that I would want to keep this figure shrouded in as much mystery as possible.  I would want to keep their face in the shadows so that we can never see their face clearly.  And maybe dress them in a long dark robe so that their precise movements are hard to make out.  It would have to be a tall actor with a commanding physical presence, or maybe we could use camera trickery to make the actor look significantly taller than our actor playing Jacob.  Interestingly, Tilda Swinton was the first actor who popped into my brain as I was mentally casting my film, but if she isn’t available, maybe we could ask Johnny Depp or Denzel Washington.

The main action sequence in our film is a wrestling match between the two characters – Jacob and our mysterious being. We aren’t told why they began to wrestle, but they wrestle through the night, and then, just as the dawn is beginning to break on the horizon, with the two of them locked in each other’s arms, we have our main dialogue.

The mysterious stranger demands, “Let me go!” but Jacob replies, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.”  Our stranger asks, “What is your name?” and Jacob replies, “Jacob.”  Our stranger, in that moment, re-names Jacob Israel, which means “One Who Struggles With God,” but when Jacob-Israel demands to know the stranger’s name, our stranger refuses to answer, asking why Jacob wants to know.  Finally, our stranger blesses Jacob, and then… disappears?  The stranger is there in the story, and then they aren’t. We can probably have some fun with the visual effects at this point in our movie.

And then our big cinematic moment comes at the end of the film, with the sun rising in the background, and Jacob limping towards the river to go and rejoin his family, limping not only because of his hip injury, but limping as an outward, visible signal of his inner change – changed by the blessing that he received, changed by his wrestling with God, changed by the new name he has received.  Roll the credits.

To me, the most interesting question to ask of this story is the one that I hinted at a while ago.  Why did Jacob wrestle this stranger, there on the riverbank?  Why did Jacob think that he needed to wrestle a blessing out of God?  When I think of God, I think of love radiating out in abundance, for God is love – the very substance of God is love.  And yet Jacob feels the need to wrestle a blessing out of God.  Jacob, who has spent his life tricking others and being tricked by others, thinks that he needs to trick a blessing out of God, rather than realizing that God’s blessing is there for the taking.

To me, a blessing isn’t about material good fortune – it isn’t about fancy vacations or a fat bank account or even about good health.  To me, when something is blessed, it is set apart to be the thing that God made it for. A blessing dedicates a person or a thing to God.  I suspect that when this building was first built, it was blessed, set apart to be a place of worship and service.  We end each worship with a blessing, setting us on a path to be God’s people in the world in the days ahead.  Jacob is blessed to be Israel, the father of many nations of people who will love and serve God.

I wonder if one of Jacob’s character flaws might have been that he wasn’t able to see God any differently than he saw other people.  He went through his life thinking that he needed to fight others for what he wanted; and then when he met God, he could only see God in the same light.

I’m thinking of our movie that we are making, and how we might portray that moment when Jacob first encountered God, I mean, a “shadowy stranger,” on the banks of the river as the sun was setting.  I imagine Jacob looking at the stranger with longing in his eyes, knowing that this stranger had something that he wanted, but unsure of how to ask for it.  I imagine Jacob yearning to know God better, just as his parents and grandparents had, but unsure of how to approach God, and then falling back on his usual patterns of how to handle life’s challenges with violence and trickery.  But all the while, God’s love and God’s blessing were there for the taking – no trickery required; no violence required.

Now what about you?  How do you approach God for your blessing?  Do you relate to Jacob, scrambling for everything in life, and wrestling this blessing from a seemingly-reluctant God?  Or do you feel like you want to turn around and run the other direction, fleeing from the path that this blessing might put you on?  Or do you shrink back, not certain whether you deserve this blessing that God is about to give you?  Or do you stride forward confidently, knowing that this blessing is there waiting for you?

But no matter your approach, you, my friend, you are blessed.  You are blessed by a loving God, blessed to be the person God created you to be, beautiful and beloved.  You are blessed for a journey that may not always be easy, but it will be a journey with God always at your side.  You are blessed, so that your life might be a blessing to the world.  Amen.

 

 

Now picture Jacob-Israel, silhouetted by the rising sun,

limping,

preparing to cross the river to re-join his family

Image Credit:  “Grand River Sunrise” by Rachel Cramer on flickr

Used with permission.

A Thanksgiving Prayer

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 12 - Thanksgiving Weekend

God of overwhelming grace,

         this Thanksgiving, we pause,

                  and we choose gratitude.

