Our Latest Outreach Project at the Flesherton Farmer's Market:

Every Saturday morning The Flesherton Pastoral Charge has a booth at the Flesherton Farmer's Market to promote and sell Fair Trade products.

We have a wide selection of Coffee from Level Ground Trading in BC, tea and coffee from Nova Scotia's Just Us, and we will in time introduce other coffees, from other Fair Trade companies as well as chocolate, sugar and dried fruit.

The prices are affordable, the selection is remarkable, and the product is exceptional.

If you're in the Flesherton area on Saturday morning, stop by and check us out.

Or, come by the church office during our regular office hours on Monday, Thursday or Friday to browse our display of Fair Trade products.

Using Fair Trade products means making a difference locally, and globally one cup at a time !!

Sermon for Sunday May 29th 2011

I remember one of my visits to my Grandmother’s church in Waterloo when I was about 4 or 5. We were sitting in the huge sanctuary, and I turned to look behind me.

I got a some-what gentle swat on the ear and my grandmother whispered at me – “we don’t turn around in Church …”

“Why not?” I asked, “how do you know who is behind you ?”

I don’t remember Grandma’s answer, but I DO remember the lesson that we don’t turn around in Church … because it was so different from my home Church, where we not only turned around, but we actually had conversations with the folks in front and behind us.

When I was a teen in my home congregation of Centennial United Church in Stratford, we staked a claim on the back corner of the sanctuary, and it was where a cluster of us gathered each Sunday during worship. In front of us sat two wonderful older women who greeted us each week with a smile, and who were always interested in our lives. Even when we were up to something (and that only happened occasionally …) they would ‘shush’ us with smiles.

Turning around in my home congregation was normal and accepted by many. I’m sure there were those who shared my Grandmother’s view, but by and large the majority of folks had other things to worry about …

BUT, what strikes me in recalling that visit to my Grandmother’s church, was the optics left with me from that moment. What I remember about visiting the Church is being told “we don’t turn around in Church.” I don’t remember anything else – just that … yet, my Grandparents helped shape my faith, and my place in the Church in a myriad of ways, but what I remember about my Grandmother’s church was and is that single moment … if, as a leader in the Church, and one who has spent almost my entire adult life in active ministry in the Church, can remember an instance like that from my childhood almost 40 years ago – I have to wonder what kind of impressions and experiences of the Church have others had in their lives?

Optics are a powerful thing.

Our experiences and impressions are a powerful thing.

What we think is happening – how we perceive things, might be at odds with others, and what we experience as positive and affirming might be regarded as anything but by others. And we ignore this difference at our peril.

The challenge in the church, and as people we face in regards to this, is accepting the importance of pausing periodically to engage honestly, openly, and frankly, as we assess things and really reflect on how others are experiencing us, our faith, and our presence in the community.

And it is not just the experience of the visitor or the newcomer who might stray in the door, but also the regular attendee and those who are part of the circle but who have for any number of reasons, pulled back and are less involved than they once were.

As we move through the season between Easter and Pentecost, and mark the earliest days of the Church in our readings, we are mindful that we began, as a church, amongst people who felt great passion to go out into the world and share the Gospel. They wanted to invite anyone and everyone to share in the Good News that Jesus had proclaimed, and that they now had to share.

Paul standing in the streets of Athens, pointed to the altar of the ‘Unknown God’ to illustrate and invite his listeners to join in the movement that would become The Church. He knew that people were yearning for something, and he wanted to offer them the transformative effect of the Gospel as he and as the others had experienced it. So, Paul used the Unknown God to extend that invitation.

He wanted his optics to be consistent with the message.

Too many times in the Church we tend to place an asterix on our proclamations and our invitations. We’ll say – “All are welcome” but then have a limiting factor or a condition on that welcome.

I liken it to an illustration from Canadian Musician Connie Kaldor who once noted at a small concert in Brandon that she grew up in a small rural town in Saskatchewan – ‘you know that place she said, its where you stop in the local coffee shop with the big sign ‘welcome’ out front, but when you EVERYBODY gives you the ‘stranger stare’ …”

The optics of the stranger stare is at odds with the warmth and welcome many rural prairie towns offer …

I’ve been in churches that say proudly – “we want to attract new people and we want to grow …” but then the new people arrive and start wanting to change things then the STUFF really hits the fan, and we learn that they only want certain people, or they only want certain aspects of the people …

The optics in that moment say something very different from what is really going on …

So at a celebration of Baptism, we have a moment to pause and reflect and honestly appraise who we are, what we are about, and how we do our ministry … and it’s not a bad thing. It’s an opportunity … it’s a moment to ensure our optics are in synch with our expectations ands beliefs.

