Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
Baptism Sunday, May 25, 2008

Text: Isaiah 49:7-23

We began this Sunday by celebrating the baptisms of 3 infants: Maggie Rose, Asia Anna, and Thomas Bruce. We completed our church day by approving a call to our new minister of Youth and Young Families, the Reverend Ruth Noble, currently of Aurora UC. Our great expectations have less to do with the Dickens novel of the same name, than our anticipation of the generation rising up before us, and imagining the road ahead for us all.

I invited you to reflect not only on the generation rising up before you, but also those lying behind you. Each one of us remembered their own parents, and grandparents, and great grandparents, from many different countries and religious traditions. What would they all make of us trying to make church in our generation, and to share it with these children? What will these children, and the next generation, make of us with 20/20 hindsight?


There’s a book in our church library, by John Westerhoff III: Will Our Children Have Faith? The author argues that the real question is ‘will our faith have children?’ Any specific child or family is part of who and what the church is now. We are always surprised at how we raise them up, and they populate pews elsewhere, while others join us from other churches and traditions. It’s not just biological transmission, or congregational preservation that carries the faith from the generations that lie behind us to the one rising before us.

I showed you a old photo of my great grandfather William Milton Bruce, born in1850 on a fresh homestead near what was then called Berlin, in a township where the population was already 60% black. His parents had come from Ireland in the days of the potato famine, and the census records show that his mother and other family members could not sign their names, making the “X” mark of illiterates. But his middle name was Milton after the poet, and they made him do well at school. He became a dentist, taught it, and died in 1918.

Yesterday I took a funeral of a man born in 1916 in a house backing on Prospect cemetery, where my great grandfather was buried 2 years later. We’re really just a couple of generations into this project of making a Canadian indigenous church. Generations before us lived through emigration and immigration, wars and depression. My generation has been blessed with a long stretch of privilege and opportunity, as those lying behind us might have hoped. So what lies ahead for the generation rising up before us?

They say this is a WASP denomination and congregation, but I invited you to look around and check the hypothesis. We were Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, with ancestors from every continent. Then I pointed out that even ‘WASP’ was a daring alliance of folks who used to hate each other, based on old grievances of the English ethnic cleansing of Scots from Culloden through the Highland Clearances, and domination of Irish from the Siege of Derry through the ‘Troubles’ in our lifetime. What are our grudges, and our next alliances?

I showed you photos of a man called Gustav Niebuhr, with a moustache like my great grandfather’s, who came from Germany in the same generation. He had a good grammar school education, but as an immigrant in the Midwest US he had to do farm labour. His son Reinhold Niebuhr grew up speaking German at home, and worshiping in German at church, as Gustav drove his children to get as much education as possible. Reinhold, his brother Helmut Richard, and his sister Hulda, all became university professors in the end.

A century ago, Reinhold Niebuhr became pastor of a small church of 65 Germans in Detroit. During World War I, being German was unpopular, just as being Japanese in World War II and Arabic or middle eastern has been in the past decade. In Canada, the town of Berlin changed its name to that of Allied General Kitchener, and locked up Ukrainians. Reinhold Niebuhr learned as a young man the tensions of patriotism and religious and cultural identity.

Niebuhr kept taking political stands, which were rarely popular, and usually printed in papers and magazines. He challenged Henry Ford’s philanthropy, saying that profits made laying off workers when they got sick were funding charity handouts to the same guys’ families. Niebuhr said love without justice is sentimentality, but justice without love is tyranny. He let union organizers speak in his church when Detroit was a non-union town, and argued for a Christian socialist and pacifist position in the Fellowship of Reconciliation in the 1930’s.

Niebuhr was a man who could be persuaded to change his stand. Through the decades, recognizing the greater evils of Hitler and Stalin, he supported war and became an outspoken anticommunist. He then opposed the excesses of the Vietnam War before his death in 1970. He said that some religious folks dealt only with sublime mountaintop peaks and deep dark abysses of human experience, but that most of us live in the foothills of real choices in the real world between greater and lesser evils, our own pride and sloth.

