Babble

BABBLE, BLAH, BLAH, SPIRIT
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.ca
Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 2007

Text: Genesis 11:1-11, Acts 2:1-13

This was the 7th Sunday of shared worship for uniting congregations who last worshiped separately on Easter Day. This was Pentecost, the culmination of the Great 50 Days of Easter, and festival of the gift of the Holy Spirit. We celebrated with handbells, children’s and adult choirs, ‘Catch’ praise band, and confirmation of 4 teenagers as members of the church, each of them speaking a couple of times in the service. We put the sermon last, in case we ran out of time and needed to abbreviate that part of the service.

We’ve been changing the look and sound of worship modestly each week in Easter season at the Bellefair site, lest anybody think they’ve arrived at a ‘new normal’ already. We’ve tried to describe why we put the font or the table or the pulpit in the centre of worship, or changed robes. This day, ministers wore stoles, symbolizing service of footwashing, red for Pentecostal spirit. Ending this season as I began it, I showed the symbol of the preacher’s watch. The child asks ‘what does that mean, mommy?’ The grandmother answers ruefully, ‘absolutely nothing’.

I invited you to let your minds wander as we ended our worship service – or now, as you read these notes – in echoes and reflections of the sights and sounds of one service, one season, and beyond to other services, and seasons. Some of you said after worship that you’d been recalling your own confirmations, and other Pentecost Sundays. As usual, if God had something to say to you, God got it said, through or despite my words, which are not the Word but responses to it all.

I began with some choruses from ‘The Rock’ by T.S. Eliot:

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?...

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City…
There I was told; we have too many churches,
And too few chop-houses. There I was told:
Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church
In the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays…
We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor…
If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers…

And the church does not seem to be wanted,
In country or in suburb, and in the town,
Only for important weddings.

The confirmands had courageously stood and spoken already, with a scripture each had chosen, voicing their words in response to the Word. I attempted to do something similar. God forbid you should find my voice, and not your own, in this sub-vocalized conversation in which my end is so often more audible and recognized. So I responded to stories that Luis and Brendan read:

I remember Babel – and so do you! After the flood and the rainbow, when we all got off the ark, the bible story sums it up like this:

The whole earth had one language, and few words.

We thought and felt and experienced life and death, but we had no words for it all. No poetry, few stories, only a couple of songs, and hardly any jokes… and they weren’t that funny. Everybody seemed and sounded exactly the same. Even though we were difference, we were too poor in language to discover all that we were or might yet become, unique and complex. After the flood and the rainbow, when we all got off the ark, that’s what it was like for awhile:

The whole earth had one language, and few words.

But remember, the story keeps going. We few refugees from the ark immigrated from the east, into an open plain of Shinar, and settled, and somebody said:

Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.

Somebody invented baked bricks. They were harder and all the same, like we thought we were. The bricks were better for building than sticks and skins, and stronger than mud dried in the sun. And somebody figured out how to use bitumen for mortar, to stick those hard bricks together in great tall walls. What technological progress! We could do great things, big things, even if we were poor in language and in our expressions of life and death.

Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.

I remember how that worked out – and so do you. A few people planned and organized the building of a city and a tower, with the new baked bricks. And they said:

Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered.

Those guys that were making a name for themselves were expressing themselves, as none of us could do with one language and few words. But most of us spent our lifetimes in the brick ovens, and carrying bricks, and bricklaying. It consumed all of us. The women didn’t even have that much link to the grand plan of making a name for the few. Children were just potential brick workers, but more of a burden than a joy to us. Where are they in this part of the story?

Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered.

After the flood, after the rainbow, when we all got off the ark, the whole earth had one language, and few words. And as we refugees settled in the plain, somebody said come, let us make bricks. And a few people said ‘let us make a name for ourselves’, and started to build a city and a tower.

I remember Babel – and so do you! That’s the way I heard the story, and began to retell it. I tried to interpret it by remembering it and rehearsing it in my voice, in our church – not to demand that you hear it through me, my way, but with me, your way, to find or change our way.

We came to the plain of Shinar poor in language and in our expression of our living and dying. Soon we became poor in our very living and dying. We were all too busy with the bricks, making a name for the few. Those were not ‘good old days’, even if the new economy prospered. As one of you told me on the steps later, part of the old days used to be respect, but part was fear. Those were hard times at home, and back breaking work for the boys with the bricks.

