Author: Scott McAndless

Hespeler, 5 March, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Lent 1

Luke 19:1-10, Hebrews 13:1-6, Psalm 112

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acchaeus was entirely comfortable in that tree. That is one thing that we fail to understand about Zacchaeus in his story in the Gospel of Luke. It says in the gospel that he climbed the tree because he wanted to see Jesus and he was very short – was a wee little man – and was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to see Jesus among the crowds that had gathered in Jericho to see him. And , sure, that was true enough as far as it went, but it fails to take into account the fact that, as far as Zacchaeus was concerned, from the branches of a tree was the perfect vantage point for the kind of encounter with Jesus that he wanted.

      Zacchaeus was, you see, a certain type of a person. He was what you might call an observer of life. He had an insatiable desire to perceive and study and understand whatever he could to the best of his ability. As such he had a very long attention span – could sit and observe the world for hours and never waver in his attentiveness. And so, when he heard that someone as unique and interesting as Jesus of Nazareth was passing through Jericho, of course he was going to arrange to observe him.

      And the tree was perfect for him because it allowed him to see everything. The fact that he had to run ahead and wait for Jesus to pass that way was no problem for him as he never lost patience waiting to observe something interesting. But there was another reason why the tree was so ideal. Zacchaeus was an observer but he was a detached observer. He didn’t want to be down there interacting with what was happening. As a matter of fact, he never really felt comfortable in a crowd situation like that where people might touch him or invade his personal space. No, it was just better to observe from a neutral vantage point. The tree was ideal.

      And there are people like that, like Zacchaeus, aren’t there? I’ll bet you have known some. They are the great observers of life but they often take a lot of persuasion to go beyond watching and thinking about what they see and actually engage with the world. They are often brilliant, often the very first to come up with new ways of seeing things. But it is often easier for them to observe and think and collect experiences than it is for them to do something with what they learn.

      There are also some other traits that are found in such people. Often they are people who are looking for some security in their lives more than anything. This is often because, at some point in their early development, they have gone through a time when they strongly feared that their basic needs were in danger of not being met. They weren’t assured that the food, shelter, clothing, affection or belonging would be there for them. This means that they do not feel entirely safe in this world and so they tend to withdraw from close contact, they hesitate to trust too much and are strongly protective of their personal spaces. They become content to merely observe the world and store up whatever knowledge of the world they discover.

      This same sense of insecurity also compels them to store up possessions as a kind of insurance against whatever may happen or go wrong in life. They keep everything and hesitate to throw anything out because it all means something to them and, as they always say, “You never know when you might need it.”

      If this particular kind of person has one big problem, therefore, it is avarice. Their root sin is greed. I am not necessarily talking about that in terms of them being stingy with money, though that can be part of it. They are stingy with many things: their knowledge and understanding, their space, their emotions and thoughts. They share none of it easily. And sometimes that can certainly also mean that they are greedy with money.

      I would suggest to you that Zacchaeus in this story in Luke’s Gospel is a perfect example of the kind of person that I am talking about here. Not only is he someone who clearly prefers to take an objective vantage point in order to observe and find out things and someone who would rather not mingle with the crowd, he is also described as being very rich and having many possessions, some of which he obtained by defrauding people. I don’t think that it is a big stretch to say that Zacchaeus likely had some issues with greed as well.

      So Zacchaeus is a good example of this sort of person, but chances are that you have known such a person yourself. They are wonderful people who have been able to bring much good into this world through their ability to observe and understand. But they, like all people have certain things that they struggle with. In this case, those things seem to be intimacy and greed. The question is what can be done to help such people?

      The traditional Christian answer to that question, by the way, has been to blame and to shame. We just tell people that they are wrong to be greedy and to store up possessions. We tell people that they should share with others more freely even if that is hard for them. This has been the traditional moralistic approach of the church to effecting ethical change in people’s lives in general. But I am not sure how successful that strategy has been in really helping people to change. We need a new strategy.

      So I would like us to climb up in our own sycamore tree and objectively observe what Jesus does for Zacchaeus in this story. It is quite clear that, when Zacchaeus meets Jesus, it does make a difference. He is a man transformed by the time Jesus leaves town. So what is Jesus’ secret and is it possible that Jesus’ approach may be just the kind of thing that people like Zacchaeus need to reach the fullness of who they were always meant to be?

      It is interesting to note that Jesus’ approach is not to attack Zacchaeus over his greed or tendency to store up personal possessions. Jesus does target something else – he targets Zacchaeus’ tendency to isolate himself in order to observe. Jesus comes to the place where Zacchaeus has set himself up in his nice safe tree and looks right up at what he thought was his perfect hiding place and says, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.”

