Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

Why pray?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, November 19th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 18 November, 2018 © Scott McAndless

Matthew 6:5-8, James 2:14-17, Psalm 138

hy pray? That seems to be a question that people ask with increasing urgency these days. We are living in a time when “thoughts and prayers” have become a very unfortunate cliché. Every time there is a tragedy, every time a gunman walks into a school and opens fire or a man walks into a synagogue and starts mowing people down, it has become a part of the national liturgy.

Political leaders, celebrities and religious officials send out their Facebook messages and tweets: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.” And people have caught on. They have recognized that “thoughts and prayers” has become a kind of a code – a code that seems to mean, “Let’s not do anything and, for God’s sake let’s not change anything just because some tragedy has occurred. Instead let us say something that makes it seem like we care.” It is amazing to see, but we are to be living in a time when praying for something, for many people, has become a synonym for doing nothing. And so, yes, people are asking, “Well then, why pray?”

I’ll tell you I have certainly changed my own personal reaction to tragedies. Yes, I may pray as seems appropriate, but I now certainly think twice before posting anywhere that I am doing so because people now often read that as me just brushing off the tragedy.

Even good, practicing Christians, for whom prayer is an essential part of their spiritual life, can’t help but ask the question from time to time. I mean, look at what Jesus says this morning in our reading from the gospel: “When you are praying,” he says “do not heap up empty phrases… for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” How can you read that and not ask the question, “Why should I bother praying if God already knows what I need, what I’m going to say and has probably already decided what he’s going to do about it anyway? Why pray?”

These are just a couple of the reasons why the practice of prayer seems to have fallen into some disfavour in our times. But the problem, I suspect, is not with the practice itself but with our misunderstanding of the true nature of prayer. We live in a capitalist and consumer society. For that reason, I think that we have a strong tendency to understand just about everything in those terms. That is why we tend to think of prayer as a transaction – as something that we give in order to get something in return. And so we come to God and try to butter God up with our praise and worship, we may even make some vows and promises, and then, in return, we think we can at least hope that we have made God happy enough that he will give us what we ask for. But is that what prayer is?

Prayer, in our thinking, is like a vending machine. You put in your money (or these days you tap your credit card), push a few buttons and you hope that you get what you asked for. Of course, some of us may experience prayer as a broken vending machine – one that doesn’t always seem to get what we want right – but it is a vending machine nonetheless.

But I don’t think that is right. I think that Jesus is telling us that that is not what prayer is because, even while he tells us that God already knows what we need before we ask it, Jesus doesn’t suggest, even for a moment, that there is no point in asking. He sees value in the activity itself and it is a value that goes beyond the transaction that we tend to think of.

But what is there beyond that transaction? There is, I think, conversation. When I pray and bring to my God the things that are on my heart or that are on the hearts of the people I pray for, I absolutely agree with what Jesus says – that I hardly need to tell God about those things in order for God to know them. God already knows them. But I also recognize a great value in speaking these things aloud – of saying them to God even if I do not dare to say them to anyone else. I need to vocalize them, I need to put those longings into words because I honestly sometimes don’t even realize what it is that I desire before I say it.

I mean, who among us hasn’t done that? You go to a trusted friend who you want to help you with a problem that has been bothering you and the first thing you have to do is put that problem into words and as soon as you do so, you can actually see for yourself what the solution is. For example, I once had someone come to me with an ethical problem at work. A co-worker was doing something that was actually endangering the lives of some people and he wanted to know whether he should report it – what he should do. But here is the thing, by the time he had finished describing the dilemma, it was pretty clear he knew what he needed to do. He didn’t really need to be told. He maybe needed some encouragement but the answer was clear and all he really needed to do was put it all in words for someone. I just happened to be that safe someone. Prayer sometimes works exactly like that and God is only too happy to play that role in the conversation.

But beyond conversation is something even more essential to the practice of prayer: there is participation. Prayer is not like the vending machine. It is not a transaction. When you ask God for something in prayer, God doesn’t just give it, God is more likely to say, “Wow, what an amazing and good thing to ask for, how can we make that happen together? That is the point that James is trying to get across when he says, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

I know that he is talking specifically about faith there, but what is prayer if it not a spoken expression of faith? God doesn’t merely grant the requests of our prayers, God enters into the journey towards the answer to that prayer. That is why the politician who sends out “thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy without having any intention of doing anything to change anything is not actually praying at all and may, in fact, have done nothing at all. It is also why prayer is a dangerous act because, when you truly pray and ask God for something good, God is only too likely to ask you to be a part of the fulfillment of that prayer.

Why pray? There are many good reasons to pray. It is not fancy language or delivery that makes a prayer acceptable and effective. It is not length or frequency. But if we can make our prayers a conversation with God where we bring our whole selves to that conversation, if we can make our prayers a participation in what God is already doing and wants to do in the world, prayer actually can change the world. And that is why we pray.

Sermon Video:

Reflections at the conclusion of Transform 2018

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, November 11th, 2018 in Minister

The Transform Conference in Orillia Ontario was intended to be about just that: transformation. Some useful tools were offered but the point in coming together was not to get more tools that you might use to enhance your ministry. Stories of church growth and development were told and shared, but the point in coming together was not to take an incremental step in church size or programming.

The goal was transformation and that is a pretty ambitious goal when you think about it. If such a goal were to be fully realized, wouldn’t everyone have to go home as completely different people than the ones who came? Wouldn’t they have to return to churches that were soon radically different from the churches they left?

