Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 23, 2008

Read: Matthew 27:57 - 28:10

Who’s the boss?

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 16, 2008

Read: Matthew 21:1-11

Believing~ Beloving~ Beliving

Sermon for March 9, 2008 Rev. Shannon Mang

Lent 5, NeighbourLink Sunday

The Pharisee in the mirror

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 2, 2008

Read: John 9:1-41

Desperate housewife

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for February 24, 2008

Read: John 4:5-30

Hidden in plain sight

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for February 17, 2008

Read: John 3:1-17

Spring training

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for February 10, 2008

Read: Matthew 4:1-11

Rev. Shannon Mang's Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, February 3, 2008

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   January 27, 2008
Read:   Matthew 4:12-23

Text: John 1:29-42

Matthew 3:13-17
Rev. Shannon Mang's Sermon for Jan. 13, 2008

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   January 6, 2008
Read:   Matthew 2:1_12

Rev. Shannon Mang's sermon for Sunday, Dec. 30, 2007
Luke 2: 22-40

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   December 23, 2007
Read:   Isaiah 7:10-16

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   December 16, 2007
Read:   Isaiah 35:1-10

Dec. 9, 2007: special service?

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   December 2, 2007
Read:   Isaiah 2:1-5

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   November 25, 2007
Read:   Colossians 1:11-20

Read:   Luke 14:15-21

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   November 11, 2007
Read:   Luke 20:27-38

Nov 4, 2007: missing

Oct 28, 2007: missing

Oct. 21, 2007: missing

Oct. 14, 2007: missing

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   October 7, 2007
Read:   Deuteronomy 26:1-12

Sermon for Sept. 30, 2007
  1 Timothy 6:6_19         Rev. Shannon Mang

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   September 23, 2007
Read:   1 Timothy 2:1-7

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   September 16, 2007
Read:   Luke 15:1-10

GAP

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   April 15, 2007
Read:   Acts 5:27-32

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   April 8, 2007
Read:   Luke 24:1-12

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   April 1, 2007
Read:   Luke 19:28-40

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   March 25, 2007
Read:   John 12:1-8,  Mark 14:3-9

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   March 18, 2007
Read:   Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

Mar. 11, 2007: missing

Set right with God
Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 4, 2007

Read: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   February 25, 2007
Read:   Luke 4:1_13 NRSV

Feb, 18, 2007: missing

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   February 11, 2007
Read: Luke 6:17-26 (The Message)

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   February 4, 2007
Read:   Luke 5: 1-11

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   January 28, 2007
Read:   1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Read 1 Corinthians 12: 12_31

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   January 14, 2007
Read:   John 2:1-11

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for   January 7, 2007
Read: Isaiah 43:1-7

Awe full days

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for April 13, 2008

Read: Acts 2:42–47

Propelled by the power of the Risen Christ among them, the first followers of the Way of Jesus became the social movement we call the Early Church. In the second book of his gospel, which is the Acts of the Apostles, Luke describes communal life in that Early Church.

⁴²They committed themselves to the teachings of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers.

That is a succinct summary of what any Church should be about. As parents bring their child to us for Baptism they’re entering as a family into this community. They need to know what are the essential functions of this group. And Luke’s little sketch of the ideal church community lists four core activities:

• learning from the first witnesses about the stories of Jesus and the stories about Jesus;

• living together in daily interaction;

• sharing a common meal; and

• praying together.

That is like a four point character sketch of the ideal church. Followers of the Way of Jesus do these four essential things:

• they explore the Jesus story, so that it infuses and transforms their story;

• they share themselves, spending time with each other in deep and open ways, sharing the truth about themselves with each other;

• they commune, both in the simple sense that they share food together, and in the rich symbolic sense of the ritual called the Lord’s Supper during worship;

• and they pray together, which is to say they frequently speak to God, so that their life, in the world and in community, is infused with a vivid sense of God’s presence.

When a family brings a child for Baptism in our congregation they are promising to join with their child in those four actions: to explore together the Jesus story, which entails adult learning-in-faith as much as Sunday School; to be present with others in the congregation to do joint projects and have fun; to be a family at worship, which centres around this communion table; and to pray, so that their daily interaction in the home and their weekly worship in the congregation both reflect a clear sense that God is involved in all of our life.

And yet... that’s not the heart of it. Learning, visiting, gathering to worship, saying the prayers are behaviours. You can watch a congregation doing those things without understanding the full meaning of what they’re experiencing. What is the inner reality that moves the whole thing?

Luke points to it.” ^43-45Everyone around was in awe—all those wonders and signs done through the apostles!” Luke has us observe the behaviours of the earliest Church – their excited recounting of the Jesus story, their sharing of food and of their lives, their frequent and spontaneous prayer – and see these to be “signs”. They are signals of something else going on inside and below the surface, and Luke points to it when he says “Everyone was in awe”.

Think for a moment of this human reaction we call “awe”. We now say colloquially that something wonderful is “awesome”. We may observe people to be “in awe” of a hero. Driving west on the TransCanada from Calgary as you come down the long curve from Scott Hill to turn westward again onto the Morley flats, the great wall of the Front Ranges reveals itself from north to south, right to left, mammoth precipices and ramparts that speak of colossal geographic forces thrusting themselves up into your small and horizontal existence. Take note of that panorama unfolding before your eyes and you must get an inkling of what it is to be “awestruck”. Awe is our natural response when we perceive something to be sublime or wondrous, or when we appreciate suddenly that the moment we are living is illuminated from within by profound truth. Many of us get a physiological signal that great awe has come over us when our eyes fill with tears, tears of joy.

Several folks have told me that there were moments in last week’s confirmation service when, as we say, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the house”.

