Ramblings from the Rector - April 2017

Ramblings from the Rector

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:13-15)

Today’s ramblings come from a place of my own personal brokenness. Many years ago, while I was still in high-school, I “helped” my girlfriend, who was a year younger than me, become pregnant. Up until that point the issue of abortion was not high on my list of issues needing my attention. I did not come from a church background that outwardly condemned it. In fact, we just didn’t talk about it at all. Looking back at that time, I am sure that I was not totally ignorant about the issue, but I was a teenager and, like most teenagers, I was sure that it would never be my issue.

Suddenly my girlfriend and I were discussing what it would mean for both of us if we were to have a child. By the time the baby was born I would have just graduated and she would be entering grade 12. We had just started talking about what all of our options were, including abortion, when her pregnancy ended itself. My wording there was very intentional. In my understanding, both from a scientific perspective and, in my understanding, a Biblical one, we did not lose a baby. It was too early for that. We lost a collection of cells that had the potential, with God’s help, to become a baby. I will always wonder who that child would have become had that collection of cells continued to grow and I mourn that lost possibility, but I do not mourn the death of a child.

In the years since, I have had many opportunities to pray and discuss with others, both those with similar experiences and those untouched by this choice. Of those with direct experience, none make the decision lightly, either to abort or to attempt to carry to term. Even the fact that they considered it weighs on them for the rest of their lives. I do not condemn them, I join with them in praying for peace.

My personal experience led me to do a lot of research into the topic of abortion and the beginning of human life. What I found, particularly in the area of the anti-abortion movement (I refuse to call it pro-life because many pro-choice advocates care more about the wholeness of human life). First of all, my understanding had been that the objection to abortion originated in the Religious Right movement in the United States following the Roe vs Wade court case. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133#.U4cuc15MkmY

In fact abortion didn’t become the Christian issue that it is today until six years later, when evangelical leaders were pulled together by a conservative activist to stop Jimmy Carter from getting re-elected as president. They did this because of the ongoing de-segregation of schools, which Carter supported. The entire pro-life movement was created as a slight of hand to uphold systemic racism.

In the same time frame, there was a “Stop ERA” campaign going on, led by a Christian right leader named Phyllis Schlafly who said that “feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society.” Both the men and the women in leadership of the Christian right were actively working against anything that new rights for people different from them.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/29/the_religious_right_formed_around_support_for_segregation_not_against_abortion.html

My choice of text this month speaks to my Biblical understanding. This text is the closest we have to something saying when life begins and it is far from clear. In English it talks of God “knitting” us together, in Hebrew it is “weaving.” Either one is a process. When I read this, I imagine knitting a scarf. When you buy the yarn with the intent to knit a scarf, is that a scarf? When you first cast the stitches onto the needle do you have a scarf? How about after you have knit the first inch? At some point before it is done, it becomes clear what it is intended to be. At a later point, even if you stopped, it would be a scarf, albeit a short one. Just as we are at work to create a scarf, God is at work to create a human. If there is a sin in an early abortion, in my understanding it would not be murder, it would be getting in the way of God’s work. This is a position that we, as human beings, put ourselves in all too often.

While the Bible does not directly speak of abortion, it does speak of the monetary value of unborn and children up to one month old. Mostly they have zero value. It also speaks quite graphically of killing women with child and newborns and of cursing unfaithful wives with barrenness. I am glad that we have moved beyond this “Biblical” understanding of human life, both born and unborn.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/abortion.html

I absolutely agree that abortion is a moral issue, but I do not believe it to be a specifically Christian issue. Christ gave us quite a number of issues to focus on, such as the poor, welcoming strangers, accepting people as who they are, not who we want them to be, forgiveness, the pursuit of peace …. I also agree that we should not and cannot legislate morality. For me, this means that we cannot remove from someone else their right and ability to make their own moral decisions.

Embracing Death to Find Life

Hi all,

Haven't posted in a while, but here is my latest sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent. (As presented at St. John's, Fort Qu'Appelle on March 22, 2015).

