God Did It

At a Christmas party this past December I was in a friendly conversation in which I was asked what I hoped to achieve or accomplish in my sermons. I talked a little about how at the very least I hoped the congregation could actually learn something about themselves, God or the world. I talked a little about my hope that the sermon contributed broadly to a person's overall spiritual formation. Then today I preached partially on Jesus's command to store up treasures in heaven. This passage of course is found in The Sermon on Mount. As I prepared for this message I began to ask myself what Jesus possibly could have hoped to 'accomplish' in his sermon. Before I could to anything very relevant I felt as though Jesus was first of all establishing his authority. Going up the side of the hill evokes images of Moses ascending Mt. Sinai to receive God's instruction. The imagery in Matthew is complete with a tiered ascenscion with Jesus at the top, the disciples in front of him, at the crowds in background (at Sinai the 70 elders ascended partway while the rest remained at the foot of the mountain). Jesus acknowledges the law but places under his authority. Following this I wondered whether Jesus hoped to create a crisis for the people. The sermon runs along in dialectical fashion always exposes the audience to the appeals of two authorities from which they must live.
I shared some this in the sermon and then in the adult educaton time afterwards we talked a little about the message. I asked the group about my suggestion that perhaps Jesus was trying to create a crisis in his audience. There was some general agreement to this idea but then the conversation quickly turned to whether or not God wills or creates 'crisis' in people's lives. To this we could not of course agree. God does not creates crises, right, though he seemed to be doing in so in his message.
Is this the difference between natural theology and dogmatic theology? Does natural revelation function in the same manner as special revelation. It did for Isaiah. And today I would argue that at the very least natural (and manmade) crises are in fact revelatory. Crises expose false foundations and de-centre our lives. The expose the spirit of a person or community.
Is it so horrible to say that indeed God caused perhaps even that God sent that crisis? Why does this have to then be equated with retribution for sin? Most often what a crisis reveals today is not the sin of those who suffered but of the ones who ordered things so that those might suffer. The connection of God with natural events carries a whole host of unhelpful associations. I am asking honestly, is it so horrible to say that God causes all or particular (I am not sure what is more helpful) crises? Is it possible to say that in a manner that then allows us then to appropriately discern and respond to the revelation latent within that event?

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The Only Offensive

From this morning's sermon,

It has often been noted that the armour described [in Ephesians 6] is not meant for offensive attack. There is no spear, bow, or long sword. The equipment described assumes close and intimate contact. It is interesting that the only piece of equipment used for any sort of offence is the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God. We often make truth or righteousness or even salvation as the sword we wield. We try to outdo our opponents in disputes over truth. We claim victory in our acts of righteousness. Or we divide people over our claims about salvation. Instead of offensive weapons Paul describes these things as gifted to us, that we take up and dress ourselves in. This sword of the Spirit is also mentioned in the book of Hebrews where it says, “For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”
And so even this one offensive object is something we ourselves can never master or control but is something that we allow to work on ourselves as much as others. When we allow the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, free movement it shifts from being the crusaders sword to the surgeon’s scalpel and the priest’s sacrificial knife able to make cuts and incisions that work for healing and wholeness.

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Imagine

Last Sunday's sermon on Jubilee

Imagine

(August 17, 2008; Leviticus 25, Luke 4:16-21)

What if I told you that Canada existed only as an act of imagination? That we fight wars, pay taxes and support Olympic teams for an act of imagination. What could that possibly mean? I recently read two books by William Cavanaugh, someone who could very quickly become one of my favourite theologians. Cavanaugh makes just such an assertion. In the opening lines to one of his books he writes the following,

Politics is a practice of the imagination. Sometimes politics is the ‘art of the possible,’ but it is always an art, and engages the imagination just as art does. We are often fooled by the seeming solidity of the materials of politics, its armies and offices, into forgetting that these materials are marshaled by acts of the imagination. How does a provincial farm boy become persuaded that he must travel as a soldier to another part of the world and kill people he knows nothing about? He must be convinced of the reality of borders, and imagine himself deeply, mystically, united to a wider national community that stops abruptly at those borders. . . . Modern politics was not discovered but imagined, invented.

So why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with our readings this morning? If we hope to accept the Bible and live out of its story and particularly this morning’s story then we are going to need to re-imagine the world around us. We need to the learn the truths and expose the falsehoods of our current story, as it is and step into the biblical story and allow it to shape and transform our expression of church. I believe that our reading this morning offers one such re-imagination. So this morning I am inviting us to consider our story and also the story and imagination that forms the concept of Jubilee.

