Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

One Perfect Afternoon

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, April 7th, 2019 in Minister

Hespeler, 7 April, 2019 © Scott McAndless – Lent 5

Isaiah 43:16-21, Psalm 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8

remember one perfect afternoon when I was in grade 6. It was a winter’s day and after school a friend and I had stayed late. We were having fun in the schoolyard. The hills behind the school were covered in ice and snow and we were sliding down them. And we were having so much fun particularly because my winter boots at that point were kind of old. The tread was all worn away and so I was able just slide all the way down the hill on my feet. It was so much fun. It was a perfect afternoon and I never wanted it to end.

And then my mother came along. You see, she had been waiting for me at home and wondering why I was taking so long so she came to look for me. She had decided that today was the day I needed to get new boots. She had noticed something. She had noticed that my winter boots were really old. So old, in fact that the tread was, like, completely worn away. We had to go shopping for new boots and we had to go now.

So I went. And my mother has never said anything, but I suspect that what happened next was probably one of the most frustrating experiences has she ever had shopping with me because, well, none of the boots that we tried on were what I liked. I couldn’t, or at least I didn’t, explain what was wrong with every pair of boots that I tried on, but I’ll tell you right now what was wrong with them. They were all winter boots and, as winter boots, they all had treads on the bottom. And that was the last thing that I wanted because if I got boots with winter treads on them, I would never be able to go sliding down the hills behind the school standing on my feet again. I would never again have that perfect afternoon.

Well my mother was not going to leave that shoe store without a new pair of boots for me. So there was nothing for it but that I choose a pair and finally I found them. They were ugly. They had these weird high heels on them. They were actually really kind of heavy so that if you walked too far your feet would drag. But they had one thing going for them: they had virtually no tread. I don’t know what my mother thought about my taste in boots. I’m quite sure she didn’t know what I was basing my decision on. But at that point, I’m sure she just wanted to get out of the store. My winter boots had been chosen.

I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. Spring came soon after. I graduated from that school and went to another school that was a much longer walk. I never again had the opportunity to slide down those hills on my feet. And I was stuck trudging along in those ugly, heavy boots for many years to come.

And I think I’ve gleaned a little bit of wisdom from that experience. It is probably not a very good idea to make a life decision based on wanting to go back to one perfect afternoon. And I’ve noticed that nobody ever talks about that side of success and perfection. When something goes extraordinarily well, it can sometimes doom us to future failure.

You know, the people of Israel once had a perfect afternoon. It was amazing. There they were, trying to escape from lives of slavery in Egypt when they were caught, red handed, between a hostile army of horses and chariot drivers and an uncrossable body of water. They were sure they were done for. They were getting their affairs in order. And then, a miracle happened. God made “a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters.” It was a path that they could follow on foot but when the chariots tried to chase them their wheels stuck in the muck. “They lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”

It was perfect – they were saved, chosen and beloved by God and their enemies got everything that they deserved. And so they told the story of that perfect afternoon over and over again and who wouldn’t forgive them if the story grew a little bit in the telling over the years. But here is the thing. The story was so perfect that, generations later, they were still trying to make it happen again. They were still buying winter boots without treads just in case they might have the opportunity to go sliding down the hills on their feet. No, wait, that’s not quite right. Let’s say that they kept buying rubber boots just in case they had to go wading through the Red Sea again.

And you might think that that should be a good thing, that we should remember those moments in our history when God did something truly amazing for us. And of course that is true. But the fact of the matter is that that perfect afternoon was creating big problems for the people at one particular moment.

You see, the people were in a position once again where they needed God to save them. But they weren’t slaves in Egypt. They were exiles in Babylon. And you might say to that, fine, what’s the problem with that? Surely the God who could save them from Egypt could save them from Babylon too. You would think. But it seems that they were having problems. There wasn’t a Red Sea between Babylon and their homeland. What there was instead was a huge uncrossable desert. They were so stuck back in the time when God saved them by creating a path through the sea that they couldn’t imagine that God could save them by creating a path through an uncrossable desert. They had bought rubber boots and they were no good for walking in the desert. That is the only way that I can understand the message we read in the Book of Isaiah this morning.

“Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old,” says the prophet. Now normally that is not something that we would expect to read in the Bible. Usually the people are being told to remember what God has done for the nation in the past. But, no, this prophet insists that they must forget it. Why? Because God says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” You see, that is their problem. They do not perceive it. And the reason why they do not perceive this new thing that God is doing is because they can’t forget that perfect afternoon that they had so long ago. They can’t stop trying to go back there.

I sometimes wonder if this isn’t the problem that we also have as the church these days. It’s not that God is unable to save the church, that is, to give to the church a future that is exciting and meaningful. God is doing that and it’s going to do that. Our problem is that we do not perceive it. The reason why we don’t perceive it? It’s probably because we remember one perfect afternoon. and the perfect afternoon that we remember doesn’t include sliding down snow-covered hills or jaywalking across the Red Sea. The perfect afternoon that we remember is that moment when everything seemed to be just right in the church. And I realize that that perfect afternoon occurred at different times for different people. For some people, the perfect afternoon of the church happened back in the 1960’s and 70’s when Sunday Schools were full to bursting with the children of the baby boom. I don’t know how many times I have had people paint the picture of that particular perfect afternoon for me. But other people may locate that perfect afternoon of the church at another point in time – especially at a moment when the ministry of the church may have fulfilled a particular need for them or touched a particular nerve.

The problem is not that we have such perfect afternoons in our memories of the church. Nor is the problem that we may sometimes remember them in some idealized way (forgetting some things about them that were less than perfect). The problem comes when we are so fixed on that perfect afternoon that we do things like try to revive programs that no longer work, or we reject new ideas or new ways of doing things because they do not look like that perfect afternoon or we criticize something that is happening that is really good because it doesn’t look like or measure up to something that happened during the perfect afternoon. When the memory of that perfect afternoon means that we cannot perceive the new things that God wants to do and is already doing among us, then we are certainly better to “not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.”

So, I do think that the wise words of the ancient prophet do apply very powerfully to our collective life as the church today. But there is also an individual application that the Apostle Paul would bring to our minds in the reading from his Letter to the Philippians today. Paul is speaking to the Christians in Philippi in this passage about his own struggles to be a faithful follower of Christ. He looks back on the perfect afternoon of his own life and says he was “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

Paul is here looking back at a very idealised time in his life. It was basically a time when everything made sense. He had answers to every question. He knew what was right and he knew what was wrong and he knew what he had to do in every circumstance. Yes, that sense of certainty that he had made him do things, like persecute the church, that now horrify him, but he cannot deny that it just felt right at the time. And Paul could have held onto that perfect afternoon, kept trying to go back there, but it would have meant missing out on this incredible new thing that God had done in Jesus Christ. It would have meant missing out on the wonders of God’s grace and the power of Christ’s resurrection.

But even after Paul had given in and become a follower of Christ, he could still have spent all of his energy trying to get back to that perfect afternoon. He could have become one of those Christians who was always trying to say he was better than everyone else and that he had it all right. Paul knew that that was the danger and so he made a conscious choice. He would forget what lay behind and strain forward to what lay ahead. He would press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

My friends, we have all of us been blessed to have had perfect afternoons in our lives both individually and communally. We have those moments in time where everything just seemed to go so well. That can be a wonderful blessing but the warning of Paul and of the prophet is that it can also be a curse. I invite you – I invite all of us – to examine the things that we do in our Christian life. Ask yourself, are you buying boots in the hope of recreating a perfect afternoon that will never happen again? Think of some of the decisions you make, some of the things you buy. Are you doing things, trying to recreate a memory of a time that may be wonderful but just won’t happen again?

I don’t blame you for doing that. I’ve done it myself, as I have confessed. But I will remind you that the danger is not that you might end up wasting your mother’s money on boots that you don’t really like (if you know what I mean). The real danger is that you might not perceive the new thing that God is doing in our midst. And I’ve got to admit that that is my greatest fear, that I, that you and that we together as the church might miss out on the great new thing the God has probably already begun to do in the world today.

While I kept silence…

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 31st, 2019 in Minister

Hespeler, 31 March, 2019 © Scott McAndless

Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32:1-11, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

e read a story today – a rather famous story told by none other than Jesus – in which a young man gets a number of things tragically wrong. He goes to his father and asks to receive the inheritance that will rightly be his upon his father’s death. That is a bad thing to do. He is basically saying to this man who has done everything for him that he doesn’t value him as a father. He is saying that he would rather have him dead so that his value can be converted into cold, hard cash.

Can you imagine how much it would have hurt for a father to hear something like that? I’m pretty sure it would have broken his heart. And that is all on the son. But the father, perhaps recognizing his own imperfections in the parental role (for, I’m sad to say, there is no such thing as a parent who gets it all right) gave in to his son’s demand. Perhaps he was at a loss and didn’t know what else to do.

But the young son was not finished making bad choices. He went away to a distant land, foolishly thinking that he would leave all of his problems behind him. That is a strategy that almost never works. His problems went with him because he carried them within. The next mistake was to waste the precious resources that had been maintained and passed down by his family for generations. He threw it all away because he did not know its true value. He made bad connections – befriending people who did not value him for who he was but merely for what they could get out of him. Such people never make good friends.

