Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

First Church of the Wilderness

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, November 13th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 12 November, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 6:32-44, 2 Corinthians 9:6-12, Psalm 34:1-10

he First Church in the Wilderness was facing yet another crisis. The twelve member leadership council assembled to talk about it and try to come up with a solution. The problem, as usual, was the budget. There just didn’t seem to be enough resources for everything that was needed. People were coming, they were hearing the word of life and it was affecting their lives giving them hope and a sense of purpose. It was just so darn hard to find the resources to keep the whole thing going.

And it is not just them. This seems to be a universal problem. There may be a church out there somewhere that never struggles to make ends meet, but I haven’t found it yet. It doesn’t matter whether a church is small, medium or mega. It doesn’t matter whether it is in a rich neighbourhood or a poor one, every single church I’ve ever looked at just seems to find that its revenues fall at least a little bit short of its expenses on a regular basis. I’ve seen it so often that I no longer believe that it is an accident. It is something that the designer of the church planned. There is a reason why it keeps happening.

Nevertheless, it does tend to make the leaders (and many of the people) worry and fret. And that is what the leaders of the First Church in the Wilderness were doing. “What will we do? This isn’t sustainable. The church will just have to cut back somewhere. It can’t continue to try to help meet the needs of so many people.” The solution seemed obvious so they went to the boss with their plan.

“Boss,” they said, “This church is going through a dry time, there are very few resources and there is not enough to go around and take care of everyone. I mean, to properly help the people around here who need it, we would need like an additional 200… thousand dollars in our budget and we just don’t have that kind of money. Here’s what we think you ought to do: all of the people who are takers – all of the people who are not contributing to the needs of this organization because they need too much help themselves – just tell them that they need to go. Let them go and find some way to take care of their own spiritual, physical and psychological needs because, once they are gone, we are pretty sure that we can stretch the resources that the church has to cover our needs.”

I want you to listen carefully to that plan that the leadership came up with because I can tell you that it is the plan that we always come up with in the church. I’ve seen it happen again and again in innumerable churches that I have dealt with. First of all, notice what the disciples are focused on. They are focused on what they don’t have. They don’t have the $200,000 that would be necessary to take care of everyone. And that is what we always do too. Whenever things get tight – and they always manage to get pretty tight – we are inclined to be ever more worried about what resources we don’t have. What’s more, we see that as a smart and sensible way to be – that it is just common sense. You don’t spend what you don’t have.

And I understand that approach completely. I am very sympathetic to it because it seems to make good sense to me too. But I do want to point out that there are some big assumptions we make when we think like that. We are thinking of the resources that are available to the church as a fixed sum. There are only so many resources to go around and so our task is simply to make sure that everything is stretched to cover the basic needs. That is an assumption that may be correct in certain circumstances – in a household on a fixed income, for example. But it is not necessarily true in the church.

This assumption of a hard limit on the resources available leads to the disciples making a second assumption: that the only way to deal with the scarcity is to send away the people who are using the resources. “Send them away,” becomes the default strategy for dealing with that feeling of scarcity.

So the leaders of the church come to the boss to make what seems to be a perfectly reasonable suggestion to deal with the shortage: “Send them all away and then we’ll be able to manage.” But the boss has another idea, not only of what to do but also of what the problem is. “Wait a second,” he says. “You’ve made it clear to me what you don’t have, but I have to ask you just one question: What do you have? What need-meeting resources are available to you?”

Do you see how a question like that changes everything? They, like us, only wanted to talk about scarcity. And when you talk about scarcity, you always end up talking about what you can’t do and why you can’t do it. You are always bumping up against limits. It may be a sensible point of view but it is always a restrictive one.

But the boss turns that around and wants to talk about what they have. And it turns out that they actually do have something. “Well, boss,” they say, “we do have a little rainy day fund set aside down at the National Loaves and Fishes Bank. We have about five hundred in a loaves account and I think there is another couple hundred in a fishes account. But that’s nowhere near enough to even start to deal with the needs of all these people out there and we need to keep that just to make sure that the operation keeps running around here.

I just have to mention: isn’t it interesting that we haven’t heard anything about the five in loaves and two in fishes up until this point. All this time the disciples have been fretting about there being too many people in too much need, and somehow the loaves and fishes never came up. Even when they went to Jesus with their plan to get rid of all the needy people, it just never came up that they had a little set off to the side in loaves and fishes. They only tell him what they don’t have and he has to explicitly ask them about what he has probably already guessed that they have.

And isn’t it obvious why they wouldn’t have mentioned it up until then? They were keeping the loaves and the fishes for themselves! That is why they were so keen on their plan where everyone else got sent away. They knew that once everyone else was gone they could break out the loaves and the fishes and maybe they wouldn’t have had a whole lot for themselves, but at least they would have had enough to scrape by. The loaves and the fishes were their personal safety net. They didn’t think of them as what they had to meet the needs. They thought of them as what they needed for themselves.

What happens next is commonly described as a miracle. And I suppose it is. Once they have let go of it and let go of the idea that that was what would take care of them, the very small amount of resources that the leaders had set aside to take care of their own needs multiplies and grows to meet the needs of the many. I suppose that that qualifies as a miracle; at the very least it seems to defy the laws of physics. But the way the story is told, nobody appears to be showing off or trying to impress people with the miraculous provision. It just happens. The people sit down, the disciples bring them the food and everyone eats until they are satisfied. The miracle isn’t directed at the crowds. If anything it is directed at the disciples.

How do I know that? Because of what happens after everyone has had enough to eat. Everyone is sitting around, patting their stomachs, loosening their belts (because some of them had certainly had more to eat on this day than they had had in a very long time). The boss is just finished picking his teeth when he looks up and says, “Hey guys, some of the people out there seem to have had so much placed in front of them that they couldn’t even eat it all. Why doesn’t each one of you grab a basket and go around and pick up all the scraps and leftovers and bring them back here?

So all twelve church leaders get up, each takes a basket and goes out gathering. You should see the look on their faces when each one of them comes back with a basket brimming full of food. Yes, there are exactly twelve baskets stuffed full of loaves and fishes left over – no more and no less.

Don’t you try and tell me that that is just a coincidence. These twelve leaders are the very people who, back when this all started, conveniently forgot to mention that they were holding on to their own little store of loaves and fishes. What they had been storing up for themselves was hardly a massive feast. It would have looked like a meager meal indeed when stretched amongst them all, but maybe it would have been enough. Now, after collecting their baskets, they are looking sheepishly at each other knowing that they can eat all that they want and still have some left over.

That’s why I think what happens out there in the wilderness is really directed at them. Jesus isn’t trying to impress the crowds with some stunning miracle that will blow them all away. God providing for his people, that, as far as Jesus is concerned is what God does every day. That is why he teaches them to pray and say “give us, this day, our daily bread.” That God will feed the people of Galilee with the bread and fish of Galilee if they trust him for it is something Jesus takes for granted.

No, if Jesus pulled off a miracle for the sake of anybody, it was for the twelve disciples who clearly stand for the church – which means he did it for us, to teach us as a church. He did it to teach us that a church that is focussed on its own needs – that is obsessed with making sure that it has its own little safety net of five loaves and two fishes set up over here someplace so that it can feel safe and secure about its survival and will not risk what it has to do anything much more beyond survival – that church is the one that is in the biggest trouble. As he said elsewhere, “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it.”

But at the same time Jesus was teaching that the church that sees what little it has and takes what little it has and risks it for the sake of genuine ministry directed towards real needs, that is the church that Jesus is excited about. “But those who lose their life will keep it.” (Luke 17:33) Not only does Jesus seem to be suggesting that he will heap special blessing on such churches, this story seems to be suggesting that if a church gives itself away, spends all of those things that make itself feel secure in a quest to genuinely care for those most in need, somehow from the leftovers of that ministry, Jesus will provide twelve overflowing baskets of abundance of blessing for the church.

We are now at that time of the year when churches start to worry about meeting the budget and when we start thinking about the budget for the coming year and how that can possibly be balanced. The temptation at such times is always to focus on what we don’t have. The temptation is always to focus on the loaves and fishes that we have set aside hoping that they will make us secure. The temptation is to settle for mere survival. I pray that we don’t give into that temptation this year because Jesus seems to be giving us a choice. We can concentrate on making our few loaves and fishes stretch to meet our survival needs and maybe we’ll get by, or we can put the emphasis on mission and ministry and from the overflow and leftovers of that we can discover how many baskets of abundance Jesus offers to us.

Sermon Video:

Peace, peace, when there is no peace.

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, November 7th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 5 November, 2017 © Scott McAndless Remembrance Sunday

Jeremiah 6:10-15, Matthew 10:34-39, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

e call Jesus the Prince of Peace. We love to tell the story about how, when he was born in Bethlehem, the angels sang that an era of peace on earth had dawned. And Jesus was the one who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” wasn’t he? I don’t know about you, but that is one of the key reasons why I am pleased to identify myself as a follower of Jesus. We need peace. The world needs peace. And on a day of Remembrance like this when we remember all of the carnage, all of the death and all of the grief of war, we particularly look for the healing power of peace. Indeed, no one craves peace more than veterans who remember war’s horrors all too well and soldiers on active duty. So I feel blessed indeed to be a follower of the Prince of Peace

But Jesus doesn’t seem to have always remained consistent on the topic of peace. There were days when he seemed to be no fan of it at all: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” he warned. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And he further promised that he would stir up trouble between all sorts of people: sons and fathers, daughters and mothers pretty much anyone else in any household.

