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.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Thursday, February 17, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Merry Un-Christmas
In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the math behind the un-Birthday. We only have one Birthday, but 364 possible un-Birthdays. Statistically you will do much better with the un-Birthdays.
The same math will hold true for Christmas. There are a lot more days that aren't Christmas than are. I'm not advocating that we should decorate the house, eat turkey (or our feast of choice) and exchange gifts every day, but the bedrock essentials of Christmas are there for the celebrating every day that we wake up.
Christmas highlights what God wants to give us each and every day; Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. Why wait until December 25th to enjoy these gifts? Why not bask in love on March 23, or live in joy on July 2?
When the last turkey sandwich is consumed, the tree relegated to its box and the decorations packed away for another year, the most important stuff will stay with us. God came to us, so that we could return to God. Today, tomorrow and tomorrow.
Have a blessed Christmas, and a very merry un-Christmas.
The same math will hold true for Christmas. There are a lot more days that aren't Christmas than are. I'm not advocating that we should decorate the house, eat turkey (or our feast of choice) and exchange gifts every day, but the bedrock essentials of Christmas are there for the celebrating every day that we wake up.
Christmas highlights what God wants to give us each and every day; Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. Why wait until December 25th to enjoy these gifts? Why not bask in love on March 23, or live in joy on July 2?
When the last turkey sandwich is consumed, the tree relegated to its box and the decorations packed away for another year, the most important stuff will stay with us. God came to us, so that we could return to God. Today, tomorrow and tomorrow.
Have a blessed Christmas, and a very merry un-Christmas.
Friday, December 3, 2010
This whole Christmas thing
Every year about this time as the stores begin their onslaught of Christmas sales and people make their sacrifices to the gods of consumerism. Each year it becomes easier too. Once we had to actually go to the bank and take out money. Now we can simply swipe a card and, if the stress hasn't made us forget the PIN, we're done. Laden down with our bounty of stuff we head home to wrap the gifts, decorate the house and snarl at anybody with the temerity to disturb our celebration of peace and joy.
At the same time the "Put Christ back in Christmas" people come out in all their forms urging the world to remember that this whole thing is about a baby born in a manger whose name is Jesus. They are right. It is Jesus' birth we are celebrating. Without him we wouldn't have Christmas.
We would, however, probably still have some huge consumerist binge, but it would be called Solstice or Saturnalia, or some other catchy phrase. It's just that since the empire took over Christianity we have had a hard time separating ourselves as Christians from ourselves as inhabitants of a world that really doesn't believe the same things that we do.
I'm all for putting Christ back into Christmas, in my own personal life and in the life of the church which I serve. But can I really expect the Wal-mart employee who is not Christian to put Christ into their Christmas? While it is absolutely essential for people of faith to celebrate with faith, it is also necessary to recognize that we no longer rule the world. We are a minority.
I am not going to stop wishing people a Merry Christmas, because that would mean that people of other faiths and other celebrations would also have to stop. I will not stop reading the Christmas story in church and in my home, but I am not going to demand that Frosty and Rudolph be replace by the Little Drummer Boy and the Littlest Angel as specials on TV.
I truly believe that Christians were never meant to be the majority. We are supposed to the people on the edges who call out for justice and peace. If we become too strident about things that don't directly effect the Gospel, then we won't be listened to when it is really important.
So go ahead, put Christ back in Christmas, but put him back in Valentine's and St. Patrick's Easter and Canada Day or July 4. In fact put him back into every day you live - and that peace and joy we celebrate at Christmas may just last through the entire year.
Even through Christmas.
At the same time the "Put Christ back in Christmas" people come out in all their forms urging the world to remember that this whole thing is about a baby born in a manger whose name is Jesus. They are right. It is Jesus' birth we are celebrating. Without him we wouldn't have Christmas.
We would, however, probably still have some huge consumerist binge, but it would be called Solstice or Saturnalia, or some other catchy phrase. It's just that since the empire took over Christianity we have had a hard time separating ourselves as Christians from ourselves as inhabitants of a world that really doesn't believe the same things that we do.
I'm all for putting Christ back into Christmas, in my own personal life and in the life of the church which I serve. But can I really expect the Wal-mart employee who is not Christian to put Christ into their Christmas? While it is absolutely essential for people of faith to celebrate with faith, it is also necessary to recognize that we no longer rule the world. We are a minority.
I am not going to stop wishing people a Merry Christmas, because that would mean that people of other faiths and other celebrations would also have to stop. I will not stop reading the Christmas story in church and in my home, but I am not going to demand that Frosty and Rudolph be replace by the Little Drummer Boy and the Littlest Angel as specials on TV.
I truly believe that Christians were never meant to be the majority. We are supposed to the people on the edges who call out for justice and peace. If we become too strident about things that don't directly effect the Gospel, then we won't be listened to when it is really important.
So go ahead, put Christ back in Christmas, but put him back in Valentine's and St. Patrick's Easter and Canada Day or July 4. In fact put him back into every day you live - and that peace and joy we celebrate at Christmas may just last through the entire year.
Even through Christmas.
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