Go ahead and Google the name of Reinhold Niebuhr, and read what you find. My own favorite is a book of essays called Pious and Secular America. His was a faith that took public witness and collective sin and justice seriously, in balance with personal piety and individual charity. He expresses that 20th century liberal protestant faith of which we are the children in the 21st century. I fear that we often become a caricature of the political gospel in our denominational circles, and a dim sentimental shadow locally of the church which raised me to believe that faith had a public and political dimension and witness to offer the world.

After all that biography, you may have wondered why I made Sat Taniguchi read so much from the prophet Isaiah. The original prophet Isaiah preached to people in one generation, as they were exiled from Judah to Babylon, in our day Israel to southern Iraq. It was the next generation of faith who developed that voice of Isaiah, to get beyond the initial traumas of exile and a strange land, and to begin to sing songs of hope. Isaiah 49 offers some of those images of what the people imagined about the future rising up before them, without forgetting the generations lying behind them.

In our day and age, with stories told in terms of heroes and victims, cowboys in white hats and villains in black hats, the world needs our tradition of telling stories of confession and solidarity and hope. We are obliged to find ways to tell the same story in a new world. So I invited you to listen to Niebuhr, in the echoes of Isaiah. Try it now, online or in hard copy:

Reinhold Niebuhr, living through the 20th century as I told the story today, wrote this:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
therefore, we are saved by love.


Niebuhr also wrote a prayer in 1943, which has been adopted by 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous everywhere as the Serenity Prayer. Here is Niebuhr’s original – can you see how it is different from the version you know, and truer to his story?

O God,
Give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed,
The courage to change what should be changed,
And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other…

Now listen to the voice of the prophet we call ‘Second Isaiah’ 49:7-23

Thus says Yahweh, / The Redeemer of Israel, his Holy One /
To one deeply despised, / Abhorred by the nations, / The slave of rulers:

“Kings shall see and stand up; / Princes, and they shall prostrate themselves – /
Because of Yahweh, who is faithful, / The Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.”/

“In an hour of favour I answer you, / And on a day of salvation I help you – /
I form you and make you a lesson to the peoples – /
Restoring the land, / Allotting anew the desolate heritages,/
Saying to the prisoners, “Come out”, /
To those who are in darkness, “Show yourselves.”

They shall feed along all the ways, / On every bare height shall be their pasture /
They shall not hunger or thirst / Scorching and sun shall not strike them; /
For he who loves them will lead them, / He will guide them to bubbling fountains of water. /
I will make all mountains a way to travel / And my highways shall be raised up. /

Look these are coming from afar /
These from the north and the south /
And these from the land of Sinim./

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth! / Break forth, O hills, into singing! /
For Yahweh has comforted this people, /
And has taken back these afflicted ones in compassion. /

Zion says, /
“Yahweh has forsaken me, / My Lord has forgotten me.” /
Does a woman forget her baby, / That she has no compassion for the child of her womb? /
Even if these should forget / I forget you not. /

See, I have engraved you / On the palms of my hands.
Your walls are continually before me
Swiftly your builders are coming; / Those who ravaged and ruined you shall leave you.
Lift up your eyes round about and see: / They all gather, they come to you!

As I live – declares the Lord –
You shall don them all like jewels, / Deck yourself with them like a bride.
As for your ruins and desolate places / And as for your land laid waste –
You shall soon be crowded with settlers / While destroyers stay far from you.

The children you thought you had lost / Shall yet say in your hearing,
“This place is too small for me; / Make room for me to settle here.”

Then you will say in your heart:
“Who bore these for me?
When I was bereaved and barren, / Exiled and put away –
Who has brought these up?
I was left all alone – / And where have these come from?”

Thus said the Lord Yahweh:
“Behold, I lift up my hand to the nations / And raise my signal to the peoples;
And they shall bring your sons in their arms, / And carry your daughters on their shoulders.”

“Kings shall tend your children as foster fathers
Their princesses shall serve as your nurses.
They shall bow to you, face to the ground,
And lick the dust of your feet
And you shall know that I am the Lord –
Those who wait for me, Yahweh,
Will not be put to shame.”

Would that we be as shameless in our praise and our hope for the generation rising up before us, as public in our witness, as faithful to one another traveling these foothills of real choices in the real world, between the mountaintop peaks and dark abysses of religious experience. Great expectations indeed, that our faith might have children like us, and like these! Amen.