Then something changed! We started talking about other stuff, not just the bricks and mortar. Some folks made poems. Other folks told stories, that weren’t even true or about city towers. There were all kinds of tunes, and new music. So many jokes, that made different people laugh, although some people just didn’t get most of them. We had different languages, many words, and the more we invented, the better we expressed – and experienced – life in all its rich glories.

The more we gathered around the poems and stories and songs – and the jokes – the less we cared about carrying bricks. People stopped building. Lots of us just walked away, or left town. The people who had been in charge were angry. How would they make a name for themselves? They told us so – we were scattering across the face of the earth. When we were united, nothing was impossible for us. We were productive, and efficient, and effective. Till it all changed.

Now the bible tells us that God changed it. God gave us confusion of language, and we couldn’t understand each other, and we scattered. But the bible doesn’t say how, or that it was a curse. That’s up to us to figure out, with poems and stories and songs – and jokes – in our own voices. What do you think? One language, few words, bricks & mortar, nothing is impossible: blessing? Babbling confusion of rich diversity: threat, curse, or promise and blessing? Remember Babel!

Remember that story, as only you can retell it, to speak about economy, globalization, or empire. Retell that story, as only you can remember it, to tell your story, our story, and God’s story in all the rich relationships of reference, difference, and citation. Preach your own sermons now – and listen to the babble of all the other sermons finding expression all around you in this place. We get to be architects of Babel, make names for ourselves. We also haul bricks, or scatter.

We’ve been trying to worship together for 7 Sundays so far. We’ve been moving the furniture, changing the outfits, varying the order of worship and the types of music. For all of us, even me, some of it, some of the time, is babbling, and words come out ‘blah, blah, blah.’ I don’t get it! Go ahead, admit it – your mind wanders! But is that when you’re losing the Godtalk, the Word, or when you are beginning to find it? God forbid we all agree, as if we were lobotomized!

Scholars say our tradition is not univocal, but dialogical, or intertextual. One oppressive authoritarian voice that silences others never wins. One language, few words, bricks & mortar, making a name for ourselves, is not utopia, but dystopia! Confusing our speech, scattering us across the face of the earth with poems and stories and songs and jokes is not a punishment from God, but a blessing! Listen and find your own voice. Watch, and witness in your own response.

When the early church, and the gospel tradition we call Luke and Acts, tried to express its own story, it used the story of Babel, and the promise of the prophet Joel, to shape its own account. The second lesson is like a funhouse mirror of the first one, in poetry and story and song and even in jokes – but we still don’t get it. I asked for a couple more minutes now, to see if you can make sense of the confusing language of Pentecost from your own voice telling about Babel.

After all, I remember Pentecost – and so do you!

We huddled pretty close after Jesus died. We were holed up in Jerusalem, behind locked doors. We were scared, and we were suspicious. We’d already had one martyr, and one traitor. Enough. That’s the eleven guys, mind you. We could describe what Jesus did, remember what he said, but who could find words for what it meant now? It wasn’t enough to sit in a circle agreeing with each other that ‘you had to be there’. We were already wearing on each other, despite that amazing shared history. We needed ways to share it with others, with a future and a hope.

You can only hang around inside with ‘people like us’, remembering ‘good old days’, so long. We needed some new poems, and stories, and songs, and jokes, and we weren’t generating them. It was a bit like a prison. You know the one about the cell block when they’d all just call out numbers, since everybody knew all the jokes in the crowd? Number 14! One guy laughs longer, since he really likes 14. Number 18! Another guy laughs, and laughs – he’d never heard 18….
We really needed language worthy of our experience of Jesus life and work – and ours.

If you try to just hang around with ‘our kind of people’ – just the right nuance of liberal protestant, treasuring our precious differences – you will soon find that nobody is exactly ‘our kind of people’. I’m not ‘my kind of people!’ The protestant heresy is schism: ‘it’s you and me God, and I’m not so sure about you!’ There is more complex diversity within each of us, among any crowd of us, than between us and between groups. We are not the Word – we respond to it.

Something changed, that released the 11. Call it tongues of fire, rush of the wind, or even spirit. Call it poetry and stories and songs and jokes. People scared and suspicious, huddling behind locked doors, changed. Their whispers became loud babbling, that people confused with drunkenness, until they realized that fragments of voices were making sense to different people. No one voice reached everybody. My ‘aha’ was your ‘blah, blah’. But each one reached one.

