Order of Service for February 26th 2012

Gathering Music:

Welcome and Announcements:

Lighting of the Christ Candle:

Reading:

*Introit: Dust and Ashes VU 105

Call to Worship:

One: The ashes remind us of our frailty and our mortality.

ALL: This water proclaims the grace of God.

One: God our creator, has formed us out of the dust of the earth.

ALL: May we remember our mortality and penitence, as we recall that it is

by God’s gracious gift of grace that we are we given everlasting

life through Jesus Christ our saviour. Amen.

Our Personal Confession and Silent Prayer …

Silent Prayer ……………………… (F) Voices United pg. 959

Our Father, who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory,

for ever and ever. AMEN

Prayer of Approach:

One: Loving God, we come here today to worship you with all of creation.

May our sounds, our songs, our listening, our thinking, and our sharing be pleasing to you. Be with us as we begin this Season of Lent, as we reflect on your word, on the life of Jesus, and on our own lives. Open our hearts and minds to your transforming love. AMEN.

(E) *Hymn: Magic Penny (insert)

(E) Story Time:

(F) *Hymn: One More Step Along the World I Go VU 639

WE LISTEN FOR A WORD FROM GOD

Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm 51 (VU pg. 776)

I Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-15

(E) *Hymn: One More Step Along the World I Go VU 639

(F) Choir:

Reflection: “One Step, One Moment, One Penny …”

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*Hymn: O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee VU 560

Minute for Mission:

Offering:

Offering Hymn: “Praise God From Whom …” HFG 382

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,

Praise Him all creatures here below,

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost AMEN.

Offering Prayer:

Prayers of the People:

(F) *Hymn: Magic Penny (insert)

(F) Story Time:

* Hymn: Lord Jesus, You Shall be my Song VU 641

*Benediction:

*Choral Response: Amen, Amen, Hallelujah, Amen (VU 974)

Sermon for February 26th 2012 - 1st of Lent

One Moment, One Penny, One Dollar ...
... making a difference in our world:

In the Jimmie Stewart movie “Mr Smith goes to Washington” it is observed that “all good things in the world come from fools with faith.” As I reflected on our readings today, and moved through my week, I realized the truth of that statement, and how through faith our world has been shaped and changed for the better. It’s all part of being a Good steward, and as we move into the season of Lent and the preparations it embodies, we face the challenge of thinking about how we can live as Good Stewards in our world today.

To be honest, I think I’ve offered maybe 3 or 4 Stewardship sermons in my twenty some years of ministry. But today, the readings combined with ongoing conversations and worries about our budget here, drew me to the realization that offering one today wouldn’t be a bad idea.

My previous forays into preaching about stewardship have been in similar moments of convergence where the need was pressing. In Bella Coola I offered a “dig deep into your pockets” reflection that hoped people would come up with more than just lint … I think I even invoked that image of Jack Benny and his legendary frugalness along with jokes about moths fluttering out of wallets when they get opened.

My favourite Stewardship sermon though began with the joke: “The Minister rose on a Sunday morning to address the congregation and said, I have bad news, I have good news and I have the absolute most horrible news of all … he continued the bad news is the roof is leaking, the furnace packed it in last night, the back stairs have collapsed and thanks to a computer hacker ALL of our computers and electronics need to be replaced. But the good news is we have the money. In fact we have more than enough to cover ALL these expenses and more. HOWEVER, the most horrible news of all is that every dime of that money is in your wallets, purses and pockets and you’ve been pretty cheap lately …”

I tend to avoid stewardship sermons. I’m not particularly comfortable offering them, and I chose instead to weave the idea of stewardship throughout my preaching and reflections on an ongoing basis. Too often the tone of Stewardship sermons is uncomfortable and laced with guilt and the overarching theme of “here I stand in the pulpit, and my salary is paid by you – so you better do better” SO I tend to avoid that theme all together, choosing instead to celebrate our achievements and encourage us to work together in a positive way … but often stewardship themes are met by the response of “how dare he suggest I give more …” and the oppose reaction kicks in and we end up with fewer people pulling MORE of the weight … and everyone feels bad …

So, having set the context I would like to point out that if we were to consult the Stewardship guides and books written on the topic for Churches, we will discover that as a Community of faith, we’re doing pretty good in our stewardship. We can pat ourselves on the back for the simple fact that we are doing ‘all the right things’ according to the gurus of things Stewardship in the United Church, and we have a pretty good level of givings and support – so I don’t offer this reflection with a tone or even a suggestion of guilt, but rather as a means of opening up the discussion as it pertains to our current situation.

