Sermon for October 16th - On the edge of a social revolution?

When we think about our readings today – Moses having is spectacular face to face – or in this case, face to back, encounter with God, and Jesus calling on us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to render unto God that which is God’s we are left to consider how our world interacts and relates to itself …

As I consider this, my mind drifts to a sermon by Martin Luther King I first heard over 30 years ago when our then minister Rev. Ross Cumming pulled out an old vinyl LP – remember those? – and played Martin Luther King’s Christmas Sermon on Peace for us in the basement of Centennial United Church in Stratford.

King, spoke of attaining peace by saying:

Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Yes, as nations and individuals, we are interdependent. I have spoken to you before of our visit to India some years ago. It was a marvelous experience; but I say to you this morning that there were those depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when one sees with one's own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when one sees with ones own eyes thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night? More than a million people sleep on the sidewalks of Bombay every night; more than half a million sleep on the sidewalks of Calcutta every night. They have no houses to go into. They have no beds to sleep in. As I beheld these conditions, something within me cried out: "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh, no!" And I started thinking about the fact that right here in our country we spend millions of dollars every day to store surplus food; and I said to myself: "I know where we can store that food free of charge? in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God's children in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even in our own nation, who go to bed hungry at night."

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can't leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that's handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that's given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that's poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you're desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that's poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that's given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

Today is world food day – the day when we are to pause and think about our food and where it comes from and how it is produced and in many circles, we are challenged to intentionally think about those who do not have enough food.

Today is also the day when many in our area, including our sisters and brothers within the United Church are gathering in Honeywood to enjoy a food festival while raising awareness about the proposed mega-quarry and the threat it poses to local food production there, and perhaps across the entire province.

Couple these with the movement around the world that is protesting not only corporate greed, but the growing chasm between the rich and the poor, and you have an interesting time in which to live … despite assurances from our governing party in Ottawa that it is simply people expressing themselves and their discontent at some aspects of the modern market system, I would dare to say that we stand on the edge of something bigger than just random protests.

I believe that with the growing awareness of how things work – or perhaps don’t work, we stand on the edge of a social revolution that will radically change how we do ‘business’ and how we live in the world.

There is a stark contrast between the have’s and the have-not’s in our world, and even in our own country the gap between the rich and poor is widening. Something as basic and mundane as homeownership is no longer and option for an ever increasing sector of our society. With spiralling housing costs, stagnating wages, the loss of good paying jobs, and changes to the legislation by our Government, owning your own home and building the security of equity in something tangible is no longer and option for many.

And overarching all of it are voices saying – “things have to change.”

Our approach to food has to change.

Our approach to wealth and money has to change.

Our approach to the rich and the poor has to change.

Our society not only has to, but WILL change … and that change has begun … and the question we need to consider from a faith perspective is – where will we stand ?

From a faith perspective we are called to care for the poor and the marginalized. We are the ones told to care for and care about those who lack adequate food and necessities for life. We are the ones who should be first to stand up and cry out when the brokenness of our system is revealed.

Yet, often we remain silent … often we hope someone else will do something … often we wait praying and hoping that things will just work out.

Yet, over and over, we can look back on our history and our heritage and see clearly that seldom do things just happen, nor do they just work out. Instead, it is often people deeply committed to their faith and to the value of justice and righteousness, that have enacted and embodied the very change we yearn to see and experience.

As Gandhi once said – “be the change you seek …”

If we want to do something about the growing gap between the rich and the poor in our world, or even in our own community, the burden of action rests on OUR shoulders.

While we support and assist agencies and groups like our local food bank in meeting the immediate and urgent needs of those around us, we also need to be working to change the system that creates those needs to begin with.

We need to appeal to our politicians to address the issues of hunger, food security, poverty and homelessness in our country.

We need to appeal to our banking and business leaders to put people BEFORE profits.

AND, perhaps most challenging of all – we need to be informed consumers who change the way things are done from the bottom up … look at the fair trade movement – something we’re now deeply involved in as a Church community. 20 years ago the ONLY fair trade products that were relatively easily available were those offered by Bridgehead and OxFam Canada. Then along came small groups like Just Us and Level Ground who opened the door with quality products available first at specialty stores and through some churches and associated agencies.

NOW, you are truly hard pressed to find a grocery store that DOESN’T have fair trade coffee and tea on its shelves. Even the big companies like Starbucks, Second Cup, Nabob, Maxwell House and the others have responded to consumer pressure and offer a wide variety of fair trade and more fairly traded products.

