Author: Scott McAndless

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t was late on the sixth day when the Lord God turned to the newly created humanity and said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” And the Lord God said to Godself, since this responsibility for the Earth has now been passed on to the humans, then I declare that this work of creation is finished. What more do I need to do? The humans can be in charge. I’m sure that will all work out fine. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.

      And very truly did humanity hear that command and they said one unto another, “Okay, you heard the Creator, we’ve got some work to do! There is a whole world out there to have dominion over and that adds up to a whole lot of filling and subduing. And yes it will be hard but we will subdue the land itself and break it with the plow and the shovel and the backhoe so that we might have dominion over it. We will make the earth produce food and great wealth in precious stones and metals and we will make the land itself a great treasure – real estate, we will call it – and it will become so valuable that it will produce millionaires and even billionaires.

      In the same way we wi ll exercise our dominion over the beasts of the earth, we will take them and make them to work for us and we will breed them for our food. We will exercise our dominion over the seas by extending great nets to sweep up all of the fish, we will dig out harbours for trade and pour all of the waste we produce along the way into the waves even until a giant garbage patch of floating plastic forms in the Pacific Ocean.

      And our dominion over the air? Well, that might take some time, but eventually we will build great machines that will enable us to fly, like the birds, on the winds themselves, we will take our craft even to the stars and there we will build great satellites which will constantly send information from one place to another and that information also will make huge amounts of money for someone.

      And so it was that humanity went to work subduing the land and the sea and the air. And lo, it was very good for it created great amounts of wealth and prosperity for many, if not for all.

      But the Lord God looked upon the people that he had made and saw that, though they were fulfilling their destiny, there was something that was just not quite right. For their subduing work brought them great profit and wealth and, while this was a good thing, they found that the more they worked and gathered wealth to themselves, the less they seemed able to rest and to enjoy these good things that they had. Instead they felt a compulsion to gather ever more and more for themselves.

      Yes, they had good things, but, as they looked around, some of them saw that their neighbours had more than they did and so they were not satisfied. And there were even some who were able to gather to themselves so much wealth and so many goods that they would never be able to spend or use them all, but still they were not satisfied and they used the influence and wealth that they had in such a way us to favour themselves and they became even richer.

      And while they were doing this, they were taking everything that they could from creation. They did not see the need to let the earth or the sea or the air rest or regenerate. They were constantly seeking ways to make the earth produce more and more. They did not rest from pumping their waste materials into the air and the sea. And they pushed the animals and the machines and the men and women who did their hard labour to be ever more productive and even used the technology to make it impossible for people to escape their work and the expectation of productivity it just never stopped. But that was good, right? They were supposed to subdue and have dominion. Wasn’t that what their Creator said that they were made for?

      When the Lord God saw this, he recognized that his work of creation was not quite finished. One more thing had to be created. And so it was that the Creator opened up the books of creation and said, I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve. And on the seventh day, the Lord God created rest.

     

      I suspect that many of us are not quite sure what to do with the creation story in Genesis chapter one. Most have probably come to the conclusion that we can’t just read it as a simple historical account. And we at least struggle with the notion that the entire universe was created in six 24 hour days. But I think that is okay because I don’t believe that it was ever meant to be read in that way. It’s not a story about the origins of all things so much as it is about the purpose of all things and it is especially about the meaning and purpose of being human beings in this world. And that commission that God gives to the newly created humans on the sixth day – the command to multiply, subdue and dominate – actually tells me a lot about how we approach our humanity. I wouldn’t just say that God told us to live in this world in that way, I believe that it is a drive that is built into every single one of us. We are in this constant quest to have more and more. We seek to build up wealth because we feel insecure or because it makes us feel important and, left to ourselves, we are not inclined to stop.

      I do believe that God placed that drive within us, but God also created us, as the creation story makes clear, with a need for sabbath. That is why we are here. Today is Thanksgiving. It is a wonderful opportunity to stop for a moment and be thankful to God and to the earth and to one another for all the good things that we enjoy. But is being thankful going to be enough? Thankfulness, at least as we often practice it, is little more than a pause in the midst of our work of subduing and dominating in this world.

      How often do we experience thanks like that? When someone patronizes your store, for example, contributing to the wealth that you are accumulating, it is not uncommon, at the conclusion of the transaction, for you to say thank you. It is nice, of course, it is polite, but it doesn’t really change anybody and is often quickly forgotten.

      You are working on something and ask someone to grab you a tool that you need. They hand it to you, you pause for but a moment to say, “Thanks,” and then you are immediately back to work. Again, that is nice, but is that really what thankfulness is all about.

      I am glad to see all of you here today, that you have taken time out of what I know are your busy schedules of subduing and having dominion in all kinds of ways, to say thanks – thanks to God, thanks to everything that has contributed to your prosperity. But is that all it is – is that all we need – a brief pause in all our work to say thanks? The way that we use that word, thanks, may not quite capture what we actually are in dire need of here today so let me propose another word: gratitude.

      Thanks can just be a word, but gratitude is an attitude that lingers long after the sound of a word fades away. Thanks can be very polite thing to offer, but gratitude can transform you and the person to whom is it is given. Thanks is sixth day enjoying the blessings of what you have accumulated through your work. Gratitude is Sabbath rest in what you have received whether or not, by the measures of this world, what you have received is considered to be enough.

      So let me give you a challenge and encouragement on this Thanksgiving Sunday: be thankful, yes, but even more practice gratitude. The word gratitude comes from a Latin word that means welcome, pleasing and praiseworthy. Gratitude means welcoming everything that you have and celebrating it as a pleasing and praiseworthy gift of God. It is the attitude that God has when God looks out over God’s work at the end of the sixth day of creation and saying, “It is good.” In fact, it is God’s expression of gratitude on the sixth day that actually makes it possible for God to rest utterly and completely on the seventh.

      God doesn’t do what we would do and worry about the job that he was doing all week. He doesn’t lying awake saying, “Did I give the octopuses too many legs?” or “What was I thinking making those mosquitoes?” or “What will people think of me when they see the platypus?” No, God knows the goodness in creation and so can rest in whatever has been made. That’s gratitude.

      It doesn’t seem to come as easily for us as it does for God. We go about our job of subduing and having dominion but never seem to be satisfied because we cannot receive whatever we receive with a simple attitude of gratitude. We constantly second guess the work that we do, worry that others will judge us for it and most of all we seem to have a hard time learning to be satisfied with what we have. If we could learn to practice gratitude, perhaps we could find true rest – sabbath rest – in this world.

      It is kind of odd, when you think about it, that God should give his people an actual commandment, an order, to take a break – observe a sabbath. You would think that we should have figured that one out ourselves – that you shouldn’t keep anything going, much less yourself, forever without a rest. But God knows us better than we know ourselves, God knows that we will tend to drive ourselves to continue to subdue and have dominion because we’re afraid that we won’t have enough or that somebody might do better than us. God knew that you would need to learn to rest in what you have.

      I know that sometimes people have treated the sabbath commandment as a burden and as a reason to criticise other people. Jesus ran into that a lot. People criticised him for letting people enjoy themselves with a little bit of free grain or for actually relieving people’s pain and suffering on a sabbath. Jesus rightly pointed out to them that they were really missing the point of the sabbath. Sabbath was not about burden, it was about freedom. It was not about obligation, it was about gratitude. Sabbath was made for humans because we need it, not to hurt us. God gave you sabbath in order to save you from your natural tendency to work to excess. It is an invitation to trust God enough to rest in what you have. That is how God always works, by the way: salvation by grace through faith or trust.

