Pre-Arranging a Funeral

PRE-ARRANGING A FUNERAL
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
4th Sunday of Lent, March 18, 2007

Text: John 12:1-8

The choir sang ‘Jerusalem My Destiny’, and I asked you to remember that next week, when the world tries to tell you that death and taxes are our ultimate ends. Thanks to the choir for the echo.

I’ve already got my plot and my headstone. Have you? It’s a big grey granite stone, in the old south end of Prospect Cemetery, inscribed William Bruce – my great grandfather. A few years ago, I got title to that one piece of Toronto real estate, after watching a bereaved family who couldn’t get consent from all the potential beneficiaries to inter ashes in an old family plot.

The funeral industry has a pair of euphemisms for planning: ‘pre-need’ and ‘at need’. When you go in to discuss your own funeral, that’s ‘pre-need’. When a bereaved family arrives to arrange for someone dying or already dead, that’s ‘at need’. Which is your approach? Have you got a contract, prepaid or not? Have you got a will, and powers of attorney? Service and music plans?

How often have you heard after a funeral: ‘I never knew that about him’! ‘Imagine that she never told us about that!’ Other familiar phrases include: ‘I haven’t seen her – I wanted to remember her the way she was,’ or ‘if only I had known he was going to die so soon…’ Increasingly, we avoid arranging or attending funeral rituals altogether. What a loss, amid loss.

We live in a culture of denial of death. The taboos are stronger than those around sex. People were afraid this sermon would be morbid and maudlin, and admitted their apprehension and discomfort. Others acknowledged it was good for them. We are all, in fact, ‘at need’, but we prefer not to think about it. But if not in church, safely staring forward, then when?

There has to be a shape to life, a beginning and middle and end. Some ministers – and I assume people in other fields – simply do one serviceable thing over and over, repeating year one, forty times. Others learn and change. Most of us have cycles that remind me of the ‘three envelopes’:

You get a new job, and your predecessor gives you three envelopes, telling you to open one when they leave, and then one each year. The first envelope says ‘Blame me, your predecessor, for the mess things are in’. After a year of blaming, you open the second envelope: ‘Begin reorganization study for change’. As the reports come in, a year later, the message is: ‘Prepare three envelopes’.

Repetition and cycles are important. The layers of meaning are like the depths of a lacquered finish on an antique, or the resonance of orchestral music. A lifetime of seeing different productions of the same plays of Shakespeare discovers new sides each time. Hymns, sung over years in various situations, build up associations, good and bad. Members here reported that one of the hymns they didn’t like was Amazing Grace, perhaps for its hackneyed use at funerals!

As you reflect about your own funeral, and others, I’m inviting not demanding, and offering not imposing, a chance to imagine what you could begin to pre-arrange, what to ask and tell. Start rewriting an obituary, or a eulogy today – but don’t finish it yet! If you can anticipate events, why not address the predictable preventable regrets, of ‘I wish’ and ‘if only’?

The gospel today is John’s version of the anointing. All four gospels have Jesus anointed with costly perfumes before he dies. The type of anointing is associated with the scents applied to dead bodies in that culture in that century. It’s a bit like a whiff of formaldehyde under a layer of pungent lily scent in the funeral homes of a few years ago. The power of olfactory senses to trigger memories and associations is well known. What do funerals smell like to you?

Luke 7 gives us the salacious version of the story. A woman of ill repute throws herself at Jesus’ feet, weeping, then wipes off her tears with her hair, and then anoints his feet. His host protests, and he scolds his host for being less demonstrative. Matthew and Mark have an anonymous woman anointing Jesus, and an anonymous person criticizing the wasteful expense. Jesus says the woman should never be forgotten, the story always told, as the first person to really ‘get it’.

It’s important not to conflate the four versions of one story. It’s like boiling down this congregation to one lowest common denominator, and losing the rich variety of opinions. Luke’s woman may be a prostitute, but not the anointing women of Matthew or Mark, and certainly not Mary in John. Stereotypes of women as virgins or whores are ours, not gospel.

John personalizes the story. We’ve already met Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. Lazarus was dead, and though Jesus was slow to come, and the sisters complained, and Lazarus ‘stinketh’, he was brought back to life in the chapter before this one. We know Martha as the busy hostess, and Mary as the student who ‘chose the better path’. Jesus wept to hear of Lazarus and was close friend to this household of characters. That’s John’s version.