AND it happened because a dedicated group of people believed that because of that inter-relatedness in the world we truly can change the world one cup of coffee at a time …

Our readings today, particularly our Old Testament reading, reveal a God who is intimately involved in our lives and our world, and who cares about us … Moses experienced that care when God carefully protected him … Jesus speaks of that care when acknowledging the necessity of faithful people be informed and mindful stewards … and ultimately, the task of experiencing and sharing that care rests with us.

How we live our faith, and what we do in faith, is how the world will experience the very presence of God … if we go about our daily lives without thinking about others, or how our actions and decisions might affect them, we are failing to live our faith … but if we move through our days mindful of life’s inter-related qualities and aware that what we do here affects others around the world, we can’t help but live a faithful life …

Our decision in the grocery store aisle here in the Grey Highlands ultimately offers us a moment to faithfully consider how we shall render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to render unto God that which is God’s … the choice is ours to make.

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

Sermon for October 9th - Thanksgiving Sunday

It’s interesting and challenging to preach on Thanksgiving.

On one hand the message is clearly about remembering to be thankful and expressing that thanks and appreciation. But on the other hand there is always a tension in our culture and society that from a faith perspective reminds us to be mindful of just how much stuff we have and how we are required by faith to be good stewards of our life resources. It means appreciation and thankfulness as well as sharing.

Yet, as I acknowledge these to standard themes that are often promoted from the pulpit at this time of year, I can’t help but acknowledge that they are indeed standard themes and ALL of us have heard over and over and over … do we really have anything new to say about being thankful? Do we really need to state the obvious in our world today that we need to do a better job of sharing our wealth of stuff and money?

So what then are we to say about this thanksgiving theme and our readings that clearly remind us to be appreciative and grateful for this precious gift called life and all that it give us?

I could answer – I don’t know, and sit down … or I could follow the lead of a colleague in ministry who once stood before a congregation with a photo of a sports car and passed it to his assembled worshippers suggesting they reflect on things they covet in their lives …

I could do those things, but I think the M&P committee wouldn’t be very appreciative nor thankful of the calls they would get about it … So I won’t.

Instead, I want us to pause and think about which of the 10 lepers in our Gospel story we really would be …

Here are ten ordinary men, who are brought together through the happenstance of having developed this disease that leaves them outcast from their family, their friends, their community and the culture in which they live. They are left to fend for themselves while struggling with a disease that is debilitating and limiting … all the while their health is crashing because of circumstances entirely beyond their control.

With no income they can’t feed themselves adequately … with minimial or outright inadequate nutrition the disease worsens … and the spiral just speeds up … leaving these men outcasts, living outside of their communities, begging for scraps and being forced to live a perilous and very marginalized existence.

So, along comes this faith healer and teacher, who in the blink of an eye heals the ten … they are no longer diseased but clean … they no longer need to lurk on the margins of the community, but can after being announced as clean by the religious authorities, can return to their lives and their homes …

Which of the ten would be you be?

The one who remembered to come back and say – “thanks”, or the other nine who were so caught up in the excitement of getting their lives back that they hurried to find a priest so they could get back to their families and their circle of friends and their lives that had been wrenched from them?

It’s easy to condemn the nine as ungrateful … but that’s an oversimplification of the story and their experience.

Instead of condemning them, we have an opportunity to step into their lives for a moment and realize that in that instant as they were made whole and healed, they were able to reclaim something incredibly precious.

They could reclaim their lives.

Instead of condemning them, we need to pause and consider how hard it would be in that instant to turn around and go back to Jesus and say thanks. The pull would be to rush home and say “Look at me!! I’m clean and healthy and I’m home !!”

Our hearts that have ached for home would pull us there like a freight train.

The truly exceptional behaviour is the one who was able to pause and turn around and not only say thanks, but to stay and express that thanks.

If we were honest, in this scenario ALMOST all of us would rush home to reclaim what we’ve lost … some of us might remember to shout a hurried “thanks” over our shoulders as we raced down the road, but few of us would really take the time to express our appreciation until much later when we were sitting at home basking in what we had once been denied – then from our comfortable chair in the corner we MIGHT look around and say “oh yeah, thanks …”

And that is perhaps the point … remembering to be mindful and appreciative of what we have … living out our thanks, not just once a year but showing and celebrating that appreciation through a subtle reorienting of our lives and our faith.

The M&S fund of the United Church used to talk about an “attitude of gratitude”

It’s recognizing and truly APPRECIATING that we live in a world full of blessings and all the good stuff life has to offer, and we need to live and move through our days mindfully of that rather than failing to appreciate what we have.

It’s the old ‘the glass is half empty … no the glass is half full’ dichotomy.