      So, when you gather with your loved ones today or tomorrow or, I hope, soon, yes do pause to say thanks – thanks to God and thanks to the earth and to each other. But don’t just leave it there. Practice gratitude together. Take the time to celebrate whatever you have, to welcome it, to savour it. Recognize that whatever you have is a good gift, a divine gift. It is very good. Rest in what you have today, without even thinking about what you might need tomorrow. This is gratitude.

Hespeler, 30 September, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Exodus 32:1-8, 15-24, Romans 1:18-23, Psalm 135:1-5, 14-21

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he Bible tells us that, even while Moses was up on the top of Mount Sinai and receiving the Ten Commandments and the Law from the very hand of God, the people of Israel were down below breaking one of them – breaking it hard. That commandment was the second one, the one that said, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

      Even as God was dictating (or inspiring or however it was actually transmitted) that law, Aaron was apparently hard at work melting down gold and molding it into the form of a calf, a beast that is found on the earth beneath. God, we are told, was not pleased. In fact, God was so angry that he was willing to wipe out the entire nation right there and then and Moses had to talk him out of it.

      But let me play the devil’s advocate for just a moment here and just ask the question why. What was the big deal with one golden calf statue? I’m not talking about the technical defense that the Israelites might give – how could they be punished for breaking a law that they had not yet received? That may be a valid question, but I am asking a much more fundamental question: what is the problem with idolatry anyways?

      The impulse to create idols is probably as old as human civilization itself. Some of the oldest human artifacts found have been statues of various gods and goddesses. So the desire to make them seems to be almost knitted into the very fabric of our humanity. But why? What do we think that we are going to gain from creating idols? They are costly and labour-intensive so why would anyone invest that much into something if they didn’t think they were going to get something out of it? What do people think that they are going to get from their idols?

      Perhaps we can answer that question by looking a little closer at what was happening in the camp at the foot of Mount Sinai when that fateful decision was made. The people, clearly, are afraid. They have just escaped from slavery in Egypt having been led through a series of harrowing and amazing experiences by this man Moses. But now Moses has disappeared up the mountain. He’s been gone for far too long and they feel exposed and frightened. So they turn to Aaron and ask him to make them feel safe.

      And so this is what Aaron offers them. He takes their gold, he melts it down and he creates a golden calf. This makes them feel safe. But why does it make them feel safe? Well, I would suggest you that the issue that is at stake here is the visibility of a god. The issue at stake is not a question of which God is being worshipped. You probably noticed that when the people of Israel saw the golden calf they responded by saying, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” suggesting that they associated this golden calf with certain unknown gods, perhaps even the gods that they had seen in Egypt. But Aaron’s response to the golden calf is a little bit different. Aaron builds an altar and he says, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the Lord.” this suggests that Aaron was thinking of that calf as being somehow associated with the worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel. And, indeed, that is the history of the golden calf. We know that certain Israelite people, particularly in the northern Kingdom of Samaria, did associate the worship of the God of Israel with a golden calf.

      So, the issue that is at stake in the golden calf incident is not a question of which God is being worshipped. There seems to be some confusion about that. So I would suggest that that is not what God is reacting to. The issue is that God has a problem with is how he is being worshipped and that God has an issue with the use of idols in his worship. But why?

      That takes us back to the question of why human beings have always made idols. I would suggest to you, the reason why they did it was they were seeking influence and control over their gods.

      Take the ancient Greeks, for example. They believed in a god called Poseidon. Why did they believe in Poseidon? Because they were surrounded on all sides by the sea and they knew how unpredictable and how dangerous the sea could be. The sea was very frightening for ancient people. They didn’t understand the tides or the terrifying tsunamis that could sometimes come in with such destructive power. And when people are frightened, what do they do? They try to assert control.

      And that’s what the Greeks did. They created idols in the form of Poseidon, the god of the sea. It was a way of capturing Poseidon, anchoring him in one place, and when he was in that one place they could do things to influence his actions. They could perform sacrifices and rituals that would influence the otherwise unpredictable acts of the sea. And that, I think, is the origin of that human impulse to create idols. It is human beings seeking to control the otherwise uncontrollable and to exercise a degree of influence over that which is completely outside of their control and so terrifying.

      It is a normal reaction and, by the way, one that I think we often have without thinking. I love the way that Aaron describes the making of the golden calf when he is confronted by Moses after the fact. Moses asks him, “What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?” And the best answer that Aaron can come up with is to say, “So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” “I threw the gold in the fire and this calf just came out,” he says, almost as if he didn’t have anything to do with it. And I realize the Aaron is just trying to get out of accepting the blame here, but I think that there is some truth to what he says. There is a sense in which we do create idols in moments when we are frightened almost without realizing what we are doing. We throw the gold in the fire of our frightening experience and an idol pops out.

      But, with this commandment, God is declaring that this will not be an appropriate way to relate to Yahweh, the Creator God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God, in other words, is not going to be tied down in one place. God is not going to be worshipped in such a way as to limit his own freedom of action. That is why God refuses to be made into an idol and will not countenance the worship of other gods in the forms of idols.

      With all of that in mind, I think we can now turn to the question of how we can apply this particular commandment to the Christian lives that we live today. What does it mean to not have idols today? We are not tempted, as were the Ancient Greeks, to create a statue of Poseidon and think that we can use that statue to control the tides or the actions of the ocean. But that is not because we are not seeking control. That is simply because we no longer believe that you are able to control such things using statues. We understand what causes the tides and the currents in ways that the ancient people simply could not. I would suggest to you that whatever it is that we do use to try to control the uncontrollable forces of our world, these are our idols even if they are not necessarily in the forms of people or birds or beasts.

      For example, we seem to be living in these days in a world filled with events that seem out of control. There are many different elements that make people feel this way right now: refugee migration in unmanageable numbers, an opioid epidemic, a climate crisis and some related disasters, just to name a few. In such an environment, it is only natural that people would react out of fear and grasp for anything that might even feel a little bit safe. In other words, we seem to live in a time that is rife for idol making.

      But, again, chiseling out a few statues isn’t going to work for people today, so what do we do? I think that one trend that we see is people grasping for political leaders who tap into that feeling. Globally speaking, we seem to be in an era when so-called populist leaders are able to rise like never before.

      I would argue that the reason this is so is because these are specifically the kinds of leaders who can project that aura that makes people feel safe even if the policies they are putting forward may not work and could possibly even make things worse. I would suggest to you, without naming any names, that we are using some of our populist political leaders these days as idols. And, yes, they are false gods and they will doubtlessly let us down sooner or later but in the mean time, a great deal of damage may be done. But it is like we can’t help it. We throw the gold in the fire of a scary global situation and out pops an idol.

      And I honestly don’t think that Christians should feel too complacent about this either. These are stressful times for the Christian church – times when we seem to feel a great deal of insecurity about the future for all kinds of reasons – and I think that we, too, have been tempted to create idols in order to make ourselves feel safer.

      Remember that, in the commandment, God is warning his own people about the danger of making idols of Godself as much as he is warning them against making images of other gods. So, I wonder, how might we still do that as believers today? What sorts of things do we construct that we think will be able to limit or control the action of God in our favour? Once again, as modern people were not going to resort to making statues and thinking that that’s going to control God, so what do we use instead?

      Well, let me suggest one thing that I do see Christians doing. It’s the way that we sometimes use this book, the Bible. Yes, it is true that we see this book as inspired by God and believe that it gives us a unique insight into the character and will of God especially as it has been demonstrated to us in the person of Jesus Christ. That is all true.

      The problem, for me, comes when people take that basic truth and push it further to say that, because they know the Bible, they now know exactly what God can and cannot do, how God can behave, on whom God may have mercy and on whom God will not have mercy. If you fall into a mode of thinking that, say, because I know this verse of scripture or I know that verse of scripture I therefore know an absolute and unchanging for all-time truth about God, you have fallen into idolatry. You have taken a good thing, a great gift of God in the scriptures, and turned it into a mere idol. I believe that that is exactly the kind of thing that God is warning us against with this commandment.