Blessings,

Warren+

EDIT: another way to listen that hopefully works for all.

Dropbox link - Embracing Death to Find Life

Are You a Pharisee or a Tax Collector?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

How many of you here have ever used Facebook?

I’m glad to see I’m not alone.  For those of you who do not use Facebook, don’t worry.  What I’m going to talk about was around long before it ever hit the internet.  In fact they were around long before the internet.

How many of you have ever taken one of those quizzes with titles like “Which character on the Simpsons are you?”  (I’m Flanders).  One of the latest quizzes going around is “Why is the inquisition after me?”  According to that quiz, I practice witchcraft.

Well, today we are going to take a quiz called “Which character am I in today’s parable?”  I am going to make a few statements.  All you need to do is keep track of whether more of them are true for you or more of them are false.  Here we go.

There is only one right way to do things.

If I study hard enough, I can learn the right way.

Some things cannot be forgiven.

Prayer needs to be done in a dignified manner.

Following the rules will make me closer to God.

Being a sinner will make God love me less.

I’m a better Christian than my neighbour who isn’t here.

If you answered true to more often than false, you are a Pharisee.  If you answered false more often, you are a tax collector.  I have to admit right now that I am a sinner because I envy those of you who can easily answer false to most or all of those statements.

I want most of those to be true.  It would make following in Christ’s footsteps much easier.

I would love it if all of my study could have taught me the “right way.”  I would love to have a list to follow that would guarantee my place in heaven and God’s favour on Earth.

Unfortunately that’s not the way it works.  The only real difference between the Pharisee and the tax collector is that the Pharisee cannot see that he is just as broken as the tax collector.

I am broken.  I am a sinner.  Sometimes I am a Pharisee.  I hide behind my knowledge.  I do all the right things and I believe that makes me better that those who don’t.  When I do that, I am wrong.  I am not better.  I am just as broken.  That is part of what it means to be human.

We – I need to learn from the tax collector.  “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

I’m going to make a few more statements.  Once again, keep track of your true / false balance.

It is possible to do things right.

If I trust in God, I can find the right way for me.

Some things are easier for me to forgive than others.

The way I pray feels right for me.

Following a set of guidelines makes it easier for me to feel close to God.

I am a sinner and God loves me anyway.

I am committed to trying to follow Christ.

Congratulations.  If you answered true to at least one of these statements, you are on your way to being a tax collector.

Being a Pharisee is easy.  It is comfortable.  It is not dangerous.  No one can hurt me when I know I’m right.

Being a tax collector is risky.  As a tax collector I have to put myself out there.  I have to invite others to attack me.  I have to expect that I will do it wrong much of the time.

I have to hope that at least occasionally I am doing it right.

Thanks be to God!

Evangelism is ...

I speak to you in the name of the God who made us, the God who nourishes us, the God who never abandons us.  Amen.

Just who are God’s people anyway?

The easy answer is us.

It’s true too.

We are God’s people.  We gather here in his name to honour him and to be fed through his holy mysteries.  We give of our resources of time and money to see that God’s work is done here in this community and throughout the world.  At the end of the service I will send you out to continue to live life as God calls you to live it.  Just before we share communion I even say: “The gifts of God for the People of God.”

We are God’s people.

But are we alone?  Are we God’s only people?

No.  It’s easy to see that there are more of God’s people around.  Some of you have even married them.  There are the United folk, the Presbyterians, the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Alliance, just to name a few denominations.  They, and all who follow Christ, are God’s people too.

We Christians are God’s people.

But are we alone?  Are only Christians God’s people?

What makes someone one of God’s people?

Do they have to be free of sin?  Do they have to avoid working for Revenue Canada?  Not according to today’s Gospel.  Jesus kept company with sinners and tax collectors.  Jesus sought out those very people whom the “godly” avoided.