Early in Canada’s history land was secured by the emerging government and then gifted and sold to those who would be most economically productive and stabilize the government. The legal immigration of people to Canada was developed around their potential benefit to our economic base and so our immigration act still disallows immigrants if they will be taxing on our health care system or are unable to financially support themselves. Land in our system is obtained and maintained by those who have the ability to obtain and maintain more land. This is not how land was imagined in Israel. Land in Israel was not distributed on the basis of a self-interested government but was a gift offered on the basis of a promise. The space and society this opened then was always based on this foundation. The foundation was that the land belonged to God and that every family in Israel had a share in it. It still happened that families fell on hard times and would have to sell their land or work it for someone else. But this was always in relationship to God’s promise. No one was allowed to continually amass more land and wealth. At some point in each generation the family’s promised land was restored to them and people were allowed another opportunity to provide for themselves. God says this to Moses, “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.”

Can you imagine what the American and Canadian landscape would look like if in the 1980s, fifty years after the Great Depression, the children of those who profited from that time, those who acquired all the land from farmers who could not survive returned the land to the children of those who lost it? Economic theory is certainly not my strength but I can’t help but note the irony that it was in the 1980s that we witnessed the rise of huge multinational corporations and the outsourcing of work to economically impoverished counties. It was at this time that land and capital began to be increasingly centralized around fewer and fewer people. This is a movement that the act of Jubilee works directly against. So we need to ask ourselves how can we re-imagine the redemption of the land for all people?

In North America personal security is understood largely in economic terms. Our economic model encourages us to amass wealth infinitely through work and saving. In many cases this can nurture a healthy and responsible work ethics. However, the reality of our current economic model is that increasingly the most wealthy people in the world are making their money without producing any valuable goods or services. Even with the economic slowdown in the U.S. corporate CEOs continue to increase their own compensation despite posting losses and layoffs. Since 1965 CEOs have moved from making an average of 51 times minimum wage to 815 times what a minimum wage employee earns. Others have made millions off others’ adversity in the US mortgage crisis. A number of the most recent billionaires attained their wealth by opening online gambling sites which relies on the addiction we have to the promise of wealth. We live in a system where we find increasing security with increased wealth though the reality is that the most wealthy are not wealthy from hard work and prudent saving but make their fortune all too often off of the misfortune of others.

For Israel, at least as God would have it, wealth simply cannot be an end in itself. What we have flows from God and is not an object to be pursued and obtained. In Deuteronomy it says that even a king, perhaps today’s CEO, should not accumulate large amounts of gold and silver. And every seven years the people are not to plant their fields or gather from their vineyards. They are to eat only from what the earth provides and from what has been provided the following year. Rich and poor trust in God’s provision from the land. Can you imagine if after each six year cycle you would spend the entire year in the basic task of acquiring and preparing food and maintaining your home? Imagine the opportunities for family growth. Imagine the opportunities for personal growth and exploring passions. Imagine the opportunities for fellowship and relationships. How is it that we can we re-imagine our relationship to wealth and time?

In North America freedom is claimed as one of the highest goals in life. In Canada we sing of the true north strong and free while our neighbours to the south sing of the land of free and the home of the brave. Freedom is conceived of as strength and independence. We typically talk of freedom as the ability to live without interference or support, to be independent. We talk about having a free market system with free trade so that we can achieve freedom 55. We encourage free speech and free choice and we have people who call themselves free thinkers. However, this view of freedom is always defined negatively as freedom from something as opposed to freedom towards something. Freedom form constraints as opposed to freedom to construct. The recent movie Into the Wild portrays the true story of Chris McCandless. McCandless was a young man dissatisfied with what he saw as all the trappings and bondage of western society. After he graduated from university he donated the remaining 24,000 dollars of his college fund to charity and spent the next two years of his life wandering around the US with little or no money. His words and actions were constant attempts at freedom. It is a freedom we can all relate to. We daily feel the pressures of work, of the government, of advertising, of television and internet images portraying an ideal life that we seem always to pursue and never attain. McCandless attempted to free himself from what he thought were unnecessary and harmful pressures. The problem with how he approached this freedom was that he was still caught in the mentality and the culture that he was raised in. He kept pushing for freedom from things and not freedom towards things. One of his goals was to survive alone in the Alaskan wilderness and on April 28, 1992 he was dropped off at the head of the Stampede Trail in Alaska where he hiked into the bush and eventually found an abandoned bus where he lived alone for about 200 days before he eventually starved to death. There was no end or goal to his freedom. In some ways he became the ultimate expression of our attempts at freedom, which is isolation.

In one of the final scenes of the movie as he is already declining in health McCandless reflects on his past relationships and the realization of what is happening he pens the words, “Happiness can only be shared.” Our search for freedom must lead towards something and someone if it is not to lead towards isolation.