I KNOW in my heart that my grandmother would be mortified at my example. She was one of the most warm and welcoming people I’ve ever met, and she meant no offense by her action, or by that expectation in her congregation. But that example helps to remind all of us that sometimes we need to pause, reflect and try to do things a bit differently … it’s about sometimes being open to that terrible six letter word: CHANGE.

The church we invite folks like Jordyn to be part of, is not church I was invited to be part of at my Baptism, or the Church you were invited to be part of at your Baptism. The Spirit has been busy changing and altering the Church and its people …we are a dynamic every changing group of people because the Spirit is as our texts celebrate, with us – moving among us and touching our lives …

Instead of fearing that change, or clinging too tightly to the past and the way things are, the challenge – the opportunity is before us to CONTINUE to embrace that change and allow the Spirit to guide and inspire us …

To return to the example of my grandmother’s church. Forty years later, what has stuck with me about my Grandparents was not the rigidity of that visit to their church, but rather the depth and strength of their faith. When I think back, it is the many conversations we had about faith and things to do with our spiritual journeys that I remember most. I remember holding my grandfather’s hand and as a 20 year old youth, praying with an 80 plus year old man the night before a major surgery because he was frightened and worried and wanted the comfort of prayer before he slept … I remember holding my 95 year old grandmother’s hand on our last visit mere days before she died, and saying good bye while she smiled and said “I know where I’m going – I’m not afraid …”

I remember the strength of their faith, not the cuff on the ear for turning around … and more importantly, I remember the power and the welcome and the love that they share through that faith …

And at the end of the day, that’s OUR only JOB as a Church – to share our faith and to openly and without conditions or limits, invite others to share in this journey …

May it be so … thanks be to God … Let us pray …

Sermon for May 22nd 2011 - Rocks and Stones and Dandelions - the post-rapture challenge!

I was tempted to call this – “the sermon I didn’t plan on writing”, given the announcement that yesterday was the going to be the end of the world … I think someone got it wrong … we’re still here, and from what I can gather, either the crowd caught up in the Rapture was pretty small, or it simply didn’t happen …

However, far from being a negative thing, I had the thought earlier today that this non-event offers believers within the Christian Church a great opportunity to get back to some sense of reality and refocus our life and ministry on what’s really important.

In the last couple of decades, likely in response to the ever present whirl-wind of happenings and event throughout our world, there has been a noticeable and troubling rise in apocalyptic theology, visions, and messages throughout the church. Book series about the ‘end times’ have proven to be popular in Christian Bookstores across North America, and by my count this is atleast the fifth time since 1980, that someone has put an actual date on the day things will end. In the 80’s you had ‘The Late Great Planet Earth”, then along came Herbert W. Armstrong and his tv show and magazine The Plain Truth that offered a date in 2001, and there was the Japanese group who set a date in the mid-nineties, and when I was at Theology College there was a big newspaper distributed by a religious group that warned of the pending apocalypse, only to be proven wrong …

What I find fascinating, and bit scary though, is the response when they’ve gotten it wrong. Instead of recognizing that they are dabbling in things they should be dabbling in, and predicting something that is completely and utterly unpredictable – they instead say – “oh we mis-calculated …” and try again and again and again … and most disturbing of all, is the number of people who continue to go along with this line of thought …

The world WILL end someday … we just don’t know when …

So, our job as people of faith is to build a good foundation on which to nurture and share our faith, and with which we should be encouraging and welcoming people into our circle of faith and community … and encouraging and welcoming happen best when we abandon a theology of fear and exclusion, and instead place our trust on The Gospel and focus on a theology of care, compassion and inclusion.

The foundation on which we build our faith, and ultimately our Church needs to be strong and loving so that what rises upon it is strong, loving, caring and most of all welcoming …

And of course, we all know what a good sturdy foundation is built of … rocks and stones … if Grey county has taught generations of people nothing else, it has taught them the value – both positive and negative – of stones, and what you can do with them …

When I think about the uses of stones and rocks, I am mindful of a scene in the movie “the Last Temptation of Christ” when Jesus confronts the crowd about to stone the woman caught in adultery. He challenges them to consider that only ‘the one with no sin can cast that first stone’. One by one people in the crowd drop their stones and stand uncertain and hesitant.

Then one man steps up and says – “I have nothing to hide …” and gets ready to lob his stone at the woman.

Jesus smiles and says – “are you sure? …” and begins to challenge this man and his assumption that he is without sin … the man then drops the stone, and the crowd disburses and the woman is free … stones have HUGE potential for both good and destruction – ultimately, the choice is in our hands …

I remember as a kid coming up to my great-grandmother’s farm in Desboro and being struck by the stone fence lines and the rocky pastures we passed on the way … there’s a lot of rocks in them thar hills !!!