Looking back, it wasn’t such a big reach. We were in Jerusalem, and the folks who made sense of our babbling were all Jewish like us. But they were from different languages and cultures. What they heard from us was not one language and few words, bricks & mortar, making a name for ourselves, but one message, a Word in a flow of words that would not be stopped, like water or wind or fire, all metaphors for Spirit. They started locally, with people like them or near them.

I remember Pentecost – and so do you!

We’ve been talking a lot about uniting over the past year. We keep saying ‘we are not alone’, until it seems we have one language and few words. We say it’s not all about bricks & mortar, but we confess that it is also about bricks & mortar. Are we just making a name for ourselves? Who’s hauling bricks, and who gets angry as their pet project is lost? Who is ‘just a woman’, ‘just a lay person’, ‘just a kid’, or ‘just an old guy’? What voices need to join the babble? Yours?

We’ve been talking a lot about reaching out this past year. We keep saying ‘we believe in God’, who has created, and is creating, who works in us and others by the Spirit. But it often feels like the usual suspects in more long meetings. What if we just connected with near neighbours – or even with another side of our own selves, just like the 11 reached out to Jews in Jerusalem? That would be pretty good practice, and if we got good at it, God knows where it might lead!

Of course, to begin with it might seem like Babel. I don’t want to boil this down to sloganeering, lowest common denominator unity of one language and few words. Do you? Find your own voice, and God forbid you just sound like me! You can reach people I never will, and you keep changing my voice, in our conversations about my story, our story, and God’s story. Thank God Read more...

Imagine

IMAGINE
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.ca
Ascension Sunday, May 20, 2007

Text: Acts 1:1-11

Katherine Barber, the ‘word lady’ from CBC, editor of the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary, spoke at our church last Tuesday. She drew a bigger crowd than worship did this Sunday of the Victoria Day long weekend. People were right to pack the room for her, despite a wild rainstorm, or as she put it, the ‘welkin bursting’. ‘Welkin’ is an old Celtic word. We are more familiar with synonyms like ‘heaven’ or ‘sky’, from Norse Saxon roots. Perhaps the more elegant ‘celestial firmament’ appeals, from the later Roman rulers’ language, Latin. All the words originally meant the same thing: the dome embedded with stars under which we live, here on our flat earth.

Ms Barber pointed out that etymology, the study of words, should not be confused with entymology, the study of bugs. Details matter – but so does context. Words shape how we construe or construct reality, but the meaning of words changes, particularly in the endlessly flexible English language appropriation of words from other languages, recycling and reusing, but rarely reducing. Semantic fields change by use and application. Words don’t work by reference as much as by difference, by correlation as much as allusion. Citation of original usage of a word matters, but what is received by your hearer or reader now is determinative.

So when you say welkin, or heaven or sky, or celestial firmament, the references include the apparent arch or bowl under which we all live on our flat earth. But when you use the terms, you mean and convey something other than that obsolete cosmology. You don’t simply adopt uncritically the whole religious worldview and mythology of the linguistic sources. You may not even refer to those webs of belief, but if you do, it is to distinguish yours, or allude to more. We live in a rational scientific disenchanted modern world, with little time for old superstitions, eh?

We live in a world of many modernities, or post-modernities, of many cultures and subcultures. What was once common sense is no longer either sensible, or common. G. K. Chesterton said when people stop believing in God, they won’t believe in nothing, but will believe in anything. Perhaps somebody in town does believe in the bowl over our flat earth. Certainly lots of us read our horoscopes, based in the cosmology of constellations of stars studding the bowl.

Charles Taylor, the Montreal professor of philosophy who recently won the million dollar Templeton prize, points out that we enjoy moral consensus on a number of issues, but none on underlying moral sources. When we lose that glib liberal consensus, we lack the resources to articulate the grounds for our own moral position, and polarization and conflict follows. Peter Emberley, the Ottawa academic, asks how long then can we maintain our consensus bequeathed to us by the generation that built liberal modernity, and answers: not long.

