I would like to begin this morning with a story about a dear, dear friend, and the lesson she taught me, and herself about change.
Edith was one of the elders of the Church in Port Hardy BC, where I was sent as one of my 16 week student internship charges as part of my theological training. Port Hardy is three hours north of Campbell River at the northern end of Vancouver Island – it remains one of BC’s more remote and isolated communities.
When I arrived it was a fairly prosperous community with a booming logging, fishing and mining industry … Edith was born and raised on the coast. Her father had been the second son of royalty in England, and had come to the West Coast in the latter part of the 19th Century to find his fortune and build a life. He settled in the Kingcome area, where he raised his family and created a tiny corner of England on the coast.
In time Edith moved from the family home, married and raised her children in Port Hardy, a proud member of one of Port Hardy’s founding families. She was a force to be reckoned with, but was also someone who took her faith very seriously, and lived life with a HUGE heart that had a place for almost everyone. Edith, even in her later years took in the lost and lonely ones she encountered along the way. Often people feared for her safety because she wouldn’t give a second thought to bringing home a hitchhiker she met along the highway, and giving him a place to stay in her spare room.
Edith was an interesting character … she was very set in her ways, strong in her opionions, and more than a bit eccentric in her point of view on everything from the Bible through to Politics.
But Edith was firm in a few things – one was that the ONLY Bible to read was the King James version, two folks like Bishop John Spong were leading the Church astray, and three she firmly believed that Jesus was married, and that the male hierarchy of the Church had hidden away his wife and denied her existence in an attempt to marginalize and oppress the strong women in leadership within the early Church.
One afternoon, years after I had been ordained, I had tea with Edith at her kitchen table along with the minister at the Church. Merv and I started teasing Edith and her views – in a good natured way – and the conversation turned to Jesus and his family background. Merv and I had planned a bit of an ambush on Edith. Earlier in the week I had been at a Bible Study where Bishop Spong had come up, and Edith had had a proper fit denouncing him and his writings, while also admitting in passing she had never actually read much of his stuff.
Merv and I turned the conversation to the issue of Jesus’ perhaps being married, citing the Rabbinic traditions that said by 30, ALL Jewish males were expected to be married, and to be called Rabbi and regarded as a teacher worth listening to one had to have a wife and children.
I then handed Edith a photocopy of a chapter from a book that cited this. Edith was kind of excited – this was the kind of thing she had been pushing for years … she read the chapter and pointed out various bits and pieces as proof of her ideas.
She finished the chapter and asked – “who wrote this?”
Merv, in his find British fashion smiled, took a puff on his pipe and said – “shall I tell or do you want to?” Together we told Edith that she had just read AND AGREED with a chapter from the reviled Bishop John Shelby Spong.
That afternoon Edith began reading everything that Bishop Spong had read – his books, his articles, and anything else she could find … her opinion of Spong changed in a heartbeat because she had read what he actually had to say about a topic near and dear to her heart …
Edith in her mid-80’s was open to change. She was open to learning something new, and altering the way she saw and experienced the world. And she also passionately shared that openness with others.
That afternoon, Edith taught me the truth behind the value and the inevitability of change.
Around the same time, I was privileged to attend the AGM of BC Conference where Anglican writer and theologian Herbert O’Driscoll delivered the key note addresses. In one of his addresses, O’Driscoll talked about how radically and subtly the Church has changed since its founding some 19 centuries ago. He noted that if we were to move forward or backwards a mere 50 years in the Church we would find ourselves hopelessly lost.
We may recognize some of the music, and get a sense of what is happening liturgically – but our overall impression would be confusion and bewilderment, because change in the Church happens constantly and unceasingly, and so subtly that we might be totally oblivious to it.
Even here, in this place, we’ve experienced an unrelenting wash of change over the last 134 years since Egerton Ryerson stood in this sanctuary and dedicated the new building on November 11th 1877.
Physically, the interior and exterior of the building has been altered. The Bibles, hymn books and other resources we use have changed. Even the use of technology has, in the last ten or so years changed dramatically – when I started my path in ministry in 1993, email was a new novelty that took forever to download through dial up modems – today I can check it in seconds on my cell phone.