The reality is that as a Church we can’t avoid Stewardship, and we should avoid speaking of it on an ongoing basis. I have in my office a tiny selection of the Stewardship books and resources that are created regularly for Church use. It’s part of who we are – but in the United Church, we’ve shyed away from the discussion for fear of offending the very people who put their donations of time, talent and treasures up for use every week. We don’t want to offend anyone, so we don’t talk about it … we don’t talk about it despite the reality that every time we open the Scriptures and begin to read we’re standing in a context that is permeated with the very idea of faithful stewardship.

Noah, hearing the promise of God to never again destroy the earth by flood, and offering the gift of the rainbow to remind ALL of us of this Covenant of love and faithfulness, is a story about being a Good Stewards and caring not only for creation, but for one another, and our relationships and how we live our lives in faith … Noah embodies a second chance to be lived out in God’s promise of love … how can we NOT be a good stewards of our life and all that fills it?

Then as he rises from the waters of Baptism, Jesus hears the voice saying “this is my son, the beloved …” words we echo in our own baptism. If we are to be celebrated as one of God’s beloved, how can we live as anything less than a good steward over our blessings and treasures?

Our faith is ALL about Good Stewardship … and yet, so often we don’t want to talk about Stewardship in Church circles because we may offend people … so we limit our Stewardship talk to seasonal letters and campaigns, or special appeals, and we HOPE that by some mystical process of osmosis, people will ‘get it’ when it comes to our finances and our needs on committees and councils … we won’t talk about it openly, but we hope people will give generously and freely … it’s a strange dichotomy that we’ve set up for ourselves really …

Yet, when we do dare to talk about stewardship it’s been my experience that amazing things begin to happen … and the way to best talk about Stewardship is through stories … stories of what ordinary people can do, and do easily that makes a world of difference.

When it comes down to it, the story I like to tell is that of the First Nations Church in Bella Coola wanting to buy copies of Voices United when they first came out. There was a real willingness to buy these new hymn books, and number were purchased almost immediately as memorial gifts from families and church members, but we didn’t have enough for the whole congregation … so we were left wondering what we could do.

Then one of the elders of the community came up with the idea of collecting pop and beer cans and turning them in for the nickel and using THAT money for buying the hymn books.

It worked … almost every morning I would find a plastic bag of pop cans at the garage door of the manse that I would add to the growing pile in the garage, and in turn I would sort in to bags of 100 cans which I could take to the store and turn in. Uma, the elder and others encouraged the kids and youth to gather pop cans after basketball games at the hall, and from the ditches around the community to help the Church – we had people who seldom entered the building helping out, and the trickle of cans quickly became a torrent.

One memorable afternoon we loaded two pick up trucks to over flowing – the bags were bungee corded into place over the box and cabs of the truck as we headed up the road to the store to cash in thousands of pop cans …

The campaign was SO SUCCESSFUL that not only did Emmanual Church buy enough copies of Voices United for their use, they had money left over to buy another set of hymn books that the United Church was no longer going to publish, and that we used extensively in the Congregation there … and it ALL happened one pop can at a time.

This past week I had the privilege of spending some time with some of the greatest minds behind the running of Food Banks across Canada. During the course of our informal chat David Northcott, the director of Winnipeg Harvest one of Canada’s biggest and oldest Food Banks mused that he finds the promotion of hunger and addressing it most challenging within the United Churches of Winnipeg and Manitoba. He said off handedly – “I don’t get it really … people are hungry, we’re called by faith to feed them, why is this so complicated for Churches?”

And in that moment, he hit the heart of Stewardship … why is it so complicated? Why is talking about stewardship so frightening and so fraught with danger? Why is it, when a minister stands in front of a congregation and offers a reflection stewardship, he or she runs the risk of being run out of town for offending people? Why do we have to make something so simple as good stewardship so complicated?

I’ve always like the story that Tim Huff offers in his book Bent Hope, about the young man who lived on the streets of Toronto and LOST everything in a sudden flood following a summer rain storm. This young man lost his backpack and a precious and irreplaceable picture of his sister that he carried with him in the hopes that one day of finding her again … and yet even with this enormous loss of everything he possessed, Tim marveled how later he found that same young man begging on the streets with a time horton’s cup full of change and a sign that said the money collected was for the survivors of Hurrican Katarina because they had lost everything.