We have a learned predisposition to see the glass half empty all the time. We’re good at seeing what we lack, rather than appreciating what we have.

I remember once sitting in having a beverage with one of the Manitoba MLA’s – the Manitoba equivalent to an MPP. We were talking about the pending election and I suggested that instead of promising tax cuts and defending the government’s actions in the past couple of years the Government should call the election and campaign by saying – “here’s what you pay in taxes … and here is where that tax money goes … here is what benefits you, here is what benefits your neighbours, and here is what benefits all of us …”

He laughed and said – “yeah but we want to be reelected. NO ONE will get reelected telling the people that they should be appreciative of where their tax dollars go …”

We then talked about the attitude of people and our seeming inability to see almost anything from a positive point of view … and really, that is the root of the challenge we face. We have a pretty good life, yet we find something to grumble about … it’s warm and sunny, but we WILL remind each other that it is gonna be miserable by the end of next week, and winter is only a month away … even in the church we will have a community of a few dozen talented, capable and dedicated people, but we’ll lament that there are so many empty pews and we don’t have the same attendance or participation that we did back in 1957 … whether we like it or not, we tend to be like Winnie the Pooh’s friend Eeyore more than we may want to admit.

So, thanksgiving – our readings – and shelf after shelf of books, dvds and other resources – serve as a reminder that we should find ways of living our lives more mindfully, and more aware of the importance of appreciating what we have.

And it starts simply and easily … tomorrow morning, sitting and watching the sunrise with a coffee or tea on the back deck (or the front depending on which way your house faces) is a good way of starting to re-appreciate life’s tiny miracles … taking time to notice – truly notice the wondrous things around us, from ducks and loons on a lake, to the breadth of colours in our autumn landscapes … take time to appreciate these wonders will leave us in a place of awe.

Years ago I read a commentary on the Old Testament – the Pentateuch that said the stories that formed the foundation of our faith – things like the flood, the battles and wars waged for the promised land, and the many happenings that marked the lives of the Patriarchs, are not about scaring us and rendering us terrified of God. Rather, these stories are about showing us in real and tangible ways the reasons for experiencing awe and wonder when we encounter God.

The involvement of Yahweh, in the lives of the people with names like Abraham, Lot, Isaac and Jacob, is not about fear and trembling, but awe and wonder … the world is an amazing place full of amazing things to see, to taste, to experience … and God wants us to experience them fully, and to appreciate them.

American writer and doctor Patch Adams once wrote “life is a precious, fragile and amazing gift, I can’t imagine why anyone would waste even a moment of it …”

Why indeed … the first step to not wasting it, is more fully appreciating it … and that means standing in a place of awe and wonder once in awhile and whispering the simple phrase – “thanks”

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

Sermon for October 2nd - Gifts of the Small Church

Today is one of those days where we can pause to reflect on what it means to be part of this thing we call the Church. Not only are we breaking bread and pouring out the cup like countless other around the globe, we are being reminded in our readings of what foundational covenant started this Judeo-Christian movement that we are a part of.

Today as we gather at the table and remember we are also remembering the Torah law that lies deep in the foundation of faith.

Ralph Milton, the author and storyteller from BC who for a time served as President of BC Conference once told the story about a Rabbi who lost a valuable gem and gathered all the kids in the neighbourhood to help him find it. They searched all over the front yard and back – they checked under every bush and combed every inch of the Rabbi’s yard before finally saying – “Rebbe, we’ve looked and looked and looked for the gem and we can’t find it … are you sure you lost it here?”

The Rabbi laughed and said, “Oh no, I dropped it in the basement. But the light is much better here …”

Ralph likened the Rabbi to our spiritual quests in the church. We spend lots and lots of time out in the yard searching because the light is much better, but we neglect the dark shadowy places and the difficult uncomfortable places because it’s easier and more comfortable to be out in the yard. In conveying his story, Ralph encouraged us collectively to go back into the basements and the dark shadowy corners and look there …

This is one of those moments … we have before us the story of the Ten Commandments – the foundational tenets – the Torah Law on which everything that follows rests. And yet, if you ask most Church members gathering at the table this worldwide communion Sunday, I doubt very much that many have given much thought to the ten commandments at all … we avoid the basement.

So, too descend those rickety old stairs for a moment – what do the Ten Commandments have to teach us today as we gather to break bread and share the cup?

The first lesson might be simply that the role of Law in the life of the Jewish faith, and ultimately our faith, is not what we’ve assumed. Often we see the Law as a burden that is imposed on people as a series of restrictive statements and proclamations.