In Leviticus God says that every fifty years on the Day of Atonement a trumpet is to be sounded and then it says that the people are make the day holy and proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. This freedom was based entirely on restoring families and neighbours and space for worshipping and celebrating with God. We often assume in our minds that freedom is attractive and natural to live out but this tends not to be the case. God’s freedom is, from our perspective, a radically unstable way of living. Stanley Hauerwas expresses it as living ‘out of the control.’ It is the daily trust of the Israelites in the wilderness as they often longed to return to slavery in Egypt where at least there was some order and predictability to their lives. We tend to be happy living within the norms of our culture rather then running the risk of being shunned, humiliated or rejected by living outside those norms. This is the type of freedom Jesus announced at the start of his ministry. He proclaims freedom for the prisoner and release for the oppressed. And how did those caught up in the daily work of ‘living in control’ respond to his acts of freedom? Jesus compares these acts of freedom to an extravagant banquet that people are invited to. But when they receive the invitation one says that he must attend to his business, one says he must work his field and another says that he is off to be married. We refuse God’s acts of freedom because we attend to the demands of security and control, the illusions of freedom. Can you imagine if we allowed ourselves to be freed even just a little from the demands of productivity, accumulation, security and control? Can you imagine if we were free to invite friend, neighbour and stranger into our home? Can you imagine if freedom was understood solely in terms of worshipping God and loving our neighbour? How can we re-imagine and proclaim God’s gift of freedom?

In the Old Testament God revealed to Moses that in each generation there should be a time when things would be made right and restored to their original intention, a time of Jubilee it was called. Jesus came and lived his life in the spirit this Jubilee. He came to restore those who were ill to their original health. He came to redistribute the wealth of the few so it could be shared with the many. He lived outside the control of idolatrous temptations of wealth, status and power. And Christ gave his life for and his Spirit to the church that we might live this reality. But where are we now as a church? How do we understand ourselves? Are we a lobby group trying to influence the political process? Are we a social club that meets for fun and friendships? Are we a peer-support group that tries to help each through the difficulties of life? Are we an educational institution trying to form our children in a particular way? Are we a non-profit organization trying to serve the community? By themselves these expressions all have their appropriate place. But even if they were all put together they would still be too narrow to describe the church, the body of Christ.

In his book Cavanaugh asks what it would mean for the church to recover and re-imagine herself as a truly free and public space. Not one expression within in a national body but as the body of Christ within which national, racial and economic boundaries are overcome. In the New Testament language of God’s people took on the broadest terms. The church could have been referred to as a guild or association but instead Christians are called citizens of God’s Kingdom as well as members of God’s household. The calling of the church covers both the private and public life of believers. Recovering this understanding is a call back to a life of discipleship, or what Cavanaugh simply calls discipline. The church is called and equipped to practice the discipline of jubilee living. Oscar Romero the Catholic martyr in Latin America said, that “the church is well aware that anything it can contribute to the process of liberation . . . will have originality and effectiveness only when the church is truly identified as church.” Each local gathering of believers and the lives they live are called to express the social and global vision of God as church, there is no higher calling.

If the church is called to the discipline of Jubilee living then we will need to re-imagine our practices as church and begin to conceive the church, the body of Christ, as the central context for life. We need to re-imagine tithing as an expression of gracious thanksgiving for God’s provision and as our opportunity to distribute wealth in life-giving ways. We need to re-imagine Sabbath as a time to cease our own pursuits of living in control and rest, with our neighbours, in God’s presence and provision. We need to re-imagine the practice of forgiveness so that we can lead one another out of the bondage of guilt and shame. We need to re-imagine the practice of baptism so that those being baptized understand they are gaining a new citizenship in a community that is not bond by the powers of this world. That with baptism we accept and learn to live knowing that we are named as a child of God who is valuable and gifted. And as Mennonites we may need above all to re-imagine the practice of communion. As a Catholic William Cavanaugh has a well developed theological and social role of communion. He states that it is in communion that we consume the body of Christ and in turn we are consumed into the body of Christ which is freedom and equality. Communion is a common practice in which no one is privileged. It is through communion that some Catholics have re-imagined the social space of the church. Cavanaugh quotes Fr Rutilio Grande of El Salvador in a sermon he gave in 1977 in response to dominating expressions of power through wealth that he witnessed. He said,

The Lord God gave us . . . a material world for all, without borders . . . [Some say] ‘I’ll buy half of El Salvador. Look at all my money. That’ll give me the right to it.’ No! That’s denying God! There is no ‘right’ against the masses of the people! A material world for all, then, without borders, without frontiers. A common table, with broad linens, a table for everybody, like this Eucharist. A chair for everybody. And a table setting for everybody. Christ had good reason to talk about his kingdom as a meal. He talked about meals a lot. And he celebrated one the night before his supreme sacrifice . . . And he said that this was the great memorial of the redemption: a table shared in brotherhood, where all have their position and place . . . This is the love of a communion of sisters and brothers that smashes and casts to earth every sort of barrier and prejudice and that one day will overcome hatred itself.