The young man knew what it meant to lose everything, and was compelled to help. But more than that, even in his dire straits, he saw the folks in New Orleans as worse off than him, and wanted to do something … a young man with nothing, was doing what he could to help someone he say worse off than himself … and he did. With Tim’s help, he donated his collected change to one of the funds set up to aid the people who survived Katarina.

That’s GOOD STEWARDSHIP … and it’s what we’re capable of doing when we live our stories, and our faith and have the courage to really look at what’s before us and respond.

It’s been suggested that we engage a Twoonie Challenge where in ALL of US are challenged to donate an extra twoonie each week to help address the deficits we’re facing … it is startling to realize that if each of our 95 resident members in the Pastoral Charge donated JUST two dollars extra each week we would by the end of December have almost 9900 dollars more in our budget … if we each donated 5 dollars we would have almost 25 000 more dollars … and if we each donated an extra ten dollars a week we would have almost 50 000 extra dollars in our budget this year.

One small gesture can make a difference … a pop can … some spare change … a twoonie … a five dollar bill … if together we each respond as good stewards of our time, our talent and our treasures we can and WILL do astounding things in faith … all it takes is a willingness to try.

As Margaret Mead once said – “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world – indeed, it is the only thing that ever has …”

In faith, we gather here as thoughtful fools … let’s go and change the world !!

May it be so, thanks be to God, let us pray …

Sermon for February 19th 2012

So, what are we to do with our Scripture readings today?

We have Elijah being carried up into heaven in some wondrous happening worthy of the best special effects Hollywood can muster, and we have the Transfiguration of Jesus on the top of the mountain that also stretches our imagination and leaves us wondering …

So, what are we to do with these stories?

Do we opt to take the stance that because they are in the Bible – The HOLY Bible, that our only option is to simply believe? And go along with them uncritically?

Or do we take the modern stance of disbelief and dismiss the whole thing as poppy-cock?

Or is there another option?

What if we step back and consider the concept of the Axis Mundi that I touched on briefly last week and expanded our understanding of the Axis Mundi so that we could view these accounts from a place of faith that understands what and where our Axis Mundi is, and views the world from there …

The Axis Mundi, is essentially the place where heaven, earth and hell meet – it is the centre of the universe – the navel of the Earth to use a more ancient understanding. To the First Nations cultures of the West Coast, the Axis Mundi is the Totem Pole that stands in the heart of their village and conveys the mythic stories of the people while providing them a focal point around which everything earthly and spiritual revolves.

In the Christian Church our Axis Mundi is Golgotha where Jesus was crucified, died and was risen … in ancient Judaism the axis mundi of the people was the temple, but more ancient traditions within Judaism posited the axis mundi at Mt Tabor in the Galilea … Mt Tabor rises like out of the flat plains that surround it like some strange out of place mountain. The physical anomaly gave rise to an understanding of its place and role as something different spiritually … and so it was regarded as the cosmic mountain – the very navel of the earth. And that may be why the story of the Transfiguration is placed on its summit, rather than just one some random mountain …

If you’re going to change our understanding of the world, better to do it some where significant and meaningful, rather than on some random street corner somewhere …

So, with our Axis Mundi posited physically and spiritually on the site where Jesus suffered, died and rose again, we can begin to see the first lessons offered by our readings today:

Undergirding these accounts is the understanding that we are never alone. Elijah being bodily lifted up into heaven, and the disciples experiencing the transfiguration of Jesus are ALL happening within the very presence of God. They are not alone … we are not alone … Jesus and Elijah are not alone …

What if the next step in this is to realize from that – being immersed and surrounded by the Holy Presence – is to allow that understanding to alter our experience of the world, and to open our eyes, our hearts, and the whole of beings to that Holiness that is ALL around us?

What if we are to be open to the wondrous presence that is found ALL around us everyday, rather than expecting the big flashy and grandiose moments like our readings?

Do we dare see and feel Holiness all around us?

It’s a good question to consider as we begin our Lenten Journey. Traditionally, Lent was a time of preparing for the coming of Easter . Fasts and special observances were standard.