      Yes we get scared. The world is a scary place, maybe especially these days, and in response we often do see golden calves just coming out of the fires of our fears. But God knows you are better than that. God knows that, if you will trust him, you can deal with the uncertainty, the change and the unresolved future. God believes in you enough to give you a command: don’t fall back on idols. Don’t just give divine powers to the latest lump of gold that comes out of the fires of your affliction. It might feel good in the moment. You might feel extremely relieved to have finally found a god of your own creation to tell you that it will take care of everything and keep you safe, but over time you will see that the only God who can save you is the living God, the God who will never be limited to one time or place by some human made construct, the God who doesn’t just brush you off with easy answers, but who is in it for the long haul.

      Thanks be for that God. 

bout a dozen years ago, there was a United States congressman named Lynn Westmoreland who cosponsored a bill to place the Ten Commandments in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the Senate. He also had another bill that would permit the Ten Commandments to be displayed in courthouses throughout the land. That proposed legislation, and some of the things that happened as a result of it, are very interesting to me. It illustrates to me some of the ambivalence that I feel about the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament law.

      On the one hand, there is absolutely no question that the laws of free, democratic countries like Canada and the United States owe a great debt to the Old Testament Law of Moses as well as other ancient law codes like the Twelve Tables of Ancient Rome and the Code of Hammurabi. For that reason, the Congress and law courts might seem to be a very good place to display such a thing.

      But there were many who objected to Westmoreland’s bill, not because they denied the historical importance of the Ten Commandments, but because they worried about the message that such a display would send. Did the presence of this Judeo-Christian law imply that only Christians (and maybe Jews) could expect the laws of the United States to defend their rights? Would those who did not acknowledge the Old Testament be able to expect the same treatment before the law as those who did? Those are exactly the kinds of difficult questions that always come up whenever you discuss the place of secular and religious law within our society.
ut, of course,

      But there was another very interesting thing that happened in the midst of that particular discussion. The congressman appeared on a television show called The Colbert Report where this happened;

     

      And I am honestly not very surprised that, when Stephen Colbert asked the congressman to tell him what the Ten Commandments were, he couldn’t do it. How many of us really could? And that tells me something else about our attitude towards them. We may revere them, but it’s not really because of their contents. We revere them because of what they symbolize to us. In fact, it often seems to matter little to us what they actually say.

      But I happen to believe that it is actually very important for us to know what the Ten Commandments say and what they mean. We need to treat them as more than just a symbol. This is not because I think that we need to begin to apply them directly to our modern secular society. Most of them weren’t designed for our kind of society. But as Christians, we need to understand what they are actually about. So I am glad that the upcoming section of the Catechism deals with the Ten Commandments.

      But before we start to look at the individual commandments, we need to start with a more fundamental question: why are they there at all? What is their deeper purpose? Because I think that a lot of people would say that they know what the commandments are for, even if they are not quite sure what the commandments say. They are there, people assume, to keep order and make sure that people conform to expectations. They are there to curtail freedom – not in a bad way necessarily, but hopefully in a way that makes it easier for us all to all live together. Most of all, people seem to assume, the commandments are there in order to make sure that people who behave wrongly are punished.

      That is how we talk about the use of the commandments and their importance. That is why lawmakers like Westmoreland want to put copies of the Ten Commandments on public display, as a way to impose order. But is that the purpose behind the commandments that we find in the scriptures? What does it say? What does Moses say when the Commandments are given? Well, the purpose of the commandments is not only given in the Book of Deuteronomy. It is given in such a way as to make sure that that purpose is not forgotten and is passed down from generation to generation.

      This is what Deuteronomy reports that Moses said: “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded you?’ then you shall say to your children, ‘We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.’” Moses goes on to tell the people of all that God did to save them from slavery and bring them into a Promised Land and concludes with, “‘Then the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our lasting good’”

      When asked what the purpose of the commandments is, Moses doesn’t say “conformity.” He doesn’t say “limits on freedom” or “punishment.” He says, “Because you were once slaves.” And when you really dig into the contents of the commandments (instead of just treating them like a symbol whose contents don’t matter), I believe that you will discover that that is indeed the ideal that lies behind all of them. When you read them right, you can see that they are all about being free from slavery and especially about making sure we don’t fall back into slavery again.

      Now, in weeks to come, the Catechism that has been guiding us all this year will begin to take us through the Ten Commandments one by one and we  will have the opportunity to dig into the real meaning and application of some of them. Today I want us to think about how we approach them as a whole – what attitude we need to bring.

      Well, the Book of Deuteronomy makes it quite easy to discover that attitude. We need to read them as former slaves. Isn’t that interesting? It suggests that people who have a direct experience of slavery – the descendants of former black slaves for example or others who have lived under circumstances where they were less than free – would probably have an easier time grasping the meaning of the commandments than most of us. That is not how we usually think about such things. For a long time, privileged people – people who can afford more education and, to be blunt, white western people – have argued that they are the ones who can best interpret the meaning of the Bible. Moses here suggests that they are not.

      But, despite our handicap, despite our long experience of freedom, we need to try. We need to do our best to approach these commandments as they are supposed to be approached. So try to put yourself in that frame of mind. Imagine yourself as an ancient Hebrew, recently released (beyond all hope and expectation) from slavery in Egypt. With that in mind, how might the commandments sound different to you? Take the commandment against idols, for example: “You shall not make for yourself an idol” or, as it is sometimes translated, “a graven image.”

      Well, a slave in Egypt would have been very familiar with graven images. Images of the Egyptian gods would have surrounded them on every side. But they were all the gods of their oppressors and the very fact that they were there in the physical forms of idols gave power and influence to the people who had made them and controlled their temples. The Hebrews were saved from slavery by a very different kind of God – a God who could not be reduced to the form of a statue and who would not be controlled or limited by anyone. Hmm, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it; was the prohibition against idols about protecting God’s fragile ego (like we often seem to assume) or was it more about making sure that they didn’t develop, in their new country, a class of people who could claim a monopoly on power structures? Was it about making sure that a new class of oppressors, who would create new slaves or slave-like conditions, did not arise among them?

      Or what about the prohibition against “wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God,” or “taking the Lord’s name in vain,” as we sometimes put it. You know how that commandment has been traditionally used by prosperous white folks; it has been used to police and control the language of other people – most especially the language of poor folks and racial minorities. But what would a law like that mean to former slaves? Who had used the names of gods against them? Well, once again it was their oppressors. It was the Egyptians who declared that the power of their gods gave them the right to enslave others. I think that a former slave would understand that misusing the name of a god was actually about misusing that name to enslave others or to gain power over someone else in any way.

      Which brings us, of course, to the Sabbath law. Once again, I think we all know how upper-class white people have tended to interpret that commandment. For them, it has tended to be a very restrictive kind of law. They have used it to put limits on all kinds of activities including on the kind of work that lower class people often have no choice but to do and on the few enjoyable activities that they can afford like dancing or playing games. Over the centuries I think that many people have experienced Sabbath laws as very restrictive things. But, let me ask you, how might a former slave who had been forced to work seven days a week since forever against their will experience a law that said you can't make anyone work seven days a week without breaks? For them, that is all about liberty. That is all about freedom and the exercise of it. Let me tell you, former slaves heard the Sabbath law in a very different way.