The young son truly did mess up. But, you know what, I’m not going to write him off because of all that. Yes, he was foolish. Yes, he valued the wrong things. Yes, worst of all, he deeply hurt people who cared about him. But I have done that and so has pretty much everybody else. I think I’m actually pretty fortunate that, when I messed up, the consequences that were visited upon me did not lead to me sitting starving in a pigpen and dreaming about eating the food that I was supposed to feed the pigs. But it could have. I suspect that all of us have made mistakes in our lives that, had the circumstances been right, would have lead to a similar dire situation.

For example, one good way that someone the age of that young son can really mess up their life is by not taking their education seriously. A young person who is not interested in study and work – who only sees school as a place where they plan for their next party – runs a very serious risk of messing up the remainder of their life. We all agree that is true, right?

But is it? It may well be true if you are poor, a member of a racial minority or don’t have other advantages, but there are other young people who seem to have this privilege of being able to mess up without worrying about consequences. We just heard about a scandal in the last couple of weeks in which wealthy parents bribed their children into the best of colleges and universities regardless of how seriously those children had taken their education. Some people are spared the worst consequences of their errors because of who their parents are or because of other advantages that they have. But I think we can probably all say that we have done some things that could have, given the right circumstances or the lack of certain privileges, landed us in a very bad place.

What I’m saying is that I am not willing to condemn the young son because he messed up. Neither, by the way, is his father. And since Jesus told this parable in a way that clearly was trying to teach us something about God, neither does God. The crisis in this story is not that somebody sinned or made a big mistake. Sin and error are just part of what it means to be human. Sin, as a problem, is something that God has taken care of. That is what the coming of Jesus is all about. The crisis is in something else.

That brings us to the words of the psalm that we read together this morning. It is what is called a penitential psalm – a song that was written to be used by worshipers who have messed up and want to make things right. It is a prayer that certainly could have been prayed by the young son at his lowest point. But, as a prayer, it also points out where the biggest problem is. The penitent says this, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”

You see, sins, mistakes errors and screw-ups they can all be overcome. In fact, they have all already been overcome. Jesus came and he was obedient even unto the cross so that the power of sin over the lives of people might be broken. We do not need to be in bondage to sin, not here and now and not in the life to come either. But people are in bondage. Many people are caught in patterns of disobedience or dependence. Many people are victimized by violence or hatred. Many more are trapped in the consequences of their own foolishness or of the evil systems set up by others. So what is the problem? What is it that keeps us in bondage to all of these things? I think that this psalm hits the nail on the head. The problem is silence.

I mean this certainly applies to the young son in the parable of Jesus. I suspect that he knew very early on that he had messed up. He knew it when he saw the hurt in his father’s eyes as he made his request for the inheritance. He knew it when the wild life that he was living in that far distant country did not satisfy him. He knew it as he watched the people that he had thought were his friends turn away from him when his money ran out. But clearly there was a long walk from knowing the truth of his errors and speaking them aloud even to himself. He held his silence. Why? Out of pride; out of a stubbornness that is common to us all. (The psalmist also hits the nail on the head when he compares us to, “horse or a mule, without understanding.”) He kept his silence out of fear of further repercussions. The reasons for his silence might have been many, but the fact of the matter is that his situation only went downhill while he kept silent about his errors.

But as soon as he decided to speak, everything changed. I’m not saying that it was easy. I am quite sure that he felt a whole lot worse before he began to feel better. But that decision to speak up about how he had messed up was the beginning of healing for himself and for his father and even, I would suggest, for his older brother.

But we all get stuck in that time of silence don’t we? You know that you have hurt somebody. You can feel it every time you are in their presence. The feelings of resentment and tension only build and build. And the longer you wait, the harder it is to move from silence to speech. But breaking the silence is truly the only way to move forward.

It is the same thing with God. I know that doesn’t make sense to some people. Why do you have to tell God your sins or the things that you regret? Doesn’t God already know everything about you? Why do you have to say it; it can be so hard to say – hard for your pride, hard to admit your own weakness. If it doesn’t change anything for God, why do you have to say it? Well, I don’t presume to understand it all from God’s point of view, but I do know this: it certainly changes something for you when you break that silence. It is precisely because it is so hard for you – because you don’t want to do it – that speaking honestly with God about your failures can begin to change things for you. It frees you to start moving forward to new and better ways of acting and being.

And sometimes it is also helpful to speak to God through another human being. I know that, as Protestants, we don’t buy into the whole Roman Catholic sacrament of confession. We don’t believe that you have to go through a priestly mediator in order to find forgiveness from God. But they are not completely wrong in their approach. Sometimes speaking to a wise and trustworthy spiritual counsellor – to speak aloud to another human being our regret – can be a very helpful experience, especially when the person you open up to is then able to speak to you the words of grace and forgiveness that God would speak to you because of Jesus. You break your silence and they break the silence of God and healing and hope can abound.

There are other ways in which silence is the enemy. When people remain in silence, that is an environment in which guilt and shame breed and become ever stronger in their destructive power. Shame, in particular, is a very destructive force – especially when people are made to feel ashamed of things that are completely beyond their control. When someone feels shame for something that is simply a product of who they are (their heritage, their gender, their sexual orientation) or because of something that has been done to them (rape, abuse, other crimes) it can destroy lives. Even when people feel shame for something that is a result of their own choices, it is rarely a helpful or productive thing.

Shame festers in silence. It spreads its destructive power to every area of a person’s life and can damage their every relationship. But breaking the silence robs shame of its power. When we speak of the reasons for shame aloud, we can realize how ridiculous they often are. And when we speak words of grace and forgiveness aloud, shame is revealed to be a powerless tyrant, defeated by God’s love.

And what of the other sins that plague this world? Sins like racism and hatred, sins like economic systems that drive some people deeper and deeper into poverty while a few reap all of the riches and then think they can bribe their kids’ way into top colleges, sins like an opiate crisis that inflicts our entire society because countless people were driven into addiction by drug companies that, thinking only of their profits, promised doctors that they could prescribe their opioids to patients without worrying that it would lead to addiction even though this was a lie.

Well those sins all thrive in an environment of silence. So long as people are afraid to speak up and name what is happening, these things will continue to rule in this world. So long as people don’t challenge the racism or injustice that they see, it will continue to flourish. So long as we fail to call greed the sin that it is, it will continue to be presented as a virtue and the world will never change. So long as silence is the rule, so will sin be.

The psalmist was incredibly wise. Silence is often the root of so much of our misery. God has done so much to take care of the power of sin and guilt and shame, but the roadblock that gets in the way of us experiencing everything that God has done for us is silence. So I will close today by asking you a simple but very hard question: is there a silence that you need to break? Is there someone that you have wronged and you know it but you haven’t been able to say it to them? Speak. Do you need to break the silence between you and God about something that you have regretted or resented? Speak. Or do you need to speak up about something that is just wrong in some situation that you find yourself in? Speak. It is the simplest thing in the world, but it can also be the hardest thing you have ever done. May God give you the strength and the grace to break the power of silence.

Ho! Everyone who thirsts!

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, March 25th, 2019 in Minister

Hespeler, 24 March 2019 © Scott McAndless – 3^rd Lent

Isaiah 55:1-9, Psalm 63:1-8, 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, Luke 13:1-9

o, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have money, come, buy and drink. Come, buy and drink.

There is a well, not all that far from here from which a certain company pumps 3.6 million litres of groundwater every day. This is a fact that upsets a few people because it is such a large amount of water from a water table that we all depend on and maybe mostly because they don’t pay anything for that privilege. Well, that is not quite right. They actually pay something – a little over $13 a day. But, considering that they then put that water in bottles that they can sell for a dollar each or more – a markup that is so huge that I couldn’t even figure out how to calculate it – you might say they pay close to nothing.

And I realize that the whole Nestlé Aberfoyle Bottling Plant water contract thing can be a bit of a controversial topic in these parts. And I don’t mean to get into the whole political controversy around it. I mention it, simply to name it as one of the controversial issues of our time.

The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, whether we are more concerned for the job creation aspect or the environmental health aspect, it is an issue that’s simply not going to go away. We are living in a world where some of the basic things of life, things like water, have become and are becoming commodities and not merely services. And there is a lot of money and jobs and investments on the line as we deal with the question of the commodification of these things. These are issues we simply cannot escape.

And it is strange. In fact, there are times when I just don’t recognize it. I mean, this is not the world that I grew up in. This is not the world that I was promised When I was small, the notion that someone would buy a bottle of water, much less that some corporation would build a billion-dollar enterprise on the sale of water, was simply laughable. Water was a service, not a commodity. That would never change especially in a place like Canada with abundant water resources. And yet here we are. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living as a stranger in a strange land.

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have money, come, buy and drink. Come, buy and drink.

The prophet had heard that song every day of his life for decades now. He was living in the city of Babylon, but he was not a Babylonian. He was a Judean, a foreigner, who had been brought there many years before by a hostile invading Babylonian army that had destroyed his land. And in Babylon, they had these water sellers. Early in the morning they would walk the streets with their song: Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have money, come, buy and drink. Come, buy and drink.

And the Judeans had no choice. They didn’t own access to wells or streams. Since no one could live without water, they had to buy from the water sellers. This was not the world that the prophet had grown up in. In Judah, the people had possessed the land that God had given them. They dug their own wells and built their cisterns or shared them in their communities. Never, back then, could they have imagined that the song of the water seller would be a part of their lives. It was as unthinkable to them as, well, the idea of buying plastic water bottles once was to us. It was simply laughable. It would never happen. And yet here they were, living as strangers in a strange land.