The priest understood the Eucharist to be the ultimate order of reality one that would overcome all political or economic boundaries. In Israel the Jubilee announced that the land was sufficient for all people. In communion we share in the body of Christ which is sufficient for all people. This priest understood communion in the body of Christ as the place where God’s vision of jubilee could be enacted. Fr Grande was gunned by a government sponsored death squad only one month later. In response to this tragedy the Archbishop Oscar Romero declared that there would be only one Mass or service that churches in the area could celebrate on Sunday and it was to be a funeral Mass. All who called themselves faithful, rich and poor, would share in the same table and acknowledge this loss and this attempt to overcome the freedom that God proclaims.

In response to the destructive powers of the world Cavanaugh states that Romero enacted the global and universal vision of the church in that place at that time.

The practices of the church are not magic and they are not clever strategies. They are the gift of God for the salvation of the world. We need to daily recall and re-imagine the story of God’s Jubilee. We need to daily invite Christ to speak freedom over our lives, to release our grip from possessions and from time. To learn to take steps that are in faith and out of control. May we as a church recognize and practice the disciplines of jubilee in our gathering and in our scattering that the trumpet may sound and freedom proclaimed throughout the land. May we begin with this prayer,

O Come, O Come Immanuel and ransom captive Israel.

O Come Desire of Nations bind all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy, strife, and quarrels cease. Fill the whole world with heaven’s peace.

And may our days end with this refrain.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel shall come to thy O Israel.

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Peace in Unpeaceful Places

[Excerpts from this morning's sermon]

God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai which is somewhere in the desert between Egypt and Canaan. The giving of God’s law happens between the place of slavery under foreign power in Egypt and the giving of land and control to the Israelites in Canaan. The place of Mt. Sinai and the giving of the law is not insignificant. God’s law is given outside of the context of any human control or authority. Laws and rules work in our society and with our children because we are somehow able to enforce them through our authority. God’s laws, however, are not given through any institution. Samuel Balentine writes this of the location of Mt. Sinai. “[T]he location of Sinai is finally indeterminate; it lies in the wilderness somewhere between Egypt and Canaan. This elusiveness functions in [the Hebrew] tradition as a symbol of both Yahweh’s freedom and Yahweh’s authority. Like Sinai, Yahweh’s authority is not confined by, indeed may stand in opposition to, the sovereignty claimed by any earthly kingdom.” The authority of God’s law in the Old Testament ultimately lies in the presence of God alone.
. . .
It is God’s presence then that becomes important for understanding the Ten Commandments and how they might lead towards peace. If peace is to be found in God’s presence then it can only be experienced in a place like Sinai, in a place outside boundaries of human power and authority. This is why right after the Ten Commandments and other laws were given we read that God called Moses up to the mountain again were he was given instructions on how to build the Tabernacle. God says, “Make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” And in the heart of the Tabernacle was the Holy of Holies where there was an empty space reserved for God. God said, “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of Testimony, I will meet with you and give you all my commands for the Israelites. The Tabernacle functioned as a sort of portable Mt. Sinai. The people of God were always to carry with them a space reserved for God alone; a space that was not influenced or controlled by any individual or group.
. . .
What then does the law have to do with peace? We often assume that following these commands will lead to peace within ourselves and peace with our neighbours. There is an extent to which that is true. But if we look at the structure of this passage something more significant emerges. We find that the people witnessing this event on either end of the Ten Commandments are trembling with fear. As God meets Moses on the mountain the people witness smoke, fire, thunder, lighting and earthquakes. The people are not yet prepared to enter the presence of God and so they roped off at the foot of the mountain. Then after Moses brings the Ten Commandments to the people it says that “when the people saw the thunder and lightening and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled in fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.’” When God’s commands come to us they shake our foundations. They search out our thoughts and actions sitting in judgment on them. They force us into confrontation with our neighbour as we attempt to throw down the idols within and around us. If they are allowed into us these commands leave us trembling, vulnerable and at the mercy of God. They leave us in the wilderness in the space of Mt. Sinai where no one can claim power and status. According to the text it is then, and only then, as we enter into the commands from either side, the commands to love God and to love our neighbour that we encounter something in the centre.
For those of you who were counting I have left out one commandment. It is at the centre of the commandments. It is at the place where the love of God and love of neighbour meet.