Awe is not just a feeling. It is a response. It is a perception, a recognition, an acknowledgment of a majestic Other. That is what Luke is indicating. The core experience which underlay all the behaviour of the Early Church was their recognition of the presence of God energizing them and sustaining them and uplifting them and holding them in place.

If a child comes to be among us through Baptism, and learns the story of Jesus, and gets to know other people, and absorbs the rituals of worship, and learns the words of prayer, but never tastes here the majesty of God, never hears the whisper of the holy, never experiences the eye-stinging awe that befits the indescribable love of God – then we have failed that child. The Holy Spirit will find some other means to bind that person ’s spirit to the Great Spirit which is its ground and its destiny.

And this gives us an agenda as a church, does it not? Luke’s simple sketch of the Early Church challenges us to remember that beneath our talk and our song, as the motivation for our handshakes and our hugs, we must seek always to the vehicles through which the wonder of God may be shown.

May it be so.

Laughing with Thomas

Sermon for March 30, 2008 Rev. Shannon Mang

John 20: 19- 31

“Doubting Thomas”-y’know- I’m REALLY tired of still getting this bad rap for not wholeheartedly going along with the my friends who first saw Jesus.

Right- You’ve not yet heard the story- well here’s what happened.

After Jesus died I needed to be way- on my own for awhile to do my grieving in my own way. After crying a river of tears, I again wanted to be with my friends, but when I got there they were all laughing and crying with these big stupid grins on their faces- it was not what I expected to see… James and Andrew were the first to see me- they rushed me and started babbling some gibberish about Jesus having just been with them—that got the attention of the rest of the loony birds and they were all chirping about “Jesus said this” and “ honestly- he was here!” , and “we couldn’t believe our eyes”…. Even the women were going on about this- and they were always the steady disciples. And I’m thinking they’re all nuts- in their collective grief they’ve al had some weird mass hallucination that Jesus was not longer dead.

It frightened me- and it angered me.

I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an adult among us here today who hasn’t had someone very close to them die- now imagine how you would feel if, shortly after that someone had died, someone else close to you had said, by the way- “blank” isn’t dead anymore- they just dropped by for a chat- so sorry you missed her/ or him.

I couldn’t figure out what they were playing at- yet they just seemed blissfully happy—so I exploded- NO WAY! This can’t have happened! I will not believe your stories… you want me to believe you? I’ll believe you when you can show me the scars of his execution on a living body!- then I took off again. I stormed and stayed away from them, but besides being angry with them- I was also still hurting badly with my grief and I was frightened- it was not safe for those of us who were followers of Jesus. As the days passed, nearly everywhere I went, in the markets and the courtyard, there were people whispering about rumours of Jesus no longer being dead- Mary found me and spoke gently to me. She convinced me to come back and be with my friends, even if they were a bunch of grief- stricken wackos.

They welcomed me back- they were no longer acting so crazy. They were all a bit subdued around me- I noticed that there was laughter and joking, or they’d be singing and worshipping the way we used to with Jesus- until I walked in- then they’d go very quiet. One by one they’d come up to me and tell me the story of Jesus suddenly being in their midst… it was coming up to a week prior… I tried to be patient with them. If I wanted to be with them- I knew that I’d just have to let them have their delusions.

We had just finished having supper, I was helping Mary and Joanna clearing the food bowls when everyone in the room stopped talking- there was this sudden dead silence. I first looked at Joanna, who had stopped in her tracks and was looking over my shoulder with that big stupid grin on her face again.

I turned around…. And there he was--- the most important man in my life, Jesus- who I’d last seen dying on that horrible cross- Jesus, whose body had been put into a borrowed tomb by some powerful friends of ours- Jesus whose death had torn my heart in half—was standing there in the middle of the room, looking right at me. He was as real as he’d been every day of those three years we’d spend together.

My knees gave out and I sank to the floor. Jesus came towards me and called me by name- “Thomas- here—look—you can touch the scars if you still need to” Well- did that invitation ever sound ridiculous to me now! He held our his hands to me- then started to lift his robe to show me the wound in his side- all the while with this big grin on his face- he didn’t take his eyes off of me. I started to laugh, then I howled with laughter- I was already on my knees and I sank the rest of the way to floor. All my friends were laughing too. I didn’t need to see or touch those scars- what I needed, I already had… his presence! I was laughing so hard I was crying. I felt him beside me, he was pulling me to my feet—and then I was in his arms- in a big old bear hug, and then all the rest of the women and men in that rooms were holding Jesus and holding me and we were all laughing and crying.

He was often with us in those early days- in person I mean. Then, more and more he was with us, just without his physical body… and then after awhile he was all the time – he didn’t need to show up with a physical body, and we no longer needed to see a physical body to know he was right there with us.

All those years that I travelled, teaching and preaching and healing and starting little groups of believers across Persia and then in India, I never again was without him. They listened to my stories and became followers of the Way. You know- in the long history of the St. Thomas Christians of India- they’ve never made a big deal about me being a “doubting Thomas”- somehow I’ve managed to get that label in the European church- I’ve never really understood what made this such a negative thing. AT the time I thought that I needed physical proof- that I needed to see scars and touch wounds- when we’re deep in grief and anger, we often think we know what we need- what I really needed was “him”- and I knew that as soon as I saw him standing there holding his hands out to me.

European Christians went way off in a strange direction of somehow equating intellectual assent with faith or belief in my friend Jesus. Belief is not something that we know to be true with our heads necessarily, belief is better understood as be-loving or trusting in a relationship. Its all about friendship- trust and love- not some intellectual exercise. So When I come to these gatherings of the saints I make my own nametag to say… Thomas, friend of Jesus.

Trailblazer

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 23, 2008

Read: Matthew 27:57 - 28:10

On Easter Sunday we preachers are tempted to explain the text. Rather than trusting the Easter story to do its own work, we can think we must explain and justify and make it comprehensible to a sceptical, “scientific” age. But this would be misguided. We actually don’t live in a climate of scepticism. Indeed, ours is an age that believes too much and trusts too little.