With each breath we take, we thank you for the air we breathe.

With each meal, we thank you for making the plants grow.

With each hug, each smile, each handshake,

         we thank you for the people that you put into our lives.

With each morning that we wake up,

         we thank you for giving us the breath of life,

                  for filling us with your Holy Spirit.

 

As we gather around Thanksgiving tables,

         celebrating the abundance of the fall harvest,

we thank you and pray for all of the people who make it possible.

We pray for the farmers and for the farm workers.

We pray for the drivers who transport the food.

We pray for the manufacturers and processors.

We pray for the people who work in grocery stores

         and farmer’s markets

         and gas stations

         and farm stands.

We pray for the people who prepare the food,

         who set the table,

         who issue invitations,

         who serve the food,

         who wash dishes.

Thank you, God, for the gifts of all of these people,

         and we ask you to bless them and bless their labour.

 

And yet even on this Thanksgiving weekend,

         Loving God,

                  we know that all is not perfect in the world.

And so we pray for everyone who is sick or injured,

we pray for everyone who is lonely,

we pray for everyone who is mourning,

we pray for all caregivers,

we pray for everyone who lives in fear,

we pray for everyone living in war zones and places of violence.

We pray that your love might reach to every corner of the world,

and we ask that you transform us, by your Holy Spirit,

         into people who reflect your love into places in the world

                  that still rest in the shadows.

 

God of all people and all places,

         our prayers today stretch around the world.

In the WCC Ecumenical Prayer Cycle,

         this week we especially pray for the people and churches

                  of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama.

We pray for the people of Gaza,

and we pray that the tentative ceasefire

         might grow into a just and lasting peace.

We pray for peace in Ukraine,

         and also for peace in places that don’t reach the news cycle.

We pray for an end to this drought –

         for rains to fall that will fill wells and fill rivers

                  and quench the thirst of the dry land.

As the world feels ever more divided into isolated silos,

         we pray for your Holy Spirit to break down walls that divide

                  so that we might truly hear one another.

We pray for safety for all who are marginalized –

         for immigrants and refugees,

         for all members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ Community,

         for racialized people;

and we pray for your kingdom to unfold soon

         as a place where all people are equally valued.

 

And we pray too, for the people and situations

that are closest to our hearts,

as we name them now, aloud or in the silence of our hearts.

(pause)

 

Merciful God,

         finally we pray for ourselves.

You see us as we truly are.

You know the needs and desires of our hearts.

You know our secret joys and our secret sorrows.

Embrace all of us in your warm, enveloping love.

Fill our hearts with the peace of Christ.

Nudge us forwards, by your Holy Spirit, when we feel stuck,

         comfort us when we need comforting,

and most of all, draw us into your eternal dance of love.

 

All of our prayers, spoken and unspoken,

         we gather together and hold up to the light of Christ,

                  entrusting them to your care.

 

We pray all of this in and through Jesus Christ,

         in whose name we are called.

Amen.

 

 

"A Mustard Seed of Faith" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday October 5, 2025
Scripture:  Luke 17:5-10


In school, they give out prizes for all sorts of things.  Last spring, my nephew Charlie got the prize at his Grade 8 graduation for the top student in Geography.  Another nephew, Eddie, was on the Dean’s List at the end of his first year of university.  And another nephew, Jonathan, was given the Sandrine Craig Award by his school, awarded to a student who chooses kindness, cooperation, commitment, and respect, and acts as a moral compass in their classroom, speaking up for those who need help.  (And yes, that wording is straight from his certificate.)

So here’s a question – if Jesus were standing in front of us, what sorts of awards might he choose to give out?  He probably wouldn’t be giving out awards like Best Mark in Geography, or Best Goalie in the league.  So what sorts of awards might he give out?  (Invite suggestions – e.g. the kindest person award; most generous person award; choir practice attendance award; most sandwiches made for Romero House prize)

But if you think about it, this is a pretty silly thought experiment.  Because if we are giving out an award for the kindest person, that would imply that everyone else wasn’t kind.  Or, maybe, that only one person could win at kindness, so if you weren’t in the running for the award, you might as well not try.

In reality, Jesus wants all of us to win the kindness prize, or the most generous person prize, or the most compassionate person prize.  These are things that are expected of all of us – it isn’t a competition.  It would be pretty silly for Jesus to stand here and say, “I give the runner-up prize in generosity to (name)”; or “The third-place winner in the compassion category is (name).”