Well, I don’t think that that is what happened during our gathering, but I do think that the seeds of true transformation were offered and if those seeds are well tended, real transformation is possible.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, offered us a series of practices that could lead to transformation. Now, in some ways, that is not really anything new. I don’t know how many times I have been given a series of practices by an author or a speaker that the church ought to employ. Some of those lists have been helpful and useful, but I cannot really see that I have seen transformation come out of them.

Dr. Kim’s list is not necessarily hugely different from some others that I have seen and I can’t really say whether or not hers is the best or most exhaustive list. What is important about her approach is that she sees a sequence to them. You need to start with a particular practice and cannot successfully move on to the next one until you have entered into the first to a sufficient degree.

There seems to be a lot of wisdom in this approach, especially because the first practice that she begins with is lament – lament that is then followed by repentance and relinquishing power. I believe that she is right and one of the things that truly prevents our churches from being transformed into the image of Christ is our inadequate practice of lament.

Healing and Reconciling with Indigenous People

Let me give you one example that struck me hard during our time together.

I was blown away, yet again, by the depth of pain and suffering in the indigenous communities that are served by our church. One afternoon I had the privilege of participating in a First Nations healing circle and the pain that was expressed there was almost too much to listen to at times. I can’t imagine how people can live with it – broken down in mind, body and spirit. It was a true and deep experience of lament for those present in the circle.

I could not help but wonder why complete healing and reconciliation is so elusive, given such real pain and lamentation. In particular, why do we as settler people of European ancestry, struggle so much with being able to repent of past and present injustices and with letting go of certain power dynamics. What is lacking?

Well, Dr. Kim seems to be saying that, if we are having trouble with repentance and relinquishing power, it may be because there has not been sufficient lamentation.

But how could that be the problem? Canada’s Indigenous people have been lamenting their losses in various ways for about five centuries!

Ah, but that is just the point, what is lacking isn’t their lamentation but ours.

Our lamentation? What do we have to lament?! We had it great, we got the land, we got to be in charge and we received almost all of the benefits from the relationship between Indigenous people and settlers.

But we have to recognize that, for us even to begin the walk towards healing and reconciliation, it means giving up so many of those privileges and benefits that we have taken for granted for so very long. That is a loss – a real loss – and I don’t think we can properly process that loss without lamentation.

The problem is that most of that, most of what we enjoyed, was sinful in some way. We may not have realized it at the time, of course, but a lot of it was based on attitudes and ways of thinking that were just wrong and even evil.

And it just seems wrong to lament the loss of something that is evil. Isn’t that like former addicts lamenting the loss of that feeling of the “high” that the drugs gave them? So I think that, for this reason, we avoid such lamentation and maybe even try and pretend that we haven’t lost anything at all.

And that might just be our problem – we don’t lament, don’t acknowledge the loss, and so cannot move on to the next step in true healing and reconciliation. So here I go again. I will attempt to compose a lament for my people, the settler folk:

A Lament for the loss of the “White Man’s Burden”

O God, it was so sweet. We sailed into this place and right away we were able to take charge.

We brought our own concepts and ideas about things

like who could own the land and how.

Our ideas won out.

We got to set up everything in ways that were comfortable for us.

We got what we wanted: land, government, customs.

We didn’t really even have to think about what others were losing in order for that to happen.

But that wasn't the best part; do you know what the best part was?

We got to feel all virtuous about it.

We were saving them.

We were civilizing them.

We knew what was best for them.

And, yes, it was a lie, often an abominable lie. It was often only too obvious that it was, but we could believe it and believing it felt good – really good.

Any story you can tell yourself where you are the hero and obviously better than the others always feels good.

But God,

It's not working anymore.

The lie ran into evidence, into reality and into people who were strong enough to stand up and object. We can't tell ourselves the fantasy anymore because deep down we know it is not true.

And we hate it. We don't think it is fair. It is like you have abandoned us, God, because we don't know how to be your people without enjoying special privileges.

We're mad, and it is getting in the way of us moving forward.

Yet you are God. In Christ, you have shown us how powerful it is

to empty oneself

to consider the needs of others as more important than our own

to love.

If you are with us, maybe we can let it go.

Transform 2018 Day 2 Reflection: Grief

Posted by Scott McAndless on Saturday, November 10th, 2018 in Minister

Day two of the Transform 2018 Conference began with very meaningful and moving worship service that was led by the eight Canadian Presbyterian ministries that are focussed on Indigenous people and communities.

In many ways, this service set the tone for the entire day, especially as ministry after ministry talked about their experience of ongoing injustices -- things like residential schools, the sixties scoop, youth suicides, drug addiction, missing and murdered Indigenous women. The sorrow expressed was deep, but the worship that accompanied it was nevertheless beautiful as it appealed to the limitless love of God.

This worship let us directly into our first session with our speaker, Dr Grace Ji-Sun Kim, and it was what prompted her to spend some time talking about the Korean concept of Han (a concept that I had previously only encountered in an episode of The West Wing). Han, she explained, is the sadness and sorrow that is felt in response to systemic injustice. In Korean culture, Han is something that needs to be expressed and is often expressed very dramatic form, something that we often have trouble within Western cultures.

Reflections with a Mentor

This day included two mentor sessions -- break out groups for more personal discussion led by a chosen leader. Our group was particularly blessed to have Dr Grace Ji-Sun Kim as our leader (or, perhaps, did the organizers feel that we were most in need of her help?). Our discussion led me to some interesting thoughts about my own situation.

