Sermon for January 14th 2018 - Can Any Good come out of a Sh@#hole?

Cartoon borrowed from The Naked Pastor:

          Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

          In a world with the president of the United States disparaging other nations by calling them SH@THOLES, this particular Bible verse gains profound and ironic meaning …

          Fr James Martin, an American theologian writes in response to President Trump:

"Why are we having all these people from sh#*hole countries come here?"
1.) They are our brothers and sisters in need.
2.) They are often fleeing war, violence or famine.
3.) There are children among them.
4.) The Old Testament asks us to care for the "alien."
5.) Jesus asks us to welcome the "stranger."
6.) Jesus asks us to love one another.
7.) We will be judged on how we care for the stranger.
8.) They come bringing hope.
9.) It's the right thing to do.
10.) That's who we are.
One more reason: Jesus himself was from a "sh#*hole" place. Nazareth was a minuscule town of 200 to 400 people, where people lived in small stone houses, and, say archaeologists, garbage (that is, s#*t) was dumped in the alleyways. "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" says Nathanael when he hears where the Messiah is from.
God, in other words, came from a "sh#*hole" place. And he pointedly asked us to welcome him whenever he appeared as a "stranger," or as one of our "least" brothers and sisters. That's why we have all these people come. Because Jesus came.

          And so, as people of faith, we MUST ask the modern equivalent to the question – What good can come from Nazareth ? – why are we having people from these sh@#hole countries comes here?, AND we must have the courage to FAITHFULLY face the answer even when it necessitates and demands of us that we stand against the powers and principalities of this world and offer a vision different from theirs.

          What good can come out of Nazareth? is a question that also resonates with the calendar when we consider that our southern neighbour is heading into Martin Luther King Day on Monday, and the blatant racist offensiveness of Trump’s reputed comment deepens in the face of that national day of observance that remembers and opposes that very kind of racism … a day that commemorates one who lost his life in the quest for equality and justice in the face of racism and hatred …

          So, as people of faith, we ask - what good can come out of Nazareth in the face of fear … bigotry … hatred and what pulls us away from living justly and with righteousness?

          Our reading from John, in addition to asking the tough question what good can come from Nazareth? Also challenges us to see the humanity of those who followed Jesus, and the humanity of Jesus himself as Jesus offers the invitation: follow me.

          From a scholarly point of view, in our reading from John this morning, we are clearly stumbling into a cliché like a Newfie joke directed towards the Galilean provinciality of Jesus and those who follow him … it is kind of like saying “that’s so Grey county …”

          But from the country hick overtones we immediately move to something bigger – something far greater – responding to the call Jesus offers and embodies …

          Call is fundamental to our Church. As a minister I do not have a contract, but a call. Starting out in ministry there is a discernment process that is to affirm our call to ministry. We toss the word around quite a lot – our readings today ALL speak of call in some capacity … Call is central to who we are and how we understand our faith … yet, I wonder how often we really reflect on the idea or concept of call …

          This week, I’ve been reading a book on mission mapping – essentially, it is the concept of understanding our community and our world – what lies around us, and our place and CALL within it – how we live and move and share our ministry in community. Mission mapping is about living out our call, and so our reading of Samuel’s call from God and that crucial response: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening” highlights the first step in the process of mission map making … being open to where and what God wants of us …

          The next step, is comprehending and understanding the context in which we live and move and have our ministry … for young Samuel it was a world in transition. A world filled with uncertainty and insecurity. A world awash in fear and anger and trepidation … for the disciples, it was a world under military occupation, a world that knew conflict and violence, a world that was awash in uncertainty, fear and many of the same things that fill our media today …

          So, the idea of call in today’s context speaks to how we will engage the world, and how the world will view and engage us … for Samuel, it was the role of prophet and priest – a powerful figure who chose and guided kings, a figure who had control and prestige and authority … for the disciples, it was the role of preacher and teacher – wandering itinerants who moved from town to town healing, teaching, preaching and being present … and for the modern era, in the face of leaders who speak hateful racist and sexist language, and who have clearly shown a preference of the rich and powerful, we are called to something more than quiet acquiescence. We are called to engage the world and the needs we see and feel and experience in real and practical ways.

