Text: Luke 15:11-32
If you leave the gloom of London and you seek a glowing land,
Where all except the flag is strange and new
There’s a bronzed and stalwart fellow who will grip you by the hand
And greet you with a welcome warm and true;
For he’s your younger brother, the one you sent away,
Because there wasn’t room for him at home;
And now he’s quite contented, and he’s glad he didn’t stay
And he’s building Britain’s greatness o’er the foam.
You’ve a brother in the Army, you’ve another in the Church;
One of you is a diplomatic swell;’
You’ve had the pick of everything and left him in the lurch;’
And yet I think he’s doing very well
I’m sure his life is happy, and he doesn’t envy yours’
I know he loves the land his pluck has won;
And I fancy in the years unborn while England’s fame endures
She will come to bless with pride - the Younger Son
I opened this week with those opening and closing stanzas of a longer poem by Robert Service, “The Younger Son”, from my 1910 pocket edition of Songs of a Sourdough. I closed with the opening and closing stanzas of another long poem in the same volume, “The Parson’s Son”, which paints a less positive tale of a younger son seeking his fortune in the New World.
Everyone was dealt a playing card this morning, with a single word label: Prodigal, Father, or Brother. Which card were you dealt? ‘Prodigal’ is a strange word, rarely used except in relation to this story in the gospel of Luke – and the word is not event in the text! It comes from a Latin marginal note in the Vulgate bible, upon which 16th century English translations were based, and they adopted ‘The Prodigal Son’ as the title of this parable. If you read a German bible, it would call the story ‘der verlohren sohne’, ‘the lost son’, while other modern bibles and commentaries call it ‘2 sons’ or in one edition, ‘the powerless father’.
‘Prodigal’ means a wasteful, profligate spender. But as I preached here in Advent, what’s the true line between use, misuse, and waste? Our subculture is obsessed with making, saving, and spending time and money – and could do with a bit more wasteful relaxation of control, I’d say. We risk losing our sense of gift and celebration if we only measure transactions in terms of a balance of benefit and burden, earning and worth and just deserts, rather than mercy and grace.
Looking around you at others dealt the roles of Prodigals, Fathers, and Brothers, and holding one of those roles yourself - who do you see? I acknowledge that most of us learned this story as a moralistic tale of the mistake of the younger son forgiven by the generous father, as a warning allegory that God would forgive Prodigals if they groveled. I invited you to unlearn your old version of the story, and try to hear another version, as if for the first time.
There once was a man who had 2 sons… and the younger one came…
The younger one came to his father, and said give me my inheritance now, ‘donatio inter vivos’, not ‘donatio mortis causa’. What’s the inheritance he’s got coming? Palestinian tradition of the time gave 2/3 of the liquid assets to the elder, 1/3 to the younger – arguably with a discount for early taking – and land title by primogeniture to the one elder. As anybody knows who has administered an estate or a matrimonial property division, even 1/3 of liquidity is a lot to ask!
The father has been dealt control. The brother has been dealt an entitlement to 2/3 liquid assets, plus land. The youngest has been dealt less, for later. So the guy dealt the least and last initiates change. Entrepreneurial, an emigrant, the guy with get up and go got up and went. To another country he got up and went, and spent it all in riotous living, until there’s nothing left. Then he takes a job, an ugly job, tending pigs, which are for Jews unclean, as well as dirty.
It just gets worse, when famine in the land leaves this immigrant with the worst job living in hunger and poverty. The pea pods fed to the pigs look good, like corn cob silage in Ontario. The younger son comes to himself, and things ‘how many of my father’s employees have more than enough - I will rise and go to my father and I will say “I have sinned against you and against heaven, I am no longer worthy to be called your son, treat me like a wage slave!’
So the youngest took the weak hand he was dealt, and played it boldly and badly. Hindsight calls it wasteful and prodigal, when he comes home repentant, his tail between legs. Have you never been prodigal? Have you never spent too much, too fast? Have you never risked and lost? Who has never lost a job, claimed employment insurance, taken a business loss, impaired her credit rating, or even bankrupted? After all, as I say of myself, ‘good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment!
Are we not all Prodigal? We live in the first world, middle class, suburban, spending more, faster, than we have made or earned. Our personal debt soars faster than even our collective public debt at every level of government. Our generation in our part of the world consumes more resources than anybody, anywhere, anytime. How many paychecks is anyone from trouble? How many are at risk from changes in rates and spreads?
The Prodigal was dealt the weak hand, and played it boldly and badly. He came back with his tail between his legs. But who cannot identify with his choices? Who dare condemn it outright? Only the smug complacency of risk averse elders who’ve been dealt better!
Now it’s the Father’s time to play the hand he was dealt. First he permitted the lad to pre-take his expected inheritance, and now he has to meet him coming home. This Father meets this Prodigal halfway – forgives him halfway through his groveling speech, kills the fatted calf, and throws a big party. (Ken Brown tells me that when he’d come home from college 70 years ago, his father would say ‘let’s kill the prodigal calf, here comes the fatted son’)
Those dealt this Father card could identify with how he chose to play it. How many adult kids are living in suburban basements? We call it ‘failure to launch’, ‘yoyos’, ‘rebounds’, or the ‘boomerang’ generation. Young adults come back due to recessions, cutbacks, marital breakups, disabilities – and because Boomers like me won’t make room for them in the workplace. Parents finance room and keep, and another degree, or a college certificate.
How’d your response compare to this model of a generous Father? Were you as uncritical? The Observer column of ethical challenges 2 months ago proposed an adult kid who was over mortgaged, out of work, and you have a windfall – do you share it? A member of this church wrote in to oppose the Observer’s advice to pay up. Our member objected to spending good money after bad, and proposed ‘tough love’ instead. What side do you take?
What side was taken with you and for you in wider spheres? The decade of Jubilee petitions had our denomination leading the campaign to forgive international debt choking third world nations.
The social welfare state and social safety net is fraying and decaying. When you get to the end of EI, as many autoworkers from the current recession are discovering, you have a long way to fall to the next net. What ‘social wage’ will be paid from what capital to what needs? Taxpayer or voter, you are invited to get tough on law and order, and punish failure to motivate workers.
The third act of the parable is the Brother’s response of resentment and complaint. ‘I was good, and worked like a slave. Nobody ever threw me a party - not even a goat, let alone a fatted calf.’
Surely this role is dealt to each of us often, and this is how we are tempted to play it righteously, as if we were self-made men, as if we earned or deserved better. What’s our incentive to be good? Where’s the carrot for the good guys? ‘If you’re 50 and over, good driving record, you’ve earned the right’ – to what? You deserve good things, say the marketers. Don’t you?
The distributive mercy of the Fathers grace and forgiveness does not operate in a vacuum. Brothers know that it conflicts with a meritocracy – and we cherish our myths of meritocracy in this subculture of ours. We drive ourselves and our kids with it: work hard, study hard, excel and pay off. Outcomes are based in how the cards are dealt as much as how we play them -
what is waste, what is use in the making, spending, saving of time and money, from what, and for what? The Brother is estranged, joyless – too familiar a role for us.
The last word is the Father’s:
This son of mine was lost, and is found
Was dead and is alive –
We had to celebrate that!