Having spent a significant time during the day talking about grief-inducing situations in various places, I was led to reflect on my experience in my own situation. If often seems to me that one of the things that prevents our congregation from embracing the change and transformation that may be needed in our present time and place is that we are carrying too much grief.

We grieve:

The church that used to be. We are hardly alone in this, but I note that many in our congregation carry a lot of grief over the way that things used to work in the church. They grieve the fact that we can no longer attract people in the ways we used to do. They grieve the loss congregational size and influence.
Two former ministers, both of whom recently passed away. One of those passings was particularly difficult as it was the most recent minister and he died under particularly tragic circumstances.

This grief seems to impact our present life in some powerful ways. After all, how can we possibly embrace all of the new ways the church needs to be and act if we are busy pining for the way things always used to be? How can we possibly appreciate the present leadership (especially if it is significantly different in terms of style and personality) if we can't stop missing the old leadership?

I shared these concerns with Grace and she suggested that one of the things that might help us to move through some of that grief would be a practice of lament. There does seem to be a lot of wisdom in that suggestion and it certainly suggests that my thoughts expressed in yesterday's blog post may have been on track. So I will try to follow through with her suggestion.

Here I'd like to present a first draft of a prayer of lament that I think could be particularly useful, not only to our congregation, but to many Presbyterian Congregations.

Lament for the 1970's

God, it used to be so simple.

All we had to do was put on a reasonably good quality program in a beautiful building and people would just come.

They would come because they wanted to,

because everyone else was doing it,

because it wasn't like they had anything else to do on a Sunday anyway.

And people used to volunteer, step forward to serve on committees,

to bake, to teach and they were happy to do so.

And, sure, maybe they had the time to do that because everyone in the household didn't need to be working at a job all the time, but it sure made finding the people to do the work of the church easier.

And people respected the church, and listened when we spoke and cared if we got upset.

God, why did you make all of that go away?

Didn't you know that we liked it that way?

Didn't you care?

We keep trying to bring those times back -- thinking that if only we make everything as much like things were back then as we can, everyone will just come back and it will all be good again.

We try and try but it just never seems to work.

Have you forgotten us?

Are you angry?

What did we do to deserve this?

Or maybe, God, just maybe, do you have a message for us in this painful thing?

Maybe you want to teach us something -- something about the new life in Christ, about faith and trust in you? We wonder.

We wonder...

Transform 2018 Day 1 Reflection: Lament

Posted by Scott McAndless on Thursday, November 8th, 2018 in Minister

I am at the Presbyterian Church in Canada's Transform 2018 Conference in Orillia for a few days. This is the first of what is expected to be a yearly conference with the goals of helping participants to:

Embrace a missional culture that encourages initiative and risk-taking
Discover new ways of nurturing faithful, vibrant and generous ministry
Encourage generous investment in the mission to which God calls us
Build relational connections that embody Christ’s missions

I would just like to take the opportunity while I am here to share some reflections and thoughts. Here is what struck me after only the first few hours.

This evening our keynote speaker, Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, mostly took the time to introduce herself and her story -- setting the remarks that she will make during the rest of the time in a context. She also introduced some themes that will be highlighted.

Lament

One of the themes she introduced briefly was lament, stating, as I have often thought, that lament is a practice that we need to rediscover in the church. One of the things she said was that, while you will almost always see a prayer of confession in a Presbyterian worship service, you never see a communal prayer of lament. That set me to thinking about confession:

Communal confession and communal lament are both part of our Biblical tradition, and yet we regularly practice one but not the other. Do not both have a place. In fact, you could even argue that lament is more important than confession in our tradition, at least if we are to judge by the numbers: there are many more psalms of lament than of confession in the Book of Psalms.
I have not felt good about the way we do confession in church for some time. That is not because I don't think there is a place for confession -- there is. It is just the way that communal confessions are written that bothers me. Most prayers of confession seem to be based on models and ideas of thinking about God that don't really work for me. They portray God as a somewhat distant being who is only interested in judging us. If you asked me to describe the God that I have come to know through Jesus Christ, that is not what my description would be, yet that is the God we always seem to pray to when it comes time to confess. I do sometimes try to go out of my way to write prayers of confession the introduce different ways of talking about God and our estrangement from God, but that often seems to be hard work -- going against the grain of people's expectations of what a confession should be.
Some people (especially young people) have communicated to me that the prayers of confession are the part of worship that most irritates them, probably because they see the hypocrisy of addressing a God in our confession that does not fit the God we are trying to describe in the rest of the service.

It also got me thinking about lament:

We really need to lament these days. There are so many things that are happening for which the only proper response (at least initially) is lament. When 11 worshippers are gunned down in a synagogue (for example) we want to respond in our worship, of course. And we do so in our prayers of confession ("Lord, forgive us for the anti-semitism that we hold in our hearts..."), in our prayers of intercession ("Lord, bring healing and hope to the wounded, comfort to the grieving, repentance to those so motivated by hatred..."), and in the sermon. That is all good, but we also have a real need to lament in that situation; we need to be able to say, "Lord, why did this happen, why do things like this keep happening! Why don't you stop it!! Are you there, do you care!" We need all of those responses and they are all biblical.
Most (though not all) biblical laments do end with an expression of hope in which the worshipper usually comes to reaffirm trust in God. This would be as essential to a communal prayer of lament in a church as an assurance of pardon is in a prayer of confession.