      Now, the catechism will give us a chance to focus in on some of the commandments more tightly in the weeks to come. Let me just say that I believe that all of them are transformed when you choose to approach them as if you are presently enslaved or recently emancipated. That one understanding changes everything. For example, did you ever wonder why the Ten Commandments had two laws against theft? One says, “You shall not steal,” and the other says, “You shall not covet? What is up with that? Don’t those two laws accomplish the same thing? Well, I am sure that we will see that that does make a lot of sense if you happen to read the commandments as a former slave.

      The point that I am making is that, when we approach the Bible in a way that comes most naturally to us – with all of our privileges and assumptions and priorities in place – we will draw what seems to be a perfectly obvious meaning out of it. But the Bible itself reminds you that that is not the right approach. Moses tells us to read it through the eyes of another people – through the recently enslaved. He says that only they can truly understand it. So it seems that, if we really want to understand the scriptures, it may be time to shed some of our preconceived ideas about what it means and put ourselves in the shoes of the weak, the abused and the poor. They sometimes clearly get it when we don’t.

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any years ago, I began my journey towards literacy by every day fighting with my brother and sisters over which one of us would be the first to get a hold on one particular page in the Toronto Daily Star: the comics page. Oh, it was glorious, an entire broadsheet covered with black and white comics. It was a great way to practice reading when there were lots of pictures and not too many words and hardly any big ones.

      But there was one problem: I did know that the comics were supposed to be funny but I didn’t always get the joke. And I’m sure that there were times when my parents got pretty tired of me running to them and asking them to explain the joke. Like, for example I remember one very particular comic. It was the Family Circus, one of my favorites, and it showed the Keene family together in church one Sunday morning and one of the children, I believe it was Dolly, is whispering to her mother in the middle of the service. “Mommy,” she whispers, “I think the preacher just said a bad word.”

      I didn’t get it. And I remember going to my mom and asking what bad word a preacher might have said. She thought for a moment and said that she figured that the preacher had probably said “hell.” Now, I’m not quite sure what the moral standards for swearing are around your workplace, I suspect that these days, saying “hell” is pretty tame in most places. But back in those innocent days, using that word could be shocking. But, of course, the exception was that you could talk about hell in the context of a sermon at church. That was the joke.

      In some ways I think that the attitude has flipped today. No, it probably wouldn’t be a great big deal to hear somebody say, “What the hell,” or even, if it was said in fun, “go to hell,” today. But, in some ways, I think we’ve become less comfortable talking about Hell in church. According to some of the statistics that I have seen, most Christian still do believe in a Hell and still believe that some reprobate people will be sent there, but I really get the impression that none of us feels very comfortable talking about it for some very good reasons.

      And I don’t think we’re the first. When the Christian faith first started, it started in a Jewish world that had some very established ideas about what happened to people after they died. The Jews, at that time, did not speak about Hell, which is an English word, they spoke about a place called Sheol. Now Sheol was not exactly the same thing as we think of as Hell. For one thing, they conceived of Sheol as a physical space hidden in the depths of the earth. It was the place where people went when they died but it wasn’t a place of punishment. Nor was it really a place of reward or bliss either. It just kind of was. It was an existence with no remembrance, where no one could speak and where, as we read in the Psalm this morning, you couldn’t even praise God. It was just kind of a dry, bland holding place.

      Now, because of what they had experienced in Jesus Christ – because they had experienced the living resurrected presence of Jesus among them after he had died – the early Christian church had come realize that something very different and much more positive was in store for them after death than a meaningless existence in Sheol. They embraced this new realization with joy, of course, but there was something that bothered them about it.

      They knew that this wonderful eternal hope was theirs because of Jesus. But they were kind people and they worried about those who had not had the benefit of knowing Jesus – in particular their ancestors who, they had always been told, were waiting somewhere in the tediousness of Sheol.

      Now, I will admit that I, with my modern mind, don’t necessarily understand their concerns because we are talking about matters of eternity here. And eternity is not something that we can really speak of in definite terms, especially when it comes to time. Eternity is, by definition, an infinite amount of time and how can you talk about conditions changing within an infinite amount of time? It is not really something that we as time-limited beings can even begin to grasp.

      So however we describe the afterlife – whether we talk about Sheol or Paradise or Heaven and Hell – we are not giving a perfect description. So I am quite happy to accept that both the pre-Christian and the post-Christian descriptions of the afterlife were only imperfect attempts to grasp something that is ultimately ungraspable. They were pointing in the right directions but not completely accurate pictures of that afterlife.

      I believe that the early Christians understood that, but they didn’t really have the words to say it like we might. That is why they did something way better: they told a story. Telling stories, even sometimes completely fictional stories, has always been one of the best ways in which human beings grasp the deeper truths about things. Stories, after all, don’t just give us information, they engage our imaginations. And some of most profound truths about this world can only be grasped using imagination.

      Our reading this morning from the First Letter of Peter makes reference to the story that the early Christians told about the people who had died before Jesus. “Christ also suffered for sins once for all,” it says, “also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” But it is just a reference. He doesn’t tell the whole story. The people he was writing to had all heard the story that he was referring to before so they all knew what he was talking about. But, of course, we don’t know the story so most of us just scratch our heads and wonder what on earth (or under the earth) he’s talking about here. Many, I am sure, just give up on this passage altogether.

      But I’d like you to know the story that those first Christians told because, while it is not necessarily a story that is meant to be taken literally, it is a powerfully dramatic illustration of the awesome power of God’s redeeming love shown through Jesus Christ. Here is the story:

      You don’t know how long you have been here in this place. You don’t even know if this is even what you would really call a place, but you hear some of the people around you speaking in the greyness from time to time. They are not really carrying out conversations. What they say is more like the ravings of the insane but you have heard them call this place Sheol and that seems like as good a name as any.

      There is only one thing that makes you think that you haven’t always been in this dreary place. There is a little spark inside you. You couldn’t really call it a memory, it is not as specific as that. It is more like a series of images that you carry within you as some precious treasure that you don’t remember how you obtained.

      There is the image of a blazing gold sunrise over the deep green of a forest and another of a bright yellow and red flower. When you concentrate, you can just remember seeing the twinkling eyes of an old woman and the sly smile of a lover. You hear the cry of a tiny baby and even feel the warmth of it clutched against your breast. And then there are the more troubling images. You see a man and his sons building a giant boat, calling out warnings of doom. And you hear the laughter of the people watching. And then there is the terrifying sight of the heavens opening up and the waters rising all around you.

      You honestly don’t know what all of these things mean, but they are all that you have – all that there is to tell you who you are – so you take out these images one by one to ponder them and savour them over and over again. Otherwise your existence, if you can call it existence, is nothing but endless tedium.

      But wait, what was that – over there in that direction – it looked like… it looked like colour. After endless millennia of greys upon greys upon greys, was that a flash of yellow – green – gold? And there is a new sound like the rushing of many waters, like the sudden shout of thousands of voices released from silence. What is going on? It is an invasion! Sheol is being invaded.

      The noise and the light continue to grow until they are all around you. The sound hurts your ears and the light your eyes, but you don’t care about that because you begin to make out a figure approaching you. He is dressed all in white, white so bright that it shines like a star. But as you look at him you see that he has recently suffered great pain. There are wounds on his hands and on his feet and in his side. The blood still looks fresh – bright red. He looks like he just lost the biggest battle of his life, but as you look at his face he looks anything but defeated. He obviously stands before you as a victor and he has come with a power that you have never seen before.

      He looks at you – right at you – and his eyes are filled with love and compassion, and he says to you, “My child I have won the victory, I have won the victory for you. You don’t have to stay here anymore. You don’t have to be bound in meaninglessness and hopelessness any more. You can matter.”