But along with the irritation of annual rock picking excursions, the early settlers found the material handy for the foundations of the magnificent Bank Barns they built to anchor their farms and protect their animals and crops. And the rocks and stones formed the foundations of their houses and outbuildings and in some cases the walls and the homes they built to shelter themselves.

The ubiquitous rock became a central part of life all across the Grey-Bruce area … our own Church building stands on rocks likely gathered within a stone’s throw of where we stand today … and so the lesson was taught from the earliest days of settlement here that rocks, while being irritating and annoying in one context, are remarkably useful and helpful in another … the challenge is to be open to possibilities. To be open to the Spirit and what she is calling us to do and to be.

I’ve always likened the use of rocks to that of dandelions … many people find the profusion of little yellow flowers in their lawns annoying. They prefer a clean crisp green lawn to one speckled with bright yellow blossoms. Unfortunately, over the last few decades the means of attaining that immaculate green space on our door steps has involved the application of harmful chemicals and pesticides that have lingered in our environment and done untold harm to other plants and animals. So the response in many places has been to ban the spraying and application of chemicals and to allow the profusion of yellow to continue unchecked.

I personally like dandelions. I worry about what the application of these chemicals and sprays has done to our environment, but more than that, I have always felt lawns are for playing on, and the time, energy and money spent creating perfect green lawns can be better utilized doing other things … afterall, a weed like the dandelion is simply a plant in the supposedly ‘wrong place’.

A dandelion is a remarkably useful plant. If you search uses of the dandelion you will find hundreds of thousands of pages that tell you what a dandelion is good for … the leaves make a tasty and nutritious salad, you can stir fry the blooms, the roots and the leaves, the sap can be used as a disinfectant, the roots can be tried and ground to make a coffee, the leaves and flowers can be used to make tea or a poultice, the flowers can be friend with a bit of butter to make a tasty sidedish for dinner, and of course you can’t talk about dandelions without mentioning dandelion wine … over and over, the uses of this plant that many regard as an obnoxious weed have been listed and celebrated, yet to most people a dandelion is an irritant … but like a wise woman said to me earlier this week when we were discussing dandelions and I mentioned that may favour illustration of a dandelion’s usefulness is the example of a young child offering a fistful of the yellow blossoms that “you would have to be pretty hard hearted not to see the beauty in THAT” – dandelions call for a rethink and a reconsideration …

And that’s the challenge we have before us in this post-rapture era we stand within … we need to rethink and reconsider and most importantly, refocus our faith, not on the sweet by and by that might be coming next week or next month, or next year. We need to focus on being part of creating the Kingdom of God in our midst – ALL around ourselves – by sharing our faith through action rather than through fear.

We need to see the rocks and stones around us as a means of building the kingdom by setting foundations, forming supportive walls, and creating smooth path ways rather than using them in offensive and harmful ways …

We need to see the versatility and usefulness of the weeds around us by being open to their possibilities rather than seeking to stomp them out in a blind quest for sameness and uniformity …

We need to bring into being the Kingdom of God by living the values of our faith and sharing with one another (even the stranger and those who make us uncomfortable and who irritate us) the values of our faith and the welcome that has been extended to all, not just an elite or select few.

The stoning of Stephen reminds us of two things – the power of hate and fear, and the power of faith and belief … Stephen lived and died by his faith – he trusted in God every moment including his last … and the crowd that stoned him feared the message that he and the others brought, and so they sought to snuff it out …

With a stone in our hands we can chose to use it constructively, or destructively … the choice is ours …

We are a people of faith. We are a people of the resurrection.

We are a people who stood before the tomb when the stone was rolled away and proclaimed LIFE …

There really is only one choice for us and it is the faithful choice of LIFE.

May it be so – thanks be to God … Let us pray …

Sermon for May 1st 2011 - God Made Me Special !

In the Christian Church we tell a story … it is a story that is familiar and with a cast of characters that we know very well – men and women with familiar names that we have known since our childhood in Sunday School when we began to hear about their lives and adventures and the things that they did.

It is a story that seeks to teach us about life, faith and what it is that we are to do and to be about as we live and breath and move through our days.

It is a familiar story that we can almost recite from memory. Yet, even after 50, 70 or 90 years of telling and retelling it, there are still new lessons to learn and new insights to be had, because it is not a static story from the past, but rather is a story that ebbs and flows with events and happenings in the world, and most importantly, it is a story that is entirely dependent upon our relationship with God, to be understood, and to be told …

Our story – the one that brings us here – is ultimately the story of how God repeatedly connects with people – with us – and repeatedly shows boundless and limitless love and grace for us and to us … our story is the one that tells us that the Resurrection is real, and that its evidence and proof is found ALL around us every day.