That is the situation that the prophet is speaking to in our reading this morning from the Book of Isaiah. This passage was almost certainly addressed to Judeans who were living in exile. In fact, they had been living there so long that they had gotten used to a lot of things – things like the calls of the Babylonian water sellers. They had gotten so used to it that, while they were nostalgic for the lost past, they could not see a way forward.

And the prophet was given the task of proclaiming the word of the Lord to the people who were living through all of that. And that word, amazingly, was that God was about to do something new. There was no way to go back to how things were before exile; that way of life was over. But God was about to take his people in exile back to the land where they had once lived so they could make a new beginning.

We don’t know what the name of this prophet was; he was just the man who took up the words of the original Prophet Isaiah from over a century before and interpreted them for the new situation in Babylon. But I think that in many ways he is the biblical prophet we need most to hear today. I think we have an awful lot in common with the people that he was preaching to. We, like them, often feel as if we are living as strangers in a strange land.

And I’m not just talking about the strangeness of finding ourselves living in a world where water has become a commodity and a part of a corporate business plan. There seems to be so much that we find so strange about the world today. We are living in a multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural country of Canada today that I am sure many of us never imagined when we were younger. We are living in a world where we are being forced, many of us, to think of our relationship with Canada’s indigenous people in strange new ways. We are living in a strange, constantly connected world of social media.

And maybe especially the Christian church finds itself living in a strange new world. Thirty years or so ago, the church had a place of honour in society – why society even reserved one day a week to the almost exclusive use of the church. But today that is almost all gone, and it often feels like the church is living in a society that is sometimes even hostile to its existence.

We do often feel like exiles living in a strange land. And, like those exiles in Babylon, we know somewhere deep inside that there is no going back to the world that used to be. But that doesn’t stop us from looking back with nostalgia and pining for that lost world. God sent the prophet to those Judeans in exile in Babylon to break them out of that attitude. He didn’t want them to live in their memories of the past, but he also didn’t want them to just become complacent where they were now. He had to break them out of both of those things because God was about to do something completely new. So how did the prophet do that?

Well, one day he went out in the streets of the exile community and he imitated the cry of the Babylonian water sellers: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?” (And I’m sure that he sang it much better than that but that is probably what he did – he sang it.)

What was he doing? He was taking the familiar song of the water sellers that reminded the people every day that they were living as exiles in a strange land, and he was changing it. He was jarring them with an unexpected twist of the familiar. Pay without money? Buy without price? Spend instead on something that is not a commodity? That wasn’t how the world worked! It still isn’t how the world works? You are kind of forced into looking at everything from an entirely new point of view.

It makes me wonder, what might the prophet do if he were among us today? I think that he would recognize us as fellow exiles – fellow strangers living in a strange land. He would recognize the tendency that we have to look back at the past with nostalgia and see everything in that past with rose coloured glasses. He would recognize the complacency with which we look at where we are right now and how we don’t necessarily want to risk change or anything new. He would recognize us as people who are caught between a lost past and an uncomfortable present. Those were the people he was talking to in exile in Babylon and I really think that we would seem familiar to him.

He might even recognize what all of that leads to at its worst. Some people who can’t let go of that idealized image of the past – who think it must have been always good when for example, white men ruled unchallenged – will try and take us back there sometimes by the most despicable means. They will target and scapegoat immigrants and racial minorities, blaming them for all the problems they see in the world. They will imprison children and separate them from their parents for what is technically a misdemeanour in crossing a border without proper documentation. At the very worst, they will run, guns blazing, into mosques or synagogues. These things are all things that people who are troubled do because they feel like they no longer recognize the world that they are living in. Fortunately, the vast majority do not respond to such extremes, but the fact that a few do should give us pause.

What would the prophet do for us? I suspect he would shake us up – maybe take something familiar to us, something that reminds us that we are caught living in this world where we don’t quite feel at home. He wouldn’t use the ancient water seller’s song, of course, because that doesn’t mean anything to us. But he might do something like impersonate the Fiji water girl at the Golden Globes. But the point would not be to merely mock what’s happening in our world today. The internet is full of people mocking what’s happening in the world today. He would be doing it in order to challenge our lack of imagination. You see, we are falling into this rut where all we can see is the world that used to be, which we look back on with nostalgia and not necessarily a whole lot of accuracy – we see that and the flaws of the present world. But we can’t imagine the world that needs to be – the world that God is calling into existence. That is what the prophet was really doing for the people who were stuck in Babylon. That is what God would like to do for us.

“Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” That is what he would challenge us to do. He’s throwing out before us the radical idea that God is actually doing something in the world today and that, if we are ready to respond, we can be part of it. I know that we have fallen into thinking that God being active in the world is something that only happened in ancient times, a time before this exile in which we find ourselves, but that is a lie and we cannot accept it.

Even more, the prophet challenges us with these words, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” He is saying that we think too small. Our ideas are limited by what we may have known in the past before we entered this strange land of exile, and our ideas are constrained by the realities that we find ourselves living in today. God’s ideas and thoughts are not limited like that and God does not want our ideas to be limited either.

God is calling us onwards towards the new thing, the new creation and the new possibilities. But we have a hard time dealing with that because of where we are. God is sending us messages of possibility, wants us to dream big and to be bold enough to trust him for the big things. That was what the prophet was trying to do and he was successful. He persuaded many of the exiles in Babylon to step out and risk everything to build a brand new future. Now if only we would be so faithful.

One desert evening

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 17th, 2019 in Minister

Hespeler, 17 March 2019 © Scott McAndless – 2^nd Lent

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17 - 4:1, Luke 13:31-35

uring the season of Lent this year, I have noticed, a lot of our scripture readings take us into desert places. Last week we spent forty days and forty nights with Jesus in the wilderness as he was tempted. And I think you will find over the coming weeks that many other readings take us into the desert as well. The desert is a hard place to be, of course. With no food and water, you quickly become desperate. It is also far from human society and culture and that can be very hard for some. But there is also no question that the desert can be a profoundly spiritual place – a place where God seems nearer.

In our reading from Genesis this morning, the person we find in a desert place is none other than Abraham, the great father of our faith tradition. (In this text he is actually called Abram, but, since the story of how he changed his name really doesn’t have much to do with this particular passage, I’m going to ignore that and just call him by the name that we are used to.) But it is not just that Abraham is in a literal desert in this passage. I mean, he is. He seems to have pitched his tent in a very isolated place where there is nothing to interfere with him seeing all the stars in the sky and there are vultures and other things that prey upon dead things around him. But more than a literal desert, Abraham seems to have found himself in a spiritual desert.

How can I tell that? Well, look at how Abraham reacts when God comes to him and, in a vision, gives him an extraordinary promise. “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” I mean, that’s a pretty amazing thing for anyone to hear. The great creator of the universe comes to you and says that he has an enormous reward just for you! But how does Abraham react? The Book of Genesis puts his reaction kind of nicely, I mean, Abraham is one of the heroes of the Bible after all. “You have given me no offspring,” he says, “and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” But Abraham’s reaction is basically to say, “God, don’t talk to me about rewards. What good are your rewards if I don’t have any future?”

That is a pretty bleak place to be. Abraham is declaring that rewards, blessings and protection are absolutely meaningless to him because of something going on in his life. I mean, if I had friends who said that to me, I would be worried about them. That sounds like depression. And what has pushed Abraham into this spiritual desert? He actually has a great deal at this point. He is a very wealthy man according to the standards of his time and place. He has honour and respect from the people around him which, in that world, counted for even more. There were many who would have looked at Abraham and said that he had it all. So where does this discouragement come from? It comes from the simple fact that he sees no future.

Abraham sees no future because he has no children of his own. But his feelings are not just unique to him, I feel, nor even just to people who have dealt with the problem of infertility. I think a lot of people today are feeling that despair for the future. The current and ongoing environmental crisis certainly makes many people feel that way. The nuclear arms race has certainly had that effect on many as well. You can understand the feeling – what is the point of anything that I achieve or amass if there is not going to be anyone around in the future who can appreciate it?

Honestly, the church is feeling much the same thing in many places these days. The church has so much – such a powerful legacy that it has received from the past and so many vibrant ministries and beautiful buildings. But the church – and this is something that is true almost entirely across the board – is worried about the future. Every single denomination in Canada has suffered loss of membership in recent decades and, by far, the greatest loss has taken place in the youngest generations. The church is afraid that it’s losing its children and youth. That’s just the reality and everyone is talking about it. So, I think that Abraham could sympathize perfectly with the church today; we too are asking the question, what good are God’s promises and blessings if we don’t have children or youth to pass them onto?

Now, I would like you to note that all these dark and depressing thoughts that Abraham is having seem to happen in a particular place. He is inside. We only know that because at some point we are told that he goes outside but I think that his location is significant. It doesn’t say what he is inside, but I think it’s fair to assume, based on the rest of the story, that he is in a tent. So we have poor little Abraham, sitting in his tent in the desert feeling sorry for himself. He is surrounded, I’m assuming, by all his flocks and cattle, all the symbols of his great wealth and success, but, as he thinks of all that success, he cannot help but feel that it is meaningless because he has no children – because the future is dead and empty to him.

Often, honestly, that is exactly where the church is these days too – sitting inside our churches, surrounded by many blessings, but feeling sorry for ourselves because the future seems a bit bleak.