You were dealt a card this morning: Prodigal, Father, Brother. Which card did you get? How did you imagine playing it? You were dealt some cards today – and this season, year, decade, generation. Some are dealt Father, some Prodigal, some Brother. How will we play them?
How will we recognize others’ roles? I invited you to put your playing card on the offering plate, along with your intention of how you would play the similar role you are dealt this week.
Parables are polyvalent, subversive of any one moral truth, like grace and forgiveness, or law and order and tough love. They are not simply allegories with morals – they are better! If you have ears to hear, they can be something that works away at us, if we can unlearn the version we thought we knew, and hear again for the first time.
Having opened with Robert Service’s positive spin on those dealt the Prodigal card, and playing it well as emigrants and entrepreneurs, I closed with a bleaker reflection, the opening and closing stanzas of “The Parson’s Son”:
This is the song of the parson’s son, as he squats in his shack alone
On the wild, weird nights when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone,
And it’s sixty below, and couched in the snow the hungry huskies moan….
(The tale of a failed prodigal extends, to invite us to imagine with some empathy,
a man who waited too long to repent and return - the poem ends like this:)
This was the song of the parson’s son, as he lay in his bunk alone
Ere the fire went out and the cold crept in, and his blue lips ceased to moan,
And the hunger-maddened malamutes had torn him flesh from bone.
What is the role you are dealt today, and this week? What role will people see you in? How will you play the cards that you are dealt? Who would you rather be? The spendthrift or the repentant Prodigal of the parable, or the too late repentant 'parson's son', too proud to return to forgiveness? The generous and forgiving Father who knows when and how to celebrate, or some ‘tough love’, 'law-and-order' guy? The pouting righteous Brother, or one with a bit more empathy and sense of fun? Who will you recognize around you, each dealt some hands, and playing them in their own ways? I sent you out with our Lenten commissioning:
May you see the face of Christ in everyone you meet
And may everyone you meet see the face of Christ in you.
At least, let's try to be a bit less grumpy out there, eh?
So be it. Amen
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Sunday, March 14, 2010
Prodigal
Monday, March 8, 2010
From Loneliness to Community
Thornhill Ministerial Ecumenical Lenten Service, March 7, 2010
Texts: Judges 17, Acts 4:32-5:11
At this service at the Thornhill Presbyterian Church, led by the worship team of the Hills Community Church, from the Pentecostal movement in our tradition, I began by feigning preoccupation with my ipod, and interruption by my cellphone, while nursing my Tim Horton’s coffee. I asked if I had somehow caused offence, and transgressed some rules of Thornhill worship traditions – as if I didn’t know I had!
Did it bother you that I appeared to prefer listening to the tune on my ipod to hearing the scripture, or that I said it out loud that I already read the lesson, and didn’t need to hear it? Did if offend you that I took a phone call rather than beginning the sermon, or that I confirmed loudly that I’d rather talk with the caller than to you, and then loudly spoke to them, dismissive of you? Was the Tim’s coffee offensive to you for being in the sanctuary, or for gambling on the rim?
As a High Park resident, commuting daily by TTC, VIVA, York Region and Brampton Transit, perhaps I am too aware of the way people live with buds in their ears, and coffee in their hands. When my routine is regular enough, I recognize the same faces on the subway or bus or streetcar, and develop the illusion that I am acquainted with those other passengers. I know where they get on and off – and am sometimes tempted to tell them where to get off! Is that community?
Folk wisdom has it that ‘you’re known by the company you keep’. That can mean that you are assumed to be like those with whom you live and work and play. It can also mean that those with whom you keep company are the ones who get to know you. If, indeed you’re known by the company you keep, then how are you known? With whom are you associated – what labels do you choose, and which are pinned upon you? Who, rather, knows you from true experience?
We have heard from Heather Vais first about loneliness, then about the importance of moving from loneliness to solitude, that the journey begins under your feet, where you are. We heard from Paul Gibbon about the choice between exclusion or embrace of the other, moving from loneliness to relationship. But if we have found our feet in solitude, our hearts in relationship, what is the nature of this next step, of “community”?
A search of my old concordances did not even yield the word ‘community’. My old bibles do not use the English work ‘community’ to translate any Hebrew or Greek term. It’s only in the more recent New International, Good News or Message translations that ‘community’ is included in biblical diction. By the time I found those texts online, my mind had already gone to the texts you heard from Judges and Acts, as words about community, without using the word.
The first lesson, Judges 17, was about a time of pretty loose affiliation among the people of God, near anarchy, compared to the preceding accounts of Joshua’s conquest or occupation of Canaan. The anarchy is punctuated occasionally by tales of judges who rose up when there was a need: Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon and Samson. The editorial spin of this book is not just promoting these heroes. It’s also ruefully reminding us of the selfishness, pettiness and divisiveness of our people in those times, after Moses and Joshua, and before the kings of Israel.
The man Micah in chapter 17 is no hero, and not one of the judges. He is not the prophet whose words make a wee book later in the Hebrew scriptures. This Micah took money from his mother: 1,100 pieces of silver, about 28 kilos. That’s the same amount the Philistines paid Delilah to betray Samson. Coming so close in the same book, it’s like saying ’30 pieces of silver’ to a Christian. You’re known by the company you keep, and the people of God living amidst the nations in Canaan were picking up some bad habits. Or maybe we should blame his mom.
The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, it seems. Micah’s mother makes a big show of cursing when the money is gone, and of blessing her son when it’s back. She says she’ll consecrate the silver to God in an idol for the household shrine. Then she just commits 200 pieces to the art, and keeps the other 900 for herself. Her mansion looks great, she talks big, but it’s all done on the cheap. Can you imagine a scene like that in a Thornhill monster home? Can you imagine someone talking a big charitable game, but contributing less? How about buying ‘bling’ cheap?
Micah sets up one of his own kids as priest for his family shrine. You’re known by the company you keep, and perhaps this was the kid that wasn’t good for much in the market. Religious work doesn’t need the best and the brightest, does it? But when an itinerant Levite, from Benjamin in Judah, comes along, Micah offers him 10 pieces of silver a year and keep, to give some class and status to the family chapel. Putting real Levite on the domestic payroll is like having your own M.Div or D.Min chaplain to impress your neighbours! Can you imagine?
In those days there was no king in Israel;
All the people did what was right in their own eyes.
I suggested that this model of religious community is on the ‘thin’ end. You make up your religion as you go along, on a sort of pay-as-you-play basis. Son gives back what he stole, and mom talks a big thanks, but does much less, then the grandkid gets the job of family conscience, till a classier service provider is found. It’s not so much an evil scene, as it is a tragic image of barbarians living in the ruins of a greater tradition, that has degenerated from the days of Abraham Isaac, Jacob, Moses, or Joshua. Can you imagine such a time?
The second lesson, from Acts 4 and 5, was intended to present a biblical account of ‘thick’ community on the other end of the spectrum. Paul Gibbon suggested it last week. The early Christian commune described in the Acts of the Apostles is more familiar to us than is the ‘thin’ anarchies of Judges, but I’d confess that we don’t practice the model in our congregation, nor I suspect do Paul’s Baptist congregation. It scared folks then, and does now.
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul,
And no one claimed private ownership of any possessions,
But everything they owned was held in common…
There was not a needy person among them,
For as many as owned lands or houses sold them
And brought the proceeds of what was sold.
