Union Church

November 2, 2008
Matthew 23:1-3, 11-12

Our scripture reading has Jesus telling the people that the religious leaders don’t practise what they teach. It is all about them instead of it being about God.

It is all about rules and regulations instead of compassion.
It is all about what is right instead of what helps.
They do not know why they are doing what they are do.

Whenever any religious group falls into this trap, we hear the criticism,” They are a bunch of hypocrites.”
Even when we are trying to help and those who are criticizing don’t bother to help, we still hear from their lips, “They are a bunch of phonies.”

And to a point, these complainers are right.
And to another point, they themselves are hypocrites for expecting from us what they don’t expect from themselves.

Let’s be clear, we all engage in practices in our churches.
We are very busy people.
But are we intentional?
Do we know why we are doing what we do?
Do we see the bigger picture of the Christian way of life? Maybe. Maybe not.

When the church doesn’t remember the tradition or know the wisdom, then the critics have a point.
The church/the people may be seen as hypocrites.
They may be experienced as phony.
The church becomes irrelevant to many people.

So Diana Butler Bass, the theme speaker at a conference I attended 2 weeks ago takes the inverse of the claims of hypocrisy, phoniness and irrelevance to observe spiritual vitality within church congregations.

The inverse of hypocrisy is coherence:

October 26, 2008.

This past week, during my study leave, I attended a conference at Queen’s Theological school.
It was entitled Christianity Under Construction and the theme speaker was Diana Butler Bass.

Monday evening, Diana spoke to us very clearly and directly. “The world has changed. If our churches are stumbling it is not because we have failed. The world has changed.”

But she didn’t stop there. She moved on with story after story, example after example of vital active congregations all across the United States.

This information was coming from a 3 year Lily Endowment study of mainline Protestant congregational vitality between 2002- 2006.
Her book, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith was published soon after.

Diana began the project with the hypothesis:
"Congregations that intentionally engage Christian practices will find new vitality."

The key word here is “intentionally”. Congregations that intentionally engage Christian practices will find new vitality.

We all engage in practices.
We are very busy people in the church.
But are we intentional?
Do we know why we are doing what we do?
Do we see the bigger picture of the Christian way of life? Maybe. Maybe not.

When the church doesn’t remember the tradition or know the wisdom, then the critics have a very good point. The church/the people may be seen as hypocrites. They may be experienced as phony.
The church becomes irrelevant to many people.

Thanksgiving. October 12, 2008
2 Corinthians 9: 6-11

A saying has come back to me recently from author Ann Lamott. She writes, “One of the secrets of life is that laughter is carbonated holiness.”

It’s a wonderful image.
We’ve all had Coke or Pepsi fizz up our nose.
We’ve all had Ginger Ale foaming on our upper lip.
And we’ve known laughter that bubbles up from a mysterious place and transforms a difficult moment. We’ve known the release of humour in the face of death.

On this Thanksgiving Sunday, let’s play a little with this image.
If laughter is carbonated holiness, then what is Thanksgiving?
Or if laughter is carbonated holiness, then Thanksgiving is...

Our Epistle reading is a Thanksgiving text.
Listen to the progression of descriptive phrases: cheerful giving, sharing abundance, great generosity, harvest of righteousness, and summing up with God given grace.

We could use any one of these phrases to finish the sentence I propose. “If laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is cheerful giving.”

If laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is sharing abundance.

If laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is great generosity.

If laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is a harvest of righteousness.

If laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is God given grace.

But to stay with the beverage and food theme I would like to suggest that if laughter is carbonated holiness then Thanksgiving is delicious grace. Think about it.

October 5, 2008.
Matthew 21: 33-39

The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. threatens to affect us all.

To simplify things, it goes back to people in an overheated housing market, who were buying bigger and bigger properties with less and less equity to the point of buying what they simply could not afford. All the while, these folk were aided and abetted by unscrupulous loan officers who created sub-prime mortgages to pad their sales and bonuses. They then hid these high risk loans in bundles of asset- backed securities and sold them to financial institutions.