Believes too much? Yes, because despite the fact that we have inherited 300 years of scientific method and unparalleled technological progress the need in the human heart remains for something to believe in at a profound level. We continue to hunger for a centred and grounded grasp of reality that holds us in place and energizes us to become truly human. Our contemporary world, though, is so fragmented with different perspectives and so overloaded with trivial information that people lurch about in an ever-more desperate search for something to believe in.

And so today absurd rumours circulate with ease on the Internet and our most popular TV programs unashamedly portray supernatural happenings and occult experiences. Well-educated people seem surprisingly ready to surrender to extravagant speculation and fantasy, whether this is being retailed by a new-age “expert” or some modern-day gnostic who proposes to sell us the secret to success in life. The disciples of the latest self-help author to hit the shelves swallow uncritically their guru’s bromides and disengage both their critical reasoning and their common sense. They believe too much.

The alternative to that which our culture offers is to place all your hopes in the project of science and pragmatic rationality. This option is a radical materialism that gives credence only to what can be empirically proven. But to embrace the ideology of radical scientific empiricism is also to believe too strongly in the power of scientific fact to deliver the makings of a full human life; it is blind to all the glorious intangibles that make life worth living. Scientific empiricists have traded the glorious banquet of human experience for the thin gruel of established fact.

In these ways ours is an age that believes too much; yet it also trusts too little. We no longer trust the great stories –for us the great stories of the Bible. We have forgotten the tradition in which human wisdom and knowledge are conveyed through those stories. We have become numb to the power of symbol and metaphor to bring before our mind and heart that which can hardly be spoken of. And so we have become deaf to what our own great spiritual traditions can mean for us. We do not hear them asking us to entrust ourselves to the deep and life-changing wisdom that they bear.

Yet that is what our text from Matthew’s gospel this morning asks of us. It invites us to enter into the story of Jesus, even at this most strange and numinous moment of the story which is labelled “the Resurrection”. So my task is to help us do so. My commission is not to make it sound reasonable and tidy and comprehensible. That would be to try to explain the inexplicable, at the risk of explaining it away. Rather my task is to help us hear this oh-so-familiar Easter narrative anew – to hear it as a witness, a witness to a reality both wonderful and strange, so that its wisdom may reshape our lives. My task (and my delight) is to invite you to enter this story – so that it may enter you.

Come, then, into Galilee. This is the place in this story where we may enter.

The biblical text of Matthew’s gospel gives this witness. On that Sunday morning female followers of the Way of Jesus were running from his tomb, which they had found empty.

⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!”... ¹⁰ Then he said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

Where is this place to which Jesus goes on ahead? What is the meaning of this Galilee?

For them, Galilee meant at least these three things.

Galilee meant obscurity. Galilee didn’t count. Politically it was always described as an afterthought. And even our Christian scriptures cannot pretend that it was as important a place politically and religiously as Judea with its great capital of Jerusalem and its great Temple. Matthew’s gospel early on described the place in the dismissive words of the prophet Isaiah:

^{Matthew 4:15} "Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles”– ¹⁶ the people who sat in darkness.

It was widely regarded as a place of cultural darkness. That was where Jesus, the Anointed One now risen, promised to go. That was where Jesus would blaze a trail of light as in his risen power God’s Anointed One would continue his mission of grace and hope. The incredible power of God to bring life out of death was to be taken into places like Galilee that no one ever sees.

Secondly, Galilee meant toil. Jesus’ movement arose among the peasant classes of Galilee. His followers were fisher-folk, having the same standing as day labourers who sweated in the vineyards of the great landowners, and weavers who spun out the modest cloth that could be traded in the cities of the rich. Galilee was a place of peasant sweat. That is where Jesus, the Anointed One now risen, promised to go. He was going ahead into their place of toil.

And thirdly, Galilee meant “home”. It was where family embraced them and neighbours knew them. It meant the grinding daily routine, the rigid expectations of the community, the numbing familiarity of the everyday. That is where Jesus, the Anointed One now risen, promised to go. He was going ahead, to transform the conditions of everyday life, to bring new possibility where they expected only the same-old-same-old. That is where he would be waiting for them – at home.

That is the Galilee where he would meet them, and change them. Where is that Galilee, for us?

It is our unseen place. Perhaps it is the moment of encounter in the hallway with someone in need of your care and no one else is around to see your response. Perhaps it is the cheque you write that doesn’t even become a charitable donation on your income tax return. Galilee is the unseen place. This is where the Risen One awaits us, ready to remake us from the inside out.

Again, Galilee is our place of toil. Perhaps not the grinding physical labour of the peasant, but still a face the task to earn our way as best we can despite oppressive working conditions or the constant threat of failure. Perhaps not the precarious economics of the ancient peasant class, but nonetheless we live in a working world where lifetime job security is a thing of the past. Our Galilee is where we struggle to support ourselves and those we love. This is where the Risen One awaits us, seeking to hold us in place and guide us on a true course in the midst of all the temptations and pressures to be false to God.

And of course Galilee is our home. We may not live in a peasant village, but still we struggle with a social world that both binds us as much as it supports us. We may not have to endure the stultifying social order of a hamlet like Nazareth, where who you are had to be the same thing your parents and grandparents had always been, but nonetheless home is for us a place that sometimes forces upon us an image that is not our own, an identity that is not authentic. This is where the Risen One awaits us, powerfully claiming from us our true identity, our deepest nature, as children of God and followers of the path of light.

Our Galilee is where we meet him, and everything he can be for us. Listen again to the promise contained in these words of witness at the conclusion of our text from Matthew:

“Go and tell [the others] to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

May it be so.