It's not a competition – instead these are things that are expected from all of us – the bare minimum, you might say!  But even if they are the bare minimum, all of our gifts and all of our contributions are celebrated.  God’s grace means that there is enough celebration for everyone.  Rather than celebrating the winner in the kindness category, everyone’s contribution of kindness is celebrated in the world.  Even my nephew’s award for kindness and cooperation and respect isn’t quite in keeping with God’s dream for the world – in God’s dream for the world, everyone will be celebrated for kindness and cooperation and respect, and not just one person.

So where does that leave us?

In the reading from Luke that we heard this morning, Jesus is using the example of slavery – an analogy that would have made sense to his original listeners, even though it isn’t part of our lived experience in our time and place.

Jesus says that a slave is expected to do their work, and doesn’t expect special commendation for doing their job.

Our job, as followers of the Way of Jesus is to follow the teachings of Jesus, and like the slave in Jesus’s analogy, we shouldn’t expect special commendation for doing what is right.

We are to love God with our whole being.  We are to love our neighbours – all of our neighbours – and love here should be an active verb, not a passive feeling.  We are to live with respect in Creation, as part of God’s community of creation.  We are to seek justice and resist evil.  We are to proclaim God’s hope, peace, joy, and love with our words and with our actions.

And even though we aren’t to seek special commendation for doing these things, I don’t think that it is wrong to celebrate these things in all people.  After all, Jesus said that you only needed to have faith the size of a tiny mustard seed in order to make a difference in the world!

And so even if we, by our own efforts, aren’t able to solve climate change in the world, we are called to do what we are able to do to live with respect in creation so that all of creation can flourish.

And so even if we, by our own efforts, aren’t able to bring about world peace, we are called to do what we are able to do to bring about peace in the spheres in which we move.

And so even if we, by our own efforts, aren’t able to create a world where nobody is hungry, we are called to do what we are able to do to feed hungry people in our neighbourhood around us.

There is no prize for these things – as Jesus says in the teaching, “we have only done what we ought to have done.”  And yet we can celebrate these things when we see them happening, because we are witnessing the kingdom of God in action!

And so as we journey the Way of Jesus together, how are you going to share your gifts with the world?  How are you going to plant and nurture your mustard seed of faith?  And how are you going to encourage your fellow travellers to do the same?

And may the Holy Spirit inspire us and guide us so to do!  Amen.

 

 

 

A Mustard Seed of Faith
Image Credit:  JaBB on flickr
Used with Permission

"Irrational Hope" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 28, 2025
Scripture:  Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15


I’m probably going to break some preaching rule somewhere, but this week I want to give you a peek into how sermons are written – a bit like getting a glimpse behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.  Though, I guess, there are many different ways to write a sermon, but I want to tell you about one method.

The Four Pages of the Sermon technique was developed by Paul Scott Wilson, a United Church preaching professor in Toronto, and this technique has been adopted across denominations and around the world.  He has the preacher start with four pieces of paper – four literal pieces of paper – on the desk in front of you.  At the top of page 1 you write “The Trouble in the Text.” At the top of page 2 you write “The Trouble in the World.” At the top of page 3 you write “The Good News in the Text.”  And then you can probably guess what you write at the top of page 4 – “The Good News in the World.”  The preacher then starts brainstorming different ideas under each of these four headings, and once the four pages are filled, you can shuffle them around to figure out what order of pages makes sense for this sermon – some weeks, it makes sense to start with page 2, then page 4, then page 3, then page 1.  Another week you might want to go page 1, page 3, page 2, page 4.  And then once you have your pages in order, the sermon has essentially written itself!

I say all this, because I think that this week’s story from Jeremiah fits really nicely into the Four Pages of the Sermon technique.

Let’s start with page 1 – the Trouble in the Text.  On the surface, this story might look like a complicated real estate transaction.  Jeremiah’s relative has a field for sale.  God tells Jeremiah to buy the field.  Jeremiah pays 17 shekels of silver for the field.  One copy of the deed is sealed up for posterity, and the other copy of the deed is left accessible for public scrutiny.  Where is the trouble in this story, other than the risk of getting bored to death by the details of property law in ancient Judah?