You first, eh? If the ‘thin’ model let the son give back what he stole, the mother to promise big and deliver small, and to keep it all in the family by using a grandkid to mind the shrine, or paying a pittance for a freelance Levite – here’s total commitment in the ‘thick’ model. You convert any assets to liquid cash, and deliver it to the common purse: ‘from each according to his means, to each according to her needs’. After all, we’ve got enough, if we share. Pause. Think. What’s your doctrine of human nature, and what do you already expect to go wrong in this?
Barnabas, ‘son of encouragement’, sells his land to contribute the proceeds to the common kitty. Ananias, consulting with his wife Sapphira, sells but holds back a bit from the common purse. They both get caught, and struck dead for it. All they were doing was like Micah’s mother, promising it all and committing some, in a prudent cautious way. Peter doesn’t deny that the land was theirs, and the money was theirs – but to purport to commit it all, and only commit part, was lying to the ‘thick’ community. ‘You’re known by the company you keep’ Really known.
We are not Acts communitarians in our congregation. We don’t tithe, and some of them have been known to miss worship some Sundays. But dozens of our folks live in a pretty ‘thick’ form of community. They participate a lot, over a long time, and people notice when they are missing. They know each other and love each other. They know whom you can count on to bring the loaf of sandwiches or the tray of squares for the ecumenical service, or the casserole to the bereaved, or who will visit the deathbed. Who talks big, and does less? We know them, and love them.
We also enjoy hundreds of folks who live in a pretty ‘thin’ form of religious community, on our mailing lists and in the census as United Church, and visiting for occasional rites. I call it our ‘broad shallow pool of affiliates’. I met someone this Sunday morning who assured me she’s a member of our church – this was just the first time she had dropped in since I started in 2007!
We live in a postmodern time, with no one shared frame of reference. Our bible and our church include both ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ models of community. Who knows the playlist of the other person’s ipod? Why do they choose to construct a virtual social network on their handheld device, rather than smiling at people present nearby? Alienation, rootlessness, and what Barry Schwartz calls ‘the paradox of choice’ can leave us lonely in a crowd, reaching out.
What is it like to be lonely in a crowd? Ken Yee passed me a book review from last Sunday’s Toronto Star, of a book called ‘Lonely’ by Emily White, a successful lawyer who did not feel connected, and found that interacting could be terrifying when she was already feeling stressed and threatened. She found that superficial conversations left her feeling “doubly alone”, and intimate conversations referred to others marriages and children – she was single. Heather Vais referred to this book frequently in her sermon 2 weeks ago – it has struck a nerve.
We may be ‘known by the company we keep’ from the outside: marketing pollsters have gone from demographics to psychographics, construing ‘tribes’ of consumers, by postal code or by patterns of Air Miles points. My denomination can produce a printout of this stuff. But ‘thin’ community feels to me like Micah’s shrine, and I confess that I am suspicious of it. Just because the bible tells about near anarchy in Judges does not mean it is promoting the model. Being known by external affiliation begs some questions of being ‘known by the company you keep’.
Some of my suspicion of the virtual community replacing our actual community, is that we don’t really know each other, through a pattern of expectations, disappointments, and reconciliations. We’ve all heard the stories of people inviting hundreds of Facebook friends to a party, having dozens RSVP yes, resulting in a near empty room. We may sneer – except that it’s pretty much what happens every Sunday morning at my church. The difference is our ‘tight’ or ‘thick’ confession that our ways are known, and our hope is to be loved anyhow at our church.
What’s your Lenten confession and repentance? Where is your church on the spectrum between the extremes of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ community? How does that address your own isolation and loneliness, and what does it offer to lonely folks in the crowds around us? What might we change to move not only from loneliness to solitude and to relationship, but also to community?
I think that in our congregation, most of us enjoy a pretty ‘thin’ community. We like to come when we cant, do what we choose, and feel we belong. We are great at greetings at the door, smiles and nods, but after years, we don’t know each others’ names. We get modest satisfaction from kicking in a bit of silver and enjoying the current Levite on staff. Lonely people in the crowds can get that in lots of retail places that are open longer hours – but they recognize our ‘thin’ model of community when they visit us!
I also think that in our congregation, a few dozen of us live in pretty ‘thick’ community. We are known by the company we keep. We are known, but loved anyhow! We have a steady accountability – for many stretching over decades – for showing up, and for participating. We come to church to see our people! Lonely people in the crowds around us are aching for that – but can feel excluded from it, visiting as outsiders, or scared of it, seeing its demands. You can’t just buy it, ‘add water and mix’. We can’t easily convert ‘thins’ to ‘thicks’.
Some of the challenges for us will be to mix oil and water, or oil and vinegar, ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ models of community. We are surrounded by 2.5 million people in Toronto, 5 million in the GTA, many or perhaps most of whom are desperately lonely in the crowds. We live in a time of near anarchy and ‘thin’ community. The extreme other end of the spectrum, the ‘thick’ model of early Acts, would be called a cult now, or at least a sect. Our place on the spectrum is likely to be found somewhere in between, and should be explicit, to avoid hurting more lonely people.
Professional theologians hear how much I stole from Charles Taylor. The Canadian philosopher names our narcissistic culture of ‘authenticity’ with some empathy. He tries to find redeeming value in our ‘expressive individualism’ beyond the one good of ‘self-fulfillment’. He’s engaged in exploration of moral sources, for as Peter Emberly, a younger Canadian, puts it, “How long can our consensus on moral norms survive, without shared moral sources? Not long.” We need a community of discourse to explore our moral sources, and reshape our moral norms, and you’ll recognize that I stole the terms ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ from Jurgen Habermas’ discourse theory.
Let’s not stop at theological reflection, though. We need a community of action and service, because that’s where we really get to be known by the company we keep, and learn to be accountable and forgiven. I’m hoping you were left wondering a bit about my ipod, my phone, my coffee, and your own religious community. I’m hoping you will find that these stories of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ community help you do your work. God knows there are a lot of lonely people out there to whom we owe no less, and no more, than a bit ‘thicker’ experience of community.
I concluded with a rewrite of Dorothee Soelle’s poem on ‘friendship’, restated as ‘community’:
Keep us from the romantic illusion god
That community is made in heaven, and falls like rain from the skies
And from the conservative illusion that it grows slowly over the years, like a tree
Teach us that community takes work, and risk, to move from ‘thin’ toward ‘thick’ -
Assure us that you know us and love us already, and know the company we keep
And invite us into the risks and rewards, of being known by the company we keep.
Amen
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Lukewarm
Text: Revelation 3:14-22
Some of you know we’re reading Revelation this season, the last book of the bible that we trust and dust, and a book we fear by its reputation and by our neighbours’ versions of what it says. We’ve had great turnout at Glynnwood, and couple of dozen audio CDs and packages out here. Lots of our hymns are based in Revelation, plus several phrases we use in funerals – but only a fool would preach Revelation in a United Church.
We call the study “Peeling the Onion – Imagine that!” Revelation is like an onion. It has an initial brown wrapper, beginning and end, and a skinny first layer, where John says hello and goodbye, and tells you what he’s going to tell you, then tells you that he has told you. The deeper you cut, the more it stinks and your eyes sting and weep. Battles of good and evil in apocalyptic imagery of Armageddon should be approached slowly, with caution and good company.