Is it just me, or is there a certain inconsistency there? Either Jesus came to bring peace on earth or he came to banish it. You can’t have it both ways, but Jesus apparently thinks you can. It is, in fact, one of those contradictions in the Bible that I have wondered about the longest. Except it is not a contradiction – not really – it is more a matter of definition, of people using the same words in wildly varying ways.

Let me offer you a simple example of what I mean by talking about some contemporary events. Some of you may have heard of an American football player named Colin Kaepernick. If you have heard about him, you have likely also heard that he is the player who, a few years ago, was the first NFL player to take a knee during the singing of the national anthem. And he did it, he would tell you, for a very particular reason: to protest against the treatment of his people, Black Americans and other racial minorities, in American society. He was protesting the fact that black people are imprisoned at an extremely high rate for things like drug related crimes despite the fact that they actually use illicit drugs at the same rates as people in other communities. He was protesting numerous incidents when black men were killed by police when it was far from necessary.

What Kaepernick was asking for was a bit of justice and peace for minority people who looked like him. He was just trying to create some peace for a certain group of people for whom peace was lacking.

But what has been the response to his protest and to others who have joined in. As you may have heard that there have been a lot of negative reaction. And one of the most common negative reactions seems to have gone along the lines of, “Why, Colin Kaepernick, do you want to disturb my peace. I just want to go to a nice football game, to have a nice afternoon’s entertainment and I just want to be able to stand there and feel my heart swell with pride for my country which I love as I listen to the National Anthem. Why do you have to go and ruin my peace with your self-centred grievances?”

So you see it is quite possible that Kaeperneck’s quest for peace could totally disturb the peace of somebody else. And I think that Jesus could be saying something similar to that in our passage this morning. He is not denying that he has indeed come to bring peace on earth, he is just warning that the kind of peace he is bringing doesn’t necessarily look like peace to some people.

For most of us, when we ask for peace, what we are usually looking for is tranquility. We want calm waters and smooth sailing. We especially don’t want anyone causing any trouble. That is what it means when frazzled parents ask their children for a little bit of peace and quiet. That is what people often dream of at the end of a war. When we pray and ask God for peace, that is also often what we are looking for. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?

The quest for tranquility and calm waters, although understandable, has certainly taken us to some bad places. Over the last several weeks, we have heard a number of terrible accusations of sexual harassment, misconduct and even rape against high profile and powerful men in the entertainment industry, media, politics and other places. So many stories have surfaced and they are so terrible that it seems undeniable that there has been (and continues to be) an epidemic of abusive, powerful men in our society who have gotten away with it for a very long time.

But the obvious question is how – how is it that so many victims of so much abuse have been persuaded or forced to remain so silent for so long? That is a complex question with multiple answers, but one of the answers is definitely that our society often prioritizes peace over justice. Women who have experienced abuse have had it drilled into them that they must not disturb the waters or cause conflict by complaining or reporting. Peace in the workplace – and especially peace for powerful men – is considered to be more important than doing what is right for victims. But what if that is not what God means by the word peace?

In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. went down to Birmingham, Alabama (in the heart of the most racially segregated part of the country) to lead some non-violence actions. While he was there, not surprisingly, he was arrested and thrown into the Birmingham City Jail where he remained for quite some time. While he was there, the clergy in the area – the white clergy – gathered and came up with a statement that they published. They declared that the Civil Rights Movement was seeking what was right – that it was working for racial justice. But they condemned the actions of King and the other leaders. They said that stirring up trouble and getting people upset was not the way to bring about the change that was needed.

Martin Luther King, as you might expect, disagreed. And from his jail cell he wrote a letter – famously known as the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It is a letter that I like to keep with me and take out and read from time to time because King had a way of putting his finger right on what the problem is with the wrong idea of peace. He wrote this, in part, “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

That is, I believe, a helpful way to think of the issue. There is such a thing as a negative peace which is all about the absence of things like tension, conflict and trouble. And I understand how attractive that kind of negative peace is. I also understand that we all need it sometimes because you cannot live in continual conflict. But Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the one whose advent offers peace on earth doesn’t promise you that kind of peace. Sometimes he will bless you with it and you can be grateful when it comes, but when a negative peace becomes your main goal, you become an obstacle to true peace. The white moderate Christians that King was talking about, by prioritizing order and a lack of conflict, were actually perpetuating the problems and injustices that would prevent genuine peace or what King calls positive peace.

Positive peace is the kind of peace that Jesus did come to bring on earth – peace with justice, peace that is the very presence of justice. That is actually a promise that is coded into that very angelic hymn that was sung at Jesus’ birth. When the angels sang about “Peace on earth to people of goodwill,” that phrase would have been very familiar to the shepherds and to anyone who heard the story.

“Peace on earth,” was a propaganda phrase that was used by Roman Emperors at that time – a phrase that has been found on countless monuments and inscriptions. One of the things that made the Emperor an emperor was the fact that he had brought about peace on earth. He had brought peace on earth through victory – by defeating all of his enemies so that there was nobody left to make war any more. It was a negative kind of peace – a peace that was created through the absence of conflict – but as far as the Romans were concerned, that was the only kind of peace that mattered and only the Emperor could bring it.

For the angels and the early Christians to just say that somebody other than Caesar had brought peace on earth was to defy the emperor. It was also to say that the emperor’s definition of peace on earth – a negative peace – was insufficient.

Remembrance Day is celebrated every year on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, because it was at that moment in time in 1918 that the First World War ended. Except it wasn’t called the First World War at the time. It was called the Great War and it was called the War to End all Wars. It was called that because victory in that war was supposed to bring a permanent peace. It was a peace through victory moment – a negative peace through an ongoing lack of conflict.

How did that turn out? Not so well. The peace that the victors imposed on Germany and its allies in the Treaty of Versailles did not have a whole lot in the way of justice going for it. Today it is generally agreed that the peace that was imposed in 1918 set Europe up for the terrible war that began twenty one years later.

We celebrate today and on this coming Saturday all of those who served and who fought in those conflicts and in too many others that have followed. Few of those people fought because they loved the conflict; they fought for the sake of peace and in the hope of peace. But I must ask what would truly honour their service and their sacrifice? I would suggest to you that what truly honours them is not simply a pursuit of negative peace. That is the temptation, of course. So many of us would settle for a mere absence of conflict – especially those who have gone through the horrors of war. But negative peace will never be a truly lasting peace.

That is why I believe that we must truly honour our veterans by choosing to dedicate ourselves to positive peace, the peace that can only come when justice reigns in this world. But if we are going to do that, we will have to take what Jesus says in our gospel reading this morning seriously. It means that we must not shy away from conflict or from uncomfortable situations when questions of justice and what is right are on the line. That does not mean that we should resort to violence, by the way (Jesus taught his disciples that committing violence can and should be avoided whenever possible) but it does mean a willingness to disturb the waters and maybe to make people feel uncomfortable.

Peace is a worthy goal – one of the things that this world needs most these days. But it is so very important and valuable that we must not settle for anything less than true positive peace and the road to get there may sometimes be rough indeed. God give us all the strength to stand up for justice and for what is right, as troubling and uncomfortable as that can be sometimes. That is how we will discover the fullness of the promise of the kingdom of God in this world here and now.

140CharacterSermon #Peace, according to #Jesus was not avoiding conflict. Sometimes working for peace with justice meant creating conflict.

500 years later, what does God want nailed on your church door?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 30th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 29 October, 2017 © Scott McAndless Reformation, Baptism

Matthew 19:13-15, Ephesians 2:1-10, Psalm 13:1-6

lmost exactly five hundred years ago, on the last day of October in 1517, a young monk and doctor of theology took a piece of paper upon which had been printed 95 theses and he nailed it to the door of a church in Wittenberg. It was not, I want to be clear, an act of vandalism. Though Luther was angry about a few things that day, he was not taking out his anger on that door with a hammer.

It was actually quite an ordinary thing for a professor in his position to do. He had written down these 95 little ideas on one sheet of paper because he thought that they were provocative ideas. He didn’t necessarily think that people would agree with them – not all of them anyway – but he wanted people to discuss them together so that, out of the discussion, they might come to a better understanding of where the truth lay. Nailing the theses to door was simply the normal way of posting them in public. The church door was basically the sixteenth century version of Facebook.

But the banging of the hammer that nailed that document to the church’s door was loud – so loud that it has echoed down through the last five centuries. For the posting of that list of ideas did not lead to the civil discussion that Luther was looking for. It was the spark that ignited protestant reformations that would transform the spiritual landscape.