We know these characters, as we know each other and ourselves. Lazarus was raised, to a second chance at life, but as Northrop Frye points out, the narrative requires Lazarus to die again. The story of coming to the edge of mortality, even crossing over, and coming back, is familiar and fascinating to us. Lazarus is in the house for the anointing.

We know Martha, too. She’s busy hosting, cooking, serving, and a bit impatient with her sister who sits at Jesus feet. She can be pretty impatient with Jesus, too, scolding him for delaying in response to her summons to come help Lazarus before he died. The story of trying to manage and control, prevent or avoid trouble cuts equally close to my bone. Martha hosts the anointing.

We know Judas. He’s named as the critic of the anointing. John emphasizes that it’s not that Judas cares, but that that he won’t get his cut, skimmed off the top of the ‘helping’ budget. Look out for the guy like me who is part of the ‘do-gooder’ industries, taking a living from helping. ‘The helping hand strikes again’, we often say about the frailties of charities.

Leave her alone. She bought it so she might keep it, for the day of my burial.

Jesus takes Mary’s side, as she took his. She anticipated and prepared for his death and burial, and she didn’t wait till he died to use the anointing perfumes on him. She ‘gets it’: that this is about more than doing good, but about living fully, and dying well. Too many of us know the tag line about ‘the poor are always with you’ as a justification for selfish insensitivity. Too few of us linger at the taboo reference to death and burial – and end up on Judas’ side.

What’s the point of this whole religious thing? Is it about attitude adjustments for the insensitive greedy ones, to be better do-gooders? Yes. But is also about grounding for generations of care to the point of death, so that we live fully till we die, and relish life before death properly. Join the story, in different roles, with Lazarus, and Martha, and Judas, and Mary.

I confessed to you that I am not a frequent visitor to the edge. When I go to the boundary between life and death, it is usually as a companion or visitor to someone else, in hospital or at home, in sickness or crisis. I don’t usually go on my own ticket, except once three years ago with a brain aneurism that kept me lingering in the liminal shadows of life and death.

It would be better if you asked this sermon from a nurse, who spends far more time at the edge. Inquire of caregivers at home, or aides at nursing homes, or friends who have lingered longer at the edge than I. They’ll all tell you, as they tell me, that you find life by facing death. You discover in the pain of loss, what was worthy, and what was passing and unnecessary after all.

I, like many of you, could qualify as Lazarus, given a second chance, brought back from death. For a while, life is precious, and you know how precious is each moment, recognizing what was always a gift, and savouring it all. Then we’re back to routine, eh, with siblings and stresses, company and controversies, and the immediacy of living fully recedes.

I, like many of you, could qualify as Martha, too: grumpy, busy, serving at the table again. We’re showing our love in action, but we’re not really feeling warm and fuzzy about it. Bringing in the kingdom, saving the world, keeping our own safe, reaching out, we don’t have time to be saved, or to be touched ourselves.

I, more than most of you, could qualify as Judas. Organizing the mission of helping the poor should take priority, and I am shocked at the waste and inefficiency of our church in heating big sanctuaries and fixing great organ. I can be a bit insensitive to the value of aesthetics, of beauty and music and relationships as equally important to helping and knowing.

I, along with you, am learning to be more of a Mary, wasting time and money in new ways, anticipating future losses by relishing the here and now. John has taken this general lesson about the context of do-gooding, in living fully and dying well, and made it personal, domestic. Focus on Lazarus, and Martha, and Judas, and Mary, and on us, and so for all. That’s the good news.

John Donne was a great preacher, dean of a cathedral, and a poet. As he lay dying, he wrote meditations, sermons from his deathbed. The most famous is the seventeenth, near the end of his life, of reflection as he heard the church bells tolling the news of another’s death. I concluded this week by reading aloud much of one devotion, printed on the next page here, and concluding with the service book prayer from our own graveside committals.

Have you pre-arranged a funeral, for yourself or with someone you love? It’s not just morbid or maudlin, but a kind of anointing, a celebration of life, and a recognition of what matters or lasts, of who and what we love, who and whose we are, that death and taxes are not our ultimate ends. If you can’t think about that here, with me, then when can you? Even if you don’t change your plans, take a moment to relish John Donne’s poetic prose:



From John Donne, Devotions:
XVII. Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris
Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me:
Thou must die.