      Behind him, in his train, there is a phalanx of warriors. They too are dressed all in white, though not as bright as him. They are stern and strong as if ready to fight a war, but they all they bear with them are olive branches, a sign of peace, because the war is over. And they cry out together and they say, “Behold how the lamb is worthy, the lamb is worthy that was slain to bring freedom and hope to those who lie in prison. He has triumphed over Sheol, he has triumphed over death itself and his victory is forever and ever.”

      And even as you hear these words you receive them with great joy because you know that they are true. And in that moment that you accept them, the chains that bind you to this place, chains that you did not know had been crafted by your own spirit, they fall away. And you stand up, straightening your spine for the first time in eons, with a great cry of joy. All around you people are standing up likewise and together you form a great throng that is swept up in the wake of the passing victorious Lamb. And on he leads you, upwards and outwards into the light, into the open air and into life eternal. “Behold how the lamb is worthy, the lamb is worthy that was slain to bring freedom and hope to those who lie in prison. He has triumphed over Sheol, he has triumphed over death itself and his victory is forever and ever.”

      That is but a dramatic form of the story that those early Christians told. Why did they tell it? Not, I think, because they knew exactly what had happened in the hidden realms in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion of Jesus. They told it because they knew the power that was to be found in that crucifixion and resurrection. It was the power of God’s love – love that was so strong that it could overcome any barrier. It could break down the barricades of Sheol and even the gates of Hades would not withstand its assault. They knew somehow that the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the power of God’s love had been demonstrated so clearly that Sheol was needed no more. They told that story to get that truth across.

      That is why I am not overly concerned if Christians today don’t feel very comfortable with the notion of hell, even if they feel a certain obligation to continue to believe in it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn’t feel comfortable with the notion of Hell. It is not compatible with the power of God’s love that has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. It is not compatible with the victory over death and decay that Jesus has won on the cross and as he escaped that empty tomb. Hell is about the power of hate and destruction. Jesus is about the power of love.

      I am not about to claim here that I have a complete understanding of the geography of Heaven and Hell. I honestly feel that it is something beyond our grasp. But I can tell you a story. It is the story of the great and powerful love of God that is able to overcome any power of evil and division and destruction that this world can come up with. That is what we celebrate in the Christian church and because of Jesus. That is the story that I know. And it is the only story that really matters.

Hespeler, 9 September, 2018 © Scott McAndless

John 3:1-17, 1 John 2:21-25, Psalm 27

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here was once a king in Northumbria (in the northern part of England) – an Anglo-Saxon king named Edwin. And Edwin was a pagan – a worshipper of the old Germanic gods like Thor and Wodin. But Edwin married a half Frankish princess who just happened to be a Christian and that is where all the trouble started.

      His new queen brought some Christian priests with her and they insisted on constantly preaching the Christian message. But the king resisted that message. What need had he for a God like Jesus Christ – a defeated God, a weak God – and not a strong warrior god like the ones that his ancestors had worshipped?

      But the priests persisted. They were very insistent. And so eventually the king convened a meeting of his closest advisors. They gathered in the king’s mead-hall in the dead of winter. They drank the king’s potent mead (which, in case you don’t know, is brewed from fermented honey – yum!) and they talked about whether or not it was prudent to do what the priests were urging them to do. The discussion went on and on with very few viable reasons being offered to take the step of conversion and baptism. But eventually they decided that they would do it. They would convert – they and all Northumbria with them – creating the first beachhead for Christianity in Northern England.

      And do you know what it was that tipped the scales for Christianity – why they decided that that was the way to go? Was it because they thought that Jesus was more powerful than the old gods? No, in all honesty I suspect that they saw Jesus as laughably weak compared to Thor. (I mean, Jesus never made it into The Avengers.) Was it the benefits that might come from Christian learning and literacy? No, they had little time for such things. What convinced them was something that an unnamed courtier said. A sparrow flew through the mead-hall. It flew in out of the cold and snow through one door, swooped over the bemused royal gathering a few times and then out another door and back into the ice and darkness.

      That was when the courtier spoke up. He said that it seemed to him that life in this world is like what happened to that sparrow. According to the Venerable Bede, these are the very words of that courtier: “So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.”

      What was he saying? He was saying that, as important as this world may seem, it is totally outweighed by the reality that came before it and that will exist after it. Why is that other reality more important? Apparently because of sheer quantity. There is just more of it – an infinite amount, in fact. Infinite time is what we call eternity. That’s just math – eternity is always going to add up to more than even the longest human lifespan. He was saying that the strength of Christianity – the only thing that really recommended it – was that it could claim to know something about eternity and could maybe even give you a leg up in it.

      Of course, he was kind of implying that Christianity was no benefit, or very limited benefit, in this present life. In fact, he may even have been saying that Christianity was a negative thing or caused problems in the present life. I mean, the ancient Anglo-Saxons seem to have had little patience with things like church services and monks and vows. But, he was saying, maybe that was something that they could just put up with for the brief time that they were swooping around the mead-hall for the sake of that enormous amount of time that would come when they were out in the unknown of eternity.

      Now, apparently, that courtier was very persuasive in this observation. He convinced King Edwin, he convinced the theigns and even the pagan priests. Northumbria became Christian and England was changed forever. But I wonder, what do you think of his argument? Is he right? Are we just sparrows who happen to fly through mead-halls? Does the interior of the mead-hall not really matter because the reality that actually matters is to be found beyond the confines of this world? And is the Christian church the only source of reliable information on what that other life is really all about?

      I’ll tell you something: that sparrow might have convinced the old Anglo-Saxons that Christianity was the only way to go – the way of the future – but I am not sure that it is still working its magic on their modern descendants and other western people.

      For one thing, Christians seem to have gotten a bit of a reputation in recent years for being so caught up with their concern for what’s outside the mead-hall that they are only too happy to neglect the inside. Christians, the criticism goes, are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. There are many, for example, who would blame so much of our present ecological crisis on Christians because some people have used the Christian idea of eternity to justify not taking care of the earth. While we are here on earth, they suggest, we can feel free to take whatever we want from the earth, to profit from its resources, pollute its skies and its seas because we don’t have to worry about the future of this world; our future is elsewhere.

      Now, I would be quick to say that that has definitely not been the attitude of all Christians down through the ages, nor even of the majority. But there has been a small and very vocal and well-funded minority who have been only too happy to preach that message very loudly. They have been so successful that many people do think that is what all Christians believe. So, no, the focus on eternity has not necessarily been a big selling point for Christianity over the last few decades.

      Even more damaging, however is the fact that Christianity seems to have lost the key thing that made it so attractive to the Anglo-Saxons. It has lost the monopoly over knowledge about eternity. The Anglo-Saxons simply accepted that, since they spoke with such certainty, the Christian priests knew exactly what eternity was like and how you got to be part of it.

      How many people today would just accept the notion that only Christians could possibly have anything meaningful to say about the afterlife? What about Hindus and their teaching regarding reincarnation? What about the atheists and their confident assertion that they know exactly what will happen to you after you die? And what about the statistics that indicate that huge numbers of people in our society, who have absolutely no connection to any established religion whatsoever, still profess to believe in an afterlife. So, if we are counting on the idea that we are going to attract people to the church simply by saying that we are the only ones who know anything about what’s outside the mead-hall, we may have another think coming.

      Jesus did talk about eternal life. We are told in the Gospel of John that he gave Nicodemus, that nocturnal Pharisee, what is perhaps the most memorable promise in all of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” And if we, by believing in Jesus, may have eternal life, doesn’t that mean that that old Anglo-Saxon warrior is right? If we can have an infinite amount of life outside of the mead-hall, then what is the point of worrying about the brief time that we spend flying around inside the mead-hall? Are we not just here in order to do one thing and that is to make sure that we reserve our place in eternity?