The church of 2011 is not the church of 1991, or 1951, or 1911 … but it is intimately and spiritually connected … we are part of a continuum of faith that has continued to share its message and ministry to the community around us … and oh how we’ve changed.
In 1901, the Church Council voted to install a telephone line so that one of the elders in the community could listen to the services in comfort at home. Today, we have web pages to share our events and happenings, and when I get time – our sermons and services.
In the first Century of our life as a Church you were expected to rent a pew for the year, and it was yours to sit in during services.
Rent a pew? Even though we don’t do it, it is still an active part of the memory of this place with some recalling the little slips of paper that were tucked in the holder on each pew announcing who’s pew it was … today we sing the hymn “nobody here has a claim on a pew …” but it wasn’t that long ago when they had a claim backed with official receipts.
Even the mundane matter of our Services has changed over time. In 1877 when Egerton Ryerson came up to Flesherton to open and dedicate this building, he took part in no less than FOUR separate services over Saturday and Sunday, along with a hymn sing service and a fowl supper on the Friday night to begin the weekend. Not only where there A LOT of services, from Ryerson’s own notes he was proud of his ability to still conduct a FULL service. In a volume of his collected letters he noted in the fall of 1877 that he was able to REGULARLY preside at services that began at 10:30 am and broke up reluctantly at 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
We live in a time when services that extend past noon are frowned upon – how many of us, myself included would want much less welcome a service that stretched on for four or more hours??
These are just a few of the changes that have marked the history and heritage of this place over the last 134 years … I doubt many of those who sat in this building the weekend it opened, could have or would have imagined the Church as it is today … and if they were to step through our doors, they would be lost and bewildered … but they are part of who we are. They are not only part of the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us as a people of faith, they are part of what and who made us who we are today. Their faith and their ability to grow and change has helped and inspired us as we’ve continued on the journey they began.
I began with a roundabout mention of Bishop Spong, and he is a good place to come back to as we continue our reflection on our anniversary and the inevitability of change. In one of his books Spong mentions that he was born a Southerner in a pre-civil rights era. In his world and church blacks were marginalized and not regarded as people, women were never in places of leadership except to oversee Church suppers and teas, and there was no place for gays and lesbians anywhere in the Church.
Looking back on his life Spong muses that four strong daughters taught him the fallacy of that dated view of women, prominent leadership showed him that Blacks and other minorities had a place in the Kingdom we call the Church, and in more recent years the faith of gay and lesbian Church members and leaders challenged and changed his long held views on the place of gays and lesbians in the Church.
Overarching ALL of this Spong notes not only the inevitability of Spirit driven change in the Church, he marvels and celebrates the amazing gift that change truly is. We are not who we once were, but we are informed, inspired, challenged and strengthened by the lessons of our forebearers, and the struggles that they experienced and endured as they sought to share their faith with the community around them and the world in which they lived.
In 1877, when the people of St John’s Methodist Church gathered on a cold November weekend to hear the illustrious Egerton Ryerson dedicate their new Church building, they were standing on the edge of something great … they were part of the Methodist Church that had in Ryerson’s life time grown from 30 saddle bag preachers to over 1000 preachers standing in churches of every size and shape across this new land called Canada, even the country itself was new.
That weekend in remote Grey County, they gathered as part of the Church to proclaim and celebrate their certainty and their belief that they were part of something that was about to transform the world.
To build on an observation made by Richard Bentham, who this weekend celebrated the sesquicentennial of his family farm here in Flesherton – the people came to this area full of hope and promise knowing that they were embracing and embodying change as they built a new life for themselves and their descendents.
The men and women who gathered the supplies to build this building and who joined with Rev. Ryerson to dedicate it, lived that hope and have entrusted it to us to continue our faith journey as we seek to realize that new life of faith that we are part of.
We are part of that community of faith called for 149 years to transform the world …
May it be so – thanks be to God … Let us pray …
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