Perchance, he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all out scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s of or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but is it not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another’s danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

And from the United Church Service Book, a prayer at graveside committals:
O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered: make us deeply sensitive to the shortness and uncertainty o human life, and let thy Holy Spirit leas us through this present world in holiness and righteousness all the days of our life; that, when we have served thee in our day and generation, we may be received by thee, our Maker, having the testimony of a good conscience, in the communion of thy people, in the confidence of a certain faith, in the comfort of a holy hope, in favour with thee, our God, and in perfect charity with all humanity; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen Read more...

Just Deserts

JUST DESERTS
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
3rd Sunday of Lent, March 11, 2007

Text: Luke 9:1-9

It was the first Sunday of March Break, when ‘those with get up and go have got up and went’, in the streets and the pews, it seems: north to ski, south to sun. I suggested that they must deserve the break, and that those present must not. Those present disagreed! Do you?

It was the first Sunday of Daylight Savings Time, earlier this year to match American needs. Various people slept in, or forgot to change their clocks. I speculated that those who did get up and get here on time were more worthy and holy. Those present seemed to agree! Do you?

‘Deserving’ and ‘worthy’ is language appropriated by marketers now. ‘You deserve a break today, so get up and get away!’ The ads for hair colour, cosmetics and even Botox treatments are even more insidious: ‘because I’m worth it!’ Who agrees with this? Do you?

The old language of ‘deserts’ was associated with ethical, moral, and religious discourse, having to do with merits, entitlements, rewards and punishments. It was not about sweets in the last course of a meal. It was not about hot dry places. It was about justice, fairness, due ‘deserts’.

Do we deserve our holidays, or are we worthy because we get to worship? I and we do and are, they don’t and aren’t, are poor but popular responses! I showed you this week’s Globe tabloid and National Enquirer. One had Anna Nicole on the cover, speculating that her death was murder, and the other had John Kennedy Jr. on the cover, claiming his plane crash was murder. Inside both, Paris Hilton was prominent, with other ‘usual suspects’. Famous for being famous,
petty, self serving, in patterns of envy, greed and selfishness, are they deserving? Worthy?

Prior generations of our subculture bought a ‘just deserts’ worldview. Protestant work ethics, or worth ethics, assured us that those who work hard and live clean will prosper, blessed by God. That’s why we opposed gambling, since it implies a random chance and luck in fortune, rather than earned wealth from merit and fair exchange. God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

In reaction, my generation rejected just deserts loudly. Foucault and deconstruction, suspicious that knowledge really reflected social control, privilege, and power, cited Nietsche and will. Liberation movements appealed to the fundamental equality of each human being, regardless of gender, or race, or other apparent difference. God was a god of the oppressed. Those born on third base, thinking we’ve hit a home run, are not God’s favorites, but historical aberrations.

Whose interests are served by trust in entitlements, honour, privileges and obligations? Are such moralities always reactionary, favouring the powers that be? Are those who deny that God’s created order is moral, affirming only scientific empirical facts, always anarchist revolutionaries?
Is the world fundamentally just, with exceptions to be redeemed? Or did the clockmaker God wind it up and leave it, only to intervene on occasion in violation of that mechanism?

In invited you to reflect today about ‘just deserts’. Do you deserve it all? Are you worth it all? After 7 years of saying ‘no’, denying just deserts, I repented, trying to reclaim the idea with you.

How ‘bout those Galileans, eh? Did you hear what happened to them?
Pilate mingled their blood with their sacrifices!

What about that disaster, when that tower fell in Siloam, eh? Did you hear what happened to them?
Eighteen dead, just like that!

Scandals and disasters, gossip and sensationalism probably haven’t changed in 2 millennia. How ‘bout those atrocities in Iraq, eh? How ‘bout that overpass collapsing in Montreal, eh? Trying to make sense of those human interest stories as parables and examples, fables and moral tales, has a familiar human ring to me. Those Galileans, randomly murdered by a despotic ruler: let that be a lesson, look out for Pilate! Those victims of the Siloam tower, collateral damage of faulty building practices and industrial accident: acceptable risks of building? Look out!

I don’t know if Jesus faced these specific juicy stories, or ones like them. Luke’s community did, and tried to say what Jesus would have responded, and what we should. What, do you think they deserved it, those Galileans, more than others, or those killed in Jerusalem, more than others did? No! They did not deserve it! Those spared were not more worthy! Arbitrary evil, and accident however predictable and preventable except for evil intention or careless negligence, are unjust.

But unless you repent,
You will all perish as they did.