Today, we heard from the first meaty layer, the messages to the 7 churches in Turkey. In two weeks, we’ll hear from the last meaty bit, the vision of a heavenly city in the end. If you want the stinky stinging weepy part, come next Sunday afternoon (unless you’re heading to the Sikh temple tour), and the Easter Saturday sharing of what people will have sketched on their own blank scrolls of how they visualize what they hear in this most kaleidoscopic of bible books.
John tells us that we was on the island of Patmos, in the Mediterranean off Turkey, because of the gospel – not necessarily bad news. He was ‘in the Spirit’ on the Lord’s Day, and had a vision of a figure with a white robe and gold sash, bright face, white hair and beard, and bronze legs. Was the figure 6 feet tall, or 6 miles tall? He’s surrounded by 7 lamp stands – a menorah, or a set of tiki torches from a luau? He’ s holding 7 stars in his right hand. Got a picture yet?
John says the figure tells him that the lamps are 7 churches in Turkey, and the stars are 7 angels of the churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodocea. This is unfamiliar to us, re-enchanting our disenchanted universe, but it’s an old way of thinking and talking about transpersonal entities in imagery, not just ‘isms’ and ‘ologies’, ‘corporations’ and ‘institutions’.
We do use this kind of language in branding imagery. In hockey, we have Leafs, Hawks, Red Wings (an automobile wheel with a bird’s wing), and cartoon Ducks. Tonight, millions will tune in to Oscar, a figure standing for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, and see if Avatar wins. Nations have emblems: American Eagle, Russian Bear, or Canadian Beaver. We don’t confuse the signifier with the signified – and neither did John! If I say ‘my love is like a red, red rose’, you don’t expect a photo of a flower in my wallet – do you?
You know something about the collective identity of a congregation, to? Does a community, congregation, have an angel? Does it have character and soul, a distinctive style over time? Does it have ‘DNA’ a pattern replicated though individuals come and go? Do we confuse the figures with the thing figured? John sees 7 lamps for 7 churches in Turkey, and 7 stars for the angels of these congregations, and carries messages for each one, like an HR or school report.
For each community, God through Jesus through John through the book says to the angel of the church, ‘this I like, this I don’t, and here’s an idea for you to work on’. The first churches face risks of assimilation and compromise, and internal conflicts. The next ones face persecution and division. Each gets encouragement, challenge, and promises. Then we get to Laodicea, and the message to the congregation there, which was the lesson for today.
Laodicea, I am told, was a rich city. They rebuilt from an earthquake without imperial funding, decades before John wrote, and again after. Their big industries were banking for the trade running through the town, Phrygian powder for a medicinal eye salve, and shiny black wool for luxury black apparel.
The main civic weakness was water supply. Colossae to the southeast had cool mineral springs, and north over Lycus valley, Hieropolis had hot springs, which left white mineral deposits on a cliff facing Laodicea, called the ‘cotton castle’. Water was piped in to Laodicea, and when it arrived, was tepid and stinking to drink. Have you ever had water at a farm with a bad well?
The church in Laodicea was apparently smug, comfortable, and felt they had no problems, unlike their neighbouring struggling congregations. Their sense of themselves is challenged: you think you are rich, and need nothing? Think again! You think you’ve got eye salve? You’re blind! You think your fancy goods are great? You’re naked! Remember, the neighbour churches are at risk, sisters struggling with conflicts and persecutions. It’s offensive for Laodiceans to be smug.
Compare that to Toronto and Thornhill, the United Church of Canada and our United Church. We’re certainly a rich community, very successful in banking, regardless of what federal budget debates will say to scare you. We’re a bit centre for pharmaceuticals and technology high value-add industries. And our fashion industry is all focused on the luxury market, leaving the cheap goods to be imported. Our church shares the prosperity of our context.
We may say to ourselves we are OK, with no problem - but that may be our problem. We might in a gods-eye view be poor, blind, and naked: the emperor having no clothes! We are, as I often say, ‘temps’: temporarily employed, temporarily able not disabled, temporarily in style, then out. Revelation’s vision of judgment and justice may be scary for us, and might be good news to others not now as comfortable as we are. Perhaps we need a challenge to our complacency.
We are not the centre of the universe, after all. Most Christians now are in southern hemisphere booming movements, particularly in Africa. Economic and technological engines are in China and India, not just Waterloo and Markham Ontario. What will they say to us and about us in a generation – or two – about what we did with this opportunity. We challenge our elders on the Holocaust, when ‘none was too many’ to welcome in Canada. We apologize for Japanese internments and residential schools. But to what are we willfully blind today?
Generally, this is where our denomination’s sermon seems to stop. Feeling guilty and ashamed? Insecure and repentant? What are you left to do about it? What’s the pitch in the lesson today?
Behold, I stand at the door and knock
If anyone hear my voice, and open the door,
I will come in and sup with them,
And they with me.
Perhaps our snug and smug corner is too small. Perhaps, in fact, it actually excludes Jesus! Imagining ourselves safe inside the arms of Jesus, fearful of what’s around and beyond, might be the wrong imagery altogether.
Evangelism “from the outside in” is a proposal popularized by Cheri DiNovo, United Church minister now in her true vocation of provincial politics. She wrote a book called Queerying Evangelism, proposing that GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer) folks have great gifts to offer a church that confuses narrow sexual norms and identities with Christianity. We could learn from those who are knocking on the door, if we’d hear them and open the door.
The challenges of the big picture are big, real. We’re tempted to privatize, and domesticate faith. The errors of the old responses are big, real. We’re tempted to renounce political, public faith. However, the promise is personal and political, private and public, sacred and secular. If ours is the temptation of Laodicea, of a comfortable pew, where we don’t rock the boat, then the call and invitation is to hear who is knocking. Who and what might we be welcoming in unawares might be the Christ of Revelation 3. Who wants to miss that?
Behold, I stand at the door and knock
If anyone hear my voice, and open the door,
I will come in and sup with them,
And they with me.
Go on, expect a surprise as you leave this place.
May you see the face of Christ
In every one you meet
And may everyone you meet
See the face of Christ in you
God who patiently knocks
And waits for us to open
Keep knocking still
Keep inviting our response
For you know we cling to our comfort zones
You know we fear much outside our circles of care
God who patiently knocks
Give us ears to hear
Amen
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Monday, February 22, 2010
Sin
Text: Luke 4:1-13
This first Sunday of Lent, my colleague began a new 9am ‘EPIC’ worship programme here. ‘EPIC’ is an acronym for ‘experiential, participatory, image-rich and connective’. People left just as our regular 10:30am crowd gathered, and were saying things like ‘that was fun’ and ‘next week, I’m know who I’m inviting to come!’ When was the last time I heard lines like that at the door after Sunday morning worship? Of course, a number of you said it today: ‘that was fun’.
We heard similar good things this week after Pancake Tuesday – ‘that was fun’ and ‘I know who I’m inviting next year’. And the week before, our Communion Lunch overflowed its room, and people leaving said ‘that was a great party’, ‘that was fun’, and ‘let’s invite more to come’! That’s not to mention all the enthusiastic energy flowing through this place, even at bingo during Out of the Cold on Friday nights, where twice as many people come for the supper as for beds.