Who’s the boss?

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 16, 2008

Read: Matthew 21:1-11

“Jesus is Lord”. You may see this on the bumper stickers of the evangelical and pious. And this slogan comes originally from the letters of Paul. “Jesus Messiah is Lord” was Paul the Apostle’s rallying cry as the early Christian Church emerged from the movement initiated by Jesus within the Hebrew faith. To understand rightly what the title of “Lord” meant when they applied it to Jesus we must appreciate that who else was called “Lord”. The word was an honorific attributed by members of a household to its head; in that context, “Lord” meant something like “Sir”. It was also the term of respect by which a slave addressed her owner, where it meant “Master”. But it was pre-eminently the title of ultimate obedience which the Romans gave to their Emperor: “Caesar is Lord”. In that context it meant “the ultimate authority”, “the top banana”, “the big boss”.

In light of that, what did it mean that they called Jesus “Lord”? Today’s very familiar story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem can help us see.

☼

“Who is this?” The little girl who asks this shrinks back behind the skirts of her mother, as out the door of their little house rises the dust and noise of a thousand sandalled feet. Pilate and his Roman legion have come to the streets of Jerusalem in this week leading up to Passover, to maintain order in case there are any riots during this emotionally charged season of the year. The threat of such bloodshed is in the air, for when during Passover the Hebrew people celebrate their ancient liberation from Egyptian slavery their present slavery, their economic and political oppression by the new empire, the Pax Romana under the iron rule of Tiberius Caesar, chafes hard on their necks. This religious holiday could well explode at any moment into armed rebellion.

“Who is this?”, the little girl repeats. “Hush!”, chides her mother, slamming shut the door. “It’s the army, the army of Caesar. Never, my child, stand in their way. In fact it helps to bow a little bit. But never, ever, look them in the eye, for they would as soon slice you in half as give you the time of day.”

“And who is this ‘Caesar’?”

“Why, he’s the boss, the top man, the fattest of the fat cats. Everyone calls him ‘Lord”– at least as long as his legions are in the streets.”

☼

“Who is this?” The serving girl tugs at the sleeve of the sun-burned old peasant. She has been caught up in the swirling crowd tumbling down the dirt path from the Mount of Olives.

As he hands to her one of the palm branches he is carrying aloft, the old peasant answers. “Who is he? That was my question at first, five months ago, when I left my family up in Galilee and joined the growing company of those committed to follow his Way. At first all I knew was that somehow, in some vague way, God was with him, so powerfully that it reached out and grabbed me at the core and drew me along. As we traveled southward, slowly, village by village, I learned of him. I listened to the stories he told. I saw how the simple touch of his hand could liberate someone from madness or disease. I learned from him how to pray, not just with words but with my inward self. And gradually I have come to know who he is, and what he is. And why he must now come here to Jerusalem, to the center of our people, to bring them back to God.

“Then who is he?”, the serving girl asks again.

“The name we give him doesn’t matter, as long as we hunger and thirst for the justice of God that this man brings. He is the One your heart most needs. If you will follow, he is your Lord.”

☼

“Who is this?” 13-year-old Abner blurts out the question as he comes running up, breathless, to his uncle Obediah, who is at table in the courtyard of their villa in Jerusalem. Obediah is sharing a flagon with his neighbour, the two of them friendly rivals in the silk trade, and neither on this day much enjoying their wine. Jerusalem is buzzing with rumours. Pilate, as expected, has arrived for Passover with his legionnaires. But quite unexpectedly there is talk of a holy man from up north in Galilee come down to call for reform of the Temple system.

“Uncle, uncle, I saw them come down from the Mount of Olives. They were singing and chanting and dancing as they walked. Well, all except this one man. He rode on a donkey, and they danced around him and waved branches and threw flowers on him.”

“On a donkey?”, Obediah asks, scowling.

“Yes, uncle, and when the parade came closer to the city gates many folk ran out to join them. They threw down their cloaks, some even their tunics, so he could ride over them. Uncle, who is this?”

Obediah scowls the more. “Did you hear what they were saying?”

“Yes, sir. They were shouting ‘Messiah!’ and ‘Save us!’ Uncle, what does this mean?”

“It means trouble”, interjected Obediah’s neighbour. “Just let the Romans hear a whisper of that and there will be hell to pay. We children of Abraham have been waiting centuries for God to send us the Messiah, the Great Deliverer. He is to be the one true Lord. He is to have all authority. But these Romans say there is only one Lord, and that is Tiberius Caesar sitting on his throne over there in Rome. This little guy on a donkey hasn’t got a chance.”

☼

Each of those vignettes pictures a different aspect of the complex event that we have simplified and stylized as “Palm Sunday”. And in each vignettes the same fundamental question is raised. Who is the boss? Who has ultimate authority over the lives of these characters? Who is the one they must most fundamentally follow? Who is Lord? Is it Caesar, represented through Pilate and the legion? Or is it Jesus, perceived as the king who comes on a donkey?

This one fundamental question comes to each of us who hears this story again today. Which is the path in life that we are going to follow: the path of power, economic and social and political power, power backed up finally by the threatened violence of military might; or the path of self-giving love, the path that seeks both justice and the end to violence? The choice we make demonstrates who for us is, in an ultimate sense, “the boss”.

So for each of us the question is: Who is Lord?

The question stands. Carry it with you as you leave this place.

Believing~ Beloving~ Beliving

Sermon for March 9, 2008 Rev. Shannon Mang

Lent 5, NeighbourLink Sunday

Voices United #704 God Give Us Life

1 God give us life when all around

spells death and some have died;

and none are clear that hope is near

or fate can be defied.