And so I am looking for ways to make communal lament a regular part of worship. I am willing to even lay off a bit on the prayers of confession to make room for this. I am thinking, at the moment, of alternating between prayers of confession one week and prayers of lament for whatever might have gone wrong in the world the next week. Of course, such a regular pattern might sometimes be interrupted when particularly lamentable events happen in the world, which, unfortunately, seems to happen all too frequently these days.

Anyways, I think it might be a worthwhile experiment to introduce more communal lament.

I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God.

Posted by Scott McAndless on Wednesday, November 7th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 4 November, 2018 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Luke 1:8-20, Daniel 9:20-23, Psalm 91:1-16

echariah was a priest – not an important one, not one of those wealthy priests who lived in the big houses in the prosperous Upper City. They had money and political connections and were famously corrupt. They were in so deep with the enemy – with the Romans – that the people had nothing but scorn for them anymore. But big important priests like that; they wouldn’t have had anything to do with Zechariah or his wife Elizabeth.

Zechariah was just a low-level priest who would never be rich or powerful but he took his position seriously. It was his job, when his turn came around, to stand in the temple, to stand in a place where he was uniquely in the presence of God, and to carry all of the hopes and the dreams and the burdens of the people to the very throne of God. That is an awesome responsibility especially in times of great trouble, and Zechariah certainly lived in times of great trouble.

We are told that one day when Zechariah was in the temple and making an offering of incense – a burning of sweet smoke that went straight up into heaven as an image of the prayers of all the people rising up to the very presence of God – that “the whole assembly of the people was praying outside.” Can you imagine that? This is just a low-level nobody priest offering a bit of incense and yet for this everyone seems to be there. The people have gathered, I suspect, because they know that Zechariah is a man of integrity and honour unlike most of the priestly leadership in the city. And so the people seem to have recognized that this is a unique opportunity to have the concerns that weigh on their hearts lifted up to God through this man that they can trust.

What were they praying for? I can only imagine that they were praying for religious and spiritual renewal, for political change that would allow the people some breathing room in their own land. I’m sure they were praying for hope in a time when there seemed to be a lot of hopelessness.

Now all of that – all of the hopes and expectations of a people – was a lot for one man like Zechariah to bear. But that was only the half of it. As is often the case with those that God calls upon to minister to his people, Zechariah was dealing with his own issues. He carried his own personal sorrow that, even after years of trying, he and his wife Elizabeth had been unable to have a child. This was a personal sorrow that no words could express and that was made even worse by the insensitive comments of people who just didn’t understand.

Now, of course, Zechariah did not go into the temple with the intention of praying about that personal crisis. That was not what he was called to do in his position. But that sorrow was so much a part of him that there was no way he could leave it outside of the room when he offered up his prayers.

That is the situation that we find ourselves in at the beginning of our reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke. And into that extraordinary situation comes an extraordinary presence. He appears right beside the altar of incense with these words, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.”

Now, I will leave it to you to figure out why my mind first turned to a passage of scripture in which Gabriel appears in the Gospel of Luke on a day when we have the privilege of baptizing an infant by the name of Gabriel Lucas. But, having made that connection, I must say that I find the situation that is set up in this passage a rather compelling one for our time.

My friends, we are living in a time when “the whole assembly of the people is praying outside the sanctuary.” We are living in a time when people are losing confidence in the religious institutions of our society, and not without some good reason. Just like in the days of Zechariah, we have seen religious leadership that has not inspired a great deal of confidence. The scandals are too many to mention. The Roman Catholic Church seems to be practically drowning in the sexual abuse scandals lately. Evangelical leaders have also seemed to be ready to sell their souls for political gain. (Take the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network who recently said that an arms deal is more important than the death of a journalist. Can you imagine that: a Christian teacher saying but the death of one man matters less than thirty pieces of silver? That goes against the very foundation of our faith!)

Those are just a couple of examples, but the overall trend regarding the attitude towards religion is quite clear in our time. Yet, remarkably, even while people are turning their backs on religious institutions, interest in spiritual matters is only growing, as is belief in God and in the afterlife. People, in other words, are still praying in their own way, but they are praying outside the sanctuary because they are unsure whether they can trust those who are inside the sanctuary. It is at times such as this, that what we need most are people of integrity like Zechariah and Elizabeth to come forward to offer the incense of prayer and service before the Lord. It is when we need people like their son, John, who will be known as John the Baptist.

Who are those people that God will use? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that some of them are here today. Perhaps God will use Gabriel’s parents. I do know, for one thing, that God has put a calling on his father’s life. I don’t think that he has quite figured out how and in what kind of ministry, but there is a lot of evidence that God has something for Matt to do in the church. But it is not just those who are specifically called to the ministry of the church that God needs to use at such times. All of us must ask the question: Does God have something for me to do in the work of renewal in these times of great change?

But there is something that seems to happen as soon as someone asks that question. Everyone agrees that something needs to be done. Everyone agrees that the system is not working and that we need some real change, but they also immediately begin to think of all the reasons why they cannot be the one to bring about that change. Why? Because they’ve got their own problems – they’ve got their own stuff that they’re dealing with. Everybody can say that because everybody does. And that is an excellent explanation for why the real change that is needed often never materializes: people are just too busy dealing with their own problems.