There’s a popular notion out there that church is an institution dedicated to the proposition that ‘somebody, somewhere, is having fun – and it has got to be stopped’! We are the killjoys, preaching ‘no drinking, no dancing, no smoking’. There are standard jokes about why we don’t like dancing, because it might lead to sex – or sex, lest it lead to smoking. Moralistic, pietistic, repressive – who would say of such a programme, ‘that was fun’, or ‘let’s invite more to come’?
I asked how many of you ‘give something up’ for Lent, and how many choose chocolate. Lots. Personally, as a young minister I used to give up chain-smoking in Lent – I took up chewing tobacco instead. People work out their own fasts, their own reminders of restraint, between the festivals of Mardi Gras, Pancake Tuesday, and the feasts of Easter. We tell the story of Jesus’ 40 days in the desert without food to start, and Jesus’ passion to end – and make our own gestures.
If we define ‘sin’ too narrowly, as petty vices, then our temptation and our fast are just as small. Surely Jesus was not starving in the desert because he had a weight loss problem, and anticipated Michelle Obama’s war on obesity? Surely his temptation was not to drink and smoke too much? Just as recently I asked why Jesus got baptized, if that means being dirty and needing washing – so I intend to ask what it meant for Jesus to be tempted – to reframe our sin, and our temptation.
There was a time when Sin had a bigger semantic field of meaning, beyond petty moralistic and pietistic nit-picking about ‘sins’. It relied on a celebration of God’s good creation of all that is good and true and beautiful, and of good humans made to enjoy it and share it. It relied on an anticipation of God’s ultimate promise of a fulfillment of creation and humanity in a new creation, a new heaven, a new city and a river and tree of life. Sin was a word for our state in the meantime, whenever it did not honour the original creation or the ultimate promise.
Sin, then, was a word for how ‘here-and-now’ differs from the glories of the original creation, the Garden of Eden, where there was enough for all. It was a word for how ‘here-and-now’ differs from the vision of an ultimate end, the city and garden of God, beyond time and space. Meanwhile, that played out for each of us in asking if we were being all we were made to be, and doing all we were made to do. Our calling was to live worthy of our creation and ultimate ends as citizens of the city of God, members of a chorus of praise and celebration.
Psychiatrist Karl Menninger wrote Whatever Became of Sin? I’ve stolen from it for years. Starting with the original broad semantic field of Sin, he says we carved off chunks in turn:
• We call some things ‘crime’ and address them through administration of justice, from legislation to policing to lawyers, courts, and jails – nothing to do with religion
• We call some things ‘sickness’, and address them through medical treatment, from diagnosis to hospitals and drugs – since healing has nothing to do with religion
• We call some things ‘ignorance’ and address them through education, from schools to publication to training… since religion is if anything, on the side of ignorant superstition
Once we have reconstructed ‘Sin’ narrowly into privatized individualized ‘sins’, by carving off the big issues of what is not worthy of our created beginnings or our promised potential, then we are left with something narrow and petty. ‘Sins’ refer to socially awkward discourtesies, and indulgences, and failures of charity. Religion and churches, if we accept the reconstruction, are left with a nearly trivial task of personal improvement of individuals. That’s not fun, is it? Surely this is not what stories of Jesus’ temptation by Satan in the desert are intended to address?
What Jesus struggles with in the story is right relation with the glories of God’s good creation, the vision of God’s hope and promise, and the contrast of the here-and-now quick fixes. Jesus resists temptation to turn stones into bread, or rule his world’s principalities and powers, or to simply rely on God to keep him safe. He declines to re-engineer created order, to dominate political order, or to simply rely on divine order. Jesus in this story re-presents to us what it might look like to be truly human, truly God’s, worthy of creation and promise.
I asked you to consider our Moderator’s call this Lent to a ‘carbon footprint’ fast. You can find it on the denomination’s website, www.united-church.ca, or in our Mandate magazine. What if our lifestyle is not honouring God’s good creation or God’s ultimate promise and hope. Why not start living as if we were preparing to be citizens of the latter, with the gifts of the former?
I also mentioned the proposal in the UK, from a consortium including Anglican, Methodist and United Reformed Church leaders, calling for a ‘digital fast’ – reducing your time online, or your house of i-pod use, or balancing the time spent ‘in an attitude of prayer over my Blackberry’, as Bob Rae puts it, with time spent in the more traditional attitude of prayer. It’s not about being conformed to this world, but re-formed and transformed for the one God intended from the beginning to the end. Don’t be judged sane by the insane world of here-and-now!
Incidentally, I know I said that chocolate is part of God’s good creation – and that surely there is chocolate in my heaven – and that therefore I don’t support what is apparently our congregation’s most popular Lenten piety, of ‘giving up chocolate’. I took a lot of flack at the door for that. God bless those of you who restrain your appetites every year, in the conventional observances of avoiding sugar or nicotine or alcohol. I am only pleading that we not stop there.
Giving up chocolate for Lent may be a good reminder to you of our affluence and indulgences. Where it is a sign and symbol of our more general repentance of affluence, and sets you up for a great feast of Easter chocolate, so be it. But let’s not reduce the symbol to the signifier – and narrow our understanding of ‘Sin’ to ‘my sins’, or temptation to moralistic pietism.
Our visual focus for Lent is a door, opened a crack. What’s on your side, and the other side? ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in and sup with them – and they with me’. That might be fun! We might invite others! So be it.
Amen.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Vision & Plans
Text: Luke 9:28-36
It was Annual Meeting Sunday, a high holy day in our tradition, so I promised to speak briefly. After all, if you know what you want to say, it doesn’t take long. Confessing that I have not been promoting Black History Month, I asked if you remembered 2 famous American speeches:
Lincoln’s Gettysburg address of 1863, and Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln began “4 score and 7 years ago”, and spoke less than 3 minutes. King built to a repeated rhetorical flourish of ‘I have a dream’, and spoke for exactly 5 minutes 11 seconds.
We had a successful year at this church in 2009, according to financial reports. Total receipts of $562,000 allowed us to pay off a bank loan we took out for parking lot repairs. Our general fund receipts were a bit higher than our expenditures. You directed $48,903 to the Mission & Service Fund, a bit better than the year before. We heard at the annual meeting after worship about our plans for a balanced budget in 2010, with responsible capital repairs on our building.
We had a very busy year at this church in 2009, according to our annual program reports. Youth programs are thriving. Studies are thriving and wide-ranging, from basis bible study to interfaith dialogue through emerging progressive theology and beyond. ‘Aging 101’ workshops and resource fair developed from our caring ministries and personal experiences. Service ministries from school breakfasts through Handicapable and Camp Handi to Out of the Cold. Whew!
I invited you in my annual report for 2009, though, to revisit the idea of ’20:20 foresight’, looking ahead to the year 2020, a decade from now. I will retire from some church job that year, and if I have worked flat out for that last decade, will receive over $20,000 a year in pension. Others of us may also miss that annual meeting, due to mobility, morbidity, and mortality. What will they say about this year’s work to conserve and to renew this church? “Thanks”, I hope.