      Do you realize what that feels like for someone like Zacchaeus? Jesus has just invited himself into Zacchaeus’ personal space, his sanctum and the place where he keeps all of the possessions that make him feel safe. Jesus just barges in, and invites himself into all of this. It must have made Zacchaeus feel very vulnerable and off his guard. But Jesus also knew that there was no way that Zacchaeus could refuse and that the discomfort was necessary. Zacchaeus would always opt for protection and safety unless the issue was forced. Jesus needed to get in.

      But once Jesus had broken through Zacchaeus’ layers of protection, something amazing happened. Something almost unprecedented in all the ministry of Jesus. We are not told the whole story and we kind of have to fill in the details. It says that Zacchaeus welcomed Jesus, which likely means that he brought him into his private space, fed him and put him up for the night or even for a few nights. Luke sort of jumps over that part of the story and only reports on the reaction that the time Jesus spent with him provoked in the town: “All who saw it began to grumble and said, ‘He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.’” All of that part of the story gets skipped, nevertheless, it seems clear that Jesus must have spent at least some time when he had Zacchaeus’ undivided attention.

      And what did Jesus do with that time? Well, that’s obvious. He did what he always did – he talked to him about the kingdom of God. He probably told him stories and parables to explain what the kingdom was like and, when Zacchaeus asked him what someone had to do in order to be part of that kingdom, Jesus probably said something like what he said to other people in similar circumstances: “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” (Mark 10:21)

      And Jesus, generally speaking, didn’t have a lot of success in asking that kind of level of response to the kingdom of God from people. When he said it to a rich, young ruler, for example, the young man just turned and walked away in shock, unable to even grasp what Jesus was saying.

      But here is where we see what is special and unique about Zacchaeus. Remember that Zacchaeus was an observer – someone who had incredible focus and was always ready to learn from whatever he observed. He was someone who was always ready to absorb new knowledge like a sponge. He now applied those talents to observing this Jesus who stood before him. And the result was that Zacchaeus was able to absorb what Jesus was really trying to say probably better than any other individual in the gospel story.

      In other words, Zacchaeus got the message of Jesus better than anybody else I can think of in the entire gospel story. He indicates that by saying to Jesus, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Those are the words of someone who has understood what the kingdom of God is actually about better than all the priests, all the disciples and all the scribes you can find in the entire Bible. Zacchaeus got the message that they all missed.

      And so the wonderful gift of these extraordinary people who are like Zacchaeus is this: they can observe and absorb truth from what they observe to a degree that eludes most of us. Once you break through to them and get past the protections that they have ringed themselves with, you find a person who is able to listen, pay heed and absorb like few others can. We live in an age when the art of listening often seems all but forgotten. What a marvel a person like Zacchaeus is in such a world.

      We live in a world filled with greed, driven by greed and often destroyed by greed. Of course, our God doesn’t love greed and what it can do to people. But God is compassionate and willing to understand us. He doesn’t just condemn the sin, he seeks to heal the underlying problem. That is why, in the Letter to the Hebrews, the message of God is not merely, “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.”God is always willing to speak to our heart and remind us why we don’t have to seek security by storing up an abundance of things. And so the writer of the Hebrews goes on: “for he has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’”

      God comes to you as you are, understands what drives you and is committed enough to break through your defences and speak to your heart. We see Jesus doing that very thing for Zacchaeus; he will do it for all of us. If only we could all be as ready as Zacchaeus was to really attend to what God has to say to us.

     

Hespeler, 26 February, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 37:1-11, Genesis 45:1-8, 1 Peter 2:1-10

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ifferent people are driven by different things on their path through this life. I think we all recognize that. Some people are driven by ambition or pride. Others are motivated by greed or envy or lust. But there are some people for whom all of that really means very little. There is really only one thing that matters to them: that they are unique and special.

      Now, I realize that we are all, in our own ways, special. We are all individuals who have a unique makeup of habits, traits and interests. So, in a way, these people aren’t any more unique than anyone else. It is more a matter of how such people want to be seen and treated. They want everyone to see and notice how unique they are. They need to stand out from the crowd in some significant way.

      If you want to compliment such a person – I mean, give them a compliment that will actually mean something to them – do not bother saying things like, “You look nice,” or “You did a great job.” They will hardly hear compliments like that. But if you say to them, “Wow, I’ve never seen anybody pull off a look quite like that before,” or “I didn’t even think that anyone could do that like you did it,” they will likely go away very happy and remember you fondly.