This is reflection on the theme of deserts. Not the sweet ones, or the dry ones, but moral ones. I still reject specific threats of special providence, of quid pro quo air strikes by God, using evil people and systems to chasten people. Mine is not a micromanaged universe, where God plays dice or manipulates each situation in unilateral abusive power. But objectified reality can be fatalistic. Since we’re mortal, we ask about meaning, purpose, dying with regrets, or mattering.

Then he told this parable:
A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard;
And he came looking for fruit on it and found none.

And he said to the gardener: See here!
For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree,
And I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?

He replied, Sir let it alone for one more year
Until I dig around it and put manure on it
If it bears fruit next year, well and good
Bit if not, you can cut it down.

Here is an illustration, a provocation to reflect on ‘just deserts’. Who gets what they’re worth? Who deserves another chance? The fig tree that doesn’t yield gets one more chance, in case fertilizer, care and mercy will matter. Might it matter? Won’t it matter? Is it worth trying?

You get to empathize in various roles: losing patience with the tree as a planter, interceding as the gardener, or being the tree yourself, or ourselves. Apply it to the ‘deserving poor’ or the ‘minimum wage’ or to stock options for executives in a failing business. Who deserves a break? Who is worth a second chance? What ever matters? Is it ever worth trying?

Some people, in some seasons, build political, moral, and financial capital. Other people, in other seasons, spend it. Are the builders always hoarding? Are the spenders always wasting? One generation in our church invested and accumulated trust assets, and this generation is depleting them. Who deserves, who is worthy, and who is entitled to make those choices?

I’ve been preaching in denial of ‘just deserts’, along with my generation of critics and rebels seeking freedom and liberation from restrictive order. I’ve been teaching denials of ‘just deserts’ in terms of my and our social, economic and political privilege, which is much greater than we earned or should assume we are entitled to enjoy for ourselves in exclusion of others. We live in shadows of anxiety, knowing we can’t justify our position moment to moment.

The ‘China price’ for goods and increasingly for services undercuts our own industry and workforce, but what’s fair, to refuse to buy, or to raise tariffs, or to join the race to the bottom in a free market? AIDs in Africa affects millions of sufferers, beyond our comprehension and beyond any cause and effect relationship of blaming victims for their disease. Are we worth this standard of living, not the Chinese? Do we deserve our health, and not AIDs sufferers in Africa?

No! They don’t deserve it, any more than those Galileans murdered by Pilate, or those crushed by the tower of Siloam in Jerusalem. Those injustices and deaths are unjust, and meaningless. Get over our petty differences of moral deserts in the face of evil and accident. Recognize our common humanity and mortality, and ask the question of what matters, and has meaning. No! They don’t deserve it. But if we don’t turn, our fates will be as meaningless and unjust as theirs.

So I repent this Lent my rejection of ‘just deserts’. Skepticism about distributive justice remains. We’re blessed, not deserving, in our exceptional economic privileges. But retributive justice forces me to reclaim deserts talk. Wrongdoing, or even unjust enrichment or impoverishment, unfair losses or gains, demand redress and restoration of relationships of justice. Our admission of the limits of ‘just deserts’ in politics, economics or social privilege can’t absolve us from duties of restitution and some criminal and civil liability for what’s fair, deserved, or worthy. Some prohibitions and penalties keep social order for the weak. Freedom can’t be only licence.

Kant wrote of mutual restraint in civilization, that it can be at risk when breached by free riders. Joseph Heath’s Efficient Society (why Canada is as good as it gets) gave contextual current examples of social controls. We who preach grace, and its secular version of unconditional entitlement to social welfare and human rights, recoil at conditional versions of social contract. However, I notice we are not ready to share equally the lifestyle of China, or health of Africa.

In repenting and inviting you to consider just deserts, I am not simply joining the reactionary or right wing rush to reward only the deserving poor, or to idolize totally free markets. I distinguish vengeance and revenge, as dumbed-down versions of retributive and restorative justice, which escalate violence. I am however trying to reconcile some old ideas of honour, and of obligations proportionate to privileges, with my modern progressive liberal assumptions. I’m unsure again.

Can punishment, or penalty, restore the universe to balance, or restitution a utilitarian ledger? That assumes prior legitimate entitlements: honour, obligation, privilege, station, position. Restitution is the easy part of retributive justice, seeking to return us all to a status quo ante. Restorative justice is harder, working forward, not back, to find and build some new status quo. Either way, entitlements and relationships must be recognized, formed and reformed by deserts.