But then something prompts Abraham to go outside. In fact, not just something but someone. It says, “He brought him outside.” “He” refers, of course, to God. And, in many ways, I think that is the most significant thing that God does for Abraham in this whole passage. God takes him outside. And what is outside? Well, the desert is outside. Ah, but it is the desert at night that is outside the tent.

I wonder, have you ever been there – in a desert, far from civilization, in the middle of the night? I know that there aren’t too many deserts in Canada, but if you’ve been out in the Canadian wilderness someplace far from civilization – say in the middle of a Muskoka lake or in a clearing in Algonquin Park – you might have some sense of it. There, far from any artificial lights, there is only darkness. The only light comes from the stars and that light will completely blow you away. If you’ve only seen the stars in the city, I’m afraid that you have no idea. It’s not just the sight of those stars, it is the sheer uncountable abundance of them and the unfathomable space that they fill.

I don’t think that anyone has a simple response to such a sight. It doesn’t just send information to your eyes it speaks to your soul. You may be someone who has decided, based on logic and reason, that there is no God, but when you are staring at such a sight, you cannot just respond to it with logic and reason. It speaks to the heart and what it tells you is that there are things in the universe that are far beyond your logic and understanding.

So I, for one am not surprised that, when poor despondent Abraham lifted his eyes to the blazing glory that hung above that desolate place as he left his tent that night, God spoke to him – and Abraham received that as a much more hopeful word than he had heard inside. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4) That was the voice that Abraham heard that night in the desert and it was the voice of God.

Now, the particular word of hope that Abraham received when he went outside was that God would grant him a child that would come from inside his own body. The incredible overhead display made that promise undeniable. The God who could arrange for such an incredible sight could surely not only grant Abraham just one heir – could grant as many as those uncountable stars that filled the sky. That was the particular message that Abraham received when he looked up, but I don’t think that is necessarily the entire message nor that that voice has since been silenced.

It makes me think of many people in the world today who are a lot like Abraham – people who have received many significant blessings and even protection from God but for whom those blessings mean little and may even be a reason for despair because they see no future. I have seen reports that the upcoming millennial generation in North America is, to an unprecedented degree, opting out of having children because they despair for the future given the promise of climate change and environmental destruction. They seem to have lost hope for the future. In these discouraging times, they are not alone.

And then there is the church which, as I said, seems to have a lot in common with Abraham as we contemplate the future. Yes, we have many blessings and even riches. Many flocks and herds surround our tent on every side, but we cannot help but ask the question, what does all this mean if we do not have a future, especially a future that includes a healthy population of children and young people?

Abraham’s story is extremely relevant today. And what do you think that God would say to us when we are feeling that way? I think that God would say, “Why don’t you go outside?” To the church, sitting inside of its magnificent buildings, God would say, “Go outside, I want to show you something.”

In many ways, that is what I think God is saying. God is telling the church, for one thing, that if we think we can just wait around inside our tent – just doing the things that are familiar and comforting to ourselves – and that eventually a younger generation is going to just show up, we are deluding ourselves. Can a younger generation show up in the church? Absolutely! But I will tell you that it is far more likely to happen when the church sets out from what is familiar and what feels safe and steps into the world outside the church in mission. But if we’re just sitting in our tents feeling sorry for our lack of future, why would God make that happen?

But even more important than that, stepping out of the tent means being willing to trust God enough to be people of faith in the big bad world. We’re told that when Abraham looked up and read the promise of God in the stars, “He believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” God is looking for that kind of faith from us as well and will always reward it when he finds it in us.

Is there a future for humanity? For the planet? For the church? Do our fears concerning that future suck the meaning and joy out of the blessings of the present? If ever they do, remember that the future is and always has been in the benevolent hands of God. And God would not have us sitting inside our tents paralyzed and demoralized by fear of the future. God is inviting us outside, to consider the wonders of creation and the heavenly hosts. He is inviting us outside to trust him as we do the new thing, the risky thing, that we are called to do in the name of Christ Jesus.

A Lament (Inspired by Psalm 79 and the events in Christchurch)

Posted by Scott McAndless on Saturday, March 16th, 2019 in Minister

So here we are, once again, struggling in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy and outrage. White supremacists have attacked and killed peaceful Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand.

I always struggle with the question of how to respond, as a leader in a Christian church, in the aftermath of such events.

We may well pray in intercession -- pray for healing for the wounded and aggrieved and for a better world.

We may well pray in confession -- confessing the ways in which we participate in systems of oppression and exclusion of those who are different.

We should do these things, of course. But I believe that, in the immediate aftermath, we are not really able to do them with a whole heart.

Our first need, I believe, is simply to express to God our feelings, our desires and our disappointments. We need to complain. This is a legitimate response and a very biblical one. Therefore, for worship in the aftermath of the events in Christchurch, this is the prayer that I have written for my congregation:

A Lament (Inspired by Psalm 79)

L: O God, the wicked have entered into a sacred place. They have defiled two mosques sacred to many and thus sacred to you. That have left hundreds of lives in ruins. They have slain many people who you created and who you love. They have poured out their blood like water all around Christchurch.

P: They have spread their hatred far and wide through social media. They have made Muslims – our neighbours, our friends and fellow people of faith – feel unsafe at worship even here in Canada on the opposite end of the world.

L: How long, O Lord? Will you endure such wickedness forever? Will you let zealous wrath burn like fire?

P: Pour out your wrath on evildoers and those who support them for they have devoured people at prayer and laid waste to their mosques.

L: Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of your name; deliver us, and forgive our sins, for your name’s sake.

P: Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”

L: Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants be known among the nations before our eyes.

P: Let the groans of the aggrieved and wounded come before you; according to your great power preserve those in danger of death.

L: And let those who are afraid, who are wounded and surrounded by hatred know blessings sevenfold in repayment of the taunts with which they have endured, O Lord!

P: For you are our God. You are the hope of all nations. You are the hope of peace.

Desert Days

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 10th, 2019 in Minister

Hespeler, 10 March, 2019 © Scott McAndless – 1^st Lent

Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13

oday is the first Sunday in Lent. And on the first Sunday in Lent, if you follow the lectionary, which we have chosen to do this year at St. Andrew’s Hespeler, you always read the same story from the gospels. You read the story of the temptation of Jesus in the desert.

That can be a bit of a problem for a preacher like me, reading the same story each year at the same time. I mean, who likes reruns? It is one reason why I decided, several years ago, to set aside the lectionary for a time and exercise my freedom to choose the passages that I felt God was calling me to preach on each Sunday, even during Lent. That was fine and one way to deal with it, but I am finding it kind of interesting this year to come back to the lectionary and to live within that discipline of visiting the same old familiar stories. There is a value and even a power in repetition.

So today I find myself looking at this familiar story and asking myself what is special and what is unique about the way that the Gospel of Luke chooses to tell this story. And the answer to that question, honestly, is not that much. Luke’s account of the temptation in the wilderness is almost identical to Matthew’s.

But there is one difference in the way that Luke tells the story. And actually, it is a key difference that you have to notice when you compare Matthew and Luke. It is the last phrase. Luke, and Luke alone, ends his account of the temptation in the wilderness with these specific words: “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.”

Now, when you end a story like that, you immediately make your readers ask a question, don’t you? You read that, and you have to ask the question when? When will be that opportune time when the devil steps back into the story of Jesus? That’s going to be a particularly meaningful moment, isn’t it? And so, as you continue to read the Gospel of Luke from this point on, you should be looking for the devil to reappear. That will be the indication that the “opportune time” has come. And, guess what? The devil does not reappear as a character in the Gospel of Luke throughout the entire ministry of Jesus. Jesus does it all, the preaching, the miracles, the incredible parables, and never once does the devil show up in the narrative.

He does not step into the story again until 18 chapters later in Chapter 22, verse 3: “Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot, who was one of the twelve; he went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers of the temple police about how he might betray him to them.” Oh yes, it seems that the devil has finally found his opportune time and the opportune person through whom to carry out his design.

That is the way that Luke chooses to tell his story of the ministry of Jesus. It is bookended by the action of the devil, who is active in the temptation at the beginning and is active through the passion at the end, but the middle – the entire ministry of Jesus – rolls out in a devil-free zone. Now, why does Luke choose to tell the story in that way?

I believe that it is symbolic. Luke is trying to teach us about creating the kind of ministry that Jesus had – the kind of ministry that transforms the world, because that’s why he wrote this Gospel, to teach us how to do exactly that. That gives the story of Jesus in the desert particular significance. Jesus clearly has to go through that ordeal; he is led there by the Holy Spirit. The message seems to be that the decisions that he makes in the desert are all about setting Jesus up to have the kind of effective ministry that he has been called to have. By dealing with all of the temptations that may arise and lead his ministry astray in the desert, Jesus effectively banishes the devil from interfering throughout his earthly ministry.

And surely that is also a lesson for us. The things that tempted Jesus in the desert, the things that he rejected, will surely be the very things that will easily derail our ministry; we are being warned against them. So let us take a look at those three temptations in the desert. Is there some way in which the church today find itself facing the same temptations, though perhaps in somewhat different form?

The first temptation is fairly straightforward. After fasting for many days, Jesus is understandably hungry and is tempted to use his power to provide bread for sustenance. Now, what is wrong with doing that? When the devil tells Jesus that he has the power to provide bread for himself, he is surely not lying. If Jesus is who he says he is, he must have such power. What’s more, we are told in the same Gospel that Jesus actually did a very similar thing. He had four thousand people in a secluded place, five thousand on another occasion, and yet bread and even fish were miraculously provided at Jesus’ command. He provided bread then, what’s wrong with doing it now?