Our western culture values owning over renting, values
mortgage payments over lease payments. And these values can run away with us and cause us to think and act in disastrous ways. Look what happens when there isn’t enough government regulation or due diligence in the ownership game.

We find the same run away situation in our parable today.
The absentee owner is out of touch with his enterprise.
There is ownership without stewardship.

The tenants, as they work in the vineyard are plotting how to turn stewardship into ownership. They foolishly think they can possess the vineyard through violence and selfish zeal. But as the listeners know, it will only be a matter of time before the axe falls.

Look what happens when we will do anything to be an owner.
And look, what price the absentee owner pays for being out of touch with his enterprise.

We want to be owners more than we want to be stewards. And so, we often confuse stewardship with ownership.

September 28, 2008
Exodus 17:1-7

Let’s remember the Exodus story we have been following off and on this fall. The Hebrew slaves have been having a difficult time wandering through the desert and getting to know the God of their ancestors.

They escape the armies of Pharaoh. They reach a bitter well at Mara. They run out of food deep in the desert and now are out of water as they approach Mount Horeb. All the while, they are grumbling and complaining.

Liberation, the journey to freedom has its terible, horrible no good very bad days and the Hebrew’s are having their share of them.

In today’s reading, as the people thirst for water, Moses strikes the bedrock at the base of the mountain and life-giving water flows forth. Another miracle has saved the day.

We struggle to understand and accept miracles in our modern Western World. We struggle because miracles happen from the bedrock of our soul and we are not used to living from that place.

An international visitor from Africa said to a group of clergy one time at an ecumenical meeting, that miracles happen regularly in Africa.
He was quite surprised when he saw our puzzlement.
He continued, “Well, maybe you don’t need miracles in North America and so don’t expect them. In Africa, we need them, we expect them, and so they occur.”

We have so many layers of affluence and distraction in our Western World that it is difficult to get down to the bedrock of our souls. It is difficult to get down to our deepest foundational self, made in the image of God.

September 21, 2008
Exodus 16:2-16,

The Hebrew slaves are out in the desert. Pharaoh’s army has been turned back. After three days they come across a bitter spring at Marah. Moses purifies the water with a piece of wood and the people are refreshed.

Soon after leaving, their food runs out.
They complain to Moses, “At least in the fleshpots of Egypt, we ate our fill of bread but now you have brought us out into this wilderness to die of hunger.”

So God provides manna, white stuff from heaven that is discovered every morning as the dew recedes. The people are to gather only enough for each day to see if they will follow God’s instructions and trust in God’s daily provision.

Meat is also needed. So God sends a flock of quail into their camp each evening.

The Hebrews must change their mind set from scarcity to abundance in order to participate in God’s dream.
They must trust in God’s generosity and not their own ability to hoard food.

You see, God’s generosity is about God’s dream,
not the Hebrew slaves’ dreams.

When it comes to generosity in the Kingdom of Heaven, God’s New Day, they and we are called to let go of the fear of not enough and just live the experience.

God’s generosity is pure grace. It feeds us.
It nourishes us. It renews us. It transforms us.
We must let it be exercised through us.

With the Hebrews, we must learn that God’s generosity is abundant and enough.

September 14, 2008

Luke 17: 4. Matthew 18:21,22.

Many people today question the Bible’s truth.
They question its validity.

Perhaps it is a friend or an emerging teenager who questions the Bible.
“Did Jesus really say this? Did he really do that?
Could that story have really happened like that?”

And then follow up with: “Well, it just doesn’t make sense with today’s scientific knowledge.
It contradicts itself in so many places.
Why should I believe the Bible?
Why should I take the Bible seriously?”

These are all very important concerns.
They need to be taken seriously.

To address them, I would ask the question:
Which way are we going to read the Bible to understand what Jesus is saying?

Most people reject the Bible because they approach it as a fourth grader, as a fact fundamentalist.

Today’s original passage comes from Luke.
If we read this from the factual point of view only, we say:
“I only have to forgive you seven times a day. The eighth time I get to punch your lights out.”