In 1996, Canadian criminal law codified the purposes of sentencing. Did we have none before? Of course we did. What changed? Deserts. Earlier generations assumed peace, order, and good government: privilege, entitlements, honour to be satisfied, measured parity of response due. Now coded goal is a ‘just, peaceful and safe society’: denouncing, deterring, separating, rehabilitating, reparations, responsibility. Subsequent amendments added more qualifications of intent and prohibited grounds of discrimination and consequences. Restating deserts, I’d say.

Blame and fault is language we use when seeking return to just order, or resolution of new order. Criminal and civil liability state bases for desert: intention, unjust enrichment, recklessness, carelessness, negligence, but increasingly absolute or vicarious liabilities based in office, role, responsibility. As deserts re-emerge, privileges find corresponding obligations. Deserts.

The world is not fair, but it might be made less bad, or even better. Is it basically fair, with exceptions to the addressed? Or is it fundamentally flawed, with moments of grace and mercy? Either way, our creed speaks of seeking justice and resisting evil, in a broad reading of tradition. Credit and blame, confession of faith and of sin, of meaning or mattering, is necessary for us all,
lest futility reign. Our corrosive skepticism erodes our moral choice, until something new rises.

Should your faith and religion be relevant to your talk of deserts? I think we should be derisive toward some claims of desert, in Botox ads and other marketing aimed at our vanity or greed. Thank God I don’t get what I deserve, or am worthy of receiving! I admit this Lent, though, that we should participate in reclaiming the language and practices of desert in retributive, restorative justice, starting with confession of sin and of faith, ‘seeking justice and resisting evil’.

I know the risk of returning to petty moralism in the name of deserts: our members deserve their holiday travels, or we who turn clocks forward and get to church are more worthy. I recognize the self-serving righteousness of reactionaries – and of self-proclaimed prophets, busy blaming. No human should make you feel excluded or judged in the sanctuary of church and community. This must be a safe place to come home. As Robert Frost wrote in ‘The Death of the Hired Man’:

‘Home is the place where, / When you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’

It’s up to God to judge, and God’s mercy includes deserts, but is not limited to the deserving. Augustine’s Confessions addresses that yearning for assurance or promise of merciful welcome, prior to any condition of deserving or worthiness, and beyond losing in any just deserts:

You have made us for yourself / And our hearts are restless / Until they find their rest in you

We’re blessed, not deserving or worthy of the grace and mercy we enjoy. So I’ve been preaching against just deserts. This Lent, I’m repenting, qualifying, correcting that line, to reclaim deserts. What do you think? Is the world just a mechanism of only empirical causal laws? Is our universe a clockmaker’s work, abandoned to our use or misuse, with occasional totalitarian interventions?

Do I get what I deserve? God forbid, God forgive! Am I worthy of what I enjoy? Thank God, no! Do we deserve more wealth than the Chinese, or better health than AIDs sufferers in Africa? No! But unless we repent, our fortune and fate will have as little meaning. What if we were given another chance, another year, a bit of digging, pruning, and fertilizer? Would it matter?

As Reinhold Niebuhr prayed: God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. Read more...

Alert & Unafraid

ALERT & UNAFRAID
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
March 4, 2007, 2nd Sunday of Lent

Text: Luke 13:31-35

Last week, we began Lent with a vote to unite with our neighbouring congregation, Bellefair. The vote was 133 to 3 among members, 27 to 1 among adherents, 15 to 1 in the Sunday School, and correspondence form 46 absentees had 2 negatives. This much unanimity is rare in a United Church, and it was matched by the Bellefair crowd. That afternoon, a Transition Team and 9 working groups, each with representatives from each congregation, began work. This was near euphoria, for us. Of course, as the week went on, and the reality began to set in, several people began the echo: ‘what have we done?’ How will we complete this union?

Monday, I was visiting a member in a seniors residence, who was glued to the TV. Stocks in China fell 10% that day, and 3% in New York markets. Continuous updates warned him of his eroding retirement security. We then learned an inconvenient truth about the Academy Award winning Saint Al Gore, the environmentalist with the mansion using more power than any dozen normal homes. Storms distracted us Thursday, as the rains came down and the floods came up in our church office. It’s all enough to start us building an ark, or at least running for the security of cocooning in our homes.