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

This the heart of the commandments and the place of peace. This is where God is honoured and neighbour is loved. After the commands have searched us out and we have trembled before them as they overturned our idols and desires then we are able to receive peace from God and peace with all those who gather in this place. This is Sabbath. The place of peace is a place of the worship. We gather each Sunday so that in some real way we can enact and honour Sabbath and this way live at the heart of the commands. This was God’s call on Moses. God called Moses to lead a kingdom of priests and a holy nation; a kingdom not of kings and generals but of saints, a nation not ruled by war and economics but by right relationships with God.
As we leave from here we are called to overthrow the idols of our culture and undermine the national foundations of wealth and power. We leave knowing that as the Tabernacle was a portable place to live with God’s presence now our bodies are the temple of God’s Spirit. Our bodies carry the place where God met with Moses on Mt. Sinai. The Spirit searches us and shakes us until we let go of control and fear and misdirected desires. The Spirit moves in us so that others also might tremble as their idols are exposed. The Spirit empowers us so those who suffer under the powers and idols of the world may find rest. The Spirit carries us so that we might travel to heart of God. This is the place of Sabbath. This is the place of peace where are passions find fulfillment and our fears are healed. May we not be afraid at God’s commands for though they are often not peaceful they are indeed the way to peace.

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Getting Up on My Soap-Box

Hineini asks the question in Attack on Sanctuary,

Do you feel you are entitled as a pastor to ask your congregants to give up their safety? I'm not sure this is a fair question really but I'm curious on your take. I like the idea of sanctuary and abhore the idea of violence but, for me, part of the idea of sanctuary is that God will provide protection and I'm not seeing much of that anytime lately so I'm wondering if its time to rethink things....

This is definitely a two-part question. First is the role preaching or perhaps even education or transformation more generally. This Advent season represents the close of my first full year of preaching. Most of my sermons up until about a month ago were centered around particular images that I thought would be evoking and generative for people's lives. Very little came off as prescriptive. I did not offer a very specific 'application' for my sermons. In my mind I probably still favour this approach. However, my temperament is to be a little avoident and so I suspect this type of preaching flows from here.
Something happened in reflecting on the texts for my first sermon in Advent. Paul says to the church in Rome that it is time for them to 'wake from their slumber.' This passage roused my own thinking and challenged me in what a church responding to the Gospel should look like. I saw this call as re-focusing on the simple but encompassing love for our neighbour. The OT text was Isaiah 2 and I preached on the surrounding passages that spoke of leveling of all those lifted themselves up on high hills, which I interpreted as isolating yourself from your neighbour. I spoke these words,

Being awake means being aware of your neighbour. St. Antony the monk once wrote, “Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our neighbour, we win God. If cause our neighbour to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.” This is similar to Isaiah’s criticism.
Now then, listen, you lover of pleasure,
lounging in your security
and saying to yourself,
'I am, and there is none besides me.'

We need to know our neighbour so that we can know Christ. If we do not listen to our neighbour we will doze off to sleep again.

And in conclusion,

Christ came to establish the mountain of God above all other hills and so our calling is to come down from our individual high hills and journey to the mountain of God where justice and wisdom flow. This Christmas season we will not see Christ if we remain on our high hills. We must come down and gather together first in the valley as it will lead to the mountain of God. And then gathered together there we can make way for the saviour who has come, who is present among us and who will come again. We make way for Christ in our minds and in our actions. We make way for Christ as he comes in our neighbours. This Christmas season we are called to make a place Christ in our homes and in our lives. Keep watch and stay alert in this age because Paul tells us that our salvation is nearer now then when we first believed. The night is nearly over. The day is almost here. Stay awake. Keep watch in faith and journey with your neighbour in the valley and in the storm as we travel with Christ to the mountain of God.
Amen.

This is strong language for my style of preaching and it continued into my sermon for the 3rd Sunday in Advent (Isaiah 35; Luke 1:47-55; Matthew 11:2-11), which moves into the second part of the question, Do you feel you are entitled as a pastor to ask your congregants to give up their safety?
I was moved by the presence and use of lethal force by armed guards at New Life Church in Colorado and decided that would be my base image for my last sermon. In that sermon I focused on the context, more so that the specific content, of the texts for that Sunday. For both Isaiah's ministry and first-century Palestine the question of deliverance and freedom were open. I admitted in the sermon that other passages could be used to respond to the question of violence but that "our passages here are clear and unequivocal in their rejection of the world’s use of force." Isaiah condemns those who look to Egypt for help and points to Hezekiah's faithful act of trust that delivers Jerusalem (for the time being). Jesus overturns the popular notion of Messiah as people anticipated and rallied around heroic characters who rose and fell at that time.
And I concluded the sermon with the following statements,

