Loving God with heart, soul, mind, strength and wallet?

Jesus was asked in the temple what the greatest commandment was. The implication was that the people doing the asking were somehow trying to trap him. The question is a pretty easy one and one that most Rabbis would answer the same way. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself." These commandments, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus are really the heart and soul of everything in the Bible. If we get this, we pretty much get the rest.

The problem is that we don't get it. We want to draw a circle. These people, us and our friends, are in. Those people aren't. Since they aren't in we are free to call them names, or tell them they need to change in order to be in. Names like liberal, conservative, right wing, leftist, fascist, socialist, 99% or 1%. So there we are empathizing with the 99% and blaming the 1%. They are the problem. If only they would get it the world would be saved, global warming would be reversed and we would all be able to frolic in a flawless utopian world.

Let's be honest with ourselves. It isn't going to happen. Not that the 1% won't get it, though I think it's unlikely, but that the world would be perfect if they did. We have as much capacity to mess things up as anyone else. Most of us do our jobs, spend our money at Walmart, or some similar store, then go home and watch TV or post comments on FB. Maybe we take our kids to hockey, Maybe we go to church on Sunday. But do we really give everything we are to loving God?

Probably not.

Especially when it comes to the wallet. Oddly enough this vital part of our lives was left out of the Great Commandment.  How do we love God with our wallets? Perhaps we support charity or give to the church. That's good, but how do we decide how much to give? Most people figure out their budget than tack charity onto the end as an after thought. Do we buy that new Xbox game or give money to the church? If you give more than $1500 a year to charity you are among the top 5% of philanthropists in the country! That's less than 5% of the average income in Canada. The average charitable donation deduction is more like a couple of hundred dollars. We 99% in this country don't do too well in spreading the little wealth we have around.

What would happen if we put our wallets where our heart, soul, mind and strength is supposed to be? If we loved our neighbours as much as we loved ourselves, or at least a lot more than our charitable giving seems to suggest?

Money is power, and even if we don't have as much as the 1%, we still have a fair bit. Let's not wait for the 1% to get it. Let's get it ourselves and start living, and giving, as if God mattered to our wallets as well as our hearts. After all Jesus said that our hearts will follow our treasure.

God isn't fair

I was looking at the reading from this morning and thinking about what was going on in the life of my family and I realized that in the midst of the questions about "Why?" that God isn't fair. God doesn't ask us whether we want what's behind door number two. We follow God or we don't. If we follow God it will take us places that we can't imagine, and some that we would prefer not to go. As a friend said, God doesn't tell us "This is what I want you to do, are you in?" Rather she asks "Will you follow me?"

The parable from this morning's readings tells of a landowner who hired people through the day to work in his vineyard. In the end they were all paid the same and some complained. The landowner rebuked the complainers for being envious of his generosity. We are all to much like those workers. We demand that we get rewarded for the extra work we put in. We want a bonus for pain and suffering.

The truth is that God has only one currency. That is God's love and grace, and when it comes to God's love and grace God knows no arithmetic. There is no subtraction, no division. Everyone gets the same thing because it is all that God can give.

The funny thing is that when we follow, when we trust, when we cast ourselves into that ocean of love and grace, it is enough. We may walk day by day, or even minute by minute, but we get through because God gets through with us.

God isn't about being fair. Instead God gives us far more than we deserve.

Where's a burning bush when you really need one?

We all know the story - Moses encounters God at the burning bush, then goes on to free the Hebrews from Egypt, with a little help from God. What we don't talk about much is that Moses was a runaway, a murderer. He didn't want the job. Whatever he was doing at the time (keeping sheep) had to be better than working for God.

Yet God can be convincing and Moses finds himself heading off to Egypt for an epic showdown with the Pharoah. The movies have us thinking that this was a quick and relatively painless happening, at least for the Hebrews, but the battle between God and the Pharoah lasted for years, and both sides suffered. The Hebrews begged Moses to stop; he was only making things worse.