The trouble in the text is actually hinted at in the beginning of the story.  Verse 2 reads:  “At that time, the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and the prophet Jeremiah was confined in the court of the guard that was in the palace of the king of Judah.”  So we have a double-whammy of trouble here.  Jeremiah has been imprisoned by the king, likely for speaking truth to power, for pointing out to the king all of the ways that the king has led the people away from God’s way.  But even more than that, the city is under siege.

At this point in the history of the people of ancient Israel and Judah, they had entered the Promised Land – the land promised to their ancestors – under the leadership of Moses, after spending 40 years in the wilderness, after leaving slavery in Egypt.  But as our regular bible study people will attest, things didn’t stay good for long once they were in the Promised Land.  Gradually, under poor leadership, they turned away from God, and then things really fell apart for them.  The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen to the Assyrian Empire’s army, and the people had been deported, or had fled for refuge to Jerusalem in the southern kingdom of Judah.  And now that southern kingdom of Judah was under attack by the army of the Babylonian Empire.  The city of Jerusalem was under siege with no one able to enter or leave, with the hopes of starving the people of Jerusalem into surrender.

And from our perspective almost 3000 years later, we know that the strategy succeeded.  Jerusalem did fall to the Babylonian army.  The temple, the literal home of God is going to be destroyed. The people are going to be carried off into exile.  The world as they know it is about to crumble to pieces around them.

And so I would name the trouble in the text as the existential threat to the people that the Babylonian army is posing to them. Their very existence is being threatened.

So that is page 1 of our sermon – the trouble in the text.  Moving on to page 2, titled The Trouble in the World, is there any threat in our world today that might hold some parallels to the existential threat in the story?

I don’t know about you, but for me, when I think of the things in the world that cause me to feel existential dread, the threat of climate change is pretty near the top of my list.  To me, that is the thing in the world today that has the most potential to demolish our very existence on this planet.  Rising sea levels used to be viewed as the most dangerous part of climate change, and it still is to people who live close to sea level around the world, but I see the most pressing threat these days being the shifting weather patterns.  Floods where there were never floods before.  Droughts and wildfires in places that were never threatened before.  Farmers struggling to grow food under these changed weather patterns, with the associated threat of hunger and starvation around the world.

When I think about the future of the world – the world that my niece and nephews and their children are going to inherit – these are the sorts of things that fill the pit of my stomach with dread. Our existence, just like the existence of the people of ancient Jerusalem, is being threatened by something that we don’t have control over.

So that is page 2 of our sermon.  We’ve covered the problem in the text and the problem in the world.  Let’s move on to the good news half of our sermon!

Page 3 of our sermon is titled The Good News in the Text.  In our story from Jeremiah, where is the good news?  To me, the whole story about Jeremiah buying the field, that tedious real estate transaction, is the good news.  On the surface, it makes no sense at all – after all, who in their right mind would buy a piece of land when the city is about to fall to a foreign army?  In a very short time, that land is likely going to be worthless, as the invading army is about to take over and confiscate all of the land in the region.  So why does Jeremiah buy this field?

He buys the field because God told him to do so.  Jeremiah, as a prophet, was a mouthpiece for God.  He pointed people back to God and towards God’s way of doing things.  But Jeremiah was a prophet in more than his words – when you read his story, he was a prophet in his actions too, and did a lot of crazy things to get people’s attention, and then re-direct their attention towards God.  And buying this field was a prophetic act.

Because right at the end of our story, God says, through Jeremiah, “For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel:  Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Jeremiah is buying this field as a sign of hope.  Yes, the disaster is going to come, but that isn’t the end of the story because God is still in charge.  Even though the field is going to fall into the hands of the invaders, a time will come when it will be valuable again, and ordinary real estate transactions will be able to happen.

And from our perspective, a couple of millennia in the future, we know that this was true.  The siege is going to end when Jerusalem falls to the Babylonian army, the temple is going to be destroyed, the people are going to be carried away into exile, but that isn’t the end of the story.  70 years are going to have to pass in exile, two full generations, but eventually the people will be allowed to return to Jerusalem, they will be able to rebuild the temple, and houses, fields, and vineyards will once again be bought and sold in the land.

Hope is a funny thing, because it makes no sense in the present moment.  Hope is the thing that kicks in when the world is falling to pieces around us, and reminds us that this isn’t the end of the story.  Hope is irrational, but hope is a tangible thing, because it lets us continue on, it frees us from the existential dread so that we can continue to be God’s agents in the world.