My generation is more likely to know Luke and the Apostles as a Canadian music group who frequented Yorkville, and the Beach, in the early 1970’s – and promised as an act in next week’s Luminato festival of arts and culture in town. We don’t really know our bible, and that gospel tradition we call Luke in the first volume, and Acts in the second. John Lennon really was bigger than Jesus for us. Hear the soundtrack in your head to his 1972 song ‘Imagine’:

Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try,
No hell below us, above us only sky.
Imagine all the people, living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too,
Imagine all the people, living life in peace…

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man,
Imagine all the people, sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,
I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

He was not the only one. Lennon was voice for a generation, in youthful rebellion against collective goods and authorities: church, state, materialism, militarism, and more. They were re-imagining the world as one grand inclusive peaceful sharing, of consenting individuals without the clutter of mediating structures. How has that been going, a couple of decades in? The privileged baby boom that ‘imagined’ has done pretty well by a free market of goods and culture, and the language of human rights and multiculturalism. But how wide is the circle of market participants, and how is the distribution of wealth within that market changing?

Imagine no heaven? ‘Above us only sky’ simply replaced one utopian vision with another. Perhaps you’d prefer to imagine a welkin, or a celestial firmament. Call them ‘cultural’. You can’t have one universal and correct culture – but you can’t have none. It’s an illusion and a delusion that we are simply rights-bearing individuals shopping for ideal choices of culture along with other consumer goods. UNESCO’s definition of culture conveys both the creative or conscious culture exemplified by the imaginative, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of life, and the more lived sense of culture associated with anthropology and sociology:

Culture may now be said to be the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group. It includes not only the arts and letters, but also modes of life, the fundamental rights of the human being, value systems, traditions and beliefs… It is culture that gives man the ability to reflect upon himself. It is culture that makes us specifically human, rational beings, endowed with a critical judgment and a sense of moral commitment. It is through culture that we discern values and make choices. It is through culture that man expressed himself, becomes aware of himself, recognizes his incompleteness, questions his own achievements, seeks untiringly for new meanings and creates works through which he transcends his limitations. (Gender exclusive language in the 1987 original)

World Council of Churches gatherings have asserted that “culture shapes the human voice that answers the voice of Christ” (Bangkok 1973), and that “ the gospel is not good news unless it engages the culture of its hearers in a way that takes seriously that culture’s identity and integrity.” (Jerusalem 1995). Jesuit Michael Gallagher summarizes these insights:

In short, there is an inescapable doubleness of culture as a source of possible deception and yet as a stimulus for new languages of faith.... culture can indeed block the hearing of the Word but it is also the human zone of imagination most capable of fostering new languages of faith worthy of today’s emerging sensibilities. (Clashing Symbols 1998)

Charles Taylor, the Montreal philosopher of the politics of recognition, now advising the Quebec government on a commission on the issues of French language and culture in relation to minority ethnic and religious groups, coined the term ‘social imaginaries’ in a 2004 book of that name:

By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.

I adopt the term imaginary (i) because my focus is on the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but in images, stories, and legends. It is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. (Modern Social Imaginaries, 2004)

Taylor credits Jurgen Habermas with delineating the development of the concepts of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public opinion’ in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. Before then, our bowl over our flat earth contained many principalities and powers, and was enchanted with many angels and demons, transpersonal forces. But it had no ‘public sphere’ – nor a ‘private’ one! Gadamer also contributes the images revealing disenchanting rational enlightenment as simply re-enchanting a universe with profane fantasies of individuals in a state of nature choosing their societies in a social contract, a pre-political liturgy now presided over by priesthoods of pollsters.

Once we lived under a bowl over our flat earth, under the shadows of principalities and powers, and in the light of revelation and angels. We still say welkin (but not often), and heaven, sky, or celestial firmament. What do we imagine as the transpersonal mediating structures in being over and around us, with what imagery? I started with the American Eagle fighting the Russian Bear with the British Lion, and had more fun with Toronto Blue Jays battling St Louis’ Cardinals, before rhyming off the ‘ologies’, and ‘isms’, brands, logos by which we organize our worldview.

This morning we told children a story about Jesus going up to the sky in a cloud, to go back where he came from, and leaving his disciples to carry the good news. I believe that story, and tell it, the same way I believe we live under a bowl on a flat earth, and use words like welkin, heaven, sky, or celestial firmament. It’s not just reference, but difference, not just correlation, but allusion, citation of what they meant then, to try to make sense for us now. It’s great to tell the children the story. It must be awful to still have such childish faith in your mind and mouth when the rest of your worldview has developed to sophisticated adulthood. Grow up!