Today is actually a big deal in church history. It is the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And, in Protestant churches across the country and around the world, churches are celebrating, in particular, the unique contributions of Protestant Christianity. And there is no question that there is much that is worth celebrating. The Protestant reformers, starting with Luther, really did open up new possibilities for how we could think about and relate to God.

The reformers did that by declaring what are often called the Five Solas. (Sola is a Latin word that means alone – like when someone sings alone and we call it a solo.) By declaring these solas, the reformers were saying that we only really needed these five things in order to work out our salvation and our relationship with God. The five solas are: Sola Fide (by faith alone), Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone), Solus Christus (through Christ alone), Sola Gratia (by grace alone) and Soli Deo Gloria (which means glory to God alone).

These were wonderful and powerful ideas in their time especially because, in Luther’s day, the institution of the church as it existed then had been trying to control every aspect of the human relationship with God. The church had been teaching people that it’s traditions and authority were sufficient to fix our relationship with God and that you could even purchase the forgiveness of your sins with gifts of money. That was the thing that had made Luther particularly mad when he nailed up those 95 theses.

So the reformers came along and said no, you didn’t need to be dependent on the church and its traditions and officials; you really only needed five things. You could work out your relationship with faith alone, with scripture alone, through Christ alone, by grace alone and so that God alone should be glorified. That was a beautiful and liberating message and, as I said, it transformed the world.

I happen to believe that the message of grace was by far the most important part of that. They realized that it is pointless to try to please God with your good works or by being more righteous than anyone else. Nothing you could ever do could impress God after all. All you can do is receive God’s gracious gift of salvation, forgiveness and whatever you need most. You can never pay for it.

But I have a question. What is the best way to honour what those reformers did? Should we just take their lessons and wisdom and set them in stone? Should we just say that they figured it all out once and for all and we don’t have to think about any of it anymore? That can easily become the temptation on this 500^th anniversary of the Reformation – to get frozen in what happened 500 years ago. But does that really honour Luther’s courage and the courage of the other reformers?

The Christian church is now about 2000 years old. And someone recently pointed out to me that in those 2000 years, the church has gone through three major shifts. The church began, after the time of Jesus, as a small movement that was at odds with the power structures of this world, especially the Roman Empire, but by about the year 500, it completed its first great transformation to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. That changed everything. Then, 500 hundred years after that, the church was shaken by a second great transformation as it split for the first time into two great churches, the Roman Catholic in the West and the Orthodox in the East. From there the two churches took two very different courses. In particular the western church gave ever more power to its hierarchy which led to a number of abuses which led, five hundred years after that, to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Every five hundred years the Christian Church has gone through a major upheaval – a series of events that changed everything. It is consistent enough to make me think that there is a design to it all – to make me think that perhaps it is part of God’s plan. But, of course, you have realized the other question that such a history raises: what if, five hundred years after the Reformation, we are due? Is it possible that God is going to do something new in the church today? This is not to suggest for a moment that God is leading us to question or reject the wisdom that comes to us from the Reformation, but maybe we have gone somehow astray in how we have been living them out and God is getting ready to call on us to live out the gospel more authentically given the new challenges of the twenty first century.

I tend to think that that might be just the case. I see many indications that we are in a time of transition. For example, one of the developments that drove the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago was the invention of a new communication technology. You may have heard of it; it was called the printing press. It allowed for the ideas of the reformers to spread about at an unprecedented speed – so fast that the people who were invested in just maintaining things the same as they had always been could do nothing to stop it. Well, we are living in an age when new developments in communications are coming at us so quickly that almost nobody can keep up. Things are moving so quickly that the authorities – including church authorities – cannot manage the change.

So this looks like a time when God might be doing a new thing. But what new thing could God be doing? I don’t claim to know that for sure, but I wonder if God might not have sent us a messenger today. We had the great privilige and honour today to welcome Clara into the life of the church through baptism. We have admitted her into all of the fullness of what it means to be a Christian. But we have done that, as you may have noticed, without her really understanding what it means to be a Christian. We asked her some questions but she really couldn’t answer them. Her parents had to answer for her, as did we as her church family.

I believe that God has sent Clara to us to teach us about being a Christian in this present age. We believe and confess, as we have read, that we are saved by grace. That means that we believe that we are brought into the very presence of God (both now and for all eternity) not because we have done anything to deserve it but because of God’s kindness and love shown to us (particularly through what Jesus Christ did for us).

That is an essential part of the teaching of this church – of all Protestant churches – and one of our key inheritances from the Reformation that began five hundred years ago. But I suggest to you that we don’t really believe it. We don’t believe in salvation by grace because we constantly give into the temptation of adding conditions. We say, for example, that what we have done for Clara is not quite complete – that some day, when she is able to have some intellectual understanding of some of the things that we have said to her, she will have to make her own personal decision about whether or not she believes it. We suggest that her faith is not yet complete because she lacks in understanding.

But I suggest to you that, while she certainly will have to work out what she believes about many things for herself someday, none of that needs to limit the gift that God gives her today. Remember what Jesus said to his disciples when they wanted to prevent the little children from coming to him. He said, not merely that they could come to the kingdom of God but that the kingdom actually already belonged to them. Jesus believed that little children were actually more capable of the faith that gave them the kingdom than his disciples were. Maybe the disciples understood more, but Jesus knew that faith isn’t really about what you believe or understand, it is about who you trust and trust comes much more naturally to children than it does to us.

Ah, but you see, we Protestant Christians have this tendency to want to set up barriers. We are like the disciples in the story who “spoke sternly to those who brought” the children to Jesus. There are days when I really feel like there is a lot of stern speaking going on in the church. Anyone who disturbs your notion of what the church is supposed to be – who likes the wrong kinds of music, who doesn’t read the Bible in the same way that you do, who has a different understanding of how relationships are supposed to work – you speak sternly to them. Anyone who does something in a way that you think it is not supposed to be done, who makes the wrong noise at the wrong time, who leaves a mess behind them, you speak sternly to them. I’m sorry to say that I see it and hear about it all the time in the church. We may say that we are welcoming and loving, outwardly we may speak that way, but it is so easy to speak sternly to those others and it turns them off. Whenever we do it, we are forgetting the message of God’s grace.

So, I don’t know exactly what Reformation God may be aiming to start in the coming years. I am no Martin Luther and I don’t want to be one, but I can think of a few theses – a few ideas that it might be worth opening a discussion about. I don’t necessarily know what the answers are to these ideas are, but I also don’t know what new avenues for change might be opened up if we did boldly tackle these issues. So, in closing, I would propose a few theses for the church door in 2017.

1. What if we actually took Jesus at his word and acted as if we believed that Clara and infants like her have a better grasp of what the kingdom of God is actually about than we do?

2. What if we didn’t speak sternly to children, or to anyone really, just because they had a different idea of what it means to live out their trust in Jesus than we do?

3. What if we believed in the grace of God so much that we actually treated everyone like a genuine sister or brother without regard to their ideas, their background, status, gender, sexual orientation or intellect.

4. What if we actually decided that the Good News about Jesus Christ and the people that that news is for were more important than keeping up the institutional traditions and trappings of the church?

I invite you to consider these four theses. (Nails the 4 Theses to the church door.)

Now, I don’t know if these are the right ideas to be debated. I don’t know if the debate will ever be held. But I do know this: sometime soon, God will take a few new ways at looking at questions similar to these and make a Reformation out of them. I also know that if you are more concerned for the state of an old church door than you are for the question to whom does the kingdom belong, your priorities might be out of whack.

Bright and Breach

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 15th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, October 15, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Matthew 1:1-3, Genesis 38:27-30, Psalm 78:1-7

oday is a very meaningful day for this congregation, for Sarah and Joelle ______ and for their family. But I would like to remind us that it is not just one day. I mean, if any family decided that they wanted to share the birth of their first child (or children) with us in a celebration of baptism, that would be a wonderful gift and a day of rejoicing. But Sarah and Joelle, though they are in worship with us for the first time today, are not really among us as strangers.

For one thing, their mother has been part of the life of this congregation for her whole life which means that some of the most important and formative moments in her life have happened in this place and with people from this congregation. We have been part of the person she has become in significant ways.

Even more important, when, four years ago, she and Andrew made the most important decision of their lives and decided that they would tie their destinies together, they came here to celebrate and to make their mutual vows. I had the privilege of presiding, on your behalf, on that very special day and I particularly remember it because I was kind of inspired by Andrew’s career. His job involves building things out of concrete that is reinforced by steel rebars, so I spent some time talking about the rebars that God wanted to use to reinforce their relationship – rebars like patience, kindness and God’s unfailing love. A little corny? Maybe. But I like to think that, amongst the many things they were thinking about that day, they did hold onto some of what I said because they seem to have indeed built a strong and enduring relationship that will stand the test of time.

But if you think that their marriage four years ago changed their life, that is nothing compared to what happened to them one year and one day ago when Sarah and Joelle showed up and began to rearrange absolutely everything – especially all of their priorities. It has got to be the most significant single event in their lives up until this point and yet today they have chosen to invite us into their relationship with their children. And not just today, but on into the future as they have said that it is their intention that this congregation should be a part of their children’s life as it has been a part of Laura’s.