On Monday of this past week the reading in our Lenten Reflection book, Where the Spirit Dwells was taken from this story in the Gospel of John, the raising of Lazarus. The reflection was about a former UN peacekeeper who had served in Rwanda during the genocidal conflict. This man was so deeply affected by post_traumatic stress disorder following the horrors of witnessing the conflict in Rwanda, that he could not communicate with his family. Physically he had returned home, but all of the rest of him lingered somewhere between a far off country and death. An old friend patiently and persistently visited this man, often sitting in silence when the one_sided conversation died. One evening, during one of the many visits by his friend, the man began his return home _ first with a torrent of tears, then with a torrent of words that expressed the horrors he’d lived through. This was the first step in this man's journey back from a cold, dark tomb.

Many of us die long before our hearts stop beating and our lungs stop breathing. Our small deaths may not be like the man suffering from post_traumatic stress disorder_ we may continue to relate to those around us, or we might sink even closer to real, physical death than he did. Anytime that we experience a trauma that changes our lives_ we go through a death_like experience; we are no longer the person we were. This happens when someone close to us dies; or when we, or someone we love gets a diagnosis of illness; or when we, or someone we love has slipped away from the life we knew into a life controlled by addiction.

This story of the raising of Lazarus takes me into my own memories of times when my life as I knew it was torn apart with grief, or bitter disappointment or depression… and I don't much like going there. This story confuses me_ it makes me angry_ it makes me uncomfortable_and it draws me to a place where I am like Martha, both furious with Jesus, and deeply relieved that he has finally shown up. I came to the realization that the confusion and the discomfort were the message for me this week_ that when we live through our real life horror stories_ Christ is there, right in the midst of the confusion and anger and bitterness_calling us out of our tombs.

2 God give us love in heart and hand

to hold the hurting one,

to free the anger, meet the need

and wait till waiting's done.

After Martha comes running out to meet Jesus, she makes it clear that she is furious with him for having taken so long to arrive_ that if he’d been present, she knows that she and her sister would have been spared the grief of Lazarus' death. Jesus says to Martha: "I am, right now, the Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this?" and Martha replies: "Yes, Master. All along I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God who comes into the world."

This is where many of us want to throw in the towel and walk away from Jesus. Belief has become for us a head game about whether we "give our assent" to some statement or other, and for us Protestants in particular, faith has been diminished to those things that we can say we "believe" in. The focus of faith has become what we can or cannot give intellectual assent to. Intellectual assent is not biblical belief; saying that you know something to be true is not biblical faith.

Belief and Belove come from the same old English word_ belief is all about loving_it is a heart thing, NOT a head thing. Marcus Borg explains that "the object of believing was not statements, but a person… it means to hold dear; to prize; to give one's loyalty to; to give one's self to; to commit oneself… most simply, 'to believe' mea(ns) 'to love'… what we believe is what we belove. Faith is about beloving God". When Jesus asks Martha if she "believes" that he is the Resurrection and the Life_ he is not asking her a theological question about what her intellect can say yes to_ he is asking her if she loves him; if she trusts him; if she really knows who he is with all her heart. And, Martha says yes, she beloves him, she does really know who he is; she knows him with all her heart.

To be beloved by another is to be in deep relationship with that other. To belove one another is our calling. When we belove one another, we call one another to life… often out of death. This is the difference between what we have come to know as charity (another word that has been diminished by our culture) and justice. What we have come to know as charity is something that can happen without real face to face human relationships. NeighbourLink seeks to grow faceless charity into real human relationships… hence their name Neighbour_Link… they desire to be a way to build relationships between people in need and communities of faith. The calling of NeighbourLink and all of the churches that are involved in their ministry is to belove one another: to fulfill the great commandment to "love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourself". When we believe in Jesus_ when we belove Jesus as Martha did, we call one another from our tombs,

3 God give us skill, insight and will

to find, where none are sure,

new threads to mend the web of life,

new means to heal and cure.

Relationships change us. When we have real relationships with those in need we are part of building justice in our community. When we are going into people's homes to deliver a food hamper we cannot help but be impacted by the hunger in our midst and we cannot help but ask why there are hungry people in so rich a city as ours. Once charity has a face, and generosity has a face we are all changed. NeighbourLink is one of the places where real people work with real people to pick up threads of a life that has been ripped open with harsh realities, and through listening and caring those threads of a life are helped to mend.

When we say that we believe that Jesus is the Resurrection and Life, we are making a statement about how we belove Jesus_ we are in relationship with him. When we belove Jesus, as a community of faith, his presence is in us and we are in him (doesn't that sound like John talking_ over and over in the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking about how he is in the Father and the Father is in him). Together, as a believing/beloving community of faith, we are Jesus and Jesus is us, calling our community to life. We become a be_living community of love. In relationship with NeighbourLink we can be a part of the web that keeps people from becoming permanently cut off from life in their tombs of tragedy. Together, as the Body of Christ, we call God's beloved children out of their tombs.

4 God give us faith should all else fail

and death unsheath its sting.

O help us hear, through pain and fear,

the songs that angels sing.

Hard things happen, and for some reason, hard things often come in groups that threaten to completely overwhelm those caught in the midst of those hard things. Personally I had a year where my husband became seriously ill, I had three aunts and an uncle all die within four months, the church where I was working burned and my sister became ill and died. I know some of your stories, so I know that many of you here today have suffered much graver losses– I’ve never lost a spouse through divorce or death; I’ve never been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness... and you are here today- witness to the reality that there is life after death. I survived that year because I was a part of a faith community that would not let me stay in my tomb of confusion and grief_ Jesus, the Resurrection and Life walked with me in my confusion and grief and called me back to life in him.