The gospel tradition we call Luke and Acts of the Apostles - the bible books, not the Toronto music group - was trying to tell the significance of Jesus and the gospel to Gentiles, outside the culture in which it all began. Pax Romana was suppressing competing cultures, unless they were safely subordinate. This story was using the language of a Babylonian and Persian cosmology of seven heavens, as English used and transformed the words of Saxons and Romans. It didn’t mean a conversion to an Iraqi cult any more than me saying ‘welkin’ makes me a Druid.

If Jesus is a bigger deal than all the principalities and powers, greater than the empire or those who claimed to be in charge, then you need language to say so. The metaphors could have been about deeper roots, or wider breadth, or older origins – and that language was also used. Complex iconography, in Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Revelation to John, keep telling the same story in different ways. But here, the claim that our Jesus is a bigger deal than anybody or anything threatening our people, is framed as a story, of ascension into the clouds.

This Victoria Day, we have to confess that a WASP ‘Toronto the Good’, with triumphal hymns for which we knew all the verses, and the bass line harmonies, and the tithes flowed like milk and honey, was a bit like the apostles’ first failure to make sense of resurrection. They asked Jesus, ‘is this the time you will restore the kingdom of Israel’? He said ‘it is not for you to know the time or the seasons’. This is a subtler claim that Jesus is bigger than the powers that be – that Jesus is not a tyrant or bully – nor should Christians be. Those who claim to be in charge, aren’t.

Our modern social imaginaries of individuals ruled by their choices in relation to some sphere of public opinion floating alone in a disenchanted universe distorts our moral life. Some of us think it’s ‘all my fault’, and are paralyzed by the importance imputed to our consumption choices. Some of us have a proud delusion of power. Others indulge slothful delusions of powerlessness. Re-imagine your world with a risen Christ, bigger than cancer or AIDs, or public opinion or consumer confidence or any of the powers that be. Taking sides on penultimates is easier, then.

The apostles’ other failure to make sense is imagined as them standing looking into clouds: imagine, reunion with Jesus, above and beyond it all. They’ve become so heavenly minded they’re of no earthly good. It’s a heresy to think that you don’t need to serve or to suffer, or that your life and work in this world and this life don’t matter. Angels in white are dispatched into the story, to smack the boys upside their heads. Stay in the city, until you are clothed with power – then you will be witnesses, in Jerusalem, and Judea, in Galilee, and to the ends of the earth.

For me, the apostles’ reaction to the ascension is like John Lennon’s: imagine the ideal end! When it’s naïve, it’s human and real. But it’s not long before it’s a willful ignorance that keeps folks seeking their bliss in a focus on the skies above us, avoiding the serving and suffering that make a difference in this world and the next. It’s different than triumphal cultural imperialism of our WASP past – but it’s still repeating an ancient error, and ignoring ancient wisdom. Imagine!

Imagine re-enchanting our welkin, our heaven, sky, celestial firmament, beginning with an ascended Jesus, above and beyond penultimate powers that be. Let Jesus be Jesus, and just try to imagine how to be a better Christian. Don’t be satisfied with our trivial popular culture, with one ‘public sphere’, but put it in conversation with gospel, through Milton or Dante and others we’ve forgotten in our barbaric age. We too will be witnesses, starting locally. You may be the only gospel your neighbour reads. Write the vision, and make it plain, that she who runs may read it! Read more...

As For Me and My House

AS FOR ME AND MY HOUSE
Notes from Bill Bruce at www.kewbeachunitedchurch.com
Mothers’ Day Sunday, May 13, 2007

Text: Acts 16:9-15

We celebrated Mothers’ Day and baptisms as two crowds becoming one. Last Sunday, our new council was introduced, and Tuesday, Presbytery blessed our union. Our staffing committees were beaming with their progress, discovering the wealth of clergy talent available for them - somewhat to my chagrin, as I am competing in the same glutted market of talented people, in the ‘jump and shuffle’ season of matching ministers to churches for the coming church year.

Sinclair Ross published a novel in 1941, about a United Church minister who preaches the same sermon as he begins at each new church: As For Me and My House (we will serve the Lord). The story is told in the voice of Mrs. Bentley, his wife. She had been a musician till she married, and Bentley had been an artist till he went into the ministry. But in the life of a Protestant minister in 1930’s Depression Saskatchewan, there is no room for such indulgences. He hides in his study, secretly smoking a pipe, and she walks the rails out toward the vanishing horizon. The Bentleys can’t have children; their own infertility matching the lifeless church they serve.