As I thought about this very special day, my mind turned to the stories of births in the Bible and, for some strange reason, I particularly thought of the stories of the births of twins. There are only a few twins mentioned in the Bible. All of them happen to be boys. Some of them, like Jacob and Esau, have pretty well-known stories. But as I thought of Sarah and Joelle and what their coming among us means, I remembered another set of twins who seemed to have something important to say to us today: their names are Perez and Zerah.

But before we can talk about these two very important, but somewhat obscure twins, we need to understand that the Bible comes to us out of a world that looked on children in very particular ways. For one thing, the naming of a baby always holds deep significance and meaning in the Bible. They didn’t just give their babies names because they were popular that year or because they were naming their child after some popular television character. (And, yes, I am talking about all those parents out there who gave their daughters the name Khaleesi last year.)

It didn’t work like that in Ancient Israel. Back then, the custom was for the mother to chose the name of her child (it was one of the few things in that society that women were actually given control over) and she would choose the name based on her hopes and expectations for her child or on some circumstance surrounding the birth.

Another thing that you need to understand about the ancient people of the Bible: birth order mattered a lot. The difference between being the first born and the second born was like the difference between night and day. The firstborn male got everything (and, yes, this was all about the boys; girls were not valued in the same way, but that was really their problem and their mistake). The second son got nothing. This makes the stories about the birth of twins in the Bible particularly dramatic. The question of which one will be born a few seconds before the other one becomes a near life and death struggle.

So, with that in mind, let us take a look at the story of the Bible’s less famous twins, Perez and Zerah. Now, even though you have probably never heard their names before, they are actually very important and significant twins as far as the Bible is concerned – so important that they are named in the third verse of the New Testament – Matthew 1:3 – among the ancestors of Jesus Christ. The story of their mother, Tamar, and how she came to have them is also one of the strangest stories in the whole Bible but it never gets read in church (for reasons I’m just not going to explain to you) so you’ll just have to read it for yourselves later. (We preachers will resort to anything to get people to read the Bible for themselves.)

But the importance of these two children is something that we should pick up on here today because one of the reasons we are here is because we don’t just think that Sarah and Joelle are cute and beautiful (which they are, by the way) but also because we believe in their potential. They are only a year old. They have already started to form personalities and interests but we have no idea what they might grow up to do and to be. We don’t even have a clear idea of what the world will be like when they grow up. But we have baptized them today because we believe that God can use them and their uniqueness to bring about a better world – to establish some manifestation of the reality of the kingdom of God. That is ultimately what this is all about.

Now, as I said, birth order meant everything to the ancient people of the Bible – much more than it means to us today. And this story in Genesis plays with that ancient obsession because, of course, when you are talking about twins, that sort of obsession is exposed as ridiculousness. After all, why would you insist that a child’s destiny and inheritance must be limited by its place in the birth order when, in the case of twins, we’re only talking about a difference of a few minutes or even seconds?

But it is even more ridiculous in this case when one of the two children puts his hand out and the midwife marks him as firstborn by tying a thread around his wrist and then, in the end, it is the other one who is actually born first. By the end of it, even the author of Genesis seems confused, not really knowing which one is the eldest. (The confusion is actually even more clear in the original Hebrew text. The translators have clarified something that wasn’t very clear in the original.)

I believe that that confusion in the story is quite intentional. The Bible is reminding us – as it frequently does – that all of the systems of this world, the systems that we human beings like to set up in order to say that some people are just better or more valuable than others – are truly meaningless. We keep trying to divide people by birth order or race or wealth or status and God just seems to delight in overturning all of that. The birth of these twins is a graphic illustration of one of Jesus’ favourite sayings, “The first shall be last and that last shall be first” because God just loves turning things upside down.

That brings us, finally, to the names that are given to these Biblical twins, for their names are taken directly from the story of the contest between them to be born first. The twin who is born first (after the other twin puts out his hand and gets the bright red thread tied on it) is called Perez and Perez means breach. The meaning of this has nothing to do with what is called a breech birth which is what you call it when a child comes out of the womb feet first. This was a particularly dangerous kind of birth in the ancient world and could often be fatal for mother or child or birth. But that is not what breach means in this story. It is rather a reference to ancient warfare when a breach would be made in walls or defensive fortifications to allow an enemy army to win a battle or take a city.

The idea behind this name seems to be that Perez has made a breach in the normal ways of doing things. He has overturned the whole way that the world works by stealing the first place from his brother and maybe from all firstborns everywhere.

Wouldn’t you agree, Laura and Andrew, that breach or Perez does make a good name for a twin because I am pretty sure that you have experienced exactly that. The arrival of these two children, especially when they both have come at once, has turned everything upside down for you. They have breached every single habit, every assumption every limit you thought that you had set. They have changed everything including your living arrangements and your relationships with your families and with almost everyone else. They have changed your priorities and your anxieties. But that is what children do and they do it all the more powerfully when they come two at a time.

The other child is given the name Zerah. This is the one who first put his hand out of the womb and the midwife tied a red thread around it. The name Zerah sounds like the Hebrew word that means bright so the idea seems to be that this child is named for the bright colour of the thread.

But, wherever the name comes from, the promise that the arrival of this child brings a new brightness into the world is one that can celebrate here today. Laura and Andrew, I know that you have named your children Sarah and Joelle, but there is no question that they have brought a new brightness into your lives and into the world even as they have breached and disrupted everything. You now know a new meaning to your lives and a new purpose to your being. You now find laughter and joy in places where you never found them before – even in dirty diapers, sleepless nights and just being together. This is a precious gift and we pray that you get full enjoyment of it. And thank you today for sharing that gift of brightness with all of us.

These children, Sarah and Joelle, are among us all as a gift from God today – a gift to their family first but also a gift to all of us. They come to disrupt us because the reality is that the church needs to have its comfortable assumptions of what its priorities are breached and disrupted. They are here as a reminder that the church needs be open to change and to breach if it is going to provide for these children and for others like them a place where they can grow up and take their own proper place in the kingdom of God.

They are also here as a gift of brightness – of new life and new beginnings. They are a sign of the hope that God is with us and will continue to renew us. Andrew and Laura, thank you for sharing these gifts of breach and bright with us today!

Sermon Video:

Thanksgiving after Harvey, Irma, Maria, Las Vegas, the Cariboo Fires, the Mexico Earthquakes, Charlottesville, the Quebec Mosque, the South Asia floods, First Nations boil water advisories, the Battle of Aleppo, Freetown Mudslide, etc. etc. etc.

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 8th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 8 October, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Thanksgiving

Isaiah 25:1-8, Luke 7:31-35, Psalm 138:1-8

t is Thanksgiving Sunday and many people who live in the Cariboo Region of British Columbia are having a hard time knowing what to be thankful for. They have spent most of the last three months on the run. The forest fires and wildfires in that whole region have been record-breaking this year. People have had to leave behind homes and livelihoods and many have heard the word that what they left behind has been completely destroyed. They don’t have their good dishes with them. Some of their closest family members have taken shelter in communities hundreds of kilometers away. I think that it is worth asking, when they gather around the table later today, what will they find to be thankful for?

And they are not the only ones. In Northern Alberta, an extended family will likely gather this weekend, but probably not for Thanksgiving. I think they’ll be gathered for the funeral of a young mother of four who went down to Las Vegas to see a concert last week and didn’t come back.

A family gathers in Houston, Texas. Their home has been flooded and toxic mold has taken over everything. The wood is rotten, the foundation is crumbling and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for anything. Even if they could rebuild, they are not sure that would want to. What would be the point of rebuilding on a floodplain after all? They would just get their lives back together in time to get flooded out again. So what have they to be thankful for? And, yes, I know that this weekend is not their Thanksgiving; that it is more than a month away, but do you really think that their situation will have changed significantly by then? So when will their Thanksgiving truly be?

And there are others – so many others it seems – who struggle with the same reality. The scores of Canadian First Nations communities that have been under boil water advisories for years. They are saying that it could take 30 years for Puerto Rico to recover from Hurricane Maria! Mexico is recovering from three earthquakes and counting. Huge swaths of Southeast Asia and Africa have seen unprecedented flooding and there are the other human-made disasters that are Syria, North Korea, and American race relations. The world seems a mess these days, doesn’t it? So much so that when I was trying to come up with a title for this Sunday’s sermon and I wanted to describe the setting for Canadian Thanksgiving 2017, I ended up with a bit of a run-on title.

But the question is obvious, isn’t it? How are we supposed to be thankful at such a time as this – when so much seems to be going so wrong for so many. What is there to be thankful for? Some people might suggest one answer. It is an answer that I hear a lot from the people that I visit. I often have the privilege of being there with someone who has been through a rough time. They will tell me the story of the trials that they have gone through and the long road to recovery that lies in front of them. And some of those roads are hard and it is hard to find the words that will encourage them to persevere. But then, what will they do? They will finish off the story of their struggles by saying, “But, you know, Rev. Scott, there are a lot of people out there who have it a whole lot worse than I do and I can be thankful that I don’t have to deal with what they do.”