And hope is the pattern through the whole biblical story.  The story doesn’t end with slavery in Egypt – the story continues until the people reach freedom in the promised land.  Exile in Babylon is followed by restoration to the land.  The story doesn’t end on Good Friday with the crucifixion, but continues on to Easter and resurrection.

So what about page 4 of our sermon?  We’ve seen the problem in the text, the problem in the world, and the good news in the text.  What about the good news in the world?  Where can we find parallel good news in a world bogged down by existential dread over climate change?

I think that it is maybe up to all of us to write that page 4 in our own lives.  Jeremiah bought a field as an act of trust, as an act of hope.  Even though he wouldn’t live to see the time 70 years later when the land would be worth something again, he trusted in God when God said that this time would come. What action can we do to put our trust in God’s future?

In a moment, we’re going to be singing the hymn “This is God’s Wondrous World,” and in verse 3, we’ll be singing the very powerful line, “O let me ne’er forget, that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”

I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Martin Luther, the 16^th Century theologian who was one of the driving forces behind the Protestant Reformation.  When he was asked what he would do if he knew that the world was ending tomorrow, his answer was, “I would plant an apple tree today.”

When we trust that God has the whole world, our past, our present, and our future, in their hands, we can be freed from fear and freed to act as if that future was already here.  We can buy a field.  We can plant an apple tree.  We can drop a donation off at the food bank.  We can make tomato sauce from the tomatoes we grew in our garden this summer.  We can volunteer at the local school, knowing that these children will grow up in a world we are helping to create.

If we let ourselves fall into despair, or be trapped by the dread, we become paralyzed, unable to act because anything we do doesn’t matter anyways.  But when we have hope – remembering that hope doesn’t make any sense in the present moment – then we are freed for action.

So I’m going to leave you to ponder that question – how are you going to write page 4 of our sermon this week?  What are you going to do in the world today that signals the hope that God has given to you to carry?

And may God strengthen the hope within each one of us, and empower us to act on that hope.  Amen.

 

Image:  “Regrowth” by Q Family on flickr

Used with Permission

 

"Dishonest Manager, or Abundant Generosity?" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 21, 2025
Scripture Readings:  Amos 8:4-7 and Luke 16:1-13


There are some funny quirks about bibles, and one of them is the chapter titles that bible publishers put in there.  These chapter titles or story titles, or headings – they aren’t part of the original manuscripts.  They’re not a translation of something that the original authors put in there.  Jesus didn’t begin his teachings by saying, “Now I’m going to tell you the story of the Prodigal Son.”

Instead, it is up to the editor or the publisher to decide 1) if they want to include titles or headings to the different sections, and 2) what title or heading they are going to use.  And so these titles can give us a hint or a clue about what the editor thinks that the story is about; but we have to be careful with them, because they might not always match what Jesus intended by the story.

With the parable from Luke’s gospel that we heard today, if you were to open up a bible – either one of the pew bibles or your bible at home, you would probably see a title given to it along the lines of, “The Parable of the Dishonest Manager,” or “The Story of the Crooked Manager,” or “The Shrewd Manager,” or “The Parable of the Dishonest Steward.”

And if you were to read the parable with one of these titles in the back of your head, it becomes a very confusing parable indeed.  Because why, at the end of the parable, is the landowner praising the dishonest or crooked dealings of his employee?  What are we supposed to take away from this parable?

It is a very confusing story that Jesus tells.  Are we supposed to cheat the people we are supposed to be accountable to?  Are we supposed to “make friends using stolen money” as either the master in the story or Jesus himself seems to be praising the manager for doing?  Like I said, it is a very confusing story that Jesus tells.

But what if we were to take the title out of the picture.  What if we begin with the assumption that the manager isn’t dishonest or crooked, and is the hero of our story.  He has been put on notice for his employment, his days at this job are numbered, and he chooses to use his remaining time there spreading wealth and abundance to people with less financial clout than he has.  He could have doubled down, tightened the screws and tried to extort as many debts as possible, trying to curry favour with his master. But instead he turned around and did good to the people without wealth.  He becomes almost a Robin Hood type figure – steal from the rich to give to the poor.

With this interpretation of the story, the most surprising moment is when the master, the owner of the money that the manager is giving away, laughs and praises the manager for what he is doing.  Maybe the owner of the money is also a Robin Hood type figure, giving away their wealth to anyone who needs it.