We still speak of ‘giving something up for Lent’ but often we tend in our modern church to give up superfluous things that we don’t need anyway.

I’ve encountered people who would proudly proclaim they were giving up paprika for Lent. Do you use Paprika? They’d be asked – ‘no,’ they’d answer, ‘so it’s easy to give it up.’

Traditionally in the Church we’d give up meat, fatty foods, sugar, coffee, tea … something who’s absence would be noted and felt – something we crave so that when we think about NOT having it, we’re recognizing its absence and reflecting on why.

But what if, instead of reflecting on our piety for only 40 days of the year, we moved that idea of standing in a Holy Place outwards and into our lives EVERY DAY of the year?

What if we strived to live holy lives ALL year long instead of just in Lent, or just on Sunday morning for an hour and half while we gather around this place?

What if, we used the axis mundi of our faith to reorient our thoughts and hearts on a more permanent basis?

Rabbi Abraham Heschel observed of the Sabbath:

“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 wells as of attachment to the Spirit.”

What if we are to take these islands in time and stretch them outwards into our lives and embrace the other days of the week?

What if the transfiguration made real within us, is about transforming our lives with the peace – the true Shalom – of the Sabbath, and allowing it to permeate the whole of our being and our lives?

Heschel also contends that the heard of the Sabbath is a manifestation of peace, not only in our spiritual lives, but in the whole of our lives. He writes:

“The Seventh day is the armistice in man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within: a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world’s chief idol: riches. The seventh day is an exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness …”

The location of the Transfiguration is hugely significant theologically because it is posited on the Cosmic Mountain of Mt Tabor – the navel/belly button of the Earth, AND the characters present renders the time, the place, the happenings AND the recollection of it as HOLY.

Holy is a remarkably transcendent way.

Holy in a way that transcends ALL time and ALL space.

What we need to do then, is to move forward from this radical island of Holiness, and bring that understanding into ALL corners of our world.

We need to bring that place of peace and stretch it into the entirety of our existence … Lent is a season of preparing for the events of Holy Week and Easter – preparing for the Holy …

Today, our readings are calling us to stand firmly on the axis mundi of our faith that embodies the life, the death and the resurrection of Christ, and share that gift of Holiness with the world.

Not just for 40 days every spring … not just for an hour or two every week … but every day, as we carry that experience of the Holy down from the mountaintop and back into our day to day lives, stretching that safe harbour of peace and sanctity out into our world …

And it begins with an understanding that we are not alone …

(the new creed)

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

Sermon for February 12th 2012

If I use the word Authentic, what comes to mind? What definition do you seize on for the word authentic?

In the Merriam Webster Dictionary Authentic has a wide range of meanings: bona fide, genuine, certified, original, conforming to or based on fact, not false, or finally worthy of acceptance.

The implication of authentic is that it is real and somewhat trust worthy by virtue of its lineage and provenance.

A painting like the Mona Lisa is rendered authentic because it can be proven that it was painted by Da Vinci.

But the concept of authentic presents some challenges in our modern era. We ALL want things that are authentic, but in our consumerist society we’ve fallen victim to our own desire for the authentic and we’ve perhaps been fooled into thinking that some things are more valuable because they’ve been erroneously dubbed authentic, when that title is completely and utterly meaningless.

Consider the fine Canadian brand of Schneider’s meats … having grown up in Stratford, the ONLY brand of cold meat that crossed our table was Schneiders, made down the highway in Kitchener. To reinforce this was the perpetual tv ads that spoke of the quality of Schneiders products. The implication was that the ghost of old JM Schneider was lurking over the shoulders of the processors in the modern plant in downtown Kitchener.

Schneiders meat was by virture of its brand somehow more authentic than other brands …

Today, the implication is made over and over and over that brand products are better for us because they are more authentic, and because they are more authentic they are better … and around and around it goes.

But what defines authentic?

Or more importantly, what are we yearning for when we seek out the authentic?

This week I happened upon a book by Canadian writer Andrew Potter called “the authenticity hoax” that explores the whole issue of authenticity and implication that this modern quest for the authentic has on ALL of us. As I read Potter I kept thinking that the quest for the authentic – the HUNGER for the authentic opens the door for us as Church to feed that hunger and respond constructively to that quest.