So that is one possible answer to how we can be thankful on this particular Thanksgiving day. When, later on today, we all gather with our families around tables overloaded with bounty, we could all bow our heads and sincerely pray, “Dear Lord, thank you so much that today we are not in Houston… or Florida or Puerto Rico or Northern British Columbia or Mexico City or Syria or Liberia (where thousands recently died in mudslides) or any number of other equally horrible places right now.”

And there isn’t really anything wrong with that kind of thankfulness. It is true that we are so much better off today than so many others in the world and realizing how true that is can certainly help to keep us from falling into self-centred or self-pitying attitudes when things do not entirely go our way. But the reality is that it is not quite as simple as that. It may be true that we haven’t yet seen the kind of disasters that they have, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t or won’t. Even more important than that, I believe that thankfulness should be about more than just getting beyond our own self-centredness and self-pitying. I believe that thanksgiving is one of the forces that God wants to use to transform the world. So what kind of Thanksgiving is called for in 2017?

As I thought about that question, my mind turned to the Prophet Isaiah because that is how the mind of a preacher works. I thought of Isaiah because, of all the Biblical characters, he’s the one who lived through a time most like what we’ve been seeing over the last couple of months. Isaiah didn’t live through any major hurricanes that I know of (hurricanes don’t really make it to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea) but he did get caught in a major earthquake in Jerusalem. But worse and more destructive were the wars and invasions that Isaiah had to live through and witness. First the terribly destructive war against Samaria-Damascus and then the completely devastating Assyrian invasion.

Now the specific history of these events doesn’t necessarily matter. All you really need to know for the moment is that these events were horrible and that, in particular, they left in their wake a multitude of cities that were reduced to rubble and decimated populations of citizens. So Isaiah and his contemporaries were very familiar with the very disturbing images that we can see today of devastated cities like San Juan, Mexico City, Houston, Texas, Freeport, Liberia and the list goes on and on.

So how did Isaiah call on the people to respond to the terrible things going on in the world in his day? Well, interestingly enough, he looks at the big mess that is the world and he says this to God: “For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt.” I’m not sure which particular city he is looking at when he says this and it probably doesn’t matter. What is remarkable is who Isaiah apparently starts out blaming for all this mess. He says to God, you have done this. In fact, he even seems to be listing these ruined cities among the “wonderful things” that God has done.

I have heard this kind of talk lately as people have seen the disasters taking place in our world. There are some people who are only too happy to name God as the cause of them. Some do it because they are angry with God and really think that God (who is supposed to be all powerful after all) ought to do something to prevent these sorts of disasters. Others do it as a way of blaming the victims of these disasters for their own misery, saying that God has brought it upon them as a judgement for their wickedness and evil (whatever that might be). The worst example of that, in my mind has been the inclination to blame Puerto Rico’s present state on its heavy debt load and even on the implied laziness of its inhabitants.

So it is not too surprising that Isaiah would flirt with laying the credit for all the disasters he is seeing on God. But I believe that he turns away from that idea because something else immediately catches his attention. “Strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you,” he says to God. But why will they glorify God – that is the surprising part: “For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat.” You see, Isaiah has been surprised as he watches these disasters unfold. He has been surprised to see God, but not where he expected to find God. He has not found God in the rubble, mud and destruction. He has instead found God in the acts of compassion that have been done – especially those done for the poor and for the needy.

I think I know what Isaiah is talking about. If you are like me you have probably been overwhelmed as you have watched all of these back-to-back disasters taking place. Feelings of powerlessness and despair pile up. Sometimes it is so much that we begin to suffer from compassion-fatigue. You start to feel like you just can’t care anymore.

But then God has a way of showing you another part of the story that it is easy to miss in the midst of the misery: the acts of courage and kindness – the Mayor of San Juan running around the city in hip waders actually rescuing people who are about to drown, the stranger who stays for hours by the severely wounded man lying on the ground in Las Vegas, the hordes of people moved by compassion who donate far beyond what they can really afford. And the more you look, the more of these amazing stories you can find and, if you are paying real attention, you can discover that God is very much and very powerfully present in the midst of that disaster, just not in the ways that you thought at first.

It is as Isaiah learned: God is most present in the amazing acts of selflessness and service to the poorest and weakest. This is not something that you can prove or logically demonstrate to someone else. It is a truth that comes to you through a kind of mysticism. But once you have seen it, you know that it is true and that God is miraculously present in these selfless acts. They can bring healing and hope far beyond the mere content of the gesture itself and if there is one thing for us to see and to be thankful for in this strange world where we find ourselves on this Thanksgiving Sunday 2017, I believe it is that.

But Isaiah’s vision doesn’t end there. He goes on to describe a feast. Why do we feast on Thanksgiving? We do it because we instinctively understand that one of the best ways to show how grateful we are is to actually enjoy the bounty that we have been given together with the people that we love and who mean the most to us.

But, maybe especially this year, we might ask if it is appropriate and seemly that we should enjoy this abundance of food when there are so many in the world who have so little – when people in San Juan are literally starving for example. I am sure that Isaiah asked himself that question too. But he came back with an overwhelming answer that, yes, it was a time for feasting.

“On this mountain,” he declared, “the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.” What Isaiah was doing, in the wake of so much devastation and destruction, was calling people together – all people of God will no matter who they were and what their faith and nationality was. A feast was necessary because it would create a new alliance of people who could change the world.

“And [God] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations;” Isaiah continues, “he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.” Isaiah is here talking specifically about wiping away the scourge of death that has been brought on by war in the land. And that makes this promise amazing. God is promising to use gatherings of people of good will to change the conversation – to turn the world away from violence to hope.

If we could claim this promise this Thanksgiving, wouldn’t that be amazing? If, when you gather today or tomorrow with your loved ones to eat “a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear,” what if you all used the opportunity not just to enjoy good food and company but to rededicate yourselves to working together for a world of changed priorities – a world where we actually take care of the broken-hearted, where we actively strategize for peace instead of ginning up divisions and enmity as seems to be happening so much lately. Isaiah’s promise is that such feasts can change the world, so let me ask you: what will you do this weekend to make your Thanksgiving feast that kind of feast?

#140CharacterSermon How to #thanksgiving in wake of many disasters? Hold a feast like in Isaiah 25. Dedicate selves to making a new approach

Announcing the Launch of my New Podcast on October 11, 2017

Posted by Scott McAndless on Saturday, October 7th, 2017 in Minister

On Wednesday, October 11, 2017, my newest personal project will go online. It will be a Podcast called "Retelling the Bible."

I really love the Bible and it is a book that I take very seriously. But I also understand that the Bible is not a history book – at least not in the modern sense of that word. It contains many stories based on historical events and set within historical settings, but the goal of the authors was not merely to recount exactly what happened because they believed that they had a far more important job to do. Their job was to convey the truth about God, the world or themselves that they had experienced. And, as any good storyteller knows, you can never let mere facts get in the way of speaking the truth.

I created this Podcast to help people to hear the Biblical stories in new ways -- hopefully in ways that are closer to what the authors originally intended for people to hear. On a weekly basis, I will tell a Bible story in a way that will help you to hear it differently.

For the first season, which will run from October 11 to December 20, I will be retelling the story of the nativity of Jesus from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1:26-2:20). There will be a total of eleven episodes -- a rather in-depth retelling -- but that will be what is necessary to bring out all of the references to the Old Testament and the historical context in which the birth is set that we usually miss in the story.

Another problem that we have long had with Luke story of the nativity is that we have twisted it so much to make it fit with the other Biblical story of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew that we have lost sight of the amazing story that Luke originally told. I want to honour Luke for the gifted storyteller that he was by letting his story speak for itself without distorting it in a misguided attempt to harmonize divergent Biblical stories.

I mostly recorded this podcast on my own by setting up a little studio in my bedroom closet but I also asked my very talented daughter, Gabrielle, to help out by lending her voice for the female characters.

I hope that you can join us in this little adventure that will be the first season of "Retelling the Bible." The Podcast will be hosted at retellingthebible.podbean.com/. Once the episodes are up, you should be able to find them on iTunes or wherever else you find your podcasts. If you can't find the series on your favourite app, please let me know and I'll do my best to make sure it can happen.

If you like what you hear, please make sure you share this podcast with your friends and whoever might be interested in listening. Thank you!

Who’s my neighbour?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 1st, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, October 1, 2017 © Scott McAndless – World Communion

Luke 10:25-36, Psalm 36:1-12, Isaiah 2:1-5

t wasn’t like you probably think. It was not like he thought that he was better than everyone else. It was that he actually tried to do his best. He was earnest. He wanted to live without displeasing God or anybody else. He recycled and separated his compost from his garbage religiously. He always brought his bags with him when he went grocery shopping. Even more important, he tried to respect people and accept them as they were. He was a lawyer and he tried to use his profession to make up for the injustices of the world.

And he was not stuck up about it either; he never boasted about any of his own good deeds. It really bothered him that other people never even seemed to try to be good, but he was still patient with them. He was just a good person. There wasn’t a soul who would say otherwise.