Families who turn to NeighbourLink often have grief upon grief, hardship upon hardship heaped on their lives. Young mothers with newborns are abandoned by the fathers of their babies. Seniors are trying to support adult children with mental illness and they are also trying to cope with the diagnosis of cancer. Each person's story is usually a story with many chapters of struggle. NeighbourLink and St. Andrew's and each of the other churches who work with NeighbourLink provide immediate help for a crisis, and more importantly, together we provide the possibility of relationship that can help those being tossed on a rough sea of life a means to hear the songs of angels that can penetrate tombs of desperation.

5 Then, in the end, make death a friend,

and give us strength to stand

and walk to where no eye can stare,

but Christ can clasp our hand.

Christ believes in us_Christ beloves us and clasps our hands and draws us out of our tombs. And, when we have emerged into the light of Christ we be_live our new life in him. Then the light of Christ be_living in us calls us to reach out to one another in this community of faith and out to our community to those caught in tombs of suffering. Hear his voice, leave death behind. Believe~ Belove~ Belive.

Amen

The Pharisee in the mirror

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for March 2, 2008

Read: John 9:1-41

“Hypocrites and Pharisees!” That’s what we might say in today’s English about people who present a false image. We apply the pejorative label“Pharisee” especially to those who piously observe the religious conventions while secretly sinning. This is a standard character now in Western literature, theatre and movies.

Here is a publicity photo from a production at the Stratford Festival of the French playwright Moliere’s satire, Tartuffe, with the great Canadian actor William Hutt in the title role. His face says it all – the frowning spirit, the sharp glance looking out for his own advantage, as he clutches a large Bible to his breast. A perfect image of the stereotypical Pharisee.

It is that stereotype which likely comes to mind when we read today’s text from John’s gospel. Jesus contests with a group of Pharisees concerning his healing of a blind man on the Sabbath day. If we hear this story with ears conditioned by 2000 years of Christian stereotyping of Pharisees we will think of them as spiritual opponents of Jesus, ignorant where he was wise, phoney where he was authentic, closed off from God where he was open.

This is unfortunate. If the Pharisees remain for us straw men for Christian rhetoric to knock down, we will fail to appreciate what was Jesus’ actual argument with the Pharisaic movement. We will fail to appreciate how we ourselves have our Pharisaic moments. And, incidentally, we will risk perpetuating anti-Semitism. The image of the Pharisees, opposing Jesus at every turn, has reinforced the poisonous tendency in European history over two millennia to caricature Judaism as a failed religion that needed to be superseded by Christianity.

So it remains very important that we should continue to recognize ourselves in the Pharisees with whom Jesus tangled. We need to understand them, not vilify them.

Notice, then, that in the text itself the Pharisees are not presented as a monolithic, homogenous force of opposition. When the man who had been given his sight by Jesus was brought to “the Pharisees”, they argue among themselves. Some of them objected that this healing was done on the Sabbath day in contravention of the Torah’s prohibition on the doing of any work on the day of rest. But others disagreed, claiming that anyone who could do such miraculous “signs” had to be close to God and could not be a sinner.

Again, at the end of the story consider how some of the Pharisees are presented. What is the theological significance of this “sign” of the giving of sight to the man? Jesus interprets it to the man himself:

³⁹ Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." ⁴⁰ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?"

I think we can take that as a genuine question, not a veiled attack, an authentic expression of puzzlement and a glimmer of self-criticism.

And more generally throughout the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and even in this later and more clearly anti-Pharisaic gospel of John, Jesus has a fundamental disagreement with the Pharisaic movement but he also shares with it a fundamental goal. Indeed, that is probably why he disagrees so vigorously. Both the Pharisees and Jesus anticipate the coming of the Reign of God. Where they differ is in their understanding of what the Reign of God is like. The Pharisees promoted the public performance of pietistic practices: the giving of alms to the poor, offering lengthy and precise prayers, and ritual fasting. They pushed this agenda because they believed that if on a given day all the people of God fulfilled perfectly each and every commandment in the Torah law, then God’s purposes for the world would be achieved, and God would wrap up history and bring the “day of the Lord”. The Reign of God for them consisted of a perfect and orderly society with everybody simultaneously walking the straight and narrow.

Jesus, by contrast, proclaimed the Reign of God as something different. Yes, it would be visible in the reforming of society. But it would spring from the reforming of the human heart. The arrival of the kingdom of God begins with a new vision of our life before God. The be re-oriented to God, as an individual and as a culture, is to see in our mind’s eye the presence of God in everything, the claim of God upon us at every moment, the grace of God permeating us and surrounding us. Hence the central symbolic thread that runs through today’s story from John’s gospel. Just as Jesus enabled the blind man to see – literally – Jesus brings the Reign of God into our lives as he enables us to see – metaphorically.

The Pharisaic impulse is to attempt to create a rigid order of moral and ritual perfection. When we look at the mirror at times we see Pharisees looking back at us, that is, the Pharisaic impulse comes easily to us. But the “Jesus impulse”, if I may call it that, is the recognition that the fundamental response we need to make to God is the reorientation of our human hearts. When we look in the mirror, can we see not the Tartuffe who dwells within but the Jesus-spirit, the child of God, the flawed but grateful seeker after the Holy One, the human being with spiritual eyes open to the light of God?

To see in that way is much deeper than knowing a bunch of rules and following them. In part it consists in the gift of seeing the ordinary things of our life as moments of contact with God. Ordinary things like this loaf of bread on our communion table. Look at it: everyday, common, mundane bread. But look again. See it as Jesus, broken for us, shared out for us, nourishing us in spirit.

“I came into the world, “ he says at the end of our reading, “so that those who are blind may see”.

May it be so.