The answer, I suspect, has nothing to do with how the bread is provided, but rather the question of for whom. Jesus might provide bread for others by such means, but he will not provide it for himself. He justifies this refusal by quoting from the book of Deuteronomy, “one does not live by bread alone.” That quote comes from a longer passage where Moses is talking about God’s provision for the people of Israel and how God gave them manna to eat while they wandered in the desert. The meaning seems to be that God did this as a way of teaching them that they should trust in God first, and not in their ability to provide for themselves.

So how do we take this temptation and apply it to the life of the church today. I believe that the same power offered to Jesus is still available to the church today. We are given the ability to produce sustenance. Oh, we may not do it in as powerful a way as Jesus did it with the five thousand in the wilderness. We certainly don’t produce bread out of stones. But I have seen that miracle occur in this place. It has occurred when enough food to produce one of our famous Thursday Night Supper and Socials just appeared when it is needed most – when somebody maybe dropped off some food that they didn’t need or gave generously in another way.

I’ve seen the same miracle happen (though not with food) in the Hope Clothing room when someone has come in with a particular need for a certain item and we discover that the perfect item had been dropped off minutes earlier by some random donor. That kind of things happens once or twice and you just sort of shrug your shoulders and say, “That’s quite a coincidence.” But when it keeps happening, you start to suspect that something special is going on.

So, I absolutely believe that God can provide bread and other basic needs in stunning ways. Jesus trusted in that too. The temptation in the desert, however, is all about taking that awesome power that God has bestowed upon us and using it merely to take care of our own needs. That is not why that power is given. And this is frankly a temptation that the church often gives into.

Whenever we start to feel that resources are getting scarce in the church – when we are going through a desert experience – churches always seem to retract – to say that we cannot be involved in ministry to others because we have to use everything that we’ve got just to survive. I’ve seen it time and time again. When a church enters into that kind of survival mode, concentrating on bread for itself, it can so quickly lose sight of what it is meant to be. So Jesus dispenses with that temptation at the very beginning. So should the church do if we want to banish the influence of the devil from our ongoing ministry.

The second temptation that Christ faces in the desert is also one that the church continues to face today. The devil offers Jesus power and influence over the authorities of this world. “Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority.’” Can churches do that – sacrifice their mission and identity in the quest for political power and influence? Absolutely! The most powerful demonstration of that temptation we’ve seen in recent times is the powerful alliance that has been made between the white Evangelical Church and the Republican Party in the United States. They seem to have pledged near unconditional support in the quest to achieve certain policy and judicial goals.

The problem with that is not necessarily that there is something wrong with those political goals (though I realize, of course, that not every Christian would agree with their goals). The problem with that is what it does to the church – it takes us away from our true identity, our true calling. The church may see some short-term benefit, of course. Such power and influence is intoxicating. But the long-term effect will definitely be to turn people sour as they recognize the cynicism with which the church interacts with the world. We are willing to set aside what matters most for the sake of gain in this world. “For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” (Mark 8:36)

So, the first temptation seems to be about using the power that God has given us to merely take care of our own needs. The second one is about using our power and position to gain political influence. I think you can already see a pattern here; it is all about taking care of ourselves first as a church and as a Christian movement. I think you will find that the third temptation takes us even further down the road.

In the third temptation, the devil takes Jesus to the top of the highest building anywhere in the world, and he says, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.” That is exactly what it sounds like: an invitation to commit very public suicide. Now, you may ask, how would that be something at all tempting to the church today? We are just trying to survive as an institution, why would we be attracted to suicide?

But, of course, it’s not actual suicide that the devil is talking about. He wants Jesus to put himself in such a position precisely so that God might save him. In other words, he wants Jesus to make it all about nothing but his own survival. And that is something that I see churches doing a lot these days. Churches are scared, I know that. The world has changed and the place of the church in it is no longer as clear as it once was. When things get desperate, there is this temptation that churches find themselves dealing with. They decide that it is all about survival. The only purpose of the church becomes the continued existence of the church. We are so busy with survival that there is nothing left for ministry, mission, learning or growth in grace.

It is just like what happens when someone flings themselves from the top of a high building. In that moment every other concern is reduced to one question: will I survive or will I not. Churches go into that mode and they pray and expect that God will save them. And the issue at that point is not whether or not God can save them. The issue is not even whether or not God will save them. The issue is that we are testing God by once again making it all about us and our survival instead of questions about what God has called us to do and be in the world.

The temptations of Christ in the wilderness are not just about Jesus and what he had to deal with for our sakes. They are about us and the real issues that we continue to face. They are about banishing the devil – this very influence of evil upon the lives of our churches – so that we might get on with the business of becoming what we were called to be.

In the fading afterglow

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, March 3rd, 2019 in Minister

Readings, March 3, 2019 © Scott McAndless

Exodus 34:29-35, Psalm 99:1-9, 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-36

have been there. There have been moments in my life when I can truly say that I went where Moses went – into the very presence of God. Oh, not literally the same place that Moses went and maybe not in the presence of God in exactly the same way but, yes, there are moments that I can point to when I had absolutely no doubt and no other way to explain it than to say that I had just experienced God. Sometimes it has happened in subtle ways that nobody would have even noticed who was around me. Sometimes it has come while interpreting scripture and when I saw a special connection or deeper understanding that I knew I could not have found by myself – the spirit of God must have been operating within me.

Other moments have been more dramatic. I will never forget the time, for example, when I was literally out of money. I didn’t tell anyone but I didn’t know how I was going to get my next meal. And yet, in that moment, I impulsively chose to make a donation of my last five dollars to a worthy offering that was being taken. It was an act of faith and trust that was perhaps foolish, but I did it. I still do not know to this day how a twenty dollar bill ended up in my mailbox the following morning. Surely God had given someone a little nudge.

And yes, of course, there have also been those moments of greatest drama when, in the midst of worship or in the midst of a crisis I just knew. Every fibre of my being just reoriented to the certainty that I was in the presence of someone far beyond my understanding.

I have experienced the presence of God. I imagine that many of you have had such moments as well. Now, since such things are personal experiences, they are usually not shared. For that reason, I cannot really use my personal experiences to prove to you that God exists. Spiritual experience is not about proof. It does, however, play an important part in the formation and forms of human religion.

The model for how that works is demonstrated in how the Book of Exodus tells us that Moses gave spiritual leadership to the people of Israel. He would go into the tabernacle – a portable sanctuary that the Israelites would carry with them – and there he would have an experience of the presence of God. What that experience was – how exactly God was there for Moses in the tent – we do not know. We cannot know because it was Moses’ own personal experience. Nobody else could share in it and you could not prove that God was there in the tent to anybody but Moses.

Nevertheless, on the basis of his own personal experience, while the afterglow of that experience was still on him and slowly fading, Moses would speak to his people and give insights and commandments to them based on what he had experienced. But, after a time, that afterglow faded, the experience became less potent in his mind, and so the time of sharing based on it would come to an end. Moses would cover his face with a veil and for a time, they would only have the wisdom given in the afterglow to fall back on until it was time for Moses to have another personal experience of God in the tabernacle.

Now, in Exodus, this is all told in quite literal fashion. Moses’ face glows with a real and frightening light which slowly fades away. He then literally covers his face with a veil during the interim time. But I would say that this is how spiritual experience always works if you set aside the literal details. Whenever a spiritual leader has a powerful experience, there is a time when he or she is able to give great wisdom and insight in the fading afterglow of that experience. But then that afterglow wisdom gets codified and even turned into law to guide the community through the period of the veil – the time when no particular guidance comes through spiritual experience.

That is how it has always worked in many faiths, not just our own. It is a fairly natural way for human beings to respond to experiences of the divine. We see the very same pattern, for example, in our gospel reading this morning. Peter, James and John go up a high mountain where they have an experience of God in Jesus Christ – a powerful experience marked, once again, by glowing white light. Peter’s response, in the fading afterglow of that powerful experience, is to want to codify it. “Let us make three dwellings,” he says, “one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He wants to set up religious buildings where they can process the experience and turn it into commandments and regulations, just like Moses did when he came out of the tabernacle. He wants to do this so that the experience might sustain them through the long period of the veil when there is no dramatic God experience.

So that is the pattern. And it is a good pattern that human beings have developed to deal with the fact that people do sometimes have incredible spiritual experiences of God, the power of that experience fades and then we tend to go through long periods of veil time when there is no revelation. In many ways, you might say that that’s what religion is. It is the institutional structures that we build in the fading afterglow of experiences of the divine – structures that are designed to get us through the veil time.

But, while that is a natural human thing and while it is what Moses did, you probably picked up a little note in our reading from the gospel this morning – a note that seemed to indicate that Simon Peter didn’t actually respond in the right way. Jesus doesn’t say anything, but what happens immediately afterwards – the encompassing cloud, the mindless terror and the words, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” booming from heaven, all seem to indicate that Peter didn’t quite get his response right. But what did he do wrong? What is inappropriate in what he says?

That brings us, finally, to our reading this morning from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In this letter, Paul is talking specifically about the very passage we’ve been discussing – about the whole description of Moses having these face-to-face experiences with God, giving laws and rules and commandments in the fading afterglow, and then putting on the veil to signify the time when that direct experience of God is completely absent. Paul understands where this comes from, but he also explains what is wrong with this model of relating to God.