So what was he expecting when he came to the teacher and asked him what he needed to do to inherit eternal life? Was he just thinking that he’d be given a nice pat on the back and sent on his way with the assurance that eternal life was his? Maybe. In any case, I don’t think he was expecting a quiz on why, exactly, he conducted his life in the way that he did: “What is written in the law?” he was asked, “What do you read there?” But even there he was ready with an answer: he lived the way he did because he wanted to do his best to love God and love his neighbour.

But that did raise a question, didn’t it? Who was his neighbour anyways? Who did he have the obligation to look out for, to help, to take care of? There were so many needs out there in the world – so much he could do to make things better – but where should he start? Who did he really need to take care of? So he asked.

In response, I am sure, Jesus raised his eyes to the heavens and heaved a deep sigh. Would these people never understand? And he told a story. And in my mind, Jesus was probably about the best storyteller who has ever lived. Others may have told longer stories with more well-developed characters, but Jesus clearly had a way of getting people really engaged in what he was telling. So I don’t think that the man heard that story so much as he lived it.

It was him. It was late one night, well after dark, and for some reason he was down in North Galt walking along Ainslie St. when all of a sudden the motorcycle came out of nowhere. It just clipped him as it went by. It’s possible that the driver didn’t even know that it happened (though I doubt it). But whether he did or not, the result was the same. The lawyer ended up at the side of the road, bleeding rather too much from his head and slipping in and out of consciousness. It was probably while he was in one of those unconscious states that his wallet, identification and cell phone mysteriously disappeared.

He was, to put it simply, not in good shape. And he really didn’t have any way to pull himself together or sort himself out either. He needed help or he simply was not going to get out of this situation.

You see, that is what we often don’t get about the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. It is natural, when you hear a good story, to find some character that you identify with. And you hear this story and figure that there are only three people that you could identify with: you either see yourself as the priest, as the Levite or as the Samaritan. These are the three actors in the story the ones who are deciding whether or not they will act like a neighbour to the man who is in need. And, of course, since the other two get it wrong, you are likely to at least want to see yourself as the Good Samaritan.

But I am not so sure that that is how Jesus intended for us to hear this story. I believe that, if Jesus really invited that lawyer into that story, he was more likely to invite him into it like this:

The lawyer lay in the muck and in the filth at the side of the road. He had lost a fair bit of blood and had a bigger headache than he ever imagined anybody could have. He had no phone, no papers, certainly no money and when he just tried to sit up a little bit, the pain that hit him was so bad that it threatened to suck him back down into unconsciousness again.

“Who is my neighbour,” he muttered to himself. Surely there is someone who is passing by who will take pity on me. Heaven knows I have taken pity on many others.

Before long, he heard some footsteps approaching. Just from the sound of them, he could tell that he was hearing some well-heeled feet – someone was wearing quality shoes and had a step that was full of confidence. Surely, he thought to himself, this will be someone who has the ability to help me. Here is someone who probably has a lot to spare and it won’t even hurt them a little bit to help somebody out. And so, as the footsteps came nearer, he strained his eyes to see who it might be, his saviour in the night. And, to his delight, as the shadowy figure came into his sight, he realized that he recognized the person. It was an old friend and ally with whom he had worked on some charitable campaigns. He smiled as he waited for him to draw near and then tried to call out his name.

But his voice wasn’t working; all that came out was a croak which only serve to startle the approaching man. He recoiled. What he saw seemed appalling to him. For all he knew, the heap of humanity that he saw in the gutter was all that was left of an addict who had gone too far, who had maybe even overdosed on something awful like Fentanyl. That kind of thing had been happening more and more in the city and he had heard horror stories about how the drug could become airborne and if someone just came too close they could overdose too. He quickly crossed to the other side of the street and proceeded to pretend that he hadn’t seen anything at all.

That was the first disappointment that the lawyer in the gutter suffered. It was not the last. Others passed by: fine upstanding citizens, community leaders, even old friends who obviously could not recognize him in his deplorable state. Every one of them allowed their fear of his state or their distaste or judgement for what they thought they saw to overcome any human compassion they might feel. They all passed by on the other side of the road.

It was only when he had completely given up hope – when he had actually decided that he was going to die there in that gutter – that he heard one final set of footprints. He looked up with a momentary flutter of hope and then his head dropped as he gave a mighty moan. This was definitely not someone who would help him. It was a young woman, an immigrant probably. She was all wrapped up in a hijab. In his eyes, at that moment, she was a victim. He didn’t understand how women are treated in Islamic cultures. He certainly didn’t understand how it is that they accept the lower positions to which they seem to be relegated. On another day, perhaps, he would have pitied her and tried to help her. But today – right now – he had no pity left for anybody but himself. He sank down in despair and finally just gave up completely.

That was when he felt the hand on his cheek. He opened his eyes to see that it was the young woman and that she knelt beside him. Her touch was cool and soothing. Her gentle voice calmed him and lifted his spirit though he didn’t understand her language. He suddenly knew that he was going to be alright. So in the end it was she who called for a cab and went with him to the hospital. It was she who managed to understand, from his ramblings, what his name was and figured out how to get in touch with his family. It was she who saved him.

The people who first heard this parable would have never identified with a Samaritan. They hated Samaritans, despised them, perhaps pitied them for their failure to be Jews. If they heard a story about a Samaritan, they would have expected the character to be the villain or the victim, never the hero.

And Jesus understood that. He understood that they’d never put themselves in the place of the Samaritan. He expected them to put themselves in the place of the man who lay at the side of the road.

This was a parable about what it means to be a neighbour and Jesus knew that it is one thing to be a neighbour when you are in a position of strength – when everything has gone your way and you can use the blessings you have received to help those who are less fortunate. It is quite another thing to be a neighbour when you are at your weakest point – when you are the one who needs a hand.

This is especially true, I think, when you have the same kind of situation in our communities today as existed in the Galilee of Jesus’ time. We live (as was also true in Jesus’ Galilee) in an incredibly diverse society where people come from all over the world to live next to each other – live with different customs, faiths and practices. In some ways it is easy for us to be neighbours to such people when we are the ones who are letting them in, welcoming them or helping them because that is what we are used to. We are used to being the majority – to being the ones who are in control and who, out of the goodness of our own hearts, let others in and allow them to be our neighbours.

That has often been our attitude but it has not always been the most helpful attitude as it can make us patronizing and paternalistic to others. I don’t really think that that is the kind of neighbouring that Jesus is calling on us to practice. He is calling us to embrace our weakness and vulnerability. He is calling us to learn to be a neighbour from the ditch at the side of the road too.

As many of you will know, we here at St. Andrew’s are about to get some new neighbours – that a group of Hindu worshippers have purchased the Lutheran Church building across the street and are planning to move in soon. I don’t know about you, but I am kind of excited about that. I hope that we can be good neighbours to them – to make them feel welcome and assist them as we can. I’ve already begun to think of ways that we can do that and I know that others have as well. But what if Jesus is calling us to experience being a different kind of neighbour to them – calling us to learn to need them, to allow them to help us, to learn from them? Now wouldn’t that be an adventure?

The Bible teaches us to love our neighbours as ourselves and Jesus told a story that seems to indicate that such love might just include learning from and growing with those neighbours wherever they might have come from. Maybe he was teaching that being a neighbour means actually needing the people who are different from you, who have different ways of thinking and different priorities. Maybe he was showing us how much we really need all our neighbours.

#140CharacterSermon Who does Jesus want you to identify with in parable of #GoodSamaritan? What if it's the guy in the ditch? #Neighbours

Sermon Video:

I hope you’ll support me as I “Race to Erase”

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, September 26th, 2017 in Minister

On Saturday, October 14, 2017, I will be participating in the Cambridge Race to Erase.

The Race to Erase is an annual fundraiser where teams compete in fun-filled challenges throughout their community, all in support of local charities. The Race challenges are designed to be not only entertaining, but to raise awareness and exposure to local businesses and not-for-profit organizations. Teams compete for fundraising prizes (and the top fundraising team is chauffeured in-style in a limo on Race day!) and a trophy is handed out to the team that finishes the race with the fastest time.

I will be on one of three teams that are racing to support "Hope Clothing." Hope Clothing, a ministry housed at St. Andrew's Hespeler Presbyterian Church, assists anyone in our community who needs some extra help clothing themselves and their family. We provide new or gently used clothing, footwear and accessories to anyone needing some help stretching their budgets. Small personal
items are often in stock, too. We help out dozens of families or singles, men, women and children every week. If we don’t have something that is needed we will do our best to find it.

Our team name for the Race to Erase will be The Clothes Horses. According to the Urban Dictionary, a clothes horse is

"A person who is passionate about new clothes. A big shopper and consequently, a big spender."

The most stylish person ever?

Okay, that is not exactly who I am. I may not be the most stylish person ever, but I am passionate about making sure that people who live in my community can get the clothes they need to live, work and support their families as best they can. I am passionate about used clothes distributed through Hope Clothing.