          And that is where – speak Lord, your servant is listening gets prickly … not only is the historic figure of Jesus from one of those sh#@hole countries that Trump disparages, but his life embodies EVERYTHING he opposes … born to a mother who was too young and betrothed but not married … the texts tell us he was born a refugee in a town that was not his home … then the family fled into a foreign land fearing the ruler of the day and his erratic and violent temperament … then as an adult Jesus was very much not of the powered or moneyed class, but was poor and from a small almost insignificant rural village in a backwater corner of Israel that was itself a troublesome backwater province of the Roman Empire … we was the very definition of EVERYTHING Trump rages against today …

          And yet, as people of faith we are CALLED to follow …

          Follow into what is today uncharted territory – the familiar is fading, the comfortable is disappearing, and we are being CALLED to be the Church to a divided and troubled world … we are being called to bring light into the darkness and to care for those who truly come from the sh@#holes of the world …

          One of the commentaries for this week summarizes it well when it observes: “in these texts we meet a God who calls children, who enters into the dimly light places of our lives and speaks through the wisdom of the aging. In these texts the newly baptised Jesus, … walks into our lives, invites us to follow and heaven opens …” what follows is up to us …

          So with two simple words – follow me, Philp changes the direction of his life … he follows Jesus on the journey of ministry and all that follows. With two simple words echoing in his being Philip answers his own question:  what good comes out of Nazareth?

          Healings … teachings … the revelations of the holy revealed and embodied in Christ … a transformation of the world through this amazing gift of love, peace, hope, joy, grace and faith …

          If we take seriously our call to faith the ten tenets laid out by Fr Martin are simply part of our journey as followers and disciples …

1.) They are our brothers and sisters in need.
2.) They are often fleeing war, violence or famine.
3.) There are children among them.
4.) The Old Testament asks us to care for the "alien."
5.) Jesus asks us to welcome the "stranger."
6.) Jesus asks us to love one another.
7.) We will be judged on how we care for the stranger.
8.) They come bringing hope.
9.) It's the right thing to do.
10.) That's who we are.

          Our faith was born in a true sh@#hole … a borrowed stable behind an inn … a baby born to a young mother and a refugee father … and they were semitic – siblings to today’s Arabic nations … EVERYTHING about our origins as a Church – as a people of faith – stands opposed to the drivel that oozes out of Trump’s mouth …

          if we dare to live our faithful calling we will find ourselves challenged and stretched to BE present to the hurt in the world, and to offer a safe refuge to those that are hurting, those who are lost, those who are broken, those who are longing for home … instead of building walls and division, we will open doors, and expand tables and dare to welcome in our brothers and sisters with open arms, open hearts, and open minds …

          Jesus came as one of the least of these our sisters and brothers, and if we are to welcome him, we MUST dare to welcome them as well … In the face of the likes of Trump, we need to hear instead the voice of the one born in a sh@#hole who CALLS us saying:

          (Matthew 25:31-46)

          Come, we have the opportunity to inherit AND embody the kingdom here and in the sh@#holes of the world … it is our CALLING, and our response is to follow

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

Total Authenticity ... scruffy visitors stretch the welcome ... Advent 2

This morning I would like to add to our nativity set … today we welcome in the Shepherds and their sheep …

          Why shepherds?

          Historically, we know that shepherds lived very much on the margins of the society – they were regarded as thieves and bandits and the good church people of Jesus day had little to do with them.

          I learned an interesting tid-bit this week reading up on shepherds – if the shepherds were out on the hillside tending their flocks when the angels appeared, it was NOT December but likely mid to late May that the visitation happened … it would appear that the flocks get let loose on the hills in the spring, not in the dead of winter. In December the flocks and the shepherds would be safely ensconced in paddocks close to town …

          But that aside – why are the shepherds part of the Nativity story ? They are an unlikely group to come and welcome the newborn king … yet, there is an appropriateness in having them gathering in the stable … Raymond Brown, the great Catholic theologian notes that the shepherds were indeed on the margins of their society, and as such they represent us – the ordinary and common people – the workers, the labourers, the average joes who are coming through the darkness to herald the birth of the new born.