Desperate housewife

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for February 24, 2008

Read: John 4:5-30

The greatest gift you can give a child is to affirm his or her value. Our offspring need from us a roof over their heads and a good diet, and they need a secure community in which to play and grow, and they deserve an education fit to fulfill their great potential. But even in the absence of such blessings what they must have from us is a sense that it is good that they are here. Every child needs an adult in his or her life who conveys to that child a sense of delight in him or her. This is more than a tenet of psychological wisdom. It is part of the image of God in us. It is part of how God wants us to be. Remember that, as the book of Genesis describes it, God looks across the whole of creation and pronounces that it is good, that it is very good. God intends that we should find this world and those close to us to be good, so that in the kitchen or the classroom or the church we should pour upon every child that same delight that God takes in the simple existence of his creatures.

People who are never shone upon in that way over time sometimes become sociopaths. Or they may develop the incredible manipulation skills of the narcissist. But at the least they remain in spirit wounded children, cramped and anxious, closed off from others, nursing a great and angry grief at their core.

That is one very helpful angle into this story today from John’s gospel. The story keys upon the metaphor of thirst. That image of dryness speaks powerfully to the many people even today, let alone in Jesus’ time, who have been denied the basic affirmation that they belong. When you’re told over and over again that you don’t measure up, that you don’t fit in, that you haven’t got what it takes, that you are no good – you come to believe it. And you dry up. Worse yet, you act defensively in ways that make you unlovable. You pull back, decline to engage with others (they’ll just hurt you more), and your spirit that should grow into a blossom instead becomes a prickly cactus, a thirsty, thirsty cactus.

“Give me... a drink”, Jesus says to her. It seems he knows already, he can see already that he might as well be asking for nectar from a cactus. I think he asks quite gently, knowing (somehow) how fierce is her thirst. He seems intuitively to know the three reasons she is so desperate.

First, she is a Samaritan. As such she has the Samaritans’ caution when it comes to Jews like Jesus, for she knows of the condescension and opprobrium with which Jews typically regarded her people. She is surprised that Jesus has spoken to her because she expects him to regard her as a spiritual inferior, a follower of a religion that Jews scorn as syncretism, a faith adulterated with alien elements. She herself alludes to the emnity between Samaritan and Jew when she asks, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Secondly, she is a woman. Females in a society like the ancient Middle East (in fact like the Middle East today) suffered very close constraints on their liberty. Such societies are structured around categories of honour and shame. A woman would bring terrible shame on her family were she to speak in public to a man not of her family. This detail appears in our text. Jesus’ disciples give voice to this deeply held attitude about social propriety when they question him. You need to hear the shock, almost outrage, behind what John describes as their astonishment v.27) that he should be speaking to a woman in public.

Thirdly, she is living with a “man not her husband” – cohabiting with someone outside the norms of marriage. This housewife is no wife, formally speaking. Jesus observes: “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” Some commentators have taken Jesus’ comment here as a criticism of her sexual morals. But the explanation could be quite otherwise. Perhaps she was so incredibly unlucky that she had been widowed five times. Perhaps she had run into a string of ultra-fussy men who, finding her displeasing in one small way or another, had each divorced her. In that society she could be dismissed as easily as that. For whatever reason, she was not ready to jump back into marriage. You know our saying, “Once burned, twice shy” – what about five times burned? In fact, her circumstance of cohabiting with a man “not her husband” might indeed have been the actions of a decent but desperate woman. In that society every respectable woman had to be attached to the household of some man. Otherwise she would have had to become a beggar or a prostitute in order to stay alive. We need to be very careful not to make damning assumptions here, and Jesus may not have done so. What’s really important is the undoubted fact that, whatever was her circumstance, it brought her intense shame. That would be why she was coming to draw the daily water for her household not in the early morning, when the other village woman would be there, but at noon. Although this forced her out into the heat of the sun, at least she was away from the heat of their gossipy censure.

To this woman, thrice distanced from him, by her nationality, her gender, and her shame, Jesus gently speaks, gently asks for refreshment. Thereby he opens up between them a conversation about the refreshment of spirit that she so desperately needs. He assures her that she is worthy. She can be loved. She is loved, by God. He says, “The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” He is implying that if she can look past the religious prejudices that separated Samaritan and Jew and approach God directly, “in spirit and truth”, that is all God is looking for from any of us.

Jesus was inviting her to be open, instead of closed; to be real instead of aquiescing in the social roles foisted upon her; to trust God enough that an honest approach to the Holy One would be met with unconditional love in return. For the first time in her life, perhaps, she was recognized and affirmed as the potential object of God’s delight. She ran to her village to proclaim her newfound honesty and dignity: "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”

And she says something more. She asked, in puzzle and wonderment, whether he might be Messiah, God’s Anointed One, the one “in whom God was pleased”. Jesus had offered her spiritual living water and that was how he could be Messiah to her, for he saw into the core of her being and invited her to move from that truth about her towards the truth about God.

The greatest gift you can give any person is to affirm his or her value. And that might mean, in concrete terms, to explore with that person this story from John’s gospel. For here is (part of) what it witnesses. Living water for our thirsty souls is offered from the hand of Jesus. Unconditional love from God awaits any of us who approach the Holy One in spirit and in truth.

Hidden in plain sight

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for February 17, 2008

Read: John 3:1-17

Have you ever been watching a baseball game on TV and the camera zooms in to show the pitch into the plate, when somebody sitting in the stands behind the umpire holds up a sign that reads “John 3:16"? That is a kind of guerrilla evangelism. The card-holder hopes that viewers will recognize this as a Bible verse and out of curiosity look up John chapter 3, verse 16, which the evangelist obviously regards as the most important verse in the Bible. And indeed, when in today’s reading John’s gospel presents the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus the Pharisee, verses 16 and 17 are presented as the climax: ¹⁶ "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”

Those verses are like the headline on the story John’s gospel is telling. They try to sum up the meaning of Jesus’ life and work. The gospel inserts them here because in the course of this story of Jesus and Nicodemus, Nicodemus does not comprehend what Jesus is about. Although he is sympathetic to what he has heard about the message that Jesus has been proclaiming, he doesn’t seem to “get it”. Jesus tries twice to explain his purpose. He uses metaphors which are vivid and straightforward. And Nicodemus puzzles over each one, responding, in effect, “What are you talking about?”