My turning point this week, in figuring out this reading of the parable, was the poem that I asked Elaine to put on the back of the bulletin.  It was written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes and it reads:

And Jesus went around
to everyone who thought they owed God something,
and asked, “What do you think you owe?”
And they would count it up.
And he would say, “Erase it.”
And God said, “That’s my boy.”

What if we can see this parable as a parable of God’s abundance, a story of a world where everyone who has more than enough shares with everyone who doesn’t have enough, a story of the kingdom of God where there is more than enough for everybody.  What if we were to title this story, The Parable of the Extravagantly Generous Master?

With this reading of the parable, it makes sense for both the owner of the resources and the person responsible for managing them to seek out generosity, and for the parable to teach us to do likewise.  Be generous with what God has entrusted to us – we don’t own these things, but God wants us to share and be generous with abundance, just as God is generous.

The parable ends with, “No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”

We can’t be enslaved to God and enslaved to wealth at the same time, but the good news is that we can choose which master we want to serve.  We can choose to focus all of our attention and energy to wealth-creation, tracking the stock market hour by hour, making every decision in our lives based on what will allow us to accumulate more wealth.

The easy example to pick here would be the ultra-wealthy in the world, but I think that money-worship or money-enslavement is much more extensive than that.

There are some people on YouTube who take frugality to the extreme – even though they make a good salary, they sleep on an air mattress because they don’t want to have to spend money to buy a bed, they only buy food that is “reduced for quick sale,” they walk or bicycle not for the exercise but because they don’t want to spend money on the bus fare, they wear clothes that are torn and dirty, to avoid spending money on either new clothes or doing laundry.  I believe that there was also a TV show a decade or so ago called Extreme Cheapskates along the same principles. I think that they are as enslaved to money as the ultra-wealthy of this world are.  Money shapes every decision they make.

But when we are enslaved to God, we are able to adopt a lifestyle of generosity and abundance.  We don’t need to hoard wealth because we know that with God there is more than enough to go around.  We can become concerned with what God is concerned about, which usually has to do with caring for the poor and needy of this world.

The prophet Amos, in the other reading that we heard today, is pretty explicit about this.  God condemns anyone who tramples the poor of this land, God condemns anyone who tries to cheat in their business practices in order to make more money.  (Side note – I love the ancient description of the modern problem of shrinkflation.  God condemns anyone who makes the ephah, or container size, smaller, along with anyone who rigs the scales that measure it out.). God condemns anyone who devalues human life.

God is always, always, on the side of people who are poor, people who are oppressed, people who have less in this world.  In this season of creation, I would also name the non-human parts of creation that are voiceless and silenced in this world as belonging to God’s special care.

And when we stand on the side of the manager in the parable, who is on the same side as the master, then that is where our concern should be too.  We are called to abundant generosity – the sort of generosity that doesn’t make any sense to someone watching from the outside.  We are called to this abundance, extending our care to every corner of the world that is under God’s special care.  When we serve God rather than wealth, we are freed to live in this abundance.

And what steps to we want to take in that direction today?

And may God grant us the courage so to do.  Amen.

 

 

“Rich and Poor, or, War and Peace”

How can we correct this picture?

Image used with permission.

Renée's Butter Cake Recipe

When we were doing our undergrad at McGill, Renée used to make this cake for birthday parties or any time a celebration was indicated. She usually made it as 2 round cakes with a layer of jam between them and icing on top.

It makes a very moist, buttery cake - almost but not quite like a pound cake - that is very simple to put together. I've listed a couple of variations below.

Ingredients
2/3 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup milk
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy
3. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well in-between. Add vanilla along with one of the eggs.
4. Stir in dry ingredients alternately with the milk.
5. Prepare pan(s) for baking - one 9" square pan or two 8" round pans - by greasing them and/or lining them with parchment paper.
6. Bake for 50 minutes (9" square) or 30 minutes (8" round).
7. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then remove from the pan and cool fully on a cooling rack before icing.

Variations
Spice Cake:  Add to the dry ingredients 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp cloves, and 1/4 tsp nutmeg.
9"x13" Rectangular Pan:  Increase all recipe quantities to 1.5x. Bake for 60 minutes.
Jam Cake:  Bake the cake in two rounds. When fully cooled, layer them together with jam in-between, and ice the top.

 

 

"Not the End of Our Story" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday September 14, 2025
Scripture Readings:  Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28 and Luke 15:1-10


Those two scripture readings we heard this morning might feel like a bit of an odd pairing at first, but I encourage you to hear me out!