Hope Clothing is run by the generous donations from the community. The monetary costs associated with running this program rely completely on donations from St.
Andrew’s Hespeler Presbyterian Church, their members and our community. Clothing is given away free of charge. We are truly grateful for any and all donations that we receive because that means we can help
more people.

So, would you like to support me and the Clothes Horses as we support Hope Clothing? Any donations to our team are greatly appreciated. One way of doing that, if you will see me before the race, is to pass on your donation directly to me.

But there is an easier way and you can do it right now! Just follow this link:

cambridge2017.racetoerase.com

Click on "Donate" and then search for my name or the team name. It takes less than a minute and you are done! And the best part is that all administrative fees and credit card fees are taken care of by the YMCA and so 100% of your donation will go directly to Hope Clothing. It so easy you can do it right now. So why don't you go ahead and donate? I'll wait....

All done? Great! Didn't I tell you it was easy? Thank you and God Bless.

Scott

The little kingdom that grow: The noxious weed

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, September 24th, 2017 in Minister

Mark 4:30-32, Isaiah 55:8-13, Psalm 92:1-15

esus’ Parable of the Mustard Seed is one that that gets brought up a lot these days in certain discussions. If you ever get into an argument with people – either on the internet or anywhere else – about whether or not the Bible is true and trustworthy or not, chances are somebody will bring up the Parable of the Mustard Seed.

The argument will go something like this: “If you really believe the Bible,” someone will say, “then what about what Jesus says about the mustard seed because Jesus says that the mustard seed ‘is the smallest of all the seeds on earth’ but that is actually not true. The smallest seed is actually a certain variety of orchid that is found growing in the tropical rainforest of Bora Bora or something like that.”

“ So Jesus got it wrong and the Bible got it wrong. The mustard seed is not the smallest seed. And if the Bible is true and inspired, doesn’t it always have to be correct? If we can find even one small error (like if it says that something is the smallest when it isn’t) then the Bible isn’t trustworthy. It invalidates the entire book because if you can’t trust what the Bible has to say about seeds, you can’t trust what it has to say about anything.”

Now, I am not necessarily one who is overly concerned about arguments like that because I don’t necessarily need for the Bible to always be literally true and the entire Bible does not fall apart for me merely because it gets a few facts wrong here or there. I believe that there are truths that go far beyond literal truths and mere facts and I often find those truths in the Bible.

But there is another reason why it doesn’t really matter that this passage gives us false information about mustard seeds and it has to do with a question of genres. A genre is a particular type of literature. You are already familiar with various literary genres. You can easily recognize, for example, genres such as fiction or fairy tale, you know what a newspaper article looks like and you can read the ingredient list on the back of your breakfast cereal box. All of those are examples of literary genres that you encounter every day.

And we have different expectations of different genres. You would get very angry – and rightfully so – if the ingredient list on your cereal box was not 100% accurate. If it promises that the package contains no peanuts, for example, and you’re allergic to peanuts, well, there had better not be any peanuts. But you don’t expect exactly the same kind of accuracy from a historical novel or a book of science fiction, even though you may indeed learn many worthwhile things by reading such books. So you really need to know what kind of literature you are reading in order to know how to interpret the information that it presents.

This understanding is a very important one to bring to your reading of the Bible because the Bible isn’t just one book. It is a collection of books and different parts of it are written in different genres. The Bible contains history and myth, poetry and prose, gospel (which is not the same thing as history) and correspondence and many other types of literature. To know how to read a particular passage, you need to know what type of literature you are dealing with.

So, when Mark tells us Jesus’ pronouncements on mustard seeds, what type of literature are we dealing with? Because if this passage were some sort of scientific treatise on the mustard plant, we would expect a very high level of accuracy and be very upset if it should contain false information on the relative size of mustard seeds.

So is this a scientific treatise? What would it look like if it was? We don’t have to wonder because we actually have an example of a scientific treatise on mustard written around the same time that the Gospel of Mark was written. It was by a Roman senator named Pliny (who also had a famous son so he is usually called “Pliny the Elder”) and it was an encyclopaedia of Natural History in which he included an entry about the mustard plant. In fact, this is what Pliny wrote for his entry on the mustard plant: “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

So that is what a scientific entry on mustard would have looked like at the time when this gospel was written. And you could certainly argue that if Pliny the Elder had gotten any detail about mustard seeds wrong, it would have devalued everything he had to say because Pliny set out to communicate with that kind of accuracy.

But what Jesus was doing was something quite different. He was trying to teach his followers, as he clearly says, not about the nature of mustard plants but about the nature of the kingdom of God. So of course he is going to emphasize and even exaggerate those things about mustard plants that particularly help him to make the points about the kingdom that he is trying to teach them about – like, for example, the relative size of the seeds. It is hardly a problem that the way that he puts it is not strictly correct.

So, if we want to appreciate this parable, arguing over the size of orchid and mustard seeds is to miss the point of it completely. But what is the parable trying to teach us through this image? On one level, the point is pretty simple: Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is something that grows in somewhat surprising ways. That is a lesson that we have actually found in all of the parables that we have been looking at all this month here at St. Andrew’s. It is a theme that runs through all of the parables of Jesus that Mark has collected together here in the fourth chapter of his gospel.

But what particular nature of that growth is Jesus trying to bring out in this particular parable of the mustard seed, and what might it have to teach us about the life of the church today? Well, for that we need to understand the things that the people who listened to Jesus tell this parable would have brought to what they heard. And for that, it would be kind of helpful to know what first-century people thought about mustard seeds?

Well, fortunately, we don’t need to guess at that. We are incredibly fortunate in that we know exactly what people thought about mustard – that we actually have a scientific treatise on mustard written at almost the same time as this gospel. Pliny the Elder’s book of Natural History tells us exactly what the received first-century wisdom regarding mustard was.

We know from Pliny, for example, that they knew the usefulness of mustard. “With its pungent taste and fiery effect, mustard is extremely beneficial for the health.” They saw it as a useful spice to add taste to food and, even more important, as a medicine in various plasters and potions that they used as folk remedies for various ailments.

They also knew that it was really easy to grow, that it grew wild, in fact, as Pliny says, and farmers had even found ways of increasing its yield by transplanting it. But there was one catch when it came to the growth of the mustard plant. Pliny puts it like this: “but on the other hand, when it has once been sown, it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once.”

Pliny is saying that mustard doesn’t just grow well, it grows too well. It spreads so readily that it tends to take over the garden and squeeze out any of the other fruits, vegetables or grains you may have planted. This was, in fact, common knowledge about mustard, not just special scientific knowledge. Pliny is just reporting what everyone knew.

So, did the people who were listening to Jesus know all of this about mustard? They almost certainly did. The crowd would have been full of farmers and agricultural workers who knew very well that you did not let a mustard plant take root anywhere you wanted anything else to grow. And I can well imagine that those farmers and agricultural workers and everyone else were scratching their heads and wondering why Jesus was saying that the kingdom of God was like the most notorious weed they had to deal with in their gardens and that Jesus was even putting emphasis on how extreme the plant’s spread and growth could be.

So what on earth did Jesus mean by comparing the kingdom of God to such a dangerous and generally unwanted weed? Did he just not know what he was really saying – I mean, we are told that he was a carpenter, not a farmer, after all. Maybe he just didn’t know how destructive a mustard plant in a garden could be. No, I think that Jesus knew exactly what he was saying and exactly how shocked people would have been to hear him speak of God’s kingdom in this way.

As I said, all of the parables of Jesus that are collected in this chapter of the Gospel of Mark seem to be saying the same key thing about the kingdom of God – that it is something that grows. Jesus is teaching that growth is as essential to the kingdom of God as water is essential to a fish. To apply that to the church, Jesus is teaching that, if the kingdom of God is present in a church, that church should exhibit growth in some significant ways. But Jesus is also saying that sometimes things can happen that get in the way of the growth that is natural to the kingdom. And so, in each of the parables in this chapter, he is telling us about the things that inhibit that growth.

So what could he be teaching us about what we sometimes do that prevents growth by comparing the kingdom to a grain of mustard? I believe that he intends for people to bring everything that they know about mustard plants into this discussion of the kingdom of God. He is saying that the kingdom of God will grow in this world – will grow wild and out of control just like a mustard plant in a garden and will actually overpower other cultivated plants.

So what, therefore could possibly prevent the growth of the kingdom? The only thing that could prevent it is the same thing that could prevent the growth of a mustard seed – if you never let it take root in the first place.

And, friends, I think that sometimes we do exactly that. We do recognize the explosive growth potential of the kingdom of God in this world, and we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid that it might overtake our whole lives. We’re afraid it might make us make changes that we don’t even want to consider. We are afraid that it will disrupt this comfortable little garden that we have planted by introducing into it plants that are different from what we are used to and might just take over.

First-century gardeners would have shuddered at the thought of introducing a mustard plant into their well-organized garden and Jesus was expecting exactly that reaction. He was saying that one of the things that would prevent the growth of the kingdom of God among us is our own fear of disruption and change within our well-organized lives and our well-organized churches.