• Rebirth is the first metaphor. To be in the kingdom of God is to be reborn, says Jesus. But Nicodemus hears that literally. Jesus’ invitation to a radical starting-over in our life with God remains hidden from Nicodemus.

• The wind of the Spirit is the second metaphor. To be reborn, born from above, born anew in your spirit, is like being caught up and carried along on the unpredictable wind of God’s grace. But Nicodemus says to him “⁹ "How can these things be?"”

He is attracted to Jesus, intrigued by him, slightly alarmed by him – but he just doesn’t get him. The meaning of Jesus is out there in plain sight for Nicodemus, yet remains hidden from his mind’s eye.

To any of us who, like Nicodemus, are attracted to or intrigued by Jesus but have trouble grasping what he is really about, this famous verse is addressed:

¹⁶ "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. ¹⁷ "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

This is John’s witness for anyone who finds the meaning of Jesus opaque. In that case he is writing very much for our era, for we tend to understand “Spirit” and “God” better than we comprehend Jesus. We sort of understand “Spirit”. In our culture of recent years talk about “spirituality” has had a renaissance, and in sundry ways contemporary people are trying to connect to the Sacred, the Holy, the Mystery which is present within and around us. We sort of understand “God”. Many contemporary people retain a strong sense that the world owes its existence to a Creator. But for many folks Jesus is a puzzle. The stories about Jesus and the stories Jesus told are out there in plain sight; but their meaning remains hidden to many contemporary people.

Why is that? Because they cannot see past the “standard interpretation” of what Jesus means. The standard interpretation is the picture of what Jesus means which many people learned as children or which they hear in “Christian” media everywhere today anad which was teh framework of Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. It gives a particular “take” on John 3:16,17. It goes like this: God’s judgment condemns humankind for sin, which is rebellion against God. So God gave Jesus to substitute for us. He pays the penalty of death that we deserve. This earns us God’s forgiveness. So we are saved, meaning we escape punishment and are allowed– if we believe in Jesus – to go to heaven when we die.

Now this standard interpretation remains important for many people. They experience a vivid sense of guilt, perhaps personally, perhaps on behalf of all humankind. The testimony that because of Jesus they are not going to suffer the consequences brings them enormous gratitude, and often leads them to renewed lives of obedience to the way of God.

But for many other contemporary people the standard interpretation no longer works, no longer seems believable, no longer connects them to God. As Marcus Borg puts it:

the notion that God’s only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible. Taken metaphorically, the story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straightforward about that. [Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, 131]

It is then a huge blessing for them – actually I will say for us – that there are theologians and Bible scholars who can help us recognize that the Bible itself offers many other interpretations of what it means to say that God gave Jesus so that we might be saved. Borg, for instance, itemizes at least six of those other understandings of salvation that can be found in the Bible: 

If we are blind, we need to see; if we are in exile, we need to return; if we are in bondage, we need liberation; if we have closed hearts, we need to have our hearts opened; if we hunger and thirst, we need food and drink; if we are lost, we need a way, we need to be found. [The Heart of Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 168]

Each of those six metaphors runs throughout the Bible and surfaces in the Jesus story. Each metaphor illuminates a different aspect of the work of Jesus to bring us “salvation”.

1. Blindness: Mark’s gospel (8: 22-25) recounts Jesus’ healing of a blind man brought to him near the village of Bethsaida. But in the context of Mark’s entire gospel that healing is symbolic. It represents the way in which Jesus’ proclamation of the in-breaking Reign of God broke through the barriers of fear and guilt that prevented people from seeing God at work in the events of their lives.

2. Exile: Whenever Jesus is described in the New Testament as “The Light of the World” the language echoes the Old Testament story of Israel’s exile in Babylon. The people of God experienced that time when they were torn away from their home as a moment of the darkness. Writing during that exile, the prophet Isaiah proclaimed that “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”. The followers of Jesus believed that Isaiah’s promise had been fulfilled in the Jesus, that to follow the Way of Jesus was to move from darkness to light, a promise that we can return from our alienation from God into the light of God where we belong.

3. Bondage: When Jesus named his agenda at the beginning of his ministry he declared that he had been anointed by God “^{Luke 4:18} to proclaim release to the captives... to let the oppressed go free”. Many people became part of the Jesus movement by understanding that metaphorically: their psychological and spiritual bondage was broken as Jesus mediated to them the free and loving acceptance of God.

4. Closed hearts: Jesus’ own disciples, the followers closest to him, are portrayed in Mark’s Gospel over and over again as not appreciating what Jesus was showing them about God. Jesus said to them, " ^{Mark 8:17} Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?” And to this day, when people think on and enter into the parables and sayings of Jesus, they find themselves with a new appreciation of the world around them and of the precious values of the people around them. Their spirit opens like a flower coming into bloom.

5. Hunger and thirst: ^{John 6:35} Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” These incredibly potent images speak directly to our own perception of our need for God as a kind of hunger or thirst. It is no wonder that eating and drinking together were central initiatives Jesus took to form the community of the Reign of God. It is no wonder that bread and cup became very quickly the central symbolic actions of worship through which the Jesus movement brought people to the table of God’s love.

6. Lost: ^{John 14:5} Thomas said to [Jesus], "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" ⁶ Jesus said to him, "I am the way”.

And there are other biblical metaphors for salvation as well, beyond the six Marcus Borg lists here. Which one speaks to you? Which one (or ones) helps you understand your deepest need for God, and invites you to meet that need for Jesus?