Our little corner-store congregations made the National Post this week. The headline said ‘financial difficulties’, then something about our vote. Our 2006 financial statements were available at the church on Sunday, and confirmed that 9 out of 10 churches would be thrilled to have financial difficulties like ours: generous donors, valuable assets, and endless opportunities and talents. Remember, we did not vote out of an immediate crisis, but after long assessment of long range plans for sustainable mission, served by suitable facilities, to continue our mission and ministries in the beach. We decided to act, together, rather than wait, alone. We are not alone!

Chicken Little says the sky is falling. Somebody is always trying to make us live out of fear. Catastrophism, the discourse of crisis, threats and ad hominem accusations, surround us constantly. Investigative journalism by sensationalist media has replaced the prophetic traditions, let alone the political ones, which pointed beyond their diagnosis to prescriptions, to goods and visions. ‘Nothing stays the same, not for a minute, not for an hour’ is a tagline of our own CBC! I don’t know, don’t you sense a sameness?

Scarcity, rather than abundance is the underlying assumption. Survival of the fittest becomes a moral norm rather than a biological theory. As animals around a watering hole, we eye each other as potential carcasses to scavenge. So this is the top of the food chain, eh? We are wary and afraid, suspicious that we are lower down than somebody else. So we scan the news as if we could win the game, or out-think the market. But as one member here in the investment industry says, for a retail individual investor to try to make spectacular gains beyond market trends is like the same guy trying do-it-yourself brain surgery on his hangover.

It’s not just Al Gore whose charitable ox was gored by the media this week. Saturday papers also exposed the scandal of a Toronto bookkeeper for nonprofit and charities including daycare centres and the Stephen Lewis Foundation. Apparently he absconded to a beach in Africa with hundreds of thousands of dollars, after adjusting his assets to become judgment proof. This Sunday, the front page of the Star screams ‘Holy Profit’, gleefully skewering the pastors of the Prayer Palace at highways 400 and 7 for conspicuous consumption funded by the tithes of thousands of poor parishioners. The reporter was outraged and righteous. One tither just said: ‘I’ve released my tithe. If the pastors misuse it, they will have to answer to God.’

Don Reed gave me his copy of The Jesus Family Tomb this week, to be ready for Tuesday’s TV launch of this holy season’s scandal of religious conspiracy and cover-up of Jesus’ marriage to Mary, and his children buried with them. This one comes from the same guy who brought you the counterfeit ossuary of James the brother of Jesus, funded by the guy who brought you the movie Titanic. Last Lent/Easter, it was Gospel of Judas, and the year before, the moneymaking bonanza began with The DaVinci Code. On Tuesday March 20, here at Kew, Dr Joe Goering will speak on grail legends, based on his book The Virgin and the Grail. The hoax is up!

It turns out that Christianity was a big conspiracy. Several hundred thousand of us clergy are fooling a billion of you, just as we have been doing for two millennia. We have secret handshakes and decoder rings, but won’t share them. The goal is to keep you ignorant. Do you feel stupid about the meaning and purpose of life, and spirituality? Then it’s working! This seems to be the general hypothesis, and the market for it is huge, among those trying to justify their vanities and delusions that they are above or past religion.

Is that really what’s up? Is this a giant scam, con game? I keep saying here that your spirituality is your way of being in the world. Fundamental attitudes, or dispositions, just get elaborated and shared in the ties of religion. Today, I’m inviting you to think about fear or hope. Is the world fundamentally good or not? Which is the norm, which the exception or error? They say we learn this early, in the first months of life: either the world is warm and reliable and loving, with occasional rude surprises from which we learn, or not.

Deriding hope as naivete is just a tactic of fear, posing as sophisticated jaded journalistic cynicism. One of our members told me last week that she thinks Lent should stand for ‘let’s eliminate negative thinking’. There are after all two kinds of people in the world: those like here who think this is the best of all possible worlds, and those who are afraid she and her crowd is right. As we enter this season anticipating union with Bellefair, in the midst and echoes of our week and world, after communion, we paused and reflected:

Are you running scared?
Are you stuck, with your head in the sand, or up in the clouds?
Be alert – and unafraid.

Or, as we say in our household, ‘Be alert! The world needs more lerts!’



At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him
Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!

He said to them,
Go and tell that fox for me

Listen, I am casting out demons
And performing cures today and tomorrow
And on the next day I must be on my way….