      Well, maybe that would be true if that was what Jesus meant when he made that promise of eternity, but I don’t believe that when Jesus said that, he had the image of a sparrow flying through a mead-hall in his mind.

      What did Jesus mean when he spoke of eternal life? He was speaking of an infinite expanse of time, but here is what is different about his approach to the approach of that Anglo-Saxon retainer: the expanse of time that Jesus was talking about was not merely outside of the mead-hall.

      First of all, Jesus says that eternal life is something that may originate from elsewhere, but it begins in the here and now. Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” and then he says again “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” you see, we tend to think, like that Anglo-Saxon retainer, of eternal life as this thing that is just outside of the mead-hall – outside of our present knowledge and experience. But Jesus speaks of it differently. He is telling Nicodemus that he can enter the kingdom of God (which he later connects to eternal life) and that he can enter it right now. You, Nicodemus, can have it now by being born from above – being born again from God, but it is a new birth that takes place on earth – inside the mead-hall.

      In other words, for Jesus eternal life is not some mysterious thing that happens completely outside of our knowledge. You can know it now. And when I think about it that way, that is a much bigger selling point for the Christian faith than a sparrow flying through a mead-hall because this is how Jesus is thinking of his followers: they are a group of people who, in the here and now, are actively living out life eternal. There is another place where Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” (John 10:10) and I think that he means much the same thing as when he was talking to Nicodemus. Eternal life, for Jesus is not just an infinite length of time, it is an abundance of life itself – life that overflows in joy, love and service. Now imagine that that was what people knew about Christians, not that they had supposed secret knowledge of some other life outside the mead-hall but that they knew that Christians lived a life so full, so abundant, that it overflowed like that?

      That is why I believe that it is time for the Christianity to stop thinking that we can attract people by saying that we can give them a special mysterious new life someday outside of the mead-hall. Yes, it is good to know that the eternal life that we begin to live here will continue even after we die, but that is not our selling point. The thing that will be truly attractive to people is if we begin to live that abundant life right now. And Jesus teaches us how we may do that. All that is required, he says, is belief – faith. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

      I know that that does not come easily to any of us, but will you commit yourself to do one thing this week: trust Jesus for one thing that you’ve never trusted him for before. Just start with one thing. Trust him for something that has been worrying you. Just let go of the worry and leave it in his hand. Or maybe trust him enough that you can do something that you have been afraid of doing because you know he is with you. Trust him enough to give what you can’t afford to give. Trust him enough to take a risk. Just pick one thing, but do it and do it this week. See if you don’t find a new abundance enters your life because of it. 

I

can’t be the only one to notice, am I? The world is kind of a mess. I mean, all kinds of things are just falling apart. Political alliances like NATO and the United Nations – organizations that maintained an unprecedented ( if imperfect) global peace for decades have fallen on hard times. Russia, in particular, seems to be hard at work destroying some of our most cherished institutions like democracy. North Korea is clearly working as hard as ever at creating weapons of mass destruction and putting them in missiles that go ever further.

      And that is just the global political situation. Look at the environmental situation. Even if we somehow manage to avoid blowing up the planet with some weapon or other, that hardly seems to matter because our collective action seems to be destroying the environment and even changing global climate patterns.

      I could go on but you get the point. We seem to have all kinds of reasons to despair for the future these days. It is honestly getting to the point where I am actively avoiding certain kinds of news stories. I don’t remember ever doing that before.

      But that is okay, right? I mean, we’re Christians, aren’t we? And I have been told often enough that Christians don’t really have to worry about the long-term future of this world because it is not our destiny. We ultimately belong to another world because someday, when we die, our bodies will decay and remain in this world but our souls will live on in another, better place. So why would we worry about this world? In fact, would it not be a good and very Christian approach to life to totally forget this world, its needs and its future? “The world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” So why not just take whatever you can from the earth – plunder the forests, the seas, the depths of the earth – because our future is not here.

      I will admit that that is exactly how some Christians do approach life and often how outsiders assume that all Christians think. But I think that most of us would say that it doesn’t sound quite right and indeed it isn’t. But why not?

      The Bible does promise us that we have the hope and promise of an afterlife. Because of Jesus – because of what Jesus has accomplished for us in his death and resurrection – we can look forward to a life beyond this present existence. I believe that and I know that many of you do too, but how are we supposed to reconcile that with a commitment to this present world. We have two questions from the catechism this morning. The first focuses on our hope for a life beyond the present life by talking of our belief in the resurrection of the dead. But the next question asks about hope and the hope that it talks about is very clearly talking about hope for this present world. “We hope for a transformed world in which justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” So which is it? Are we supposed to have hope for this world or just for the next?

      Well, we are not the first Christians to wonder that. The Christians in Corinth were dealing with very similar questions shortly after that church was founded by the Apostle Paul. It was not easy to be a Christian living in Corinth in those days. It usually meant cutting yourself off from your family and from just about everything else. So things were tough for those Christians and they started to give up on this world and many began to think that their only hope was to be found in the next.

      How do we know this? Because of how Paul wrote to them in order to correct them. He asks them an odd question in our reading this morning: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” Now how can that be? How can a group of Christians, who have heard and clearly believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, possibly not believe in a life after death? It doesn’t make any sense.

      But here is what is going on. It seems clear that those Corinthian Christians did believe in the afterlife. Everything that Paul writes to them in this letter takes that for granted. Paul is not correcting them for failing to believe in life after death but rather for the way in which they are conceiving of that life. Rather than believing in the resurrection of the body, they believe in the immortality of the soul.

      This is not all that surprising, really, because most of the Christians in Corinth were Greeks and the immortality of the soul was a very Greek way of thinking about life after death. It was the Greek Philosophers, especially the great teacher Plato, who first proposed the idea that there was, within the human person, some spark of the divine – a soul – that was, in its very nature, immortal. The body could die and it would decay away, but the soul would live forever.

      Now that is an idea that probably makes sense to many of us, because that is how we generally think about the afterlife as well. I don’t know how many times I have been there at a funeral and seen people look down at the body of their loved one and say, “They are not here anymore, but their soul will live on in another, better place.” The immortality of the soul is our go-to way of talking about life after death.

      But what Paul is pointing out to the Christians in Corinth is that that is not exactly what he taught them when he preached the gospel to them. He didn’t promise the immortality of the soul, he promised the resurrection of the body. He preached that their hope for life after death was found in the fact the God had raised Jesus’ body from the dead. The promise was that since God had done this for Jesus, he would surely do it for them as well.

      So, in this letter, Paul is correcting them for falling back into the Greek way of thinking about the afterlife and so denying the gospel that he had preached to them which was based on God’s power to raise the dead.

      Now I will admit that there is a part of me that wonders why Paul is so concerned about this distinction. We are talking about the afterlife here and, while the New Testament promises of a life after death are clear, I do not believe that the Bible gives us anything like a clear description of what that life will be like. I do not believe that human language has words that could possibly describe what such an existence shall be like. I mean, consider the descriptions that are offered. One passage speaks of streets paved with gold. A lovely image, of course, but it hardly seems like a very good practical or literal description. Do you think that driving on ice is bad? Imagine driving on a street paved with gold?

      No, instead of literal descriptions of the afterlife, what we have in the Bible are images and metaphors. No one can tell us that it is this or that, we can only say that it is kind of like this or kind of like that. And concepts of the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body are the same thing – they are simply images that are meant to give us some idea of what that existence will be like.

      So why is Paul so insistent that they must speak of the afterlife in one particular way? It is not that they are wrong. The immortality of the soul is a helpful way to conceive of life after death. But he was commending to them a better way to think about it. But why? What is so much better if you think in terms of the resurrection of the body?