That’s a familiar caricature of a brittle sterile religion: pietistic, repressed, inhibited, suffocating its own leadership. You’d be wise to keep your distance from such a church, or such clergy. But keeping such distance, how would you know that’s the church and clergy we are now? Perhaps it’s a projection of your own Jungian dark side, not recognition of who we are! In an Andy Capp cartoon, Andy meets the vicar of the local parish, St Swithin’s. ‘That’s my parish’, says Andy, ‘I was married there, and got the kids done there.’ ‘I’ve been there 7 years’, says the vicar, ‘and I’ve never met you’. ‘I didn’t say I was a religious fanatic’, says Andy!

I know it was Mothers’ Day, and we had just baptized 2 infants. But let’s not just get maudlin. Sure your mother gave you birth. Many of you have given birth. Who were your godmothers? Who gave you birth in the faith? Who was the midwife, the stepmother, the caregiver for you? And for whom have you in turn been godmother, midwife, stepmother, caregiver in faith?

Bruce Cockburn got a Doctor of Divinity from Queen’s University, or the United Church school of theology there, last Wednesday. He was recognized as a Christian, a social justice activist, and a rock musician. The newspapers report that his parents were agnostics, who attended the United Church for ‘social reasons’. He was encouraged in his music by the church organist. But the real Christian stuff came later, when he was an adult, and somebody invited him to another church. People say of him now, ‘I’m not a Christian, but if I was, I hope I’d be like him’.

Margaret Avison is a Toronto poet, born in 1918, child of a Methodist minister in Saskatchewan, and raised in United Church manses in Toronto, as her father was minister at places I’ve closed. She outgrew Sunday School religion, and went off to Victoria College, Guggenheim fellowship, and in her mid-80’s, a Griffin poetry prize. The real Christian stuff came later, in her adulthood, serving at Evangel Hall downtown, with Presbyterians who talked about Jesus and did something about it. People say of her, ‘If all Christians were like her, the city would be a different place’.

Clergy come and go. We all look and sound pretty much the same. Our households know what it’s like to be of the community, but not from the community. We, and our partners and preachers’ kids, ‘PK’s’, know what it’s like to share some, but not all, of the believing, belonging and behaving of each local community. We are itinerants, never entirely settled. We’re more like you than you imagine, despite or because of As For Me and My House visions.

I know it was Mothers’ Day, and baptisms. I’m not against motherhood! Our identity is built from all our identifications. Our first identities come from being born of a woman, and those who become mothers find it changes their identity. It’s powerful, complex, not just role modeling, but a role we define ourselves against. Not all of us get to be mothers. Those who do, have complex ambivalent experiences. So sure, I asked you to remember your mother this morning - and also to remember your godmothers in faith. Imagine yourself, mother or godmother, in turn.

How did the church start? How does it continue? It’s a bit like families, taking their names through patronyms and primogeniture. That’s not all there is! It takes women, not just men! Anybody who thinks Jesus appointed a board of 12 men who converted more men to their organization and its rules has not read the scripture – or actually lived in a church. Nurture and ethos are more powerful than arguments and membership cards. The faith is caught, not taught, in relationships of mutuality and receptivity: belonging, believing, and behaving with each other.

Sure, Acts starts with the story of 11 men, huddling without Jesus or Judas. But suddenly there are many apostles, and deacons like Stephen, serving Greek and Jewish widows. Peter’s church in Jerusalem, comes to terms with Paul’s movement, through a conference meeting, like Frank and Ron and the ministers and presbytery meeting endlessly about our reorganization. Paul heads north to the Gentiles, Barnabas splits, and young Timothy joins the itinerant road show.

But read Acts more closely, and you discover that like today, there was more going on than guys in meetings haggling out turf wars. There is a record of worship and work and women, the flesh and blood of the movement. Under and around all the busy boy politics of conflict, power, listen for the ‘her-story’, and look for the women. The women didn’t huddle with the 11 men, because they’d already been to the empty tomb and moved on! Then listen and look around you now for the echoes, and the reflections, women here and now, among and around us all.

Paul and his friends traveled north from Jerusalem, through Turkey and Asia Minor. When we here today that they are in Troas, think of the Dardanelles, or Gallipoli, on the route to the Black Sea and Asia. Why didn’t they head east to Persian, Babylonian, Seleucid turf in Iraq, to Asia? Acts says it was Paul’s dream, a call to Macedonia. We call that the borderlands of the Ottomans, the Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, even Bulgarians today. They take a boat north to Philippi, a strategic Roman colony along the approaches to the Dardenelles, Black Sea, Asia.