Most talk of success and busyness reminds me of cartoons of lemmings, rushing toward a cliff edge, congratulating themselves on making such good time. Much of our experience of success and busyness feels like running faster on our hamster wheel, improving our fitness at best. True progress would distinguish between ‘speed and velocity’ as one member put it after worship. Are we working smarter, or just harder? What did we set out to do?
This year, your council adopted a new vision statement:
We’re good at planning with goals and objectives, and at being accountable. What council reached for this year was something distinguishable: a vision. Imagine that!
Our council, including me, have a managerial comfort zone. A daylong workshop here with Anthony B. Robinson pressed us to focus on a vision, rather than a laundry list of what we do. His repeated question was “what business are you in, and how’s business?” Our members live their lives, in the week and in the world, preaching the gospel, where necessary, using words. Our church does what Ephesians 4 calls ‘equipping the saints for the work of ministry’. Gathering to be equipped, we scatter to get on with it:
By living our Christian faith, we answer God’s call.
As you considered our shared vision, of equipping the saints for this work of ministry, I pointed out that our hangings were red today, not just for the Lunar New Year, nor only for Valentines, nor for the Canadian Olympic team – but to honour the ‘saints and martyrs’, and to be reminded to be civil to the saints who volunteer to lead us, and not make them into martyrs!
The gospel lesson today was Luke’s version of the Transfiguration. Jesus and 3 key disciples go off to pray. The 3 stay awake, and so they catch the vision, of Jesus’ face shining, in the company of Elijah and Moses. In this gospel, they are not talking about heading down the mountain to martyrdom on the cross, but about ‘his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem’ – the ascension. In this version of the gospel, there’s a vision beyond Good Friday, that takes a whole second book that we studied in 2009, Acts of the Apostles, to present.
Sure, we’re tempted in a good moment to set up tents and settle at the campsite and relish the good company. It takes a vision to make us get up and go again, towards something, making progress in relation to something, not just making speed with the other mainline lemmings toward the cliff, or with the other suburban middling classes spinning their hamster wheels. Imagine a vision with us, and measure our plans against that vision. Look at the coming year with ’20:20 foresight’, and ask what they’ll say about this year in 2020. “Thanks”, I hope.
We begin every annual meeting by reading the names of members who died in the year. We are surrounded by a host of witnesses, who shared our vision, and have gone before us. We say thanks, and try to get some perspective, before we review our success and our busyness of the last year, and our plans and proposals for the next year. We say “Thanks”, to them and to God, and we take a moment to check our progress and busyness against a common vision. I said less than this, and more than this, while you heard the best of it: a vision, not just a plan. So be it.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Imam Hussein Day
IMAM HUSSEIN DAY
“Imam Hussein – Symbol of Humanity”
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Sunday, February 7, 2010
The Islamic Ahlul Bayt Assembly of Canada held its 4th annual Imam Hussein Day event at the Islamic Community of Afghans in Canada this afternoon. Through our friends and neighbours at the Jaffari community in Thornhill, I accepted an invitation to attend last year, and to speak this year, in distinguished company: Shaikh Yusuf Badat of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, Dr Aman Haji of the Shia Ismaili Muslim Community, and Dr Hussein Khimjee of the host group.
In 626CE, al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali, was born to Fatimah, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, and ‘Ali, the 4th of the ‘4 rightly-guided caliphs’ in the transitional decades after the death of Muhammad in 632CE. Succession of legitimate authority was disputed in these early years of Islam. The problems of who speaks for us and who leads us in religious and secular matters are familiar to Christians in ‘apostolic succession’, creeds, and empires – but they take different shape early on in Islam.
By 680CE, most of Islam was dominated by the Umayyad empire, replacing Persian and Byzantine rule over a vast territory, and based in Iraq. The party of ‘Ali, the Shiites, were based in Mecca and resisted the claims of the Umayyads. When the caliph Mu’awiyyah, who had built this empire, was succeeded by his son Yazid, the new caliph demanded that al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali renounce his own claim to the caliphate, and recognize Yazid as his rightful caliph.
Not only did al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali refuse submission to Yazid, he set out with his family and a small band of supporters across the Arabian peninsula toward Kufa in Iraq, where he might be proclaimed the rightful caliph in the lineage of Muhammad. The small band of a few dozen men, women and children was surrounded by thousands of Umayyad troops in the desert at Karbala near Kufa. The men were massacred and beheaded, including Husayn and his sons.
This martyrdom at Karbala is commemorated annually by Shiites on the day of Ashura, and a season culminating today with Hussein Day. Christians might compare it to the 40 days of Lent, or the 50 days of Easter seasons, to appreciate the passion and pilgrimages too rarely reported in the media unless in terms of sectarian strife between Shiites and other Muslims. As the 3rd Imam, Hussein’s place in tradition is analogous to Saint Peter, claimed by Roman Catholics as the first pope, martyred in Rome – and respected but understood differently by other Christians.
The festival has taken particular significance in subsequent historical contexts, including the popular support for revolution against the Shah in Iran in the past century, for instance. In that same century, Christian festivals focused popular political resistance movements in Poland or Ireland, so we know how complex the mix of religion, politics, ethnicity and media can be.
I hope that this brief summary gives my usual readers enough orientation to make sense, without misconstruing the story as Shiites would tell it, or causing offence to those in the Sunni majority or other streams in the Islamic movement. Over 1.5 billion Muslims do not all tell their story the same way, and the issues of interpretation are important and not for outsiders to resolve. How do Christians tell the story of how Coptic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches developed out of common history and principled differences of understanding? Reasonable and faithful people can, and do, differ. My remarks as a guest at this event follow:
I began by wishing peace to my hosts, my neighbours, my sisters and brothers in the assembly. Acknowledging our congregation’s friendship with the Jaffari community, and my visit to this event a year before, I confessed my limited knowledge and familiarity with this community of Afghans in Canada. I noted that it was easier to listen than to speak, and asked forbearance.
There is always a risk entailed in being guest or being host to the other’s integrity. We invite the best of the other, and risk the worst from them. We offer our best to the other, and risk rejection by the other. This is the risk of the guest, and of the host, sensitive to another’s integrity.
As people of faith, we know that God takes the risk first, in giving humans freedom to choose.
God is always inviting our best, and risking our worst. God is always offering God’s best – and risking rejection by us.
As Christians, we know that Jesus risked first, proclaiming that the reign of God was close at hand, and was not the same as the current political and religious order of his place and time. Jesus made manifest, and bore witness to another way, and was crucified. He came inviting our best, and offering his best, and risked our worst, and our rejection.
As Muslims, you know that Hussein risked first, affirming the message of the Prophet his grandfather, which he did not confuse with the empire of his day. At Karbala, with few against many, he was martyred, with his small band and family, revealing the worst of Yazid. Hussein invited and offered the best, and risked the worst, and our rejection.
So now we are to risk. You take the risk of letting a stranger speak in your assembly. I take the risk of speaking. You take the risks of hosts. I take the risks of a guest.
There is a saying, I’ve heard and repeated, that we should all live as if every day were Ashura, and every place were Karbala. The Christian version would be that we should all live as if every day were Good Friday, and every place were Calvary.
We are not setting out to win, to talk against one another, but to relate, and talk with one another. We might today invite the best, and risk the worst. We might today offer our best, and risk rejection. What we share is God’s good creation, and the hope and promise of its fulfillment, which we talk about in terms of paradise or heaven. It’s worth the risk!