The truth is that liberation is messy. It hurts. Some people are going to end up with less than what they started with, and they will resent it. Others don't want to deal with the fight to make things fair. Short term losses have them crying "enough already". Everybody blames the poor guy with the staff.

The news these days is full of stories of rebellion and unrest. Not all of it is in "those" countries where we expect people to throw off their chains and become just like us. Even the riots in Britain can be blamed on "the British tendency to violence" because that's easier than saying that the tinder for the riots was created by policies that shelter the rich while criminalizing the poor. I expect when the riots start here in North America there will be a lot of the same kind of posturing and blaming of the poor.

Our society is ripe for liberation, the tinder dry and waiting for the spark. The have's are protecting their wealth while the poor get poorer and the government appears to work for the rich. The only question really is what kind of spark is going to set off the fire?

I'm rather hoping that it is a spark from a burning bush. I think that the churches and the faithful have a call to speak the truth and call for liberation. None of us want the job. Too many of us are close enough to the wealthy (or think we are) to be comfortable with the idea of becoming prophets of God's egalitarian Dominion. Yet isn't that likely exactly what Jesus had in mind when he talked about us picking up our crosses? After all, Jesus talked more about money and poverty than about anything else. The whole Dominion of God is based on a reversal of rich and poor, ruler and servant.

The bush is burning, friends, whether we want to see it or not.

Summertime and the living is easy

It's summer, at least here in the northern hemisphere where I am writing this it is.Summer is the time when we try to kick back, enjoy the warmth and extra daylight, and maybe finally get to that top book on the pile we've been meaning to read all year.

This year the news isn't good. There are record floods across the country, and where there aren't floods there are fires. Scientists are now saying that we have left the period when we predicted dire consequences for global warming and are entering the time when we will experience the dire consequences of global warming.

In economic news we are waiting for the fall out of yet another country being forced to the wall by debt and given the choice of radical restructuring or paying up. It is a little like a visit from the arm and leg men of your local loan shark. Once again the workers are being told they must bear the brunt of the austerity measures while the people who caused the trouble sail on with their obscene wealth. Just in case you think it's only a problem in other countries, look at how the postal workers were demonized by Canada Post during the lock out, and the fact that the government arbitrator gave the union LESS than what Canada Post's last offer was.

We live in times when the rich will get richer while blaming the poor for the crisis. It's a global thing.

So what do we do?

Jesus calls to those who are weary and heavy laden to come to him. For his yoke is easy and his burden is light. We could just flock to Jesus and turn our backs on the world. Take care of ourselves and our own and wait for the promised End Times.

Only that's not what Jesus had in mind. He talks about living in a realm in which no preference is given to the rich, where humility and wonder are primary virtues, where people take care of everyone, not just their own.
Jesus' mission statement in Luke 4: 

The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the LORD's favor has come."

This isn't a mission of retreat and stay safe. This is a battle cry. We are called to live in the world as the incarnation of the Jesus who took these words from Isaiah as his mission. We are called to do what we can as individuals to make the world a better place. We don't need to save the world, just live our lives to make it a little better.

Oh, and that call to the weary and heavy laden? I heard a sermon preached, and I wish I could remember by whom, that the burden we carry for Jesus is light, not light as in not heavy, but light as in the light of God.

Enjoy your summer, walk, sit, fish or what ever in the presence of God, and let your light shine.

Let's stop "Christianizing" the world.

This week's Gospel Reading is the Great Commission. Jesus tells his followers to go make disciples of every nation. For centuries the Church has functioned on the understanding that this means making everyone in the world just like us. After all, if we are good Christians, then that must mean that a good Christian must look just like us, right?

This attitude has done incalculable damage to the world as well as to the Gospel. Peoples who would have made a unique contribution to what God is speaking to the world were told to wear clothes, or hats, to learn English, or some other European language, so they could properly understand the scriptures. Translation of the scripture was often slow and piecemeal.