      One part of the answer, as far as Paul is concerned, is that talking in terms of the resurrection of the dead reminds us how we have access to that other life. It is a reminder that we have gained access to the life beyond because of Jesus and especially because of what he has accomplished for us in his life and death and resurrection. It is a reminder that we will be raised because Jesus was raised. And that part of the answer is what Paul particularly focuses on in our reading this morning from his Letter to the Corinthians.

      But there is also another reason why Paul stresses the idea of the resurrection of the dead and it takes us to the heart of the issue that we have been talking about. If you only think of the afterlife in terms of the immortality of the soul, you will naturally tend to devalue the things of this world. After all, your body and all of the physical things that it depends on will pass away. They will turn to dust while your soul lives on through eternity. This makes it easy to assume that the eternal thing is the only thing about you that is important and that the passing things of this world matter not at all. I would say that the idea of the immorality of the soul is one of the key reasons why Christians have developed a bit of a bad reputation for being quite willing to let this world be destroyed because it is all only so much dust.

      But if you learn to think of the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body, you cannot think in such terms. Quite simply, such an idea of the afterlife means that the body and the things that sustain the body matter. They matter because God made them in the first place. And precisely because God made them in the first place, God can make them again even after death.

      Now I realize that thinking of the afterlife in terms of the resurrection of the body creates problems and quandaries for us. If our hope is for a resurrected body, well then what will that body be like? Which body will I get after I die? The strong and healthy one that I had when I was eighteen years old or the old and broken down one that I had when I died in my eighties? And what about those whose bodies are destroyed or cremated or eaten by sharks in the sea? Does that mean that they have lost all hope of the afterlife?

      But these questions all miss the point of the idea and the point that Paul is trying to get across. As I said, no one can really say what the life beyond the grave is like. We have not the language to describe it. The resurrection of the dead is not a literal description of what that life is like, it is a helpful metaphor to help us wrap our heads around the meaning of that existence.

      But Paul encourages you to think of it that way for some very good reasons. It is to remind you that your hope for life after death is found in God (and not in some inherent nature of your soul). The God who created you and the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead is quite capable of raising you as well as giving you a body that you cannot understand now but that fulfills all of your hopes. It is a reminder that, when you die, you will be in the hands of a loving and benevolent God and that is a good and comforting thing.

      But secondly, and I think more importantly, it is there to teach us that our hope is not merely for another world beyond this one. We need not and must not wait to find hope. To work for justice, for what is right and good in this world is not only possible, it is an essential part of being a follower of Christ Jesus, the resurrected one. 

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n February 1, 1960, at 4:30 in the afternoon, four young men sat down at the lunch counter inside a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had been shopping at the store, had purchased a few necessary items like soap and toothpaste, and their plan was to sit down at the lunch counter for a cup of coffee before they went on their way.

      Except that wasn’t their plan, not really. Oh, they would have been only too happy to pay for their coffee and sit and drink it in peace and leave, but they knew that the staff at Woolworth’s was not going to serve them. You see the young men were black and the store had a clear and well-stated policy that only whites could be served at the counter. And so they were refused and in response the men simply remained where they were, sitting peacefully.

      They might have been peaceful, of course, but that doesn’t mean that everyone saw them that way. People were freaking out. They shouted at the men, insulted them. They accused them of being unruly, disruptive and especially of creating racial strife. Yes, people said that they were the ones who were making racial strife happen. The “troublemakers” just calmly remained where they were until the store closed for the night and they left as peacefully as they had come.

      The next morning, when the store opened, the men were back and they had brought 16 equally black friends with them. All twenty men went to the counter, ordered something and were refused service. I mean, what did they expect, the policy was clear. Well, of course, they knew exactly what to expect and when they were refused they simply sat there all day.

      The next day there were sixty. The day after that, three hundred showed up, so many that the decision was made to divide the protest and groups were sent to other stores and shops with segregated lunch counters. Within a few days, the whole thing had blown up and people all over Greensboro (mostly blacks, of course, but some others too) were not buying anything at all from stores with segregated counters. There was backlash as well with people shouting insults and racial epithets at the protesters. There was some violence directed towards them in one incident as well.

      But the protestors hung tough. So did the stores at arguably greater cost. During that time, they saw their revenues drop by a third and there is no retail operation that can sustain those kinds of losses for very long. By the time the protests ended, Woolworth’s had lost millions of dollars – and that is millions of 1960’s dollars. I’m sure it would be billions in today’s terms. The protests ended with Woolworths finally caving in. They tried to do it in as quiet a way as possible. They called in some of their own black employees (for they had no issue with employing such people), had them take off their work clothes and, dressed as customers, go to the counter and order. They were served with no ceremony or fuss and the battle of the lunch counter just ended.

      But my question is why. Oh, I don’t wonder why there were protests of racial inequality or why there was resistance against those protests. I understand that racial tension had plagued that part of the world for a very long time by then. But my question is why was that the particular flash point. Why did it have to be about food and especially about who was allowed to eat it with whom? Why did everybody involved put everything on the line for that particular issue? You will note that the Woolworth’s store had already desegregated everything else at that point. They had a diverse staff that included black people. The men had no trouble at all accessing the sales counter, only the lunch counter.

      I suggest to you that both the protesters and the owners of the Woolworth’s knew very well what they were doing. They both independently decided that the lunch counter was a hill worth dying on because they had an instinctive understanding of just how dangerous the idea of people eating food together can be.

      To see that, you only have to look to the scriptures. If you have ever tried to read all the way through the Bible, one of the first things you probably noticed is that the book is obsessed with food. I mean, there are pages and pages of rules about what you can and cannot eat. You can’t eat this animal but you can eat that one. You can eat fish but not ones without scales. You can’t eat veal if it is cooked in a certain way and you can’t eat anything made with yeast at all at certain times of the year. You can’t get too far through the Bible without asking yourself what all of this is about. Why were the Jews supposed to abide by so many rules about food?

      It is true that the kosher diet is generally a healthy diet, but that is also true of the way that most ancient people ate. These rules were not primarily about health and safety. No, the more you read, the more you see that the rules were actually about setting the people of Israel apart from all of the other people who lived around them. They were to be holy and that meant separate. But how could food rules achieve that? For this simple reason, because the rules were so strict and so complicated that even sharing a table with someone who didn’t follow them was impossible. It meant that you could never eat with someone who didn’t follow exactly the same rules.

      In other words, the Bible understood the principle that the people of Greensboro North Carolina were fighting over in 1960. You can do all kinds of things with people of other races and nations; you can work together, trade together, even fight the same enemies, but so long as you never eat together you will remain forever a people apart.

      Jesus understood that principle too. And as much as he respected the laws that were a part of his own religious heritage, he was determined that he would never allow food laws and customs of who you could share a table with get in the way of getting his message of the kingdom of God out. And people noticed it and criticised him sharply for it. Jesus himself admits as much in our reading this morning from the gospel: “The Son of Man has come eating and drinking,” he laments, “and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”

      Note that this is Jesus himself saying this – acknowledging that this is the reputation that he has. And it is indeed a terrible thing to have people say of you. That particular charge, the accusation of being a glutton and a drunkard is actually listed as a capital crime in the Book of Deuteronomy. According to that ancient law, if your parents publically declared that you were, “A glutton and a drunkard” – those are the very words – the entire town was required to gather together and stone you to death. So this is no idle charge being leveled at Jesus. This is a very serious thing for Jesus to be acknowledging in public.

      But what does it mean? Well, that is also clear enough when you look at the passage in Deuteronomy. The charge, in Deuteronomy, is about generally unruly and destructive behaviour and not specifically about how much food or alcohol a person ate or drank. The particular “unruly behaviour” that people seem to be concerned with in Jesus’ case has to do more with who he shared his food and drink with than how much of it he consumed. The most damning thing about Jesus was that he was “a friend of tax collectors and sinners!”