I do not speak for all the billions of Christians. My smaller part of our movement is called Protestant. We are also called non-conformists, dissenters, and worse names than that. Our part of Christianity has always protested and resisted the dominant ‘powers that be’ of any time or place, and resisted confusing the rulers of the day with the commonwealth of God.
500 years ago, the Reformation in Europe divided and united us on issues of religious and political authority, legitimacy, and leadership. The wars that followed exploited our ethnic and economic associations, but we remember the heroes and martyrs of that time: Luther, Calvin, Knox, Cromwell, Latimer, Ridley & Cranmer, martyrs of Cambridge. In a similar timeframe, the Safavids, with heroes like Ismail & Abbas, led in the spirit of Imam Hussein in Afghanistan and Iran or Persia, and renewed the festivals held in his honour. We should know each other’s stories better – and our own.
200 years ago, our wee congregation began in Thornhill with settlers clearing bush for farms. We were mostly Scots and Irish clans. My people had colonized by the early modern English empire, which began by enclosing the common lands of Scotland, and sending dispossessed Scots as settlers in the ‘plantation’ of Ulster in Ireland. Settling in the new world colony of Upper Canada was more of the same for Protestants, non-conformists, dissenters, Methodists.
200 years ago, the colonial government here would not recognize a wedding in our church as making a legal marriage. Our children were not schooled, our youth ineligible for colleges, our young men refused government jobs or military commissions. The Upper Canada Rebellion marched through our village south to oppose the Family Compact, dividing our congregation not on the merits of the complaints, but on the tactics of response. One local ‘parson’ (like ‘person’, not priest) at our congregation was Egerton Ryerson, who went on to build a school system in Ontario open to all children, and whose name is now on a university downtown.
You know better than I what the same colonial empires meant to Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. From Egypt to south India, peoples were called clans and tribes, and reorganized under a new type of imperial rule. The glory days of the Ottomans and Mughals had passed, and the new empires found great success. People of faith cooperated with some progress, but resisted confusing the rule of the day with the commonwealth, promise and hope of God.
100 years ago, our community had achieved full citizenship and civil rights in our colony, now a confederation. Scottish tartans were no long illegal as they had been a century before, but were welcome among the troops of the British Empire. Yet we remembered, and resisted, and the majority of Methodist ministers here were pacifists when war was declared in 1914. Most of our members were more eager to show their loyalty to the empire, and clergy were forced to leave their pulpits or change their sermons by their own people.
I suggested that the most militant in the faith in our Protestant, non-conformist, dissenting Methodist sect were the least violent in the face of war. Even in 1939, it was one of our ministers, MP J.S.Woodsworth of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, who voted against the war in parliament in Ottawa. He said he did it ‘for the children’. Many of our most militant in the faith again, like Professor Ernest Best, claimed CO or ‘conscientious objector’ status and alternative service, in his case in Japanese internment camps, teaching school.
You know better than I what the wars of the 20th century meant in colonial empires, as colonials were expected to take sides in European wars, and their lands were carved up at peace tables. Many nodded when I repeated that the most militant in the faith are least likely to confuse the violence of the day among rulers and empires with the real work of becoming fit citizens for God’s promise, prepared to come home to heaven or paradise, less conformed to here and now.
I do not speak for all Christians. I am a Protestant, protesting and resisting dominant powers, skeptical of confusing God’s reign and human rule. You’ve taken a risk, inviting a Protestant, nonconformist, dissenter, Methodist, to speak. I’ve taken a risk, in offering a bit of our story, to suggest how we might appreciate the model of Imam Hussein, resisting the abuse of power, from Yazid to now, for we’ve been taught similar truths about speaking the truth to power, not measuring success by quarterly reports and opinion polls.
You wondered why we call ourselves the ‘United Church of Canada’, then. It is not now, if ever it was, an imperialist conspiracy to have all Canadians join our one sect. We were always a minority of Canadians, and we expect to remain a minority. But we do celebrate our practice of overcoming old world divisions among ourselves. Scots, Irish, English and Welsh accents and vendettas were overcome, and other European protestants united with us in second generations. Currently, we welcome more Asian and African postcolonial groups and families among us.
Our denomination speaks and writes of ‘whole-world ecumenism’, based on the Greek word ‘oikumene’ meaning ‘the whole inhabited earth’. As the Hasidic Jewish tradition puts it, what is the question God asks, when God gets up in the morning? God asks ‘where does my world need mending today, and who can help?’ We try to find partnerships with any who work with God, to help mend God’s world, closer to the vision and promise of paradise or heavenly commonwealth.
This practice of resistance needs friends – united.
We unite for something ultimate – call it heaven.
We unite against something passing – call it evil.
We unite beyond some thing smaller – me, mine.
We unite within some thing bigger – us, ours.
We have a prayer about what such work is like:
The world, still torn, breaks the mending thread
The world, still sick, infects the healing hand
Imam Hussein was such a mending thread
Imam Hussein was such a healing hand
What would he and his look like in Toronto in 2010?
Who would resist Yazid?
Who would stand with Hussein?
Hussein invited his companions at Karbala, on the day before Ashura, surrounded by a greater number, to leave under cover of darkness, and in Christian traditions, martyrdom is only valid if every effort has been made to avoid it faithfully.
This model of humanity can only be an invitation, and an offer – and a risk.
This model of humanity can never be coercive and violent.
This model of humanity must always be militant and passionate.
As one of our great preachers used to say: ‘Who wants to be called sane by an insane world?’
Do not be conformed to this world, but transformed for the world to come. So be it. Amen.
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Monday, February 1, 2010
Mission & Service
Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10, Luke 4:11-18
We had a funeral this Saturday, for Emily Burnett. Emily attended most weeks for 50 years, and God forbid somebody should sit in her pew – her children recall having to arrive early for worship in the 1960’s, just to make sure they claimed the family pew. So we marked her pew ‘reserved’ today, with a rose on the cushion, to mark the place she carved out here.
Beside Emily’s casket yesterday were her bowling shoes and a bowling ball. Emily not only belonged to several groups and activities at the church - she also belonged to the community bowling league through those decades. This week, everybody in the league plans to bowl a frame for Emily, to put her on the 2010 standings.
We all recognize the subculture of joiners, of volunteers, that built this church and this suburban community since the 1950’s, building on more rural traditions of mutual care. Churches, clubs, and groups were cheap entertainment when money was tighter. We could build things together that none could manage alone. We learned interpersonal skills to work – and fight - together.
Robert Putnam calls this ‘social capital’, this collective and cooperative web of relationships and common causes. He applauds how these grassroots habits of joining and belonging create communities, and build citizenship. Somebody asked President Jimmy Carter how he ever reached the Camp David accords to advance peace in the Middle East. He said it was easy, compared to a meeting of elders back in his Baptist church! It’s not coincidental that Carter’s appreciation of social capital has carried him into Habitat for Humanity work since.
Robert Putnam’s famous book, however, is called Bowling Alone. He charts a new phenomenon. People no longer join bowling leagues. They go to the bowling alley, pay for a lane – and bowl alone! They don’t have to negotiate anything with team-mates, let alone a league. They just pay their money, and play their game. This is the consumer culture fast replacing the civil society of voluntarism, association, and citizenship.