Do they have to be the right gender?  Or the right social class?  Jesus is quite clear about this too.  If anything, it is easier to hear God’s call if you are in some way disadvantaged.  The more elite you are in your society, the more distractions you have to pull you away from God.

Nothing we are or do makes us one of God’s people.  It is by the grace of God that we are named as God’s own.  Not only that, but we cannot break God’s love for us.  In our reading from first Timothy, we hear Paul’s voice telling us about God’s love.  “Even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence” … “I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief.”  Paul was not short of knowledge about Jesus.  He knew a great deal about him and believed very little of it.  Paul’s ignorance was of the vast scope of God’s love.  He believed that he was one of God’s people.  He found out just how much God loved him.

This love is what makes a person one of God’s people.  Jesus makes it quite clear that everyone, whether they believe or not, is beloved of God.  There is not a single person in creation who is not one of God’s people.

We are all here because we have been called as Paul was called.  We have been shown God’s love in many different ways.  We are called to share that experience.  This is called “evangelism.”

When I was growing up, I spent considerable time with some of my cousins from Southern California.  Their parents attended Pentecostal churches.  They were capital “E” Evangelists and they called me their favourite heathen.  Their parents watched carefully to make sure that they didn’t start to believe the same things as I did and that they tried to “enlighten” me.  This is not evangelism.

Evangelism is sharing the good news of God’s love in the way we act, both inside and outside of these walls.  Evangelism is helping others to realize that God loves them too, that they are never alone.  Evangelism is about opening ourselves up and letting others see what God has done for us.

At the end of September, we will be celebrating together at St. Paul’s with a Dr. Seuss liturgy.  Evangelism is what this celebration is all about.  This service is a way of reaching out and showing that God’s love is for all and that our response can be expressed in different ways.

We are not having this celebration in order to bring in greater numbers, or to increase the offering in the plate.  It is not even about showing our children that we can be silly and have fun at church.

The Dr. Seuss celebration is about spreading God’s word in different ways.  It is about reaching out to say that no matter what your age or your background, God is calling you.  God loves you!

This is evangelism … spreading the good news, the Gospel, to all who have ears to hear it.  We are merely the planters of the seeds.  It is God who tends the garden.

If we can keep God’s love in our hearts and truly believe that God loves everyone, we will be a place where they want to come when they are ready.

Thanks be to God.

I Need More Oil In My Lamp -- Do You?

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.”

God is calling us to be ready to serve at any time.  God is calling us to be watching at all times for the need.  God is calling us at all times to be aware of his presence.

I don’t know about you, but I find that everything I do takes some of my energy.  By the time I have done everything that I need to do I have very little energy left.

Always watching, always being ready to act, this could take up all of my energy all by itself.  How am I, how are we, supposed to find the energy to do this and to do everything else we have to do?  It’s hard enough to find the energy to plan some time for God each day, but God is asking us to devote all of our time to him, or at least to be ready to jump in when needed and be aware enough to notice the need.

I just don’t have the energy to do that.

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

God wants us to do this.  God wants us to notice when he is acting in our lives.  God must have given us some way to do this.  But how?

I think we need help.  I think we have two major sources of help.  I’ve talked about both of them before.  Does anyone remember what the word “church” really means?  It comes from the Greek word “kuriakos” which mean “of the Lord.”  Now this might seem like a good basis for our gathering here today, but it has almost nothing to do with this (hold up the Bible).  “Kuriakos” only appears in here twice; once talking about the Lord’s Supper and once about the Lord’s Day.

That’s where the word “church” comes from.  But it is not the only word we translate as “church.”  There is another Greek word, “ekklesia,” which has been translated as “church” since the time of the King James version of the Bible.  The earlier translation, by Tyndale, did not use “church,” it used “congregation.”  “Ekklesia” appears in here more than 115 times.  In ancient Greece, the ekklesia was the civil body of elected or “called out” individuals who met to make decisions on behalf of everyone else, otherwise known as a town or city council.

The definition I was given at VST was “a group of concerned citizens taking council for the greater good.”