But here is what I see going on in our passage from the Gospel of Luke: Zechariah could have said that too. Zechariah was dealing with a terrible personal tragedy and he could very well have said, “Because I am busy carrying this terrible weight of my and my wife’s infertility, there is absolutely no way that I could possibly carry all of the hopes of the people before God. But Zechariah didn’t say that. Zechariah took all of his personal pain with him and he went and he offered up the incense before God on behalf of all the people.

And here is the really beautiful part: Zechariah didn’t go into that temple to pray to God for his own personal pain. Though he could never hide the pain that he bore in his heart, he did not say a word about infertility as he offered the incense. He took the prayers of all the people and not his own need. But where does God meet Zechariah? Right in his personal pain. “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard,” Gabriel says. “Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.” God ministers to the minister in need.

But here is where we discover how amazing our God is. Yes, God ministers to Zechariah in his need. Yes God answers the prayer of his heart, but in the answer to Zechariah’s prayer, we also see the seed of the answer to the prayers of the people. “You will have joy and gladness,” Gabriel begins, confirming that this is absolutely a gift for Zechariah and Elizabeth. But the blessings do not end there: “and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord... He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

I find an incredible comfort in this part of the story. If you have ever felt that you cannot be part of what it is that God is doing in this world because you have your own problems that you are dealing with, remember the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Remember that you have a God who would love to minister to you in order that the whole world might be blessed.

I have been blessed to know a little bit of the story and the journey of Gabriel’s parents and what brought them to this point in their life. I won’t go into it here, but I know that they have had their struggles as many of us do. And God has ministered to them in those struggles. God has brought them through all of that and then brought them together to be a blessing to each other and has now given them this extraordinary blessing in their beautiful son.

That is their blessing and their gift from God and we wish them so much joy in it. But looking at the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, I cannot help but think that God has a plan to multiply those blessings from there. I am no Angel Gabriel; I do not stand in the presence of God and so I don’t know exactly how those blessings may come. I do suspect that God might do with them as he often does and that the very things that they have struggled with may become the seeds of their ministry. I cannot forget the calling that Matt has testified that God has put on his life and I cannot stop thinking that the very things that he has struggled with in his life may give him a unique ministry in the lives of others who struggle with similar things. I don’t know the particulars but I do know that God has an uncanny ability to find a way to make that kind of thing happen.

We live in interesting times – times when “the whole assembly of the people” is praying outside the sanctuary. The hunger and the thirst for new life and new hope – the hope that can be found in the gospel – is there in the people, but they are also not inclined to trust the institutions of religion to help them find that hope. That might seem discouraging, but it is not. Yes, if we just continue on in the churches with business as usual and we resist all change, chances are that the whole assembly of the people will remain praying outside.

But I don’t think God will allow that, God will call people from among us – maybe you, maybe Matt, maybe me – and God will use those people to enable us to take some bold steps. It will come. It may have already started, after all hasn’t Gabriel come to us today from standing in the presence of God. So offer up the incense of your prayers. God is alive and God ministers to all who struggle among us. In God’s ministry to each of us are the true seeds of the renewal we need.

So you are no longer a slave but a child

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 29th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 28 October, 2018 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Galatians 3:23-4:7, Psalm 78:1-8, Mark 9:33-37

ne day, when his disciples were being kind of awful with each other – when they were arguing and fighting with each other because this one thought that he knew exactly how things ought to be done and was frustrated that no one else would listen to him and that one thought that the other guy over there wasn’t giving him the respect he deserved and then there was this other one who totally hated all of the songs that the other guys would sing when they walked down the road – anyways I don’t really want to get into it but they were being kind of typical for them honestly and so Jesus decided to do something that would help them to see what was really important about what it was that they were doing together.

So this is what Jesus did. He said to the disciples, hang on for a minute guys because I need to show you something. And he went over to a place by the side of the road where there were some women sitting and talking together and they were holding their babies. And Jesus said to one of them, “Please, ma’am, could I borrow your beautiful child for but a moment? In fact, if you would share her with me it would really help me to set these disciples of mine straight.”

The mother looked at Jesus for a moment and decided that he looked trustworthy enough and she let him take the child gently into his arms. And then Jesus carried that child back to the circle of disciples and sat down in their midst with the child upon his knees and said to them, “Guys, do you see this here? This is what it is all about.”

And I kind of feel that that is what Jesus has done for us today. Jesus spoke to Mark and to Dina and he said to them, “Say, would you bring your two beautiful children, Jackson and Amelia, and would you share them with my church in Hespeler for about an hour today? And, praise God, Mark and Dina said yes.

I know that they think that they brought their children here in order that they might be baptized today. And indeed they did. But I have no question that Jesus also had an ulterior motive and making sure they can come here today. Jesus wanted to make sure they came here so that they might teach the gospel, the good news, to us.

So, if Jesus has gone to all that trouble to communicate with us today, I think that we ought to listen. But we are kind of in the position that those disciples were in on that day when Jesus plunked a child down in their midst. They probably looked at each other and shrugged and said, “I don’t think I get it.” And the message may not be so obvious to us either. So let me suggest we turn to the Apostle Paul, that explainer of all things, because he may be able to help us.

In our reading this morning from his letter to the Galatians, Paul is speaking to a church that is struggling with the same kind of problems that the disciples were having on that walk with Jesus. They were trying to figure out who should be in charge of the church and how things should be done. They were arguing over whose concerns were more important and whose were less. And Paul, in this letter, does the same thing for them that Jesus did for the disciples; he invites them to consider some children.