I believe that Jesus wants the church to grow – wants this church to grow – as a part of the growth of God’s kingdom in this world. He wants us, like the mustard bush in the parable, to put forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. But, I wonder, will our resistance to change and our resistance to disruption be the very thing that prevents that growth? I believe that Jesus was worried about that very possibility.

#140CharacterSermon Jesus said #kingdomOfGod is like mustard seed (a swarming weed). Is he saying that the kingdom grows in disruptive ways?

Sermon Video:

The little kingdom that grows: The seed that inexplicably grew

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, September 18th, 2017 in Minister

Hespeler, 17 September, 2017

Mark 4:26-29, 2 Corinthians 9:6-15, Psalm 92:1-15

f you have paid any attention at all to the news that has come out of Texas in the past month (and there has been a lot of news to attend to) chances are that you heard the name of one Houston religious leader mentioned more than any other. His name is Joel Osteen and he is the lead pastor of Lakewood Church, one of the biggest churches in a city of very big churches.

Osteen’s church caught a lot of flack immediately after the arrival of Hurricane Harvey and the devastating floods that it brought. People were upset with it for its failure to respond – specifically its failure to offer shelter in its large and well-appointed facilities. It seemed all the worse because the church’s excuses changed a number of times in the early days. At first they said they couldn’t offer shelter because the building was inaccessible because of flooding when it clearly was not. Then, once that lie was exposed, they went with the excuse that they hadn’t offered shelter because they hadn’t been asked when lots of other companies and religious organizations had throw n open their doors without needing to be asked.

Now I am not particularly interested in piling on Lakewood Church for what they did or didn’t do after Harvey. It was a crisis situation and, while I hope that I might do better than they did in a similar situation, I recognise with all humility that I might not. But I do have one issue with something that lay behind their actions. I can understand their concerns about their building and about liability, even if I don’t think they dealt with those concerns in the right way. What I don’t get, and certainly don’t agree with, is some of the theology that may have influenced some f their decisions.

Joel Osteen, you see, preaches a very particular kind of Christian message (if it is a Christian message at all) that is known as the prosperity gospel. The promise of this message is that God wants you to be rich – that it is God’s will for you that you should have lots and lots of stuff. That is what Osteen preaches week in and week out. He has also given an excellent example to his congregation of what this is supposed to look like by amassing a personal fortune in excess of forty million dollars.

There are a lot of problems with this prosperity gospel. It certainly contradicts many things that Jesus said. Anyone remember the time when he said, “Blessed are you who are poor,” for example? The whole train of thought also has plenty of potential to lead to abuse as Christian believers are taught a very particular application of the passage we read this morning from the second letter to the Corinthians: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”

This prosperity preaching teaches that the way you switch on the prosperity that God intends for you to have is by giving extravagantly to the church. But when the generous givers fail to see the promised millions materialize for themselves, they are made to believe that it must be their own fault – that they didn’t have enough faith or they didn’t show it by giving generously enough and the cycle repeats again and again until somebody gets forty million dollars but a lot of people end up poorer and convinced that it is really their own fault.

I have trouble with this teaching for all kinds of reasons, therefore, but I must admit that I do understand why it has become so popular and why churches like Lakewood have grown so large. Who wouldn’t want to hear that God wants to give you a great deal of wealth? It is also a very pleasant when you are living in a place (such as the City of Houston a month ago) where people are rich or at least have a reasonable chance of becoming rich because the underlying assumption behind it is that, if you become rich, it must be because you have deserved it – you have earned it because of your extraordinary faith or righteousness. And who doesn’t love the feeling that good things happened to you because you deserved them?

So this can be a very successful message when all is going well. But when things fall apart completely and it is looking like they may not get back to normal for a very long time – in the aftermath of a major hurricane, for example – the prosperity gospel might fall a little short and ring a little hollow. So it is not all that surprising that Joel Osteen went through a rough patch recently in Houston, though honestly I don’t worry about him too much. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be just fine.

But there is a question about what we do with all of this. The world is a very frightening place, after all, a place where a whole lot can go very wrong. We have been reminded of that very forcefully in recent weeks – particularly by Harvey and Irma, by massive forest fires and a major earthquake thrown in for good measure. But it’s not just the natural disasters – maybe if it was just them we could deal with that – but the human ones seem more frightening in some ways. For example, the resurgence of white supremacy and even Nazism is more disturbing in many ways.

When we are reminded so forcefully about what is going wrong in the world for so many people, it can seem supremely selfish and self-centred to be concerned with one’s own needs and especially with things like personal wealth and prosperity. I understand that we would all like to be wealthy – who hasn’t dreamed of it at least once or twice – but when people are losing homes and livelihoods and don’t even have a clue about how they might get their life back – how petty does it seem to be asking God for prosperity for ourselves and expecting that God should make it a priority.

Even more important, what sort of message should we offer to the world in such times? One temptation is to be positively apocalyptic. I have certainly heard some of that recently – that these disasters are God’s payback for our sins. This message can come in many forms: hurricanes are brought on by our cavalier disregard for the environment which is directly tied to the rise in ocean temperatures that feeds extreme weather. Or others will position it as God’s punishment for our society’s immorality, assuming that God is outraged at whatever particular immorality the speaker is upset about. Racial unrest such as the resurgence of white supremacy is variously portrayed as judgement for our failure to right the wrongs of the past or for moving forward too quickly in the present.

Now, I won’t say that there is absolutely nothing to these apocalyptic pronouncements. There are lessons to be learned, I believe, in the midst of a string of disasters. If we, as a society, could actually learn that our actions (or failures to act) have consequences and that it is time to get past the short term selfish thinking that we are so famous for, it would only be a good thing. So, I get where all of this apocalyptic talk is coming from and am somewhat sympathetic to it, but I also think that it is problematic.

For one thing, I have some issues with how we chalk all of this up to God and God’s judgement because the God I have come to know through Jesus Christ takes no delight or comfort from any of it. God feels nothing but sorrow at the sight of people losing their homes or their livelihoods. God does nothing but sow tears of sadness when people are lost in hopelessness or fear – separated from their loved ones and all that is comforting to them.

I think that maybe one of Jesus’ simplest parables is a better way to approach the issue. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,” he said, “and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.”

The kingdom of God, this concept that was so important to Jesus that he spoke about it all the time, was his way of talking about what God’s best intentions are for this world. (I know that some people often talk about the kingdom of God as if it was only about what happens to people after they die, but if you study everything that Jesus had to say on the topic it becomes quite clear that it was primarily about this world. It might continue on after death, of course, but the place where you were to encounter and enter the kingdom of God was here and now.)

Jesus called it the kingdom of God precisely because he was holding it up as a counterexample to the kingdoms that you encounter in this world – kingdoms like the one that was ruled by King Herod in his day in Galilee. And the stories and parables of the kingdom of God that Jesus told make it quite clear that he believed that God’s intentions for this world are for good and not for fear and suffering.

The kingdom was something that God would do. We could participate in it, but it was ultimately dependant on God’s action. That is what the parable of the growing seed is all about. Ultimately, Jesus is saying, our responsibility is not fix everything that goes wrong in this world. That, I think, is too heavy a burden for anyone to bear. No human can carry all the burdens of this world. But, Jesus says, what you can do is plant seeds.

When you see racial injustice – when you see people who are treating other people as if they were less than human because of the colour of their skin or their faith or their background – you cannot and should not carry years of racial hatred, misunderstanding and evil on your own back. You cannot fix all of that at once, but you can stand up. You can denounce the wrong that you see. I know that is hard for any of us to do, it certainly is hard for me to do, but to do so is to plant a seed for a better world.

When you see foolish thinking, the kind of thinking that just allows people to go on with their lives without thinking of the long-term impacts of their actions. When people are unwilling to make any changes in the carbon they produce, the pollution they leave in their wake because they cannot see anything beyond their next whim or desire, you cannot fix that. You cannot just make people willing to live thoughtfully or with a long view of what the impacts of their actions are. But you can plant a seed, by setting a better example yourself, by supporting government policies that help people to see the benefit in changing and that make it affordable for those with few resources.

You don’t have to fix it, but you can and should sow seeds and I’ll tell you why. Because you never know what God can do with a seed. Someone “would sleep and rise night and day,” Jesus said, “and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” Of course, we today understand a whole lot more about how seeds grow than people did in Jesus’ day, but the point that Jesus was making still stands. You don’t have to know how the kingdom of God grows among us, you just have to plant the seeds and leave the growing to God because that is always how the kingdom of God always works.

God doesn’t want you be wealthy. God doesn’t want you to be miserable either. God doesn’t want you to lose everything you have ever relied on either. God doesn’t ever want those who don’t follow in his path to suffer in great torment for it. Those ideas are all a perversion of the Christian gospel.

What Jesus does want is for you to plant whatever seeds you can in this world – to stand up for what is right and just, to challenge evil, to engage in initiatives to make the world a better place. Most of all, Jesus wants to teach us to trust in God who can take whatever seeds we do manage to plant and make them grow in this world in ways that we could never even have imagined.

Sermon Video:

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