Now, what does all of this have to do with finding the energy to keep that flame of awareness going at all times?  How does the meaning of “church” give us strength to remain vigilant at all times and to respond to God when we do become aware of God’s presence and mission around us?

“A group of concerned citizens .”  We are not alone.  What we cannot do as individuals, we can do as a community where we depend on each other.  Because we have each other, we don’t have to respond personally to every need we see.  If it is something that we know someone else would be good at, we can bring it to their attention.  If it is beyond any one of us, we can bring it to this ekklesia, this gathering of concerned citizens.  Together, we can remain vigilant.  Together we can respond to God’s call at all times.  Depend not only on yourselves, but also on each other.  We are a community.

As I said earlier, we also have another source of help.  --- God!

When we need help from God, what do we do?

Yes – we pray!

I think I know just the right prayer for to ask God to help us stay vigilant.  It is a song called “Give me oil in my lamp.”  I’m going to sing it a few times.  There are many different versions of this song, so even if you know it, please listen the first time through and then join in with me when I repeat it.

Teach:

Give me oil in my lamp,

Keep me burnin’

Give me oil in my lamp I pray – Halelujah

Give me oil in my lamp,

Keep me burnin’, burnin’, burnin’,

Keep me burnin’ ‘til the end of day.

Sing Hosanna,

Sing Hosanna,

Sing Hosanna to the King of kings,

Sing Hosanna,

Sing Hosanna,

Sing Hosanna to the King

Amen.

Making Time For God

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Our world is a very busy place.  When I moved my family to Cape Breton from Vancouver I was hoping we would get away from that.  And to some extent we did.  At least here it was not frantic.  But it was still busy.  There was never enough time to get everything done.  I still heard the words “I don’t have time” far too often.

This business is a fact of life.  It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing.  It just is.

Many of the things that keep us busy are very important and truly need to be done.  We have to work.  We have to pay bills.  We have to see that our children get where they need to be.  And somewhere in there we definitely need to have some social interaction.

Life is just busy.

In our Gospel today we have the story of the Good Samaritan.  In this story, we have three people all passing a badly injured man.  All three of these people make decisions as they pass.  They look at what rules they have to live by and weigh their priorities.

For the priest and the Levite, the need for ritual purity outweighs the need to help the poor, the needy, and the sick.  For both of them, if they were to touch or even come to close to the man and he turned out to be dead, they would have to go through a long process to once again be ritually clean and to return to their jobs in the temple.

For the Samaritan, the priorities are different.  For the Samaritan, there is a long history of his people and the Jews being enemies.  He does not have the same religious reason to help the sick and needy.  Since he was traveling deep within Judah and had the financial means to help, he was probably a merchant.  He would probably know at least something about the Jewish rules of cleanliness.  For him, if the man turned out to be dead, it could mean that his profits for his current trip could be drastically reduced or he might even lose money.

All three passers-by had nothing to gain and much to lose by helping the man.  All three had to look at their priorities and make a decision.

All of the priorities that I have listed are personal.  They are all about how helping the man will affect their day to day lives.  What these priorities leave out is their relationship with God.

That’s what our Gospel today is really about: our relationship with God.

We don’t have the same problems facing us that the three men in our story did.  None of us is going to have our livelihood damaged by helping someone on the side of the road.  None of us will be kept from going to work because we came near someone who was “unclean.”

I think our problems today are even greater.  In our Gospel today, none of the passers-by had any difficulty seeing the need.  They all saw and they all made their decisions about how to respond.  Our problem goes much deeper.

We are too busy.

We are not just too busy to help.  We are too busy to see the need.

We have so much going on in our lives that we walk right past the need without ever noticing it.  We never even get to the point of looking at our priorities and making a decision.

We are just too busy.

I am going to put out a challenge today, both to myself and to all of you.

For the rest of the month, I challenge us all to make time for God.  I challenge us to do something every day which is not for ourselves.  It doesn't matter if it takes ten minutes or two hours, just that it happens every day.