In the next month, between now and Thanksgiving, we are going to be marking the Season of Creation in worship – a time in the church year that is set aside for us to remember that we are part of an inter-connected community of creation.  We aren’t the creator – we are part of the created, and we worship the Creator.

And in this Season of Creation, the desolation that Jeremiah paints for us is very bleak.  A hot wind from the desert blows fiercely towards the people – a wind that doesn’t cleanse, but a wind that destroys.  The earth is a wasteland, there is no light in the sky, even the birds have fled this desolation, this desert.

At the end of a summer where we had too much rain in the spring and almost no rain in June, July, August, September.  After a couple of years with recurring windstorms causing widespread and prolonged power outages.  After a couple of winters with almost no snow.  As shifting weather patterns lead to worse harvests for farmers in all corners of the world.  It is impossible to deny that our climate patterns are changing.

When I read this part of Jeremiah, my heart is filled with dread because it feels like Jeremiah is describing a world that is creeping ever closer with each year.

It is interesting to think that Jeremiah was prophesying long before the phrase “climate change” had ever been coined, prophesying long before human activity had the ability to cause irreparable damage to the earth’s climate.  And yet his words ring true in our world today.

Jeremiah was a prophet in the time when the land of Judah and the city of Jerusalem fell to the invading Babylonian army.  This was an utter devastation to the Ancient Israelite people.  This was the loss of the Promised Land, the land that God had promised to their ancestors.  This was the loss of the temple, the literal home of God.

Did you notice that the imagery in this passage reflects back to the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis?  It is almost as if the disaster is undoing God’s creation.  The sun and the stars, the first thing that God created are extinguished.  The birds of the sky flee away.  There was no human left.  The earth has returned to the formless void that it was before God spoke creation into being and darkness covered the face of the deep.

But there, towards the end of the reading, Jeremiah prophesies:  “For thus says the LORD: The whole land shall be a desolation, yet I will not make a full end.”  God will not allow a full end, utter devastation to come. Just as the first creation sprang out of the formless void, a new creation, a renewed creation is always possible.

And this is where I think that the reading from Luke ties in – the familiar parable about the lost sheep and the shepherd who searches unrelentingly until the sheep is found, and the parable of the lost coin and the woman who searches unrelentingly until the coin is found.  God is a God who never gives up.  Even when it seems like giving up is the path that makes sense, God never gives up on Creation, and God never gives up on you or me.

The story at the heart of our faith is the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection.  Our faith is a faith that acknowledges death, but doesn’t dwell there.  Our faith is a faith that says that even when death might look like it is the end of the story, resurrection is waiting just around the corner.  Our faith is a faith that says that the story doesn’t end with lost-ness, but continues until the celebration of being found.  Just as our breathing out is followed by a breath in, death is always followed by new life.  There is always hope, just around the corner.

And so just as God promises the people through Jeremiah that the desolate wasteland of exile isn’t going to be the end of the story, God promises us that the desolate wastelands of climate change aren’t the end.  Renewal is possible.

But sitting back and waiting for that renewal isn’t possible.  The shepherd didn’t sit back and wait for the lost sheep to return.  The woman didn’t sit back and wait for the lost coin to fall into her lap.  As we read these parables about God’s persistence, we should also be reminded that we are called to follow the way of Jesus, which is the way of persistently seeking return and renewal.

And so rather than throwing our hands up and saying that God will make it all right one day, we are called to change our own ways first, ending any destructive practices that we are engaged in, and we are also called to speak out, to use our prophetic voices, to try and change the destructive systems that trap us and the world.

For just as we believe in a God who has created and is creating, in the words of the United Church New Creed, we also believe that we, as the church, are called to take part in this work, to be co-creators of justice and of mercy and of renewal.

If there is one thing that I hope you take away from this reading from Jeremiah, it isn’t the picture of devastation that Jeremiah paints.  We can see that all to easily when we turn our eyes outward to look at the world.  What I hope that you take away from this is the flicker of hope at the end of the reading – the hope that says that even when things look hopeless, maybe especially when everything looks hopeless, God is a God of life, and is always bringing renewal, and new life where there was none before.  And may it be so.  And may it be so soon.  Amen.

 

 

Out of the formless void, re-creation!

Image by USDA NRCS Texas on Flickr
Used with Permission