The thing is, though, that most of what Paul says is expressed in terms of the normal child-rearing practices of that time and we can’t quite relate to those things. For example, in Paul’s time, children were often raised by a slave who was called a disciplinarian and who was given the authority to actually beat the children, so Paul talks about how children had to deal with that figure in their lives. There were also some pretty strict regulations about inheritance and Paul makes reference to those. But, as I say, those things don’t really have much to do with our experience so I don’t want to get into explaining them.

Nevertheless, the overall point that Paul is making is really important and helpful to us so I wanted to try and find a different way to approach it. So, rather than talking about what ancient children had to live through, let me do what Jesus did and invite you to consider the child or children in front of you. Let’s consider what Jackson and Amelia can teach us about the good news of Jesus Christ.

Jackson and Amelia are very young and yet they are Canadian citizens. They are free citizens of a democratic society with all of the rights and privileges that come with such citizenship. We have also welcomed them today into the Church of Jesus Christ through the sacrament of baptism and they have full rights and responsibilities within the church should they choose to exercise them. Nevertheless, over the next few years, how much freedom will Jackson and Amelia practically enjoy? Not a lot. I am pretty sure that there are going to be rules, lots of rules, that they have to live by. There will be rules like, “Hold my hand when you cross the street,” “Brush your teeth before you go to bed,” and, “Never, never, never touch a hot stove.”

Why will those rules be there? They will be there because their parents love them and don’t want bad things happen to them – things like tooth decay and burnt fingers.” Those rules will come out of love, but will the children always hear them that way? If they are like most children, probably not. Most children don’t really like rules, probably because they often feel arbitrary and they don’t understand that they are coming from love. But the idea is that, as these children grow up, they will begin to look beyond the rules and understand the love behind them and internalize the reasons for the rules in productive ways.

Of course, it doesn’t always quite work out like that. Sometimes children never understand the purpose behind the rules and instead just slavishly continue to follow them without understanding. Let me give you an example I heard about recently. One thing that sociologists have been noticing about young people coming of age in recent years in our society is that many of them seem to have an irrational fear of handling raw meat. They almost can’t touch it. This is something that can certainly get in the way of mature adults learning to cook for themselves! As a result, researchers are actually working on developing packaging for meat that eliminates the need to actually touch the meat to cook it. But where did this irrational fear come from?

It comes from the rules were given to them as young children. It is a good rule to not allow small children to handle raw meat because the danger that they will get bacteria in their mouths or noses is too great. It is a good rule for a small child not to handle raw meat, but as that child grows older that rule is supposed to pass away as they learn to understand what the actual dangers of raw meat are and how to safely deal with those dangers. That learning sets them free from the old rules to explore their freedom by cooking many different things. But if the child doesn’t grow beyond the simple rule-based understanding, they will never know that freedom and that is what seems to be happening.

And, as it is with that one particular rule, so it is with many of the rules that we grew up with. The point behind them is not simple obedience. The point is to understand their purpose in the love that is behind them. This is something that the Apostle Paul clearly understood when he said, “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:10) This is something that these children will have to learn as they mature to adulthood or they will never know the true freedom that they were born to inherit. They will simply be slaves to obedience.

Another thing that sometimes happens with children as they grow older is that they may become confused about why their parents love them. Now, I have absolutely no doubt that Jackson and Amelia’s parents love them because they love them. They don’t love them based on how well they follow the various rules of the household. But sometimes that message gets confused and children start to think that they can only earn their parents’ love and approval by obedience and by living up to their parents’ expectations.

This also is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the rules. And, unfortunately, many adults carry that misunderstanding with them all through their lives. They continue to think that they must earn love, approval and meaning by how well they live up to the expectations of others. They often especially assume this in their relationship with God. This error also leads to unnecessary and often debilitating guilt when we feel like we don’t measure up.

Does that teach us something about our Christian lives? Absolutely! The Bible is just full of laws, rules and commandments. This is true both of the Old Testament and New. These are all expectations that are placed upon us. And it is quite possible, indeed, I would say very common, for Christians to become fixed upon those expectations and to think that it is by living up to them that will become acceptable to God. But that is the understanding of a child – a child who may not know where those expectations come from. Like with Jackson and Amelia’s parents, those expectations come out of love – out of God’s love for us and God’s desire to protect us from what is bad for us. When we fail to understand that, all we are left with is obedience. We think that we can please God by being good enough and we never succeed.

That’s why Jesus came, by the way. Jesus came to show us what was really behind all that God had done and said – that God only acted out of love and only sought love in return from us. Jesus gave us such a powerful demonstration of the length and the heights and the depths of God’s love that he was willing to give his own life that we might know what God’s love actually looked like. The gospel teaches us that our relationship with God is based on love, not rules. Reflecting on these children reminds us of that truth.

So there clearly is something that Jackson and Amelia can teach us about our Christian lives today. But I don’t think we’re quite done yet. Jesus specifically brought that child among the disciples to speak to them about how they were struggling with each other about who was the greatest – about who should get their way and who mattered most. How can these children help us to get past those kinds of concerns that, honestly, still plague the church to this very day? Well, our prayer for these children today is that they grow up to be strong individuals who know who they are and therefore don’t need to put other people down in order to feel good about themselves. That is who we are all called to be, in Christ.