There are so many things that we could do that it won’t be hard to find something.  It might mean spending some extra time praying for someone or something in need.  It might mean walking down the street and picking up any garbage that you see.  It might mean dropping in on a neighbour we don’t know well and finding out how they are doing.  It might even mean taking a walk and looking for things that remind us of the glory of God.

At the end of the month I’m hoping that this will have become a habit which we can’t break.  After all, we are all here today not because we've dedicated our Sundays to God but because we've dedicated our entire lives to God.  Let’s not keep God waiting any longer.

The Flying Pigs of Gerasa

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

And now for something completely different.

Possession.  Casting out of demons.  Flying pigs drowning themselves in the Sea of Galilee.  Oh, my!!!

For those of you who haven’t covered this passage in a Bible study, I’ll give you a bit of background for that last one.  – The city of Gerasa was about 50 kilometers southeast of the Lake, which we now call the Sea of Galilee.  Pigs, which have no sweat glands, would die long before they reached the sea by running.  They must have flown down the hill.

So we have possession, casting out of demons and flying pigs all in one short story.  This story seems to be completely out of our world view, and for the most part it probably is.

In Jesus’ time, most mental illnesses and some physical illnesses were thought to be caused by demons or unclean spirits.  These demons were eternal somethings (the word literally means minor divinities) looking for somewhere to settle down.  When they got into somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, for instance a human being, they caused all kinds of problems.  Casting them out would instantly fix these problems, but there were very few people who could do this.  Jesus was one of them.  This particular man was possessed by many spirits, enough so that they called themselves legion (which would make 6,000 of them).  Jesus was probably the only one with enough power to cast out that many.

Today we don’t blame sickness on demons, at least not usually.  We do still have the rite of exorcism available to us in the Anglican tradition.  And from historical accounts, some of which are quite recent, exorcism sometimes works.  Though I’m not sure when it was last used in this diocese.  There is no cannon or policy on its use.

But as I said, we don’t often blame sickness on demons anymore.  So how do we make sense of this reading in our current world view?

Today’s version of this story would be about faith healing.  We have our own legion of demons to choose from: cancers of all varieties, depression, cerebral palsy, dementia, addiction.  The list goes on and on: diseases and conditions which are difficult or impossible to cure or even to manage with medicine.

We hear story after story about people traveling around the world for treatments which are not medically proven.  Some of these people get better.  Many don’t.  This is a type of faith healing.  This healing is sometimes medicine which just hasn’t been proven yet, but more often than not it is healing that happens because people believe so strongly that it the treatment will help.  They have faith in the medicine.  The power this kind of belief has over our bodies can be awesome and unexplainable.  This is not the kind of faith healing that this story is about.

Placing that kind of absolute belief in God is transformative.  It can sometimes accomplish the same type of physical healing, but that is only a side benefit.  The healing that comes from faith in God transforms our lives in other ways.

If we look at the man healed in today’s story we see a man who has been cast out of society in just about every way possible.  Jesus comes and the man kneels at his feet, acknowledging his power.  Jesus transforms this man.  Healing him of his afflictions does not make him just another ordinary citizen of Gerasa.  No – he returns to a city which is terrified of him because of the extreme change.  He goes back to a city where there is no real Jewish presence, where there are no followers of Jesus.  He goes back to that city to proclaim a message which will leave him separated from the rest of society in a different way than before: just as isolated but with a real purpose to his life.

Modern examples of faith healing are everywhere.  The most common examples are probably twelve step programs for addiction.  A key step in these programs is acknowledging that we can’t do it ourselves.  We need help from God.  People who are successful in these programs are not cured of their addictions, but their lives are transformed in a way that can only come from God.

Faith healing is like this.  Our body may or may not be healed – our souls are.  By putting that kind of faith in God we are healed.  Our demons are cast out.  Even the ones we never realized were there.  We all have them.  We all have the power to give them to God.

Thanks be to God.