But, what do we do with this story? And more importantly, does it really matter any more?

This past week, I’ve gotten back to reading – something I haven’t been able to do much of in the last couple of month … and what I ended up reading was a book on preaching, and the next book by Canadian writer, minister, musician and social activist Time Hufff, who has previously written “Bent Hope” about his life and ministry on the downtown streets of Canadian urban centres.

While the books seem somewhat divergent in their themes, as I read them in the wake of Easter, and reflected on our Scripture Readings today I stumbled across a theme that united them and that helps to challenge and motivate us as a community, while we gather to break bread and pour out the cup.

The theme is the centrality of Grace in the life and work that we share together in faith.

We talk about grace regularly in the Church, we even sing about it at times … and yet, we seldom really think about the implications of this gift. It is simply part of the milieu in which we live and breath as people and as members of this thing we call Church.

Yet, Grace is central to all that we do and all that we are as Church. Without Grace, we have no reason to gather, and no theology to live and to share.

Grace is what defines us, unites us, and motivates us. Grace is God’s love expressed and shared with all.

Without grace, there is no church.

And yet, how much thought do we EVER give to grace, or where we encounter it in our lives?

Therein lies the problem, or the challenge with our story as a Church – we seldom think about what it is that we believe and that we embody, and we are even less inclined to do anything with it … and that is where the two books I’ve been reading this past week intersect … the book on preaching stresses the importance of preaching and proclaiming the importance and centrality of Grace to the world, while Tim Huff’s book “Dancing with Dynamite” celebrates the presence of Grace in the most unexpected of places and in the most unlikely of moments …

One story Huff tells struck me as an apt story to be recounted as we stand on the other side of Easter and wonder what to make of the Resurrection.

The story Tim tells is of a young man he met on the streets named Bronty. Bronty was tough and hard – the kind of tough and hard that one finds on the streets where survival of the fittest is taken to a whole new level.

Bronty was pierced and tattooed, and his clothes were covered in spikes and studs and deep dark imagery of skulls and death and so on. He was a young man of the streets, and was clearly using his tough monster like persona in an attempt to find a place of safety in a neighbourhood populated with a myriad of other monsters. Bronty was trying, and succeeding in out toughing the street toughs around him.

Tim notes that he spent months trying to break through Bronty’s tough exterior, and to learn more about the young man who lurked within. His breakthrough came when Tim started asking him about the patches and imagery that peppered Bronty’s clothing. Tim describes Bronty’s uniform as: “an impressive montage of ghoulish favour, but for one glaring exception – the item that Bronty would not leave behind in his scramble to leave home forever …”

Tim opened his chapter on Bronty by musing about what we would take with us if we had ONLY two minutes to move through our homes before abandoning it forever … what items would we tuck in our pockets, or our bags and take KNOWING that we could never come back, and knowing that we had only two minutes …

In Bronty’s case it was a tiny yellow smily face patch that said in black lettering around it’s edges “God made me special” … in the midst of patches and pictures of skulls, and demons and death and all the darkness was a single fabric patch that in bright yellow proclaimed the contradictory message – “God made me special” in the life of this troubled young soul.

“what’s the story about this one?” Tim finally asked one day …the answer was not easily forthcoming … Bronty tried to avoid answering him … hostility filled the air … yet Tim persisted, and managed to tease out the story of the little yellow patch that began with the words – “there was this little old lady …”

What followed was a story about Bronty attending a Bible Camp at a local church where each day ended with this little old lady named Grandma Lu would come and sit on a chair as each child left the camp and she would give them a small gift and take a moment to tell each of these children by name – “God made you special.”

“Bronty, God made you special …” Grandma Lu said one Friday afternoon as she placed a small yellow patch in his hand …

And years later, that small yellow patch was hanging, guarded and protected amidst ALL the other dark imagery that Bronty could muster … a glimmer of grace in a troubled and pain-filled world … Tim ends his story by saying that three years and two prison stints later Bronty tracked him down to tell him that he was starting over in his life, and the ONLY patch he was carrying as a small yellow patch that with a bold smiling face proclaimed the reminder – “God made you special”.

The essence of Tim’s story is grace …the grace that tells a tough street thug that he is special … the grace that motivates a ‘little old lady’ to sit day after day on the front steps of her church and tell each of the children leaving the summer Bible camp that they are special … the grace that persists in the midst of darkness reminding ALL of us that when we least expect it – in the most unlikely of places, we WILL encounter it, and we WILL be transformed.

Grace is the story we have to share, and that we are to celebrate, and fortunately, sometimes the most startling moments of Grace come in the most unexpected of places … our calling as a people of faith is to go out into the world and share the bounty of Grace in all that do …

May it be so – thanks be to God … Let us pray …