Paul writes this: “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside.” The problem, Paul says, is the veil. And what does the veil represent? It represents that long period of time when the direct experience of God is absent. In fact, it represents the fear of God’s continued absence. We are afraid, having had these extraordinary experiences of God at some point, that it will never happen again. And so we set ourselves up to try and make it through that long period of the veil. That is what the fading afterglow time is all about. We try to codify, to reduce the experience down to laws and rules, so that they may continue to guide us when the experience of God is absent.

The problem with all of that, from Paul’s point of view, is that it’s all motivated by fear. Having had an experience of God’s presence, we are afraid of the absence of that experience. In many ways that is the history of religion. It is the story of people who had extraordinary experiences of God and then created a religion to guide people in the absence of that experience. Now, Paul does not deny the power of those kinds of experiences. He had some of his own. They were very important and formative to him. But Paul actually resists using the fading afterglow of his experiences of the risen Christ, to give laws and rules. For him, laws and rules are the problem, not the solution.

For him, the point of whatever experience of Christ you have is not to give you rules to live by. It is to transform you. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.”

What, then, does all this mean? How should we apply it to the way that we live out our faith in Jesus Christ? The fact of the matter is that we are only here, we are only the church, because, at some point there were people who experienced the presence of God. It started, of course, with the apostles who, a matter of days after the death of their Lord Jesus, experienced his presence with them alive again. But they are not the only ones. The Presbyterian Church and Reformed tradition came into being because of the experiences of reformers like John Knox and John Calvin. The people who built this church did so because, in small ways and large, they had experienced God at work in their lives. The people who, down through the years, preached in this pulpit and who led in the session and in other ways in this church had their own experiences of the presence of God. None of this would have happened without such experiences.

But the temptation, Paul is saying, is to leave it at that. To take those experiences, those extraordinary experiences, and say that that is it. That the gospels were written, the church was given its structure and doctrines, this church building was erected in the fading afterglow of those extraordinary experiences. The temptation is to live out our Christian life and faith under the veil – living under the legacy left behind by those experiences. “Let’s build three dwellings,” we say with Peter, “one for the reformers, one for the people who built this beautiful church, one for the leaders who went before and that will be enough.”

To that, Paul says no. To that, Paul says, it is not enough. We must not be merely conformed to the rules and expectations of those who have gone before. We ourselves are to be transformed daily into the image of Christ Jesus – brought to a place where we don’t need those rules and expectations because we are already becoming new beings in Christ.

These spiritual experiences – our own and those of people who have gone before us – are wonderful and beautiful – but when they become the basis of religion – when we put them under the veil – they become sterile and lifeless. Paul wants us to live under a different pattern. As a daily discipline – through prayer, scripture reading, meditation and contemplation – we are to continually reflect on the very presence of Jesus among us. Our purpose is not to build dwellings, or create rules and commandments and expectations for others to follow. Our purpose is to become what we contemplate, the living Christ, moving and acting through us in the world.

Paul is calling us to something higher here – higher than religion, higher than ethics and commandments, higher than building sacred memorials to our experiences. He is calling us to become the very embodiment of Jesus in this world.

On the other cheek…

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 24th, 2019 in Minister

Genesis 45:3-11, Ps 37:1-11, 39, 40; 1 Cor 15:35-38, 42-50, Luke 6:27-38

little while ago I had a conversation with a woman who had been in an abusive marriage. We were talking about how you know when to intervene, what the signs are that somebody might be being abused and that you might need, at the very least, to ask them some questions. Of course, one of the signs that the literature often suggests that you should look for is bruises and scars. A black eye or a bruised cheek, they say, should be taken as a significant warning sign.

And I suppose that is true enough, but I will not soon forget what my friend said to me. “You know,” she said, “I never had a black eye or a mark on my face. My husband was calculating enough to know not to hit me where anyone would see it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hit me in other places.”

And that conversation came back very powerfully to me when I first turned to our gospel reading this morning. To think of that cold, cruel and calculating violence being inflicted on a weaker victim is all that more disturbing when you hold it up against this advice of Jesus: “But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.”

These are, of course some of the most familiar words of Jesus. But they are words that we often treat in rather vague and symbolic terms. “Turning the other cheek,” has become a proverb, sometimes even a joke. We don’t usually talk about it in cases of actual physical violence. We don’t usually talk about it in practical terms at all. But I think it’s important to realize that when Jesus said it, he meant it practically. When he said it, there were people, both men and women, in the crowd listening who knew what it felt like to be struck and struck hard on the cheek and in many other places. If we cannot understand these words in very practical terms, I’m not sure how useful they are to us.

And there is, indeed, something in me that very strongly wants to reject these words of Jesus for use in practical terms because, let me tell you, if I ever had a woman who came to me and confessed to me that she was being physically abused, my advice to her would never be that she should respond to that abuse by inviting further abuse in any way. In fact, I would feel it to be my duty to do what I could to get her out of her situation if there was any chance of ongoing abuse.

I also know that passages like this one have been used by abusers to protect themselves and to keep their victims trapped in endless cycles of violence – to make the victims feel like they are obliged to accept it and not protest. And that is just not right.

But despite all of that, I do believe these words of Jesus are powerful and true and that they can apply in cases of abuse and, indeed, in the face of many other injustices. You do need to understand who Jesus was speaking to, though, and what he was really saying.

The people in the crowd that Jesus was preaching to that day – and indeed on most days – were mostly the lowest of the low. They were the people that, as we said last week, Jesus addressed directly as poor, hungry, weeping and oppressed. If they were abused, and they were regularly abused, they had no recourse and no one who would help them. For a slave, or a peasant, or a woman to be struck in that world was not considered to be illegal. It was just considered to be normal. And, while Jesus knew that what was happening to them was wrong, he could not promise that any human authority would help them. So this is what he did: he told them to respond to their abuse in such a way as to shame their abusers.

Ancient Mediterranean society was a culture that had shame and pride at its foundation. In every encounter, everything that happened, people in that society were continually judged as either honourable or ashamed. If they were judged as honorable their standing in society would be raised. But if they were judged shamefully, that could be a disaster for them and their families. Jesus told the poor and abused folks who were listening to him that, while they might not have any power to challenge the people who abused them, there were ways they could shame them.

That is whole point of Jesus’ teaching about turning the other cheek. Poor people, slaves and women were regularly struck on the face in that society, but they were struck in a particular way. The way you hit a slave was with the back of your hand, your right hand, because it would be considered shameful to touch anyone with your left hand because the left hand was considered to be unclean – something that I, as a left handed person find personally rather offensive. But that was how it was. That meant that abused people were regularly struck on the right cheek with the back of the right hand. (And, by the way, in the version of this saying that you will find in the gospel of Matthew Jesus actually specifies to the people “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek” because that was how they were always struck.) Everyone in the crowd would have known that. Just about everyone in the crowd would have been struck many times in their lives on the right cheek with the back of a hand.

So then, what is Jesus saying when he tells the people that if they are struck on the one cheek they should offer the other? They are actually putting their oppressor in a very difficult spot if they do that. Their oppressor might be only too happy to strike them one more time, but not on the other cheek. To do so, would mean either to strike them with the back of the left hand which, as I said would be shameful, or to give a front handed blow with the right hand, either a slap or a fist. To put someone in that kind of position in that society was to say there were equal to a slave or a woman and thus to bring shame upon them. I know that doesn’t make much sense to us but that was how things worked in that society.

Jesus next piece of advice essentially accomplishes the same thing. “From anyone who takes away your coat,” Jesus says, “do not withhold even your shirt.” There are also cultural considerations at work in that piece of advice. In that world, everybody basically only wore two pieces of clothing. There was a tunic worn against the body and a cloak worn over top. To make that something more that we could relate to, it was translated in the New Revised Standard Version as “shirt” and “coat.” The only problem with that translation is that if you or I were to take off our shirts and our coats, We would still be wearing pants or skirts at least and probably a bit more. Well, they didn’t wear pants. Pants hadn’t been invented yet. And everybody in the crowd would have immediately understood what it meant to take off your tunic and cloak in public. It would have meant that you were entirely exposed and naked.

Now, for you and for I to strip down in public, would be seen, probably by most of us as putting ourselves in a very shameful position. But here is another way in which their shame and honour society was different from ours. For them, when somebody appeared naked in public, it might be a very embarrassing situation, but it wasn’t necessarily seen as a shameful situation for the person who is stripped. It was seen as shameful for the person who caused them to become so. I could explain to you why this was so, there were certain legal realities and customs that came into play, but the bottom line is that this was just a very different culture that looked on these things in a very different way.

So really, a lot of the advice that Jesus was giving in these two pieces of wisdom was very much conditioned on the customs of his time and place. To simply take what he says and apply it directly to a very different culture doesn’t really make much sense. So what we need to do is extract from what Jesus says the underlying principles and then figure out how to apply them in our very different culture. So, what are the principles?

One thing that Jesus is saying is very clearly: do not answer violence or oppression with more violence. I know that not everyone will buy that nonviolent approach, but it was truly fundamental to Jesus’ approach to finding justice. He believed, and I personally agree, that more violence is not the solution to an injustice, and generally only makes things worse. In his case, he knew that the peasants and slaves who surrounded him would have only been slaughtered if they had dared to lift their hands against their oppressors. But Jesus seems to have been willing to extend that to just about any situation. Maybe there are some exceptions. Maybe there are some circumstances where violence can be part of the answer, but if he thought there were, Jesus never mentioned them.