But they will grow up in a world that doesn’t operate that way – a world where people often feel superior to others because of differences like race or gender or status. That is because people have misunderstood the reason behind the rules. They know they are not good enough in themselves and they therefore think that the only way they can be acceptable is by putting down other people. At the very extreme end of that, we have people walking into places like synagogues and opening fire. We don’t go to such extremes in the church, but we do sometimes have a bad habit of putting people down over differences, just like the disciples did it when they were walking with Jesus.

These children teach us that we don’t need to do that – that because we are in Christ, we don’t need to earn our acceptance by seeming better than others. That is why Paul can write to the church, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Old distinctions like race or gender or status, they don’t matter anymore. No one has to be any greater than anyone else to be acceptable to God and so the need to put one another down has disappeared. This also Jackson and Amelia can teach us, it is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ in whose name they have been baptized today.

When “Fanboys” Change their Minds

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 15th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 14 October, 2018 © Scott McAndless

John 20:19-29, Acts 20:7-12, Psalm 16:1-11

f there is one thing you need to know about Simon, it is this. He loves Apple. I’m not talking about the fruit here; I’m talking about the company. Simon doesn’t just like Apple products, Simon doesn’t just exclusively use Apple products. Apple products give meaning to his entire life.

I mean, you probably know some people who always have the latest and greatest model of the iPhone^®, who you never see without the ends of Apple Earpods^® hanging out of their ears, who do all of their work on a Macbook Pro^®, read and create with an iPad^® and an Apple Pencil^®, but I’m not just talking about that. For Simon that is only the beginning. He does that almost without having to think about it.

No, Simon goes out of his way to make sure that every part of his life bears the Apple logo on it. His entire home is run by his HomePod^®. Any appliance that is not able to connect to it is not the kind of appliance that Simon wants to have. Any television show that is not available on AppleTV^® is a show that Simon doesn’t need to watch. Simon doesn’t have a life, he has iLife^® and that is good enough for him. That’s Simon. If you know that about Simon, you will know everything there is to know. You will know how he will react in every situation because he will do whatever Siri^® tells him to do. He once drove into a ditch because Apple Maps^® told him to.

Do you know a Simon? I have known a few. And if you don’t know someone who is that big of a fan of Apple products, maybe you know a fan of some other brand: Honda, Nike or maybe Tim Hortons. So, if you don’t know Simon, just imagine for a moment that you do. Can you see him there – wearing his Apple Watch^®, Think Different^® t-shirt, sporting a tattoo of an apple with one bite out of it? You know the type.

So let’s say you know a Simon. You know that Apple is the organizing principle of his life until one day it isn’t. Yes, one day Simon comes along holding an Android phone and tells you that he is now Android all the way. What would you think? Wouldn’t you assume that something serious – maybe even earth shattering – had happened in Simon’s life to make such a radical change? You might not know what, of course. Maybe he had his iPhone^® explode in his hand or maybe he had an Android phone literally save his life. You might not know what, but you would know with certainty that something undeniable had happened.

Okay, now consider this. You have eleven guys – just them and a few of their friends – that you have always known one thing about. Most of the time they are pretty normal people. They work, they play, they eat with a few strange habits but they are just regular folks. But there is this one odd thing about them. One day a week they treat completely differently.

I’m not just saying that they take that day off (which is in itself a pretty extraordinary thing in our 24 hour seven days a week world). It’s that that day is completely different for them. They won’t do anything. If the fire goes out in their house, they won’t even relight it. They get on an elevator that day, and they won’t even press the button to say which floor they want to get off on. They are just freakishly strange about this day, so much so that the way that they keep that day gives meaning and definition to their entire week. You might even say that the way they keep that day gives definition and meaning to their entire life. That is how significant it is to them. That day of the week, by the way, is Saturday.

And then, one day, you run into them and everything has changed. All of a sudden, they don’t care about Saturday at all. It is just another day for them. All of a sudden it’s all about Sunday. Sunday is the day that means the world to them and that gives meaning to their entire week and their entire lives. You’ve got to figure that something very important and undeniable happened to them on a Sunday.

That is the quandary we have when we look at the early Christian movement. The early Christian Church, in the years following the death of Jesus, was entirely made up of Jews. And, as Jews, these were people for whom the keeping of the seventh day of the week, Saturday, meant everything. It wasn’t just a day off for them, it was, as I have portrayed, an observance that gave meaning to their entire existence. And yet the evidence clearly indicates that, all of a sudden, all of these Jews just stopped observing the Sabbath. Saturday suddenly meant almost nothing to them. And instead, it was suddenly all about an entirely different day of the week; it was all about Sunday.

People don’t do that, don’t make that kind of radical change, without a very good reason. You have to assume that something happened to them, something very powerful, that made them look at the entire week and at their entire lives in a very different way.

So, the obvious question when you look at the early church is this, what happened? The short answer to that question, as explained in our reading from the Catechism this morning, is the resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday. That is the one thing that changed everything for the church. In fact, I happen to believe that perhaps the greatest evidence we can present for the reality of the resurrection of Jesus is that that is about the only way we can possibly explain why a bunch of Jews would make such a drastic change in their lives. Only something as extraordinary as a resurrection could have convinced them to do that.

But I know how we usually think of that. We think of the resurrection as a one-time event. It only happened on one Sunday, Easter Sunday. But I am not sure that the early Christians experienced it exactly like that.