          On a deeper level, the joy and excitement that marks their arrival and departure, and the certainty with which they appear and gather, is something we would do well to emulate.

          On a deeper level, in keeping with the spirit of the ideas from John Pavlovitz’s book, the transformation of the shepherds from a rejected marginalized group who were good and NOT keeping the customs and rituals of the people, and who regarded as unclean and impure, - the transformation to a central participant in the Good News proclamation that is Christmas, is a template for the Church and for us as people of faith …

          The concept on the table this week is – total authenticity … and there is perhaps no better figures to reflect on total authenticity in our scriptures than the shepherds and John the Baptist and the Biblical prophets …

          The shepherds make the transition from outcast to central player, and we now hold them as paradigms of faith – we sing hymns about them, tell stories about them, we have created an amazing pastoral panorama around them … and we have the character of John the Baptist.

          John himself is pretty out there and pretty much standing firmly on the margins of society before he even opens his mouth – then he speaks … in our reading today we have an edited version of John – a tame voice … in other accounts he calls those gathering before him a brood of vipers …

          Let that sink in for a moment – can you imagine coming to a worship service and having the preacher thunder from the pulpit calling you a brood of vipers and speaking of the wrath of God that is about to fall on you?

          Yet, here is John in all his glory doing just that … he is the messenger for the greater one that is yet to come, but as he speaks, he calls for repentance of the people and for the wrath of God to fall on them …

          You can’t get much more authentic than that …

          But authenticity opens the door to deeper conversations … to stronger relationships and to a healthy community that moves beyond the casual “hey, how are you? Lousy weather we’re having isn’t it …” that we are far too familiar with.

          The transformation that can come with total authenticity in the Church, is the transformation the prophet Isaiah dares to dream of … a new way … a bold way blessed by God’s presence and touched by the holy … and forever changed. The prophets were not warm and fuzzy theologians – their words challenged people and often rubbed them the wrong way, and more often than not totally opposed the rulers and powers of the day.

          So, of that new way …

          Pavlovitz writes that after years in ministry “one day I turned around and I didn’t recognize myself. I began to grieve the smallness of life, the lack of diversity around me. Not only was I now surrounded solely by other Christians, but only other Christians from my church AND only those who I easily clicked with. My table had grown staggeringly small … the reasons he notes that his table had shrunk rather than grown was because he had stopped being authentic as a person and as a minister.

          He notes that even though the scriptures are full of people who wear their doubt and their uncertainty openly, and are still regarded as caretakers of the religious tradition, that openness doesn’t exist in the church. Instead we edit and censor and offer a highly selective version of ourselves to those we share the pews with … we have put comfort over openness and authenticity. But the church thankfully is capable of much more than gathering heavily edited and carefully censored saints, the church can, if it chooses, be a place where real people gather warts and all, and where we no longer deny our authentic selves …

          And therein lies the challenge … how do we embody and live that level of authenticity as a church? As people? As a community?

          The monty python troop has a great sketch called nudge-nudge, wink-wink … the characters are having a conversation and hit a controvertial topic and they do a “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more-say no more” bit that infers a different level of behaviour or response … that has long been true in the church.

          This past week I read a disturbing story from the US about a priest who murdered a young church member he was infatuated with, but for 57 years he went unpunished because of an epic “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more-say no more” approach to his crime … he confessed to other priests, but they did nothing … he was a suspect, but the church ignored it … he went on to have a hand in other crimes and enabling other priests to abuse young men and young women throughout the US … but today in his late 80’s he is being held accountable for his actions because the game of nudge-nudge, wink-wink has ended …

          It’s the same game that is underlying the #metoo movement and the precipitous decline of careers throughout Hollywood, and the world as the truth is being spoken and embraced. Too often, and for too long bad behaviour was endured and ignored as a ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ attitude prevailed and no one called the badly behaved to account …

          So, in the church – how do we claim our authenticity?