But, though he rejects violence as a means of making things better, that does not necessarily mean that Jesus intends to leave his listeners simply at the mercy of powerful and evil people. He is asking them to rely (as he did in all things) upon God as their helper. And the actions that he suggests would have used the mechanisms of that society and culture – particularly the mechanism of shame – to take power away from abusers. Shaming their oppressors was one of the only ways that oppressed people could actually damage and expose the people who were harming them.

So what am I saying? Am I saying that when people are being abused, they should find ways to shame their abusers? No, not exactly. There are cases where that can still work. In many ways, the non-violent campaigns of Gandhi in India or the Civil Rights campaigns led by Martin Luther King Jr. did seek to expose the sins of their oppressors by bringing them public shame. But those were very similar situations where you had completely powerless people and shame was about the only tool that they had.

But generally speaking, I think, our goal is not to use shame to expose injustice. Our society is not structured around honour and shame like the society of Jesus was. (And I actually believe that that is a very good thing – such a structure had some horrible effects.) What I am saying is that a proper application of Jesus’ teaching to our modern society would be to say that if, say, a woman is being abused in her relationship, she must not simply seek to endure that abuse by continually turning another cheek and hoping that will change something. It will not. What she must do is follow the spirit of Jesus’ teaching and use whatever non-violent avenues are available to her to expose the evil in her abuser. And fortunately, our society has provided many very excellent avenues to do so including talking to friends, officials, police, seeking shelter and more. What Jesus was suggesting had, at its bottom line, the exposing of the evil that was in the oppressors and abusers as a part of the path to God’s salvation.

If you have suffered abuse in your life, the good news that Jesus has for you today is that you were not meant to suffer such a thing and Jesus wants to set you free from any remains of that abuse that continue to weigh you down. Do not be afraid to talk to somebody you trust if any of that is true of you. If you have someone in your life that you worry may be suffering abuse, the good news that Jesus has for you today is that God has put you there to support your friend and to give you the strength and wisdom to act should your friend choose to confide in you.

My friend who I spoke of at the beginning, she is strong today – amazingly strong. Her act of turning the other cheek was not that literal act – not just because her husband was too calculating to hit her in a visible place, but also because that is not an effective application of Jesus’ true teaching in such a situation today. She followed Jesus’ teaching by seeking help, by getting out and getting safe. She did it by finding healing in the power of God. Her journey is not over – such journeys rarely go quickly – but it is amazing to see God at work in such a life.

Jesus on the mountain; Jesus on the level place

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 17th, 2019 in Minister

Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1:1-6, 1 Corinthians 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26

(From the high pulpit)

he blessed evangelist, Saint Matthew, has to us written that on a particular occasion, our blessed Lord Jesus Christ did go up into a high mountain and, when he was set, his disciples came even unto him and he looked upon them and opened his mouth and he spoke some of the most enduring words of all history:

“How blessed are those who are poor in spirit for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. How blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted and the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. How blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”

And you know those words; they are justly famous. What’s more, how perfectly apt it is that they should have been spoken from a mountaintop – you might even call it a Sermon on the Mount. After all, have mountaintops not always been seen as unique places – as places where heaven is both literally and figuratively near. Almost all ancient peoples, including the people of Israel, imagined the dwelling places of their gods on top of mountains: Olympus, Machu Picchu or Mount Sinai.

Even more important, mountains are places that are separated from the mundane of this world, literally raised above our everyday concerns. How fitting, then, to have such a soaring sermon preached from a mountaintop, for these words of Jesus also seem to take us out of everyday concerns and encourage us to think only of heavenly things. The poor in spirit inheriting the kingdom of God; those hungering and thirsting after righteousness being filled! I don’t know about you, but, for me, when I meditate on those words, I’m not always sure what exactly they mean but they do give me a shiver and they lift me up and place me above all of the troubles and struggles that so often weigh me down in this world.

So it really matters that those words were spoken on the top of a mountain. But how did the gospel writer know that that was where Jesus said all of those incredible words? Was he there? Was he listening and did he remember the setting? Well, probably not. Remember that we don’t know who wrote the Gospel of Matthew; it was written anonymously, and it was only church tradition that later decided that it must have been written by the Apostle Matthew. But most scholars who have looked at it have concluded that it wasn’t written by an eyewitness. It was written by somebody who had taken sources, likely written sources that had been circulating in the church, and compiled them into his own account of the life of Jesus.

And those written sources had the words that Jesus had spoken, but they did not have the setting. The author of this gospel decided that Jesus must have said them on the mountain, probably because he saw Jesus as a new Moses bringing down a new law from God on a mountaintop. But that mountaintop setting influenced the way the gospel writer heard those words.

(From the congregation)

How do I know that? Because there was somebody else who imagined those words being spoken in a rather different setting and, in that other setting, they sounded a bit different. The Gospel of Luke had those same words of Jesus, but when Luke (whoever he was because, of course, that gospel was also written anonymously) tells us (and tells us accurately) what Jesus said, he says they were spoken on a level place. And here is where we can see the wonderous power of Jesus’ teachings because those words that were so soaring and uplifting on the mountaintop are still just as powerful down on the level place, but their power definitely strikes you in a very different way.

What did Jesus say down on that level place? He turned his eyes, not heavenward, but clearly towards the eyes of the people who stood around him and he said, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” It is no longer, “those who are poor,” because Jesus is obviously very aware that the poor ones that he is concerned with are the poor ones who are standing right there in front of him as he looks them in the eyes with compassion and love.

Nor, on the level place, does Jesus say, “poor in spirit.” Sure, I think that what he says is meant to include those who have embraced poverty of spirit – who have are not merely financially poor but have given thought to the deeper spiritual meaning of the poverty that exists in this world. But down here on the level place, poverty isn’t just a spiritual concept or idea. It is a hard reality. In fact, the word that Jesus uses there, the word that is translated as poor, goes a little bit farther than what we would normally consider to be poverty. A more accurate translation would probably be something like, blessed are you who are destitute, you who are totally without resource. Down here on the level place, you cannot escape the worst realities of human existence.

And so it goes with all of the other sayings of Jesus down on the level place. Up on top of the mountain, it was blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And blessed indeed are such people – where would we be if we didn’t have those who pursued what is right at all cost. But down on the level place, Jesus simply looks into people’s eyes and he says blessed are you who are hungry, just plain hungry, because that is what people are struggling with down on the level place of our world right now. And again, I want to state clearly that I don’t think that one of these gospel writers got Jesus’ words right and the other one got it wrong. What Jesus said encompassed both of these meanings. It’s just that the different meanings come out based on whether you’re up on the mountaintop or down on the level place.

There is something else that is significantly different about Luke’s account of what Jesus said on the level place. Jesus started with the blessings, just as we hear up on the mountaintop, but on the level place he doesn’t stop there. On the level place, after Jesus blesses and congratulates and tells how fortunate are those people that everyone else has long concluded are the most miserable people on the face of the Earth – the poor, the hungry, the weeping and the persecuted – Jesus goes on from there. And he turns to those people that everyone else considers to be fortunate and blessed. I don’t imagine there were too many of them, but Jesus turned and he looked straight into the eyes of the fat and well-dressed people in the crowd and he said, “But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.Woe to you when all speak well of you.”

And I have no doubt, by the way, that Jesus did exactly that. That he had the audacity to look the prosperous people right in the eye and tell them that they were cursed. It fits perfectly well with everything that he has said up until that point. Even with the version of what he said on the mountaintop, it makes sense that he would have gone on in the same way. This was exactly how the ancient prophets spoke. We have the pattern laid out for us in our reading from the Old Testament this morning. First you give the blessings, but you are not done until you have also given the curses. People would have expected Jesus to do as much.

But, you see, when you’re up on the mountaintop and when you’re detached from the realities of this world, I guess it’s just easier to forget about the curses and to focus only on the blessings. It seems right to do so, and I think that Matthew is right to do so. But down on the level place, you simply cannot ignore the reality that inequality and poverty are not just the problems of the poor – they belong to all of us and we all have our part to play in solving them. So, yes, Jesus did speak boldly to the rich and well fed – far more boldly and harshly than I know I would ever dare to. But maybe that is why he is Jesus and I am not.

So it is a wonderful and beautiful thing that we have here in these two gospels, Matthew and Luke: two very different accounts of the same sermon that Jesus gave. They are remarkable in how the two versions are similar, but also quite remarkable in how they are different. And down through the centuries, the church has had to deal with the fact that we have two different versions of this same sermon that Jesus gave. Usually the way that we have dealt with that is by choosing one version and putting it over the other. We have chosen one of the two sermons and decided that it was the correct one, the superior version. And usually, by the way, it is the one that was preached on the mountaintop that wins out. There’s a reason why everyone has heard of The Sermon on the Mount but no one has heard of the sermon on the level place. And I get why The Sermon on the Mount wins. It is beautiful and it is true and absolutely it is what Jesus meant to say. But I think it is important to recognize that it is not all that Jesus meant to say.