Pharisees are not Jesus’ best buddies, but they were always around him, the company he kept. They are the likely forerunners of Christians, trying to figure out religious forms for scattered ‘diaspora’ Judaism, in synagogues after the second temple fell in 70AD, developing the canon of scripture, and in turn Talmud and midrash traditions. These are cautious, careful, reasoned, pragmatic, long term strategists. Yet Jesus is presented as being in tension with them, and with us in some of our Pharisaic tendencies.

I’ve been reading another biography of Winston Churchill. I’m still in the first volume of 1,000 pages, his decades in Parliament, changing parties regularly. He was at odds with each Prime Minister in turn. He was credited, then blamed, for military adventures and misadventures like the Dardenelles and Gallipoli. From Asquith through Chamberlain, Winston Churchil rubbed other politicians’ fur the wrong way, never more than when they were seeking accommodation, negotiated settlements, or compromises.

‘Look out’, ‘get out’, ‘run away’, ‘flee’: Herod wants to kill you! Discretion is the better part of valour! You’ve got to learn to get along and go along, if you’re going to survive to a ripe old age, and enjoy your pension! There’s the wisdom of the Pharisee. This text is not historical journalism about Herod’s state of mind. It’s a reflection after the temple has fallen, two generations after Jesus, about faithful responses to the powers that be, and to the realities of risk and reward for the early Christian synagogues and groups.

Jesus is just rude, and undiplomatic: ‘Go tell the fox’! He just keeps healing spirits and bodies. He is just making things less bad, helping them conform or re-form to the norms of God’s good creation. Who wants to be well adjusted to a maladjusted world? Who wants to be declared sane by an insane system of political and economic order? Not Jesus! It’s short term thinking, based on ultimate horizons of our created beginning and ultimate promised ends. It is not ‘long range’ strategy, or good career planning!

Thank God for such prophetic and messianic witness, even if we only recognize it and respond to it, rather than adopting it. It may be that the sky is falling, but we have good things to do before it lands. Lucy in a Peanuts cartoon goes to Christian summer camp, where ‘the end is near, so children prepare to meet your maker’. The office has plans and models for a new endowed expansion campaign, and Lucy says ‘the world may be ending tomorrow, but I wasn’t born yesterday!’ It’s a Churchillian response: ‘Go tell that fox!’


It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to it…
How often have I desired to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings
And you were not willing! See your house is left to you…

That’s metaphor, not statistics. People who nod sagely have not recently reviewed their Hebrew scriptures. In fact, Uriah the prophet, and maybe Jeremiah, and perhaps some prophets in intertestamental writings about the Maccabees, died in Jerusalem. Generally, they did not – often, they died in exile, of course. Rather, this is generalization that prophets are defined by their relationship to the centre, to the temple, to Jerusalem. If they aren’t offensive, they are false prophets.

It’s a bit like defining yourself by distinguishing yourself from your parents and family. Teenagers know this best, but we all carry some arrested adolescence all our lives, working out our rivalries with siblings, and our rebellions against parents. Prophets cannot die outside Jerusalem, and none of us make sense except in tension with the communities and traditions that shape and define us, to which we respond by informing, conforming, reforming, and transforming ourselves and those others.

Looking back, after the destruction of Jerusalem, Luke’s gospel had to mourn the ‘what if’. Jesus must have wept that the people could not be gathered as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. ‘Uchronia’ is a term coined in literary studies of science fiction, for stories about parallel universes or ‘what if’ alternate histories flowing from different events or choices. What if Hitler had won? What if Churchill had not said: ‘Go tell that fox’? What if people had listened to Jesus when he said the same thing of Herod?

And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord

Are you living in hope, or fear? Do you expect threat or promise? Are you daily meeting friends or foes? This ‘benedictus’ after the ‘sanctus’ in every mass, communion, or Lord’s Supper, is about exactly that. But it’s not just a Christian thing, but a religious disposition. Elie Wiesel quotes a Hasidic rabbinic tradition about how to measure night from day, to begin a Sabbath or festival: ‘when you meet a stranger, and recognize the face of a potential friend, it is day. Until that time, however high the sun, if you meet a stranger, and fear there the face of a foe, then is it still dark.’