I have read the Gospels and nowhere do I find Jesus telling his disciples to make the world one mass homogenous lump of believers. Instead he sends them out to preach the Dominion of God. That place that is made up of radical grace. A place that is near at hand and yet as far away as the end of the world. We wait for its coming with bated breath and yet we breathe it in with the fire and hope of Pentecost.

The Great Commission as I read it is a command to go and live as God's disciples in every place on earth. To live so that people will want to find their own relationship with God and be part of that fascinating, unsettling, joyous, place that is God's Dominion.

Is Jesus exclusive?

John 14:6 states "Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
This verse  has long been quoted as the definitive proof that the only way to salvation is to become Christian. Of course if becoming Christian is the exclusive path to salvation, then we have a moral obligation to convince everyone to become Christian by any means possible. This understanding has been the underpinning of Church outreach for centuries. Never mind that for those same centuries Church mission most often went hand in hand with conquest by the Western country that sponsored the mission.

When the British missionaries arrived in India, they discovered that there was already a thriving church there. It had been founded, according to tradition, by St. Thomas. Since it didn't look like the Christianity the missionaries were used to they at best ignored it and at worst tried to shut it down and replace it with the more acceptable British version.

We still do this. Indigenous people apparently have no ability to worship correctly, so we need to send out our own people to keep them in line and make sure they are orthodox. When we do this we are being hypocrites of the highest order. The modern church is the accretion of centuries of people bringing their own cultures and beliefs to the faith. Just because we are happy with where we are doesn't mean that the process will or should stop.

There are groups that are doing great things in the name of Christ, but I cringe whenever I hear the motivation for mission as "All those millions of people are going to Hell if we don't convert them." I don't worship a God who would send anyone to Hell unless the person truly desired to go there. The Gospels are pretty clear that Jesus died for all people. They don't say "all people who have a right and correct belief and say the proper version of the sinner's prayer". That's our stuff not God's.

So what is Jesus saying when he says "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but through me."? Let's back up a bit to see who John says Jesus is. John 1 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Later the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us. That Word made flesh is called Jesus. It is the Word that created who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In John, when Jesus makes the "I am" pronouncements he is speaking as the Word. I am Bread, I am Light, I am the Gate, I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Resurrection, I am the Way, I am the Vine. In each of these statements he is highlighting a way in which he reconciles the world to God.

These are not statements of exclusion, but rather radical inclusion. He is bread to any who hunger, light to those who need to see, the safe gate to refuge, the one who cares for the lost, hope for the dead, and the path to God, the one in whom we are connected to life. None of these things depend on us. We can't make Jesus and more or less Bread.

So what is our mission? We are to live our relationship with God through Jesus. We are, in our frailties, to incarnate the love of God in our lives. Following Jesus we too become bread, light, freedom, care, hope, guidance, and life. If people want to join us. Great. If the don't, they still belong to God.

We can listen with respect to the stories of other faiths, and tell our story with respect in turn. But our real task isn't in the talking, but the living.

I don't want to be a sheeple...

 In a recent debate around government and freedom, one of the people used the word “Sheeple”. He meant it to imply the kind of people who are easily led and kept happy by paternalistic government. The difficulty with saying that people who are like sheep are easily led is that sheep are not particularly easy to lead.

The Bible is full of stories about sheep and shepherds, and those stories are most often about the trials and tribulations of being a shepherd. Whether it is David wrestling a bear or the shepherd looking for the lost sheep, shepherding is a challenging occupation. Yet the challenge is not due to the sheep’s overwhelming intelligence, but more a result of its preoccupation with meeting the present need.

Most people are like sheep in that way. Our largest focus is on meeting our immediate desire. Want a bigger TV? There’s one on sale. Can’t afford it? There is just enough space on the credit card? Can’t pay the balance on the card? Pay the minimum payment, even if our statement tells us that our mortgage will be paid off first if we only pay the minimum. 

Our life style is unsustainable because we are never content with what we have. We always want what’s next. It is hard for us to imagine just stopping because we have enough.