People are yearning for something, and it is Potter’s contention that what they are actually hungering for is NOT the authentic stuff that fills our lives, but rather they are experiencing a “deep-felt need to reconnect with the truth of our lives and to disconnect from the illusions that everyone from advertisers to politicians try to make us believe are real.”

Potter puts it rather bluntly when he says “we need a new approach, one that takes seriously our desire for an authentic, meaningful, ecologically sensible life, but that recognizes that the market economy, along with many other aspects of the modern world, are not evils, even necessary ones, but are instead a rich and vibrant source of value that we would not want to abandon.”

As I read this, I couldn’t help but think – THIS IS WHERE THE CHURCH HAS BEEN STANDING FOR MILLENIA !!!

The very thing we need – the very thing Potter says we yearn for is in our hands. We have a connectedness to something profound and truly authentic, and we’ve had it with us ALL along. It’s who we are as the Church – it’s what we’ve been about, and it is the very thing that defines us.

So, the challenge we face is carrying what and who we are out into the world and inviting people to join us … this is not new in anyway, but is central to our calling to go out into the world … spreading the Good News.

We are called to spread the Good News – the most authentic thing humanity has to share …

The story of Elisha and Namaan reinforces this idea of focusing on the TRULY authentic … Namaan, riding high from his military victories suddenly realizes he is suffering from leprosy – a skin ailment that renders him a complete and total outcast.

The most mighty man in country is suddenly about to become a complete and total outcast. His wealth, power and prestige will be stripped away and he will be left a homeless beggar sitting outside the gates of the city … the effects of leprosy were bad enough physically, but it is the ejection and rejection of the patient from their life and community that is perhaps most devastating …

SO Namaan wants to be healed and restored to his life … and his wife tells him of this prophet-healer in the hills of Samaria who could help him.

“Saved,” think Namaan, “I will go with my wealth and offer this healer whatever he desires and he will heal me …”

Namaan is expecting something grandiose and amazing. He is like many of us in our culture today – he wants some razzah mataz, some Hollywood special effects, he wants ACTION – something dare we say AUTHENTIC.

Instead of action and razzle dazzle, he gets a message from the prophet to go and wade in the river over there … the creek – the muddy mosquito infested trickle … Namaan’s reaction is kind of understandable. He cites the great and grand rivers he knows of back home, and on his conquering travels. He likely cites the Nile, the Tigris or the Euphrates and with distain compares them to this muddy trickle.

Namaan was so focused on something big and grandiose that he almost stormed away and gave up the healing … then his slave speaks up and says “Master, if the prophet told you to do something difficult you would do it without hesitation wouldn’t you?”

“yes,” answers the great general.

“Then what is the issue?” asks the slave, “why wouldn’t you do what the prophet says …”

Namaan is us … we want something authentic, but our notion of authentic is about the grandiose and a majestic. We want the BIG glitzy authentic, not the quite subdued authentic. We put value in the big and the bright, and we would reject the simple and subdued.

In our quest for the authentic we need to listen to the voice of the servant who knowingly says – “if you were asked to do something hard wouldn’t you do it without a moment of hesitation?”

Fortunately though we have no lack of the authentic that is being searched for. To return to Potter, he notes in his opening chapter that the authentic is “a way of talking about things in the world, a way of making judgements, staking claims, and expressing our preferences about our relationships to one another, to the world, and to things.”

People today are searching for the authentic because they crave what theologian Mircea Eliade called the axis mundi. To Eliade, the ultimate expression of the axis mundi was the Totem Pole of the West Coast First people. Totem Poles anchor the people of the clan who created and tend it to their place in the cosmos. The Totem Pole tells the story of the clan who belong to it. The images tell the cosmic store of the people and their place in the universe. The Totem Pole is where they draw their meaning, and where they feel connected …

THIS is our totem pole (the building around us) … this is our totem pole (the Bible) … this (the people) is our totem pole. We understand and experience our place in the cosmos through our connectedness and our relationships with each other and with God. This is our authentic axis mundi

As people search for meaning and authenticity, we stand in a place physically and spiritually that overflows with authenticity … and fortunately, it is not big and grandiose gestures that reveal that, Instead our authenticity is shared and experienced in the cup of coffee shared with a neighbour, in the casserole taken to a struggling friend, in the phone calls, and notes and countless gestures that define our relationships with one another … our authenticity, and what we offer to the world around us, arises from the relationships we build, nurture and share in faith …

Our axis mundi comes in the quiet simple things …

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