We hear the ‘thou shalt not’s’ and assume it’s an attempt at curtailing our freedom …

But what if we accepted the view of Rabbis and teachers who say the Law – the Torah – this supposed list of “thou shalt not’s’ is actually an expression of faith that allows us to set ourselves apart as an act of devotion and LOVE to our God?

Instead of seeing the limits as something imposed from outside as a punishment, what if we turned our thinking around and saw these so-called limits as a way of expressing our faith boldly and openly saying – I don’t need to do any of these things anyway,

The Rabbis seldom see the Law as onerous and limiting. Instead they see the Law – the Torah as a means of attaining our full humanity by responding to God’s love through the living out of these distinctive ideas and restrictions.

Living Kosher, obeying God’s proclamations from Sinai, and setting ourselves apart by following the ancient teachings is not to be regarded as a negative – what limits us is NOT the law itself, but our obsession on the minutiae of the law.

We get hung up on trying to find the loop holes and the way out of the nitty picky details rather than accepting the role of these rules and regulations as a means of CELEBRATING and PROCLAIMING our faith.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote of observing the Sabbath – that infamous Seventh day: “In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil, there are islands of stillness where man may enter a harbour and reclaim his dignity. The island is the seventh day, the Sabbath, a day of detachment from things, instruments, and practical affairs as well as of attachment to the spirit.”

The observance of the Seventh day – one of the ten commandments, is about finding a place of peace and Shalom in the midst of a busy and tempestuous world.

The observance of the Law – the Torah, is about finding an expression of peace and Shalom AND faith in the midst of a busy and tempestuous world.

Breaking Bread and pouring out the cup at the table of fellowship within the church is about finding a place and an expression of peace, Shalom and faith in the midst of our busy and tempestuous lives.

It’s NOT about the nit-picky details, it’s about living, sharing and celebrating our faith.

It’s about going back to the basics and reclaiming the foundations of our faith.

This past week I read in a book by Jason Byassee, an American United Methodist minister, an example of what can happen when a Congregation remains focused on what is its foundational reason for being.

Byassee cites the congregation he once serves during a bitter and contentious election campaign. Battle lines were drawn and old friends became bitter enemies as two candidates from within the small congregation stood on opposite sides of the election.

Angry words and accusations were tossed back and forth between the two camps – but what kept the Church from exploding was a continued commitment to BEING CHURCH … the ladies of the congregation kept BOTH candidates in their prayers on the community prayer chain … the various groups within the congregation asked BOTH candidate to come and present their views … and instead of encouraging people to vote one way or another the pastor and the congregation urged people to become informed about the divisive issues, and to make sure they voted.

Then at a Church service, during the passing of the peace just prior to communion, the two rivals stood toe to toe with one another and one offered his hand saying “may the peace of Christ be with you …” and the other gentleman not only shook his hand, but embraced his supposed foe by saying “and also with you my friend …”

The kept to the basics – the foundational things that draws us here … faith, prayer, community, and the quirky things like Communion, passing the peace, and even The Law, that make us distinctive, and that show the world that we are people of faith.

Byassee for his part looking back, credits much of this healing and wholeness to the role of prayer … never did the Congregation forget to pray. They prayed for the candidates and their families, they prayed for the issues that we dividing their community, they prayed for their community, and they continued to pray for themselves. He offers the example of life’s storms breaking over the community only to be met by the breakwater formed by the women and men of the congregation firmly bowed in prayer.

This foundational gift – kept the community together.

And today that is what is happening here. We are creating a place of peace and Shalom in the midst of our busy and tempestuous lives by pausing to remember that God has entrusted this wondrous world into our care. We are simply the tenants in God’s vineyards, and when God seeks an accounting of the harvest how will we measure up? The vineyard has continued to suffer ecological damage, some workers are continually denied fair and living wages, while others have been shut out altogether. But we have the tools to return this vineyard to full health and vigour … it’s a little thing called faith, and it is based on these 10 easy steps that lead us to living our lives and our faith in a respectful and faithful way.

Today we break bread and pour out the cup remembering our connectedness to our faith, to our God and perhaps most importantly to one another … today we break bread and pour out the cup and remember that we are part of our greater community, part of this United Church of our’s, we are part of the Christian Church, and most importantly, we are part of the Faith Tradition that began that day in Sinai when Moses came down the stony path way labouring to carry the tablets given by God as a means of living and celebrating our relationship with God.

Today we break bread and share the cup remembering that for this briefest of moments, we stand fully in the presence of God and one another in a holy sanctuary of time where we are truly NOT alone.

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