God calls us sheep, because truthfully we act very much like sheep. That’s why we need a shepherd; someone who will guide us to pastures when we need food and to clean water when we need to drink. Jesus calls himself the good shepherd. Not because he intends to lead us around by the nose, but because his goal is our freedom. If we rest in him, then we can be content. If we are content then we can stop the frantic search for more.

We don’t want to be sheeple. We don’t want a government telling us what to think or do. But we do want to be God’s sheep, because what God wants is for us to be fully ourselves.

An Easter People

It has been said so many times that it is in the realm of cliche that we Christians are an Easter people. We are a people of the Resurrection. Christ is Risen, Hallelujah!


What does that mean by the way? If I came up to you on a Friday night at the pub, or Saturday morning at your kid's soccer practice and asked you about this resurrection thing, what would you say? Can you tell me, or any one for that matter, how the resurrection has changed your life?

We Christians define ourselves by the resurrection, but a lot of us struggle with how it works. Was it a bodily resurrection, a vision, a hallucination, a massive conspiracy? Do we experience the power of this moment in the moments of our days?

I think that it is less important to nail down what exactly happened on Easter morning than it is to look at it's result. Disciples who were afraid to step outside saw Jesus come among them. They touched him, and even Thomas who doubted had his moment. Two grieving followers met him unknowing on a road and were both rebuked and built up. So much so that they ran all the way back to Jerusalem to tell the others.

Perhaps being an Easter people means that we struggle with what it all means, that we lock ourselves away, or leave to go home and encounter our Christ in a way that changes us forever. Perhaps it means that we don't need answers at that soccer practice as much as the openness to the possibility that we might meet God on the field.

The stories of the resurrection are not tidy stories of Jesus coming back to pass on the torch before he retires to the big chair in the sky. They are messy tales of fear and doubt, wonder and love. For me being an Easter person doesn't mean having all the answers in a box, but rather having a heart brimming with questions, and those questions leading me to live differently, whether in church on Sunday or at soccer, or even the pub.

Christ is Risen
He is Risen indeed, Hallelujah.

Holy Week

We are coming to the end of Lent and in a matter of days chocolate, coffee or whatever it was that we gave up for Lent will be returned to us. That's assuming that we paid any attention to Lent at all, which is becoming a risky assumption.

In these days of increasingly aggressive secularization, living our faith on a daily basis instead of limiting it to an hour a week is a difficult task. Yet if we follow Jesus through the three years of his ministry depicted by the Gospels we will find a person who lived his faith day to day. Here was a person who was so close to God that he called him "Daddy" (a better translation of Abba than Father.) He spent as much time in prayer as he did doing the work of preaching and healing. In a very real way Jesus was the embodiment of his message.

The message that Jesus preached was the immanent Dominion of God. This was a way of being that demanded radical obedience to God and the ideals of God's justice. The first will be last, the poor will be uplifted.

What do we embody? It is easy to pick on the consumer society, but it is so easy to define ourselves by what we own or what we do to own it that God gets lost in the clutter.

If someone looks at our lives will they immediately sense our close and loving relationship with God?

How do we need to live for that to be true?

Are we prepared to live our lives that way?

These are the real questions we need to ponder during the season of Lent

The Spirit blows

It is 12:50 on Friday and the Spirit has been fairly brisk this week with the possibility of gale force winds in the near future...

The essential thing is that for the past number of years the reaction to gale force Holy Spirit has been to batten down the hatches and make sure that we stick to the United Church agenda. Even if we have forgotten what that is. Money is down, people are down (both in numbers and mood), the possibility of saving the church seems to be more down everyday.

At a recent meeting of Presbytery we spent 90 minutes looking at Creative Ministries, of which 30 minutes was actual discussion. We spent almost six hours talking about Creation and Empire, the idea of hiring a bus to take us to Conference was turned into a suggestion that a resolution be drafted asking Conference to hire the bus.

I am not saying that Creation and Empire is not an interesting and timely discussion, but it is one with which we are familiar. Creative Ministries less so. The United Church Manual pretty much suggests that a church is a group with a minister and a building. That limits us. There are congregations with no minister and no immediate hope of affording one. There are other with no buildings. Depending on circumstance these are both valid propositions.

Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night to ask about this Dominion of God thing that Jesus kept talking about. Jesus told him to look to the Spirit. "There's no telling what the Spirit will do." Jesus suggested that all Nicodemus' knowledge was useless in the face of God's action in the world. Nicodemus needed to start all over again with what is called "beginner's mind".

I think we need to come to our churches and our church meetings with beginner's mind. We need to see them like we have never done this before; then ask "How is this serving God?"

Asking that question may help us to refocus the discussion.

But I bet it won't make you popular at church meetings.

Light and loss

I am not preaching this week and I didn't get a post up last week. I am looking at the readings anyways and thought, what a change in mood in one week. Transfiguration has us up on the mountaintop with this Jesus, who the disciples are understanding is somehow the Son of God, even if they have no understanding of what that means. God tells them to "Listen to him", then they go back down the mountain and spend the next few chapters completely lost because they aren't hearing what they want from Jesus.

They want, like the crowd that is following them, a final earthly solution to this problem of the Romans. The return of the Golden Age of Israel, when they were more than a minor province of a massive empire.

We still look for those final earthly solutions. We want that glowing Jesus to wave a hand and make all those people who aren't like us to change. If only everyone was like us the world would be perfect.

Only it wouldn't be. The story of the Fall in the Garden is, for me, about how each person doesn't take responsibility for their action. They point their finger and cry "It's their fault, your fault, anything but my fault!" What the story shows is that we as humans don't want to accept responsibility for the mess we make of things. Whether it is global warming or the gap between the rich and poor, it is always someone else's fault.

The light of Christ shines to reveal our need for God. Why? So we can move into relationship with God and the world and take up our responsibility for each other and Creation. Look at Jesus, he goes into the desert and is tempted.

He is tempted to do good. Make stones into bread, not just for himself but for the world. He can feed everyone! How cool is that. Only he would spend all his time making stones into bread and nothing would change.

He could give into the world and go the path of power. Become King/Emperor, supreme ruler. Make good laws, enforce the Dominion of God. Only people have tried that and failed. The Dominion of God can only be entered by choice. Empire cannot defeat Empire.

He could prove with miracles and wonders that he is God's Son. Only he would have to come up with ever more spectacular wonders and people would still not believe. Because believing would mean they would have to take responsibility for their lives and that it too hard.

The light of revelation is meant for the mountain tops. It is the experience that defies language. We can't explain it, we can only live it. The temptation will be to try to translate it into something that is useful in this world, but that doesn't work.

All we can do is go down the mountain and try to listen, listen, listen for that whisper of the Spirit that tells us that we, and they, need to choose love for ourselves.

Singing Traditionally

We are singing through the service this Sunday. I spent a few weeks collecting lists of people's favourite hymns. They range from "As the Deer" to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". It is always a fascinating exercise for me to wander through the hymns that the congregation choose as their favourite.

The hymns we will be singing range from lyrical melodies to the tunes that we think of as hymn tunes, but were the bar tunes of the day. The words express a wide range of understanding of who we are in relation to God.

This exercise of singing through Sunday reminds me of a discussion about tradition I was part of at a recent course. The people in the churches think of hymns as "traditional" particularly if they were written pre-1920. Folks like singing the traditional hymns even as they struggle with their political correctness conscience. The contemporary hymns are a challenge with tunes that aren't always easy to sing and words that strive for unfamiliar concepts.

Yet neither the old hymns or the new are traditional in the sense of being part of Wesley's quadrilateral: Scripture, Tradition, Experience, and Revelation. The tradition here has less to do with the exact words or hymns we sing than the fact that from the days of Moses the people have sung to God.

So it is so much about what we sing as to whom we sing our songs. As long as we sing to God's glory, the hymns we sing are part of a grand tradition, even if it is the first time we sing that hymn.

Being Salt, Being Light

Whenever I look at Jesus telling us that we are the salt of the earth, the light of the world I think of this anthem based on Psalm 34:8.