How many of us have brooded in our minds about how many times we will put up with something and then self-righteously exact our revenge?

Sounds like elementary school doesn’t it.

Well, by the time Matthew writes to his community, the interpretation of limiting forgiveness and counting until we can take our revenge has become a real problem.
So Matthew has Peter ask
“How many times do I have to forgive? Seven times?"

September 7, 2008
Romans: 13:8-10

Neighbours - we all have them.
We all are one, one way or another.

There is an old saying, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Yet, the apostle Paul tells the Christians in Rome that if they are showing love to their neighbour they are fulfilling the Law.

We’ve talked about this before: We all have stories of the Ice Storm.
Remember how being a neighbour became so important.
Remember how we expanded our definition of neighbour in those days.

The question is:
Has the definition continued to be as broad or has it narrowed down again?

Blessing a neighbour or being blessed by a neighbour builds us up, makes us radiant.
It connects us to the goodness at the centre of Life.
Because being a neighbour we recognize a claim on our lives for the well being of someone outside our family unit.

Truth is, there is nothing like a neighbour when we are in need.

We all have a story from other times in our lives when some accident or unexpected incident at some ungodly hour catches us out and a neighbour comes by and helps us.
In those moments, we are on the receiving end of someone outside of our family who recognizes a claim on their life to help out.

Now-a-days, neighbours are not necessarily next door. Leisure activities, the workplace and school connections have replaced the geographic proximity of defining a neighbour.

Our scripture reading tells us that when we are loving our neighbour we are fulfilling the law.
We are recognizing a claim upon our life.

August 31, 2008.
Romans 12:9-21

We have just come through the Olympics. It was quite a mixed bag for Team Canada.
The first week was painful.
The second week was so much more rewarding.
Over those two weeks, so much print space and air time was used up second guessing our Olympic Program.

We were all tuned in one way or another. We saw the fingers being pointed. We couldn’t miss the National Angst.
That first week nothing seemed to work out. We couldn’t make the medal podium for love nor money.
And then someone did and the medals began to flow.

In the midst of all this, during that first painful week, the coaches emphasized to the watching public that our swimmers were achieving personal bests and Canadian records in their events. They were not flopping at the Olympics.
They just were not medaling.
The lessons learned from Athens were expressed loud and clear:

“We are not flopping. We have started over. We are on the move. We are getting better. We are realistic. We are improving.
The medals will come.”

At Beijing, we were witnessing the power of the pep talk.
The Coaches were not only pep talking their specific athletes, they were pep talking the Canadian contingent in Beijing and the Canadian public watching at home.

This is what Paul is doing in our Epistle reading today.
Paul offers a lively pep talk to the Christians in Rome.
Like a world class coach, he sets the tone, the practice,
the attitude and the vision, for realizing the Christian life.

August 24, 2008
Matthew 16:13-20

Today’s gospel lesson has Jesus skulking around the Roman town, Caesarea Philippi. This town is the northern regional administrative centre for Roman Occupation.

As he goes along he asks the crowd,
“Who do people say that I am?”

A number of responses are offered.
Some suggests the recently beheaded John the Baptist,
others suggest Elijah, the wonder worker of old.
Still others suggest Jeremiah or some other dead prophet.
Notice not one political figure is put forward in this political town.

Jesus isn’t satisfied with these responses so he asks his entourage, “And you, who do you say I am?”
Simon blurts out the outrageous, but perhaps upon second thought the obvious, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
What Simon is saying is, “You are the one and true King of Israel. You are the one and true son of God, not Caesar.”

We are used to this Son of God terminology for Jesus but maybe not used to its full implication which is Jesus, not Caesar is the one true Son of God.

Satire, as we know is one of the most powerful forms of social and political criticism. So it is no accident that Jesus went trooping around the countryside holding court, followed by his entourage acting out a peasant king routine.

It was outrageous! It turned convention upside down.
It was street theatre.

Old Testament tradition had it that when a King was coronated, he was adopted as a son of God.