This weekend was Purim, the Jewish holiday based on the story of Esther in the Megillah scroll. The Jewish beauty queen in Persia, ‘raised to the purple’ or living in the lap of luxury, is called by Mordecai to foil Haman’s plot of genocide. She could stay safe, and let her ethnic relatives suffer, but for what is power and privilege to her, or to any of us? If not for service of good, ‘to cast demons and heal diseases, today and tomorrow, and the next day to be on our way’, then it’s just empty luxury and self-indulgence. On the other hand, if you don’t just cocoon at home, take care of you and yours and to hell with the rest, then you take risks for others. Haman, or Herod, or Hitler, will want to kill you! But by whom, and by what, is your life controlled? By hope, or by fear?

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him:
‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!’

He said to them: ‘Go and tell that fox for me…
Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow,
and on the next day I must be on my way….’

Look out – the sky is falling! Herod wants to kill you! Get along and go along! You’re known by the enemies you make. Not all conflicts can be negotiated and compromised in our time frames. ‘You can’t consent to a crime’ is an old truism in domestic violence prevention circles. ‘You can’t tolerate intolerance’ is another, from human rights circles. Don’t mediate it all to the middle of the currently presented options, as we live out this union with Bellefair – seek something greater than either!

There’s an apocryphal tale of David Miller seeking advice on the hot issue of the bridge to the island airport. Those fighting the airport expansion wanted to keep the current ferry. Business interests, the port authority and Porter Airlines wanted a bridge. Committees of United Church people, famous for compromise, were gathered to advise the mayor. Their solution was clear and quick: build half a bridge, and run the ferry the rest of the way!

What is expected of us, or demanded of us, as people of the book, as followers of Jesus? What would it look like, if we regained a more militant faith, but not a militaristic one? What if we took a more adversarial approach to resist making ‘deals with the devil’, without sliding into an antagonistic attitude? Have we become Pharisaic in our self-appointed roles of mediators and peacemakers? We owe a witness and testimony to hope, rather than fear. We may not choose to be like Esther, or Jesus – certainly not Churchill – but we might train our eyes and ears to recognize such messianic and prophetic figures in our context. We might expect them.

And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord

Next time you share the sacrament of communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the mass, and hear or say the benedictus after the sanctus, remember the gospel story from which it comes. Are you living in fear, or in hope? Are you cringing and ducking the catastrophes and crises in the daily media, or anticipating and risking that there might be somebody and something good out there, for those with eyes to see, and ears to hear, and hearts open to welcome good news?

Are you running scared? Are you stuck, with your head in the sand, or up in the clouds?
Be alert – and unafraid.

Or, as we say in our household, ‘Be alert! The world needs more lerts!’ We close services here: ‘You may be the only gospel your neighbour reads this week, so write the vision and make it plain, that she who runs may read it’. Bellefair adds something crucial: ‘May everyone you meet see the face of Christ in you – and may you recognize the face of Christ in everyone you meet’. So be it – together we have a richer, greater gospel. We are not alone. Thanks be to God.


Prayer as we came…

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.

God who waits, and knocks
Persistent one, patient one…
We hear you knocking, and you can come in

We did not set out to set ourselves apart
We did not come in to come away only
We did not sit down to let you down

If it’s up to us, we’ll welcome you in,
hosts in your home
If we’re in, we’re in with you and yours, seeking more
If we sit down, it’s only to slow down, alert and unafraid

God who waits, and knocks
Persistent one, patient one…
We hear you knocking, and you can come in

We hear you knocking,
back where you’ve always been
Just beyond our grasp, just within our reach
God with us, Emmanuel…

If anyone hears your voice,
she’ll open the door
And you’ll come in and sup with her
and she with you
So stand at the door, knock once more

What word do you have for our hearts,
O God, give us ears to hear.
Amen

Prayer before we left…

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.

God who waits, and knocks
Persistent one, patient one…
We hear you knocking, and you can come in

We’re expecting you now, counting on you now –
Ready to greet you, to welcome you
Alert to recognize you, unafraid if you look strange

Though we admit we have missed your call before
Inhospitable to strangers
We have spammed the door, hung up the phone
Resisting more
Ignoring the stranger, who was your outreach to us
Scared of surprises

You know we’ve been running scared
You know we’ve stuck our heads in sand or cloud,
You know we’d rather be alert – and unafraid.

We face disturbed spirits,
physical ailments each day
Within us, among us, around us….
Not as you intend spirits and bodies, or as they end

Give us eyes open to see, ears open to hear,
hearts open to feel
Your people and your world
as you see and hear and love us
Our hope as you offer it, the risks as we face them…

Give us courage, and wisdom, and mercy and grace
To engage your world, body & soul, not run away
Bless us, and we will bless your world… Amen Read more...