Seeing and receiving Christ means being outside of the world’s power and following Christ mean walking daily in the rejection and overturning of those powers. This is why the image of armed guards at church remains so unnerving. It is perhaps possible to agree that the use of force can restrain certain events from happening. We can be thankful that the incident in Colorado did get any worse that it did. But we need to remember that this incident is not unlike another incident in the U.S. On September 11 2001 a group of extremists attacked what citizens saw as the sanctuary of their homeland. It was believed that quick and decisive action would bring about peace and justice to the situation. The world’s force only offers the possibility of restraint. Contrary to Churchill’s statement there is no promise of peace when rough men stand ready to do violence. The U.S. is not a place of peace because they have largest and most powerful military. And here in Canada we must beware of the extant to which we profit from the military strength at home and in the U.S. In these realms there is no vision of desert flowers bursting into bloom. We must individually and communally navigate and respond to conflict and brokenness around us asking ourselves if we will attempt to restrain force with force or if we will, in faith, open up a way in the desert.
In our aid the Gospel gives at least one response to a violent attack on the church. That is a response to an attack on the body of Christ, which is the church. In the Garden of Gethsemane towards the end of his ministry Jesus and his followers are approached by a mob wielding clubs and swords coming to arrest Jesus. In defence one of those with Jesus strikes out with his sword and cuts the ear of the servant of the high priest but before the violence escalates Jesus intervenes and speaks to the reality of God’s world saying, “Put your sword back in its place. For all who draw the sword will die by the sword. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” God and God’s Kingdom is not threatened with the world’s force. The mountain of God rises up on a different foundation. That foundation comes to us weak and vulnerable as a child. This is our story in the Christmas season. This is must be our story the year as it carries us towards Easter. This must become the story of our life because this is the only place where God promises peace. And from that place a way opens up where justice comes from unlikely places like flowers in the desert bursting into bloom.
Amen.

What I emphasized was that there is no promise of peace or justice through the means of the world's power and force. I hoped that here I would walk a line between overt prescription and vague moralism. Did I ask my congregation to give up their safety? Not really, I suppose. What I said was that there is no promise of safety (peace) through the medium of force. A community of non-violence must be voluntary community. This falls off the radar quickly in churches without an historic peace stance. It did for me in my time away from the Mennonite church. It is becoming more and more pressing as I allow it to intentionally emerge from the Gospel.
I see this question also opening into the larger arena of education and transformation. What challenges me is preaching such a sermon and then living with and among my congregation and wondering if and how change is possible through such mediums. I am sure this is the perennial challenge of professors and teachers as well.
Any thoughts, comments, reflections on the roles of preaching, transformation or peace and violence?

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A Relational Reality

The Advent readings for this year are Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44; Romans 13:11-14. In Romans Paul tells the church to 'wake up'. Attentiveness is central to the Advent season. Isaiah points to the mountain of God to which the nations will flow for wisdom and justice. The question becomes how we can shake our naiveties and illusions without buying into every conspiracy theory and fear-based message. Here is an excerpt from my sermon on the role of mental illness, neighbour and reality.

Our society carries a great untapped resource in learning how to emerge from a state of slumber and gain clarity about the world around us. For those who have personally experienced or walked along side someone who has a serious mental illness the analogy of living in a dream-like state can ring true. In many expressions of depression, schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder a person can begin to experience various forms of hallucinations in which thoughts, sights, sounds or just feelings are experienced as real even though they are not actually occurring around them. At first these experiences are often assumed to be real or true and so they are treated that way. This is why people’s actions can appear strange at times, they are responding to a different set of experiences then many of us are. In Hollywood hallucinations are depicted in the most exaggerated way. And while this may be some people’s experience it is certainly not the only one. The experience can often be very subtle and blend easily into the environment of the person. Or perhaps they are not specific and just a certain perspective or feeling about the world around them. For many of us and I would actually argue all of us reality is not simple and straightforward.
In the midst of mental illness people usually recognize that something is not right but often it is someone around them that needs to help them realize and address the space they are in. The process of discovering this, of beginning to wake up from that dream carries mixed emotions. People can be relieved to know that they are not alone in experiencing this. But on the other hand this discovery leads them to recognize that perhaps they cannot completely trust their senses. The weight of this realization should not be underestimated and is crucial for us to understand. Being awake and alert to the reality around someone experiencing this becomes a relational event. It is important for someone who has experienced hallucinations or any altered sense of reality to know that there are people around them that they can trust to discern what is happening around them.
And so Paul calls the church, the community of believers in Rome, to be roused from their slumber. I am convinced that if we desire to hear the same call then we must begin to ask ourselves how each one of us are hearing and speaking the words that will wake us up from the some the false realities that we have accepted. How can we create a space that does not dictate uniform beliefs but will remain vigilant and alert against harmful illusions? Are we willing to trust each other enough not be offended when someone is calling us out of that comfortable spot in our bed and, on the other hand, are we sufficiently humble and convicted in the words we speak to each other? Are we willing to except that we suffer from spiritual illness?
. . .
Being awake means being aware of your neighbour. St. Antony the monk once wrote, “Our life and our death is with our neighbour. If we win our neighbour, we win God. If cause our neighbour to stumble, we have sinned against Christ.”
This is similar to Isaiah’s criticism.
Now then, listen, you lover of pleasure,
lounging in your security
and saying to yourself,
'I am, and there is none besides me.'