      There are not necessarily a high proportion of such people in any given group because most groups can only tolerate so many people who grab all of the attention. But I imagine that you have known some. When they are around, after all, you can hardly help but notice them. They are brightly dressed, doing something weird and probably making a lot of noise doing it.

      The great Biblical example of such a person is the patriarch Joseph, the son of Jacob. Throughout his long story, as told in the Book of Genesis, Joseph goes through many ups and downs. He goes from favoured son to slave to prisoner to prince. But at every point in his story, both in times of good fortune and of bad, you can always say one thing about him: he somehow always manages to stand out and get noticed.

      There are probably some people here who are like Joseph. There are others who may have a Joseph in their life or in their family. And there are still others who have a little bit of Joseph in them. I think I have a little bit. Somewhere deep down in­side, I do struggle with that desire to be recognized to be special and unique and I certainly have done some things in my life to get noticed for being different (and, no, I am not going to tell you what they were right now.) So I think it is worthwhile spending some time talking about Joseph and his incredible journey. God did something in his life – brought about a maturity in him over time that we should pay heed to and aspire to.

      We first meet Joseph as a very young man. He is one of the youngest children of his father but he is also his father’s favourite. And right away Joseph stands out as special and unique. Now, it may seem at first that this is not something that Joseph wants for himself but that it is rather something that his father does to him. After all, it is his father who gives him the rather unique coat. In some ancient manuscripts is described as having fancy sleeves while in others to be made of many colours, but clearly, however it had been made, it definitely stood out from the ordinary.

      But that was dad’s idea, not Joseph’s. Maybe that is how it all started with Jacob treating his son as special, but at some point Joseph clearly internalised that message. We see it coming out in his dreams. Joseph’s dreams are not hard to interpret at all. Unlike some of the other dreams in Joseph’s story that take a real expert to interpret them, the meaning of his dreams are immediately obvious to everyone. Joseph is having dreams that mark him as being extraordinarily special and unique – so much so that everyone else is bowing down before him.

      I know that dreams mean a great deal in this story of Joseph. They are generally understood as being key indicators of future events. These dreams of Joseph do indeed predict the future events of the story as, before the end of it, Joseph will be a powerful ruler in Egypt and the members of his family will literally bow down before him. But I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that these dreams are also an indication of Joseph’s internal psychology. They are about how he is coming to see himself.

      But even as Joseph begins to understand himself and what really matters to him, we realize that there is a negative side to being like him. It inspires envy in the people around him. His brothers start to hate him and even his father, who loves him, becomes concerned. Envy is, in fact, the big issue that people like Joseph will run into. They easily inspire it in others who can quickly get tired of them always stealing the spotlight.

      But the really deep secret of the Josephs is that they tend to struggle with envy within their own soul. You can maybe understand why. The problem with wanting to be different and unique is that there is always the potential that there is somebody else out there who has something that you haven’t. And so Josephs are constantly on the watch for anybody who might just be getting too much attention or praise. The deep, dark secret of the Josephs is that, even as they suffer as victims of envy (which Joseph certainly does) they may harbour more of it in their heart than anybody else. Envy is, in fact, the sin that lies at the heart of a Joseph and, if redemption is not found for that sin, they will never be the person that God created them to be.

      The entire story of Joseph, therefore, is the story of how God worked in Joseph’s life to bring about redemption, renewal and change. In the beginning, Joseph is an unredeemed Joseph. We see that in the way that he deals with his dreams. He is driven by envy of his brothers (who are all bigger and more important culturally than him) to boast of the contents of his dreams. And of course, his brothers are all very wrong in how they respond to this boasting. They plot to kill him and then tone down their response to merely selling him off into slavery! We, of course, condemn them for what they do. But at the same time, if Joseph had dealt with his envy differently, maybe they wouldn’t have reacted as they did.

      Now the work that God did in Joseph’s life took many steps. I cannot do his story justice in a brief summary and you really do need to read his story for yourself. It is one of the most accessible stories in the entire Bible – it almost reads like an ancient novel – so I would definitely suggest that you take the time to read it in Genesis 37-46.

      There are many ups and downs as Joseph deals with slavery (during which he stands out among all the other slaves in the household and ends up running it) and then becomes a prisoner (during which he stands out from the others in the prison population and ends up running the prison) and then becomes the Pharaoh’s advisor (where he stands out from all of the other advisors and ends up running the country). There is obviously a very clear pattern in all of this. God may be at work in Joseph’s life and taking him through some very serious ups and downs but God clearly isn’t taking away anything that makes Joseph special and unique and