Jesus is telling that it is our work as his followers to bring out the complexity of the flavours of life. We tend to over use salt these days. It is cheap and easy to get. In Jesus' time it was a precious commodity. It would have been used sparingly to enhance the meal.

The trouble with salt is that if you overuse it, all other flavours are overwhelmed and all you taste is salt. I often order meals in restaurants without salt because I want to taste the food not the salt.

What has this to do with being the salt of the earth?

After centuries of being the religion of the establishment we often still think in terms of making everyone around us in Christians. We want to fill our churches, we would like our neighbours to think like us. Life would be so much easier. But that isn't what we are supposed to do. We are to be the Gospel and be ready to tell people about Jesus. But we aren't supposed to convert them. That, Paul says, is the work of the Holy Spirit. Our living and telling the story of our faith helps to bring out the flavour of the people around us.

Being the light of the world is very much the same thing. We shine the light of God into hidden places. We cry out for justice and peace. We illuminate what the world might be like if all followed the way of love. But if everyone is Light the same we we are Light, then we wouldn't be able to see anything.

Art needs a wide range of values both light and shadow. In our Western, white culture we unthinkingly associate light/white with goodness and shadow/darkness with evil. This is a tremendous injustice. God made both the night and the day. Our light will produce both light and shadow. It isn't our job to proclaim our notion of good and evil, but to proclaim God in Christ crucified. That is a hard thing since Christ crucified doesn't lend itself to creating empires and being a power in the word.

So I'm back to the beginning. We are to be salt and light so that people may taste and see how good God is.

Strange Blessings

I was looking at the readings for the week and wondering how I was going to approach the Beatitudes this time. I happened to glance at the opening lines of Working Preacher WorkingPreacher.org and the comment that the blessings are not a prescription of what we need to do to be blessed, but rather descriptions of people who are already blessed.

We are already blessed. What a concept! We don't need to add "hunger and thirst after righteousness" to our calendars after all. The point that Jesus is making is that we are blessed in our lives right now. We don't need to add anything more to attract God's loving grace. It is here and now.

From people who mourn to people who are persecuted, probably even including people whose calendars are too full, all of us can experience God by just looking around for a moment. The blessings are there.

All that is left to us is to be grateful for God's blessings to us. That lead us to the next interesting truth. Gratitude makes us happier. The more we give thanks the happier we are about our lives. We don't need more stuff, we don't need better lives, we just need to be grateful for the gifts we have in our lives and we will find joy.

We're blessed. Really.

The sins of the world

The John reading this week has John the Baptist looking out over the crowd and seeing Jesus. "Look there," he says, "there is the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world."

For those who favour the idea that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb whose blood sponges away the blot of our sin, there isn't much more to say. We sin. Jesus dies. We're forgiven. Repeat as necessary. I don't mean to make light of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, but there has to be more to it than that.

It seems to me that the sins of the world are not retreating in the face of the cross. In fact, all too often, people's attachment to the cross just adds to the burden. The more we claim exclusive rights to heaven, where finally only the good people like us will be allowed in, the more damage we do to the Dominion of God here on earth. Our sin is that we would rather wait until we die and go to be with God to be reconciled to our brothers and sisters. In doing so we waste our living.

Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He forgave people on the spot. There was no quiz to find out if they were truly repentant. Sometimes he didn't even ask; he just forgave them. His harshest words were reserved for the people who insisted that the world continue to be divided into sinner and non sinner. One of the many reasons for Jesus' death was that he challenged the understood categories that separated people.

Sin is what separates us. Sin isn't the stuff we do, it is why we do the stuff we do. Taking away the sin will take away the things that divide us. The funny thing is that Jesus left us here to continue his work. We are to be Jesus in the world. Somehow we got it turned around and began separating the people into good and bad, our kind of people and the other kind, us and them.

We need to be taking away the sin of the world. We need to be forgiving people, even before they ask, even before they know they need it.

We need to start with ourselves.