We need to know our neighbour so that we can know Christ. If we do not listen to our neighbour we will doze off to sleep again.
So we must be humble and except that perhaps we do not see things clearly. And like someone going through a trauma or mental illness we need to learn to trust one another to keep each other awake and call us out from those places that lull us into sleep, isolation and apathy. We must learn to diagnosis or spiritual illnesses and the illusions they produce. We need to hear concerns about the increased difficulty in providing affordable housing. We need to hear those who have experienced the increasing instability of the job market. We need to listen carefully as people explain the consequences of our lifestyles and purchases. We need to ask hard questions about how our lives affect our neighbours. We will not stay awake if we live life without regard for our neighbour.
This is the basic Advent message. Pay attention as Christ comes and moves in the midst of our neighbours. This is not a message of works. We cannot solve the world’s problems. This is why Paul spent so much time talking about faith before he told them to wake up. Christ came to establish the mountain of God above all other hills and so our calling is to come down from our individual high hills and journey to the mountain of God where justice and wisdom flow. This Christmas season we will not see Christ if we remain on our high hills. We must come down and gather together first in the valley as it will lead to the mountain of God. And then gathered together there we can make way for the saviour who has come, who is present among us and who will come again. We make way for Christ in our minds and in our actions. We make way for Christ as he comes in our neighbours. This Christmas season we are called to make a place Christ in our homes and in our lives. Keep watch and stay alert in this age because Paul tells us that our salvation is nearer now then when we first believed. The night is nearly over. The day is almost here. Stay awake. Keep watch in faith and journey with your neighbour in the valley and in the storm as we travel with Christ to the mountain of God.
Amen.

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The Space of Life

Willem immediately understood what he heard. The sentences were few and simple but it was only later that night that their significance began to well up in his heart overflowing into his body and mind. It was as though knowledge or perhaps truth or whatever it is that words can carry actually had weight to it. It pressed him down on the rustled sheets of his bed. Then as though his nose were too heavy to be held upright his head slowly fell to his left and turned towards the window where he caught the light the moon. The moonlight held his gaze and he lay there motionless drifting away from what he was coming to realize. A slight kink in his neck broke the trance and he tilted his head slightly to stretch it out. With his head now facing the window at a new angle the moon somehow looked different. Willem sat up in bed and broke the silence by something between a laugh and sigh. The window was open at an angle and the moon that he saw was only a reflection. . . . The moon was not there. He took heart and almost allowed a smile. What he thought he had was no longer his. His life was not his own. His life was at the mercy of . . . what? He wondered what exactly was holding him together?

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

In taking the narrow way . . . there is room only for self-denial, and the Cross, which is the staff by which one may reach one’s goal, and whereby the road is greatly lightened and made easy. . . . For if anyone resolves to submit themselves to carrying this cross – that is to say, if they resolve to desire in truth to meet trials and to bear them in all things for God’s sake, they will find in them all great relief and sweetness that they may travel upon this road, detached from all things and desiring nothing. However, if they desire to possess anything – whether it come from God or from any other source – with any feeling of attachment, they have not stripped and denied themselves in all things; and thus they will be unable to walk along this narrow path. . . . I would then convince spiritual persons that this road to God consists not in a multiplicity of meditations nor in ways or methods of such . . . but that it consists only in the one thing that is needful, which is the ability to deny oneself truly, according to that which is without and that which is within.
- St. John of the Cross

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

And so we enter the tight and constricted space with the jagged pressures of distress and chaos. But once inside there is the promise of transformation, the sweetness of the Cross described above. And in time our breathing that was once anxious and short in this tight space will grow deeper and more relaxed and the space that felt so confining will take on the smooth and supportive contours of a mother’s womb waiting to birth new life.
- Sermon August 5th

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Peace and Palm Sunday

Here is an excerpt from my Palm Sunday sermon. I hope it makes sense on its own.