          If we can welcome in the shepherds to the stable, and listen as they leave proclaiming the Good News at the top of their lungs with great unfettered joy, then we can welcome and even BE the shepherds in our world – the marginalized people who with great faith, and even greater joy, celebrate the presence of the Holy.

          And so, it begins by being wholly open to the TRUTH … not the truth we chose to hear, but the truth …

          No more nudge-nudge, wink-wink … no more looking the other way when unrealistic expectations or hypocritical behaviours become evident …

          Instead, the church becomes as Pavlovitz suggests:

A beautifully restorative community, one where disparate people are invited to bring the full weight of their inconsistency and hypocrisy and vacillation, and to be lovingly received as they are. It can and should be (we can be and should) a place of loving renovation and healing and growth. BUT only when we allow everyone to be exactly who they are.

          The first question that arises is - What does that look like?

          It looks remarkably like you and I being ourselves – no more roles, no more pretense, no more editing or censoring – the person that you bump into at the grocery store on Tuesday, or at the game on Thursday, or at the coffee shop or bar or beer tent, is the SAME person … if we use blue language and cuss, so be it … if we can cuss at the arena or at home in front of the tv, then total authenticity calls us to cuss here too …

          If we like to have a glass of wine with dinner, then we have it and don’t pretend we didn’t …

          For me authenticity begins with a rejection of the lovely line – “but you are a minister …”

          For starters, we are ALL ministers, and secondly, I am not different from any one except that I have specialized training and education to do the job of paid accountable ministry … I’m human like everyone else … I make mistakes and missteps and so on, just like the rest of us …

          My first encounter with the “but you’re a minister …” came a year into my time in Bella Coola when very nasty letter from a very unhappy man who had been storing his junk in the basement of the manse … when we moved in the basement was FULL – and I mean full of stuff. Some came from the years and years of ministry at the end of the road literally and physically, but the store room was full floor to ceiling with the possessions of a tenant who had rented a room from the previous minister when he arrived five years earlier.

          I managed to track him down and asked him nicely to remove his stuff – I contacted him every couple of weeks for almost a year until one day a buddy of his showed up and took a bunch of the stuff like cameras, a saw, tools and so on … I asked him about the rest and he said “this is all he wanted” SO I sent him another letter politely asking him to please remove the stuff – we had a baby coming so we really needed the space for other things … a year after my first request to him, I heard nothing so I made arrangements to clear out the room – most of which it turned out had been damaged when the basement had flooded the spring before we arrived …

          A week after the room was cleaned out, painted and made inhabitable again I got a letter from him raging at destroying all his stuff and ruining his life and so on … it repeatedly said “how could you do this? You are a minister!”

          The letter upset me, and I shared it with an elder in the native community who sat for a long time and then said – “you did nothing wrong, you were more than generous letting him keep his crap there (insert a stronger word though) for so long. This isn’t about you being a minister, this is about him being a terrible human being …” then he said something that has stuck with me in the 24 plus years since – “a minister is a person like the rest of us, some people just don’t understand that nor do they accept it …”

          More often than not – when we hear the words – “but I expected more of you – you are a minister …” it has less to do with me, or the clergy and more to do with the speaker being called on their bad behaviour …  

          Total Authenticity means opening our doors, our community, ourselves to each other not with some façade hiding the truth, but opening to each other as they and we truly are … it means sharing our frustrations, our doubts, our sadnesses, our angers, our struggles, our triumphs … sharing whatever is going on in and around our lives … sharing who we are on Tuesday after getting bad news or on Thursday when we are watching the big game …

          Total authenticity invites us to step in the door as the marginalized, and like the shepherds to be transformed by the presence of the holy in the community we find in the dark night, and it then sends us back into our days proclaiming the transformative power of the Spirit working in and through us. And it all begins by simply being who we are with no masks, no facades, no editing, no censoring – just you and I sitting down at table together and being nothing more than that children of God … creating a new reality in the presence of the holy …  

          May it be so … Thanks be to God … let us pray …