Hespeler, 22 July, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 17:1-8, Acts 2:37-42, Psalm 100:1-5

I

 was raised in a Presbyterian Church as a part of a fairly typical Presbyterian family at that time which meant that I was baptized as an infant when I was only a few months old. Since I was born near the end of the famous Baby Boom and at a time when the vast majority of the children born in Canada were baptized, my parents stood at the front of the church with a large group of parents and we were all baptized one after the other in a kind of an assembly line.

      And that wa s fine. I mean, I didn’t remember it, of course, but my parents told me that it had been done and I had no reason to be concerned that it hadn’t. But then I grew up and, in time, I came into contact with another group of Christians who didn’t do baptism in quite the way that it was practiced in my church. These Christians are collectively called Anabaptists – a group that includes denominations such as the Baptists and various kinds of Mennonites. These churches do not generally see a baptism that is performed on an infant as a valid baptism and will argue that, to be truly valid, baptismal candidates should be of an age where they can actually choose for themselves whether or not they want to be baptized.

      And when I first came to know Christians who believed this way about baptism, I will admit that I found their position to be very interesting and even persuasive. It kind of made sense to me, this idea that baptism should be something that you enter into willingly of your own accord. In fact, I will even admit that I started to wonder whether maybe there was something invalid or even illegitimate about my own baptism.

      So, yes, I went through a period of time when I questioned my baptism. And you know how it is when you are going through adolescence. Who doesn’t remember those days? You struggle with everything. If you are a person of faith, you almost inevitably question that faith at some point. You certainly struggle over your own moral choices and decisions and can be very hard on yourself when you (also inevitably) fall short. So I went through all of that too but, in some ways, it was complicated by the whole baptism question. I couldn’t help but wonder if my baptism was at the root of all my problems. Maybe if I had been baptized later, as a believer professing my own faith, it would have taken, it would have sunk in deeper and would have had a more lasting effect on my moral behaviour and my doubts. I suffered (and I am going to go ahead and hashtag this one because I think that it’s time) I suffered from #AnabaptismEnvy.

      I suspect that I am not the only one. So I do think that the question that is raised in this morning’s reading from the Catechism is a very important one: “Who may be baptized?” Finding the answer to that question did not only put my own mind at ease regarding my own baptism, it also helped me to understand the real meaning and purpose of the sacrament.

      First, let me clearly affirm what I learned as I matured as a Christian. Any struggles I had as I grew up and matured in my faith all stemmed from my own basic humanity and absolutely not from any deficiency in my baptism. I have known, and continue to call my friends, many Anabaptists. They are very fine people and highly committed to their faith and to doing what they see as right in the world. But the fact that they were baptized at a time and a place of their own choosing did not mean that they had been spared the struggles and the doubts that are common to all of us.

      I have observed one thing in a number of cases: when a person comes to that point in their life when they decide to make their public commitment to Christ by being baptized, they will often go through a kind of a honeymoon period shortly afterwards. There will be a time when all is beautiful and wonderful and clear for them and their Christian lives are so easy. Such a time is a great thing and a wonderful gift for a person to experience. But the reality is that a baptism does not solve all your problems and unless you actually address the negative patterns and triggers in your life, sooner or later that honeymoon period will end and you will find yourself returning to old ways and old problems.

      So, no, a baptism is not going to fix you. That is actually not what it is for. But what is it for? That is the question that really matters here, isn’t it? And to answer that question we really have to dig into the scriptures a bit. In our reading this morning from the Book of Acts, we find the Christian church at a very pivotal moment. It is several weeks after the resurrection of Jesus and the church is having its big coming out moment on the Day of Pentecost. Up until then there had been a discipleship group around Jesus – a group that is said, at one point, to have included at least 72 people. In other words, it wasn’t exactly huge. It was a somewhat limited group and its focus was not really on growth in numbers. But all of that changes as the church makes its big debut on Pentecost.

      So after a bit of a fire and light show in which flames descend upon the heads of individual believers followed by a pretty impressive display of the disciples’ ability to speak a huge number of strange languages, the big moment arrives. Simon Peter gets up and preaches the first sermon of the Christian Church – a sermon that he begins, by the way, by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know that we might look like it, but these people are actually not drunk.” That is personally my favourite first line of a sermon in all of Christian history.

      But, however it begins, it is obviously a very persuasive first sermon because, at the end of it, a huge number of people – Luke says that there were three thousand of them – want to become a part of whatever this new thing is. “Brothers,” they say, “what should we do?”

      This is an incredibly important moment. A movement is defined by its membership and so there is a real need to know who belongs. If you are organizing a new club, for example, you might set up bylaws or standards of dress or behavior. Only those who agree to abide by these things can belong. When you are starting is also the best time, of course, to establish membership fees. This is because, above all else, a movement is defined by who is in and who is out. So what Peter says next here is going to define the church for the next two millennia.

      And what does Peter say? Are there any rules of behavior? Are there any dress codes, any fees? No. This is what Peter says, “Repent, and be baptized.” That is it. If you read the entire sermon, it is clear what Peter means when he says, “repent.” He has just spent several minutes describing the corrupt system of this world – the system that put Jesus to death. Based on everything that he has just said, to repent clearly means to give up and turn your back on the corrupt system of this world and seek a new basis for life. That is the only requirement and it is basically an exasperation with this world and its delinquent ways. It is about a desire to see change and to be a part of that change.

      And, it is with that understanding that Peter offers the next step which is baptism: “be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” What then is baptism? It is an outward sign that you belong to a different system.

      The most important explanation of the meaning of baptism in the scriptures sees it as an image of dying and being raised up to new life. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Paul writes to the church in Rome. “Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Dying to something old in order to be raised up to something new is about the clearest image you could find of turning your back on one system in order to embrace another. That is exactly the same kind of transition that Peter is talking about in the Book of Acts.

      So, more than anything else, baptism is a declaration of what system you belong to, of where your allegiances now lie. It is not a statement that you understand everything, that you have all of your beliefs worked out or that you have all of the answers. This Peter makes quite clear when he continues to speak to the Pentecost crowd, “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.”

      To the all important question of who may access this incredible power of baptism, Peter gives the clear answer, there are no real limits. It is for you, yes, but also for your children and note that no age limits are given. Even more surprisingly, he says, it is for those who are near – those who are already sympathetic to the message – but also for all who are far away and may have no understanding of these things. And he leaves the reason for this until the last when he declares that ultimately the grace that is received in baptism does not depend on the person who is being baptized themselves but only on the calling of the Lord our God.

      So how is this any kind of answer to the question of Anabaptism envy? The Anabaptists are indeed correct that it is good to come to God and, as a competent adult, choose for yourself to be baptized as an act of personal commitment. And, of course, many people do exactly that in many different churches including our own. But Peter makes it clear in this passage from the Acts that this is not the only way, nor is it necessarily a superior way. This is because the grace of the baptism is not dependent on us but on God. And God can and does make a place for everyone. Can the person who has such a reduced mental capacity that he will never understand the meaning of baptism be baptized? By the grace of God yes. Can an infant who may or may not someday choose for herself to be a follower of Christ be baptized? By the grace of God, yes.

      For baptism is nothing and has no power if it is not a celebration of the grace of God and no one can put limits on the limitless grace of God. The promise of baptism is a new start, freedom from this world’s madness and its corrupt systems. That promise is for you, wherever you are in your life, whatever you struggle with and whatever your level of understanding. You may have had it claimed for you when you were an infant but you can and should continue to claim that promise daily. That is how the promises of God always work.