This morning we read the accounts of three Sundays in the life of the early church. The first Sunday that we read about, in the Gospel of John, was, of course, a story of Easter Sunday. “When it was evening on that day (that is, Easter day), the first day of the week (that is, Sunday), and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews...” So what we have in this passage is the church, in the form of the disciples gathered together, on a Sunday. And when the church is gathered in this way, they have an experience of the Risen Christ. “Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

I realize that you’re going to tell me that there is nothing very extraordinary about that. It’s Easter! Of course the disciples had an experience of the Risen Christ; that’s what Easter is about. But stay with me a moment here because I don’t think the gospel writer is quite done in his explanation of what the church really experienced, because what is the very next thing that he says?

“A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them.”[1] so we jump immediately to the next Sunday, the next meeting of the church, as if nothing significant has happened in the meantime. And, indeed, I think that John is saying that nothing has happened. I think it’s important for John to say that the church next experienced the risen Jesus when they gathered again on a Sunday.

There are other stories of the church meeting with Jesus after his death that happened on Sundays. There’s one at the end of the Gospel of Luke where two disciples are walking along on a Sunday and are joined by a third who explains the scriptures to them and then all three sit down to share a meal and, when the stranger breaks the bread, the others suddenly recognize that the risen Jesus is among them. That also is a description of the early church meeting on a Sunday where two or three are gathered, the scriptures are preached and bread is broken. That gospel writer, Luke, is also saying that this was the regular Sunday experience of the early church.

We read one more story how about the church gathering on Sunday this morning. This one happens many years later as told in the book of Acts, but everything in this story sounds very familiar. It’s Sunday, the church comes together to break bread, and there’s even a preacher there to preach a sermon. In fact, in a way that no doubt resonates with many Christians down through the centuries, there is a preacher who has a tendency to preach a little bit long. I mean, I’m sure that nobody in the entire history of this church has ever thought the sermon was too long so maybe you can’t relate to that, but I have heard that many Christians do think that sometimes. So we have it all, a Sunday gathering, breaking bread or communion, and a really, really long sermon. It is a stereotypical Sunday church meeting that Christians from down through the ages would recognize.

But there is one truly extraordinary element in this Sunday meeting as told in the Book of Acts. It happens when Eutychus falls asleep while Paul drones on and on. He plunges from the third-story window apparently to his death. What is important about that story? Is it just another great miracle story among many miracle stories in the book of Acts? No, I think there’s something special about this one because it happens when the church is gathered on Sunday.

The writer tells his story very carefully at this point. He doesn’t say that Eutychus is actually dead, merely that everyone thinks that he’s dead. And when Paul comes along he doesn’t explicitly say that Paul raises the dead boy to life. It could be that Paul is saying that the others are merely mistaken in thinking that the boy is dead. The author avoids saying in so many words that it is a resurrection miracle, but he certainly gets across the point that the church experienced it as a miracle. The emphasis is certainly on their experience and feelings in the last phrase, “Meanwhile they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted.”

I think that this is the author’s way of saying that, even many years after the first Easter, the church was still experiencing the power and reality of the resurrection of Jesus when they gathered on Sundays – in this case, of course, experiencing it very practically in the salvation of Eutychus.

I’m not saying that it happened so dramatically every week, of course, but I would say that the New Testament writers are in agreement that the experience of the risen Christ was not just limited to one Sunday or just to a short period of time. It was something that kept on happening over and over again each Sunday as the church continued to meet, to pray, to listen to scriptures and break bread, they discovered the risen Jesus among them in many ways.

It didn’t only happen on Sundays, of course. I have no doubt that there were some pretty amazing experiences that happened on other days of the week. But it was on Sundays, when they gathered, that it happened most consistently and reliably for the early church. And that is the only thing that can really explain how a bunch of Saturday fanboys were willing to change everything that they had ever been and had ever told them who they were to suddenly start treating Sunday like it was the only day that truly mattered.

But here’s is the thing: it doesn’t just need to be them. Our Lord Jesus Christ, crucified by Pilate so long ago, is nevertheless still just as alive today as he was for the early church. If they consistently experienced the power of his resurrection week after week when they gathered, then why wouldn’t we? The bottom line is that there is no reason why we shouldn’t. Indeed, I know that it still happens sometimes. I have experienced it myself and I have heard of the experiences of many others. Such experiences are a gift of God, come in many forms, and they are received (like all of God’s gifts) by faith. There is no reason why you should not be able to have such an experience of the risen Jesus.

In fact, I would suggest that the main reason why it doesn’t happen more is because we have largely convinced ourselves not to expect it. In our stubbornness, we have closed ourselves off from the experience by the ways in which we are always rationalizing everything, focusing on the negative and trying to keep control of everything. But just think if you, like those early Christians, were to approach each Sunday with an overwhelming expectation – if you were to walk into church each week not knowing where you would find the risen Jesus (perhaps in a reading or in a word that was shared, perhaps in a beautiful piece of music, in the face of your neighbour, perhaps even in a piece of bread and a cup of wine), but knowing that he would be there for you. Maybe you would also learn the true meaning of Sunday.

[1] Some translations here have “Eight days later.” It is true that that is what the original Greek text says, but, in the context, the first Sunday seems to be counted as the first day, eight days later would mean the next Sunday. I believe this translation is correct.

Sermon Video:

Gratitude

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, October 9th, 2018 in Minister

Genesis 1:27-2:3, Matthew 12:1-14, Psalm 92:1-15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and out came this calf

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 1st, 2018 in Minister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be for that God.

Why the commandments?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, September 24th, 2018 in Minister

Deuteronomy 6:17-25, Mark 12:28-34, Psalm 19:7-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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