Our world essentially offers one model of peace, it is the peace achieved either through victory or ironically through victimhood. In either scenario the peace we seek is simply the ability to be insulated and protected from any unwanted contact. As the victor we try to overwhelm the source of conflict and impose order on it as the United States continues to attempt in Iraq. In relationships we use our status or authority or manipulation to impose our way in times of conflict. And strangely enough we also often use the role of victimhood to attempt to overcome conflict. To be classified as a victim can absolve us of facing any criticism. In relationships if we can convince the other person that they are evil then we may debilitate their influence on us.

Now I want to be clear that this has nothing to do with someone who is the victim of abuse. In these instances the victim should be protected from the abuser. What I am referring to is how we use the role of victim to keep ourselves from meaningful, constructive relationships. Ultimately we all need to open up to someone in a meaningful way.

In both positions change or growth becomes difficult because differing voices are no longer heard, they have been effectively silenced. Chris Heubner writes that “the culture of victimhood simply reproduces the same logic of power as that of victory, namely a competition for security and control. Put differently, the hero and victim are both expressions of a desire to escape difficulty.” In both of these scenarios peace cannot be established because peace requires right relationships and these positions choke out the possibility of meaningful relationships.

When we receive Christ like the crowds did on Palm Sunday we often assume both positions. Out of a position of being victimized we, like the people, call on Jesus to enter as our victor and overcome our enemies dramatically and decisively.
Then we often become offended when Jesus does not put people in their place. And then we are even more offended when Jesus implies that perhaps we may have some things to work on.

The reality of Christ’s peace enters when we discard our attempts to preserve our lives, our attempts to impose order through the position of either victor or victim. The peace of Christ assumes that it is in fact our very lives that become the medium for peace. We do not create peace we receive, become, and then offer peace.

The extreme example we are given is this that of the martyr. I am not using the term martyr as it is commonly used today when we say that someone is making themselves a martyr. That is the definition of victim that I used earlier. Indeed Huebner writes that “one cannot designate oneself a martyr.” Also I am not assuming that a martyr is necessarily someone who dies for their faith. Rather, and I think this important, the martyr is someone who give their life for their faith.
The martyr does not enter into conflict in order to play by its rules. A martyr can do this because her identity is not defined by or dependent on the instability of the conflicting beliefs, practices or relationships that surround her. A martyr does not use the practices or materials of conflict to overcome conflict.
This is the call to be in the world but not of the world.

Being of the world means allowing Christ to remain as an icon to grace our wall. Christ the icon remains still and static passively accepting the role that we give to him allowing us to use our own means to accomplish our tasks.
Being in the world but not of it means being on the watch for a Jesus who comes on his donkey receives our welcome and continues to move on. It is in his passing through that we are confronted with the question of understanding what will bring us peace.

Here we are reminded of a parable that Jesus tried to prepare us with. This is the story of the king who gave his servants some money and then went away. When the king came back he only scolded the servant who did nothing with his money except try to protect it. The money given to the servants represents their lives. We cannot keep our lives and so we only have the choice of either trying to protect our lives or of investing, of giving our lives. Ironically enough this is the parable that Luke leads into Jesus’s entry on a donkey.
We know what it is to give our lives to our work or our family but to give our lives for Christ is to participate in something earlier, something deeper than the violence of world. It is to return, at least in part, to peace of creation. But first we must follow Jesus this Easter. Follow him and his donkey as he moves through us this Palm Sunday.
Follow him to the Last Supper where gives us the image and command of service to one another.
Follow him into the Garden of Gethsemane where he too wrestles with his own human understanding and his divine calling.
Follow, perhaps only at distance, to the hill of skulls on Good Friday where Jesus confronts the ultimate violence of death.
Watch for him on Easter Saturday as he prepares his return.
Celebrate him Easter Sunday and invite the peace of God in our midst.

Lord have mercy,
Amen

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The Shame of Egypt

Here is my sermon for the fourth Sunday in Lent.
Sin, Shame and Salvation

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The Priesthood of All Believers

Here is a link to my last sermon. I like it as a "text" but I may have prepared it too much that way because I feel the presentation was not as smooth as I would have liked.

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A New Start for a New Year

Well I am pleased to announce that I have been offered the position of associate pastor at Hillcrest Mennonite Church in New Hamburg Ontario (close to Kitchener/Waterloo). Here is a link to the sermon I preached on my candidating weekend. I start on January 9th. Crazy times.

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