Are we a church of citizen members, or of consumers? Are we building social capital by learning to work – and fight – together? Do we have ‘skin in the game’, investing our time and reputation, joining and belonging, or are we engaging in a consumer transaction, meeting our religious needs the way we meet all our needs in the marketplace of our suburban city? Andrew Davey writes in a book called Urban Christianity and Global Order that our risk and temptation as suburban churches is to act as religious consumers – our opportunity and challenge, to be citizens building social capital which can in turn address and bless our world.
As a preacher, I know the difference between speaking in a congregation building social capital, and one that is a collection of consumers trying to get their needs met. The first crowd is already working on some issues that have come up in their efforts to live faithfully, and want to be equipped to do this thing better together. The other crowd is like a room full of theatre critics, shopping for a better performance. There’s a bit of both in all of us.
Last week’s SPAT meeting (seasonal planning advisory team) put it this way: we don’t mind being challenged, but we don’t like being attacked. We want to feel good in worship, and to feel good about ourselves and about our church. We do have constructive criticism to offer, and it’s not so much consumer complaints as a sincere effort to work – and fight – better together.
This feel-good, self-esteem thing is another face of the cultural shift within and around the church in our generation. Christopher Lasch called it the ‘culture of narcissism’, and others use ‘entitlement’ as the pejorative term for our vanities and insecurities in an atomized consumer culture, without the routine give-and-take of the social capital process to shape real self-esteem.
30 years ago at theology school I was elected as student representative to the Faculty Council, which was primarily the group of a dozen professors who met monthly to monitor the curriculum. This was a school without grades or competition. There was a list of knowledge, skills, and experience standards, developed by the professors and church leaders, and in each case, you were either ‘approved’ or ‘not yet approved’. The Hebrew scripture professor would go on in a southern drawl about a student who said that his ‘not yet approved’ mark on her paper ‘did not make her feel god about herself’. He said that his goal had not been to make her feel good about herself, but to equip her to read the bible better!
Last week, I participated in interviews for 9 new United Church ministers getting their credentials this spring. It was inspiring, and hopeful and encouraging. They were all ‘approved’ and not one was deemed ‘not yet approved’. I’d be delighted to have any of them as my minister – and so would you. It was a good reminder of who we are as a denomination, and of who we are becoming. In this group, there were no straight young white men, as I was at ordination. This promises improvement in our organization, to have leaders reflecting diverse membership.
Next week, we will enjoy a guest minister, Darren Liepold, the national church Mission and Service Fund officer. He was also the chaplain for last week’s interviews, and he tells me he plans to sing in his fine tenor voice, as well as preach. Anyhow, I wanted to speak a bit about Mission and Service, before he faces you all. Many of you complain about the United Church tendency to speak on every issue, to tell governments what to do, as if all of us voted NDP.
On the other hand, you donated over $500,000 here last year, including nearly $50,000 in directed gifts to the M&S Fund. That’s a tithe, from a third of you. It’s a bit like the way you pay taxes, as citizens and not consumers. You don’t pay school taxes only if you have kids, or health taxes only if you are healthy. You contribute to a commonwealth, from our social capital.
We heard from the gospel of Luke again this morning, continuing to develop how Isaiah’s gospel shapes and defines Jesus’ person and work. Last week, Jesus read the text from the scroll, and simply said ‘today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence’. He sat down and shut up. I was less succinct, and elaborated on how we might ‘read’ our reality, and ‘write the vision’ in our own lives, rather than simply counting on Jesus, or the minister, to read bibles or write sermons.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because God has anointed me
To preach good news to the poor
God has sent me to proclaim relief to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind
To set at liberty those who are oppressed
To proclaim the acceptable Year of the Lord.
Jesus was a popular guy at this point in Luke’s gospel, and all spoke well of him. He went to the synagogue, as was his custom, and they asked him to read, and he didn’t give a long sermon. However, after the formal worship, the conversation continued, as it does here, in teaching and discussion, working – and fighting – together. What would it mean to live out that good news?
Here’s where Jesus got in trouble. He said God loved the world, not just the worshiping congregation. He said it’s not all about us having our needs met by God, the divine bellhop that we tip occasionally for good service. Remember that big famine in the days of Elijah? People were starving – good religious people were starving – and Elijah could do miracles. But did he help his own people? No! He went to some widow in Sidon, up the coast toward Lebanon. We hate those people! And what about the lepers? We had lots of good religious people who were sick, and Elisha could heal leprosy. Did he help any of the leper in Judah? No! He healed some Syrian soldier, Naaman. We hate those guys, too!
They ran Jesus out of town, and tried to throw him off a cliff. They did not want to hear that God loved the world, and not them first. Bruce Sanguin in his book on Darwin, goes further to suggest that God loves the creation, not just humans. He’ll get thrown off his cliff soon, eh? There’s a T-shirt in my office “Jesus loves you – but I’m his favorite”. That’s the sad secret of much of our faith – what we really believe, or appear to believe. If God loves the world, and not just the church, then our mission and our service will have to follow that direction.
Many of you help out with Out of the Cold here, or school breakfasts, or Handicapable here – and many more contribute to a net of pastoral care in hospitals and homes, through and beyond the church. Most of you, reflecting on the work of pulling drowning bodies from the river flowing by, are moved to wonder what’s happening upstream to make this trouble worse. That’s often the work supported by our wider church – like the analysis Kairos offered about how we contributed to Haiti’s vulnerability. Of course, they threw Kairos off the cliff for it.
I am not well versed in international development issues. Some of you work in the field, and know far more. Sometimes, reasonable and faithful people differ on political conclusions about what we can do. Often ministers and church leaders are accused of speaking out beyond their competence, or encouraged to keep quieter rather than embarrass us with their incompetence. Each of us swings between being opinionated and bashful. In the consumer model, the customer is always right. In social capital building, we have to work – and fight – together for truth.
I am only a child! Don’t say ‘I am only a child’
We heard Jeremiah’s account of his call today. The prophet says God told him to speak, and he resisted, saying ‘I am only a child’. God gave him the job again. God was getting on with loving the world, and wanted to use Jeremiah, to speak truth to power, the challenge nations. That’s mission, and that’s service. What’s your version of ‘I am only a child’? ‘I’m only a senior’, ‘I’m no expert’, or ‘I just want to feel good here’?
Are we a church of citizens building social capital, contributing to something together that none could manage alone? Or are we a congregation of consumers here to get our religious needs met? What’s God up to, and what’s our mission and my service? Are we just here to feel good about ourselves – and if so, what will make our self esteem and pride more legitimate and secure?
I ended today with a quote from Marianne Robinson, often attributed to Nelson Mandela:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we a re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
So we prayed…
God who called us into being, who knew and named us, like Jeremiah, in our mothers’ wombs – What are you up to in your world? What is our mission together, and my service to help it all? What does that mean – mission? What is not yet, and might yet be – and what is our missionary role – in making it the acceptable Year of the Lord? What does that mean – service? What is in need, and in need of help – and what is our servant role in making it better? Is the Spirit of the Lord in us, too? God forbid we serve only our own needs, and not others’, or serve only our own desires, and not yours. What word do you have for our hearts, O God, give us ears to hear. Amen.
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