Come Sabbath, they were looking for a place of prayer. They went outside the city gates, down by the river to pray. They were talking with the women. Women, not men. Talking with, not lecturing at. Lydia was there. Lydia was from Thyatira, down south in Turkey. She was a dealer in purple cloth. She ran an import-export agency, in luxury goods. When Acts says that Lydia and all her household were baptized, don’t picture a woman with two kids. Picture the whole office, the small business, following their boss’s lead. They didn’t get converted or catechized. Lydia was already worshiping God. She just jumped in with the new company!

Who was it who invited you, a newcomer or stranger in a strange land? You dance with the one what brung you, eh? Who was it whose company you kept when you set out in a new place and phase of your life to find a place of prayer? What company did you meet once you got there? Bruce Cockburn and Margaret Avison had United Church roots, but hardly religious fanatics. My father always says he goes for the music. My mother buys stuff that I define myself against. We’re all a mess of paradox and contradiction. It takes a village to raise a child, and confuse her. Some say the right things, but do bad ones. Others talk like bigots, but love in action like saints.

The people who show up in our midst here are not ‘seekers’, as the church growth gurus claim, any more than they are sinners to be reformed by the righteous. When we talk with each other, we find people who already have a sense of spirituality, and a looking for a place of prayer, perhaps some company to celebrate and serve, learn and care. If they are ignorant barbarians, well, so are we who happen to have been coming here longer. Imagine Paul’s traveling band meeting Lydia and her import agency. Who was host, and who was guest, between strangers? God knows why we gather, and what relationships may form here. No, really: God knows!

I invited you to remember who had been Lydia for you. Who were your godmothers in faith, the midwives, stepmothers, caregivers? I invited you to imagine and hope that you in turn might be Lydia for others: inviting, provoking, welcoming, accompanying. That’s how the church started, and that’s how it will be recreated again, not simply with the boys at meetings, or blissful pious ‘madonna with child’. Go find a place of prayer. Create one. Start by talking with the women. If somebody is looking for a place of prayer, will they find one with us, in the beach, next year?

Margaret Avison got her 2002 Griffin poetry prize for a collection called Concrete and Wild Carrots. One of the poems there, “Other Oceans’, has a section which the 85 year old headed ‘postmodern’, which resonates for me with the Lydias of our lives:


You know their thoughtful
responsible faces, their
capacity for goodness, their
willingness to show
good will.
They shoulder only their part of the
burden of living as a
matter of course.

Who can help warmly
appreciating such people
among us, leaders of thought,
careful, and when necessary, bold
in action?

How different it would be, today, to
“take up your cross and follow Me”, to
“take my yoke upon you, and learn….”
Take both? Take what’s to hand? Find
one follows the other?
Or find the same bewildering
burden?

It makes no sense today
to talk this way, or did
in A.D.30, thereabouts.

No, but once heard it condenses
somehow. Cautions. Compels – can
flood a person,
earth and sea and sky – all that
originated in a like
mystery (all who will die from
this reasonable lifetime we have known) –
with one
overwhelming focus,
for what remains of your
lifetime’s doings and responsibilities,
held by a steadying pulse.
Thank god now, for your Lydia, for the moments you were Lydia for another, and may yet be. I’m one of the itinerants, like Paul, or Lydia. So, in fact, are you. I hear some of you are anxious about the future, and who will be staff next fall. You don’t know from anxiety! Get over it! God holds you in the palm of God’s hand, and shelters you in the shadow of God’s wings. You have no reason to fear. Don’t worry! Clergy come and go. There are women to talk with, and a place of prayer to be found, for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts open to care. Find a place of prayer. Create one here. Imagine the ripples such simple hospitality might have!

God of grace –
now we’ve come out too –
Out of our daily paths and ruts
Just outside the city where we work
Just outside the homes and blocks where we live

And we gather ourselves again
Looking for a place of prayer
Down by the lake,
stepping inside
Talking with the women here

We’re not all that local
Not all born and raised here
You know our business,
Our memories & hopes,
Who and what brought us here,
And who and what keeps us coming,

God of grace –
there are some people here, now,
And we would like a word with you,
A word from you, a word of you

Speak now,
In a voice that comes from our midst
Truth mediated through personality
Wisdom shaped in community

What word do you have for our hearts,
O God of grace,
Give us ears to hear,
Amen Read more...