Sometimes, by the way, you will hear people put it the other way around. They will say that what Jesus actually said was basically what you will find in the sermon on the level place in the Gospel of Luke and that Matthew got a hold of it and spiritualized the sermon by adding words like “poor in spirit” and “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” to make the actual words of Jesus a little bit less offensive to rich people who might read his gospel. There is something to that, but I don’t think that is quite right either. The fact of the matter is that we have been given both versions in both of the gospels and we have to assume that we were given them both for a reason. It is only by struggling with both versions of what Jesus said that we will come to terms with what Jesus’ message was all about.

The temptation throughout Christian history, however, has been to want to safely confine those radical words of Jesus to the mountaintop. They seem safer up there. They are more at a distance from the real struggles that people sometimes go through in this life. But, while I will always defend the words heard on the mountaintop as the true message of Jesus, I don’t think they are ever going to be complete on their own. For how can we understand what it means to be poor in spirit if we do not grapple with the real problems of poverty that real people struggle with down in the level place. A Christianity and a Christian message that is only confined to the mountaintop, that is only concerned with heavenly things without getting messed up with the real misery of people’s lives, is never going to be enough.

And I believe that the real mission of the church today is in fact to bring the message of Jesus down from the mountaintop and into the level place. It is wonderful to have a message that lifts us up to mountaintops – that makes our spirits soar above the mundane concerns of this world. We need that. But there is also a great need for a gospel that addresses people where they are. If you do not have a gospel that is good news for the actual poor, the truly hungry, the deeply oppressed and sorrowful – and even better, that offers criticism to the oppressive rich and the people who are consuming the best that this world has to the detriment of others – then is that gospel truly a gospel? The gospel we need must speak to both and challenge us to aspire to both. We need to hear Jesus on the mountaintop but also on the level place.

But look how clean our nets are!

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, February 10th, 2019 in Minister

Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 138:1-8, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Luke 5:1-11

f there is one thing that these fishers knew, it was that you have got to wash your nets. It doesn’t matter how tired you are, how hard you have been working, your shift isn’t over until those nets are completely clean. A net is designed to fall swiftly through the water and to fall invisibly over the fish so that they are not frightened away. And after you have been fishing for a few hours (even if you haven’t caught a thing, as they hadn’t) the net will have scraped the bottom countless times and picked up enough sand and seaweed and shells and bits of dead things that it no longer glides invisibly to the bottom.

Also, they knew from long experience, that a dirty net will not only stink up the whole boat and anyplace you dock it, the filth and gunk will also make the ropes rot and then, before long, you have a tear and a much bigger repair job in front of you. No, they knew that they had to keep their heads down and get the job done. Sure their fingernails hurt from picking the seaweed out of the knots. Yes, they could hardly keep their eyes open, but they had no choice.

When they heard the noise of a large crowd just a little bit up the shoreline – something that just never gathered around these parts – they barely even looked up from their work. But, of course, when somebody began to call out to them, they had to take note. They recognized who it was, of course. It was the man who had been gathering crowds and performing miracles and wonders all over Galilee in recent weeks. They had heard the stories and descriptions more than a few times. But when the man approached, Simon only looked up from his work for a few moments. The man apparently wanted to borrow one of their boats – just for a little while. He wanted Simon to take him out just a little bit from the shore so that he could address the crowd and they could all hear him. Simon shrugged, grunted and quickly did as he had been asked before wading back to shore to crouch again to his work.

And thus we find ourselves in the rather absurd picture that is painted for us in the opening scene of our gospel reading this morning. Jesus of Nazareth, who we know as the Christ and the Son of the living God, is standing in the bow of a boat and speaking words that I think any one of us would give just about anything to be able to hear firsthand. These are words of life and hope, the very words that will launch a movement that will transform the entire world. Perhaps he is saying things and telling parables that were not ever recorded and passed down (after all, none of his disciples are listening) and so they are words that have been lost to all history. This is a momentous event. And where are Simon Peter, James and John – the three people who we all know will form the innermost nucleus of this thing that will come to be called the Christian church? They are a little bit down the shore, not really listening; washing their nets.

“Yes, Scott, that is what they are doing,” you will say to me, “but didn’t you just explain to us how important it is to keep your nets clean? Good net hygiene is really important, and you simply cannot stay in business as a fisher without it. You just have to take care of your equipment. They were doing a good thing.” Ah yes, they were doing a good thing. But were they doing the best thing?

I don’t ask that question this morning for the sake of Simon Peter, James and John alone. This story isn’t about them, not really. The symbolism of this story in the Gospel of Luke is quite clear; they are meant to represent the church. And, in many ways, they are an excellent representation of what we often see in the church. I believe that we do spend a lot of time and energy in the church today – and I’m talking about all the churches here, not just this one – we spend a lot of time cleaning and maintaining our nets.

In the church we are called to be fishers of people. That is the original call that Jesus gives to his disciples in this passage and it is still his call to the church today. But I often get the impression that we put more effort into cleaning our nets – into maintaining our buildings, our programs and our administration. Oh, we are good at holding meetings and forming committees to keep things in place. But I sometimes wonder if while we are so busy cleaning our nets, we might just be missing the very important things that Jesus is saying to the world just a little bit up the beach…

“Hey, how’s it going Simon.” The big fisherman looked up to see a figure looking down upon him – the westering sun behind his head. Simon had been staring so closely at the knots of his net that it took a while for his tired eyes to focus and see that it was the preacher from Nazareth speaking to him again. He looked around to notice that the impromptu lecture by the lake was over and that the crowd had started to move on. Simon assumed that the man had just come back to offer his thanks for the use of the boat so he just muttered a quick “you’re welcome,” and turned immediately back to the piece of seaweed that he just couldn’t get out.

But the man didn’t take the hint. “Hey,” he said, “what do you say we put out into the deeps and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon couldn’t help but roll his eyes. Great, another landlubber who thinks he knows more about fishing than the professionals. He’s going to want to go out and cast the nets a few times and get them all dirty while we catch nothing and then we’ll have to clean them all over again before we can go home. “Master,” he said, “we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” But then he caught the strange look in the man’s eye. He clearly didn’t fully understand what this fellow had in mind, but he was filled with a strange desire to find out. “Yet if you say so,” Simon said, “I will let down the nets.”

But once again, this isn’t just a story about a little fishing expedition that happened with a few men and Jesus one day a long time ago. This is a story about the church. The main characters are the people who will form the core of the early church. The activity of fishing is a common metaphor for the chief work of the church in sharing the gospel. And Jesus even specifically invites Simon to cast his net into “the deep” (that is what the original Greek text literally says) and the deep is a mythological term for the primordial chaos that God is constantly trying to save this world from. This is intended to be a story about our work as the church.

What Jesus is saying to us in the story is, don’t you think it’s time that you got around to doing the work that I called you to do? And what is our response? “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing.” Haven’t you heard, Jesus? We’ve been going about the work of the church for a very long time. We have been here on Queen Street down through the generations. And we have preached the word of God and we have shared God’s love in practical ways, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and sending missionaries out into the world. We have worked hard, Lord, and now we’re tired. In fact, our old fishing methods don’t seem to work so well anymore. It feels like we’ve been working hard all night long with no results. Can’t you just let us wash up our nets and go home? Yes, there’s a pretty good picture of how we often feel in the church in this story.

But there’s something else going on here – something that I think we really need to pay attention to. What have Peter, James and John been doing all of this time? They have been cleaning and maintaining their nets. They have been taking care of the tools that fishermen use. Jesus wants them to use their nets; they are really only interested in maintaining them. In fact, they recognize that what Jesus is asking them to do represents a risk to their beautiful nets – and so it proves. Do you think that it is just a coincidence that by the end of this story their precious nets are all ripped and torn and their beautiful boats are swamped and just about ready to sink? It is no coincidence; it is kind of the point.

In the church, we not only spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning and maintaining our nets; we also spend a whole lot of time worrying about them getting dirty or damaged. “Yes, Scott,” you will say to me, “but didn’t you just explain to us how important it was to keep your nets clean? Good net hygiene is really important and you simply cannot stay in business as a fisher without it. You just have to take care of your equipment.” Yes, that is true, but I think that Jesus would say that if maintaining your nets has become more important than fishing for people, you have a problem. I think he would say, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” even if your nets might tear and get dirty again.”

You know that an enormous amount of ministry to our community happens in and through this building. The hungry are fed and given food to take home to their families. Literally hundreds of pounds of clothing are brought in, sorted and then given out to people who need them. The distressed are counselled. Children are taught about the love of Jesus and given tools for growing in Christ. All of it – all of it creates mess and clutter. All of it, sooner or later, will lead to something being broken or chipped or stained. And every so often somebody will say to me (or maybe to you), don’t you think it is terrible that there is so much ministry going on here that our nets are beginning to break and our boat is beginning to swamp? Well, they don’t put it exactly like that. They say, “isn’t it terrible that this church isn’t always tidy and clean?” But it actually means the same thing. And I get that keeping your nets clean is really important, but Jesus didn’t say, “Simon, let’s keep those nets squeaky clean.” Jesus said, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

By all means, let us take care of our nets. We have inherited them from the people who have gone before us and they are a wonderful gift. But we’ve received them for a reason, and that reason is not merely so that they might be clean and tidy. We have been given them so that they might be risked in the deep water of this world. We have been given them so that they might be used to pull people out of those deeps and so that they might have the chance to truly experience the love of Christ in word and in deed. We have been given them to fish for people. Simon, get up off of your knees, stop worrying so much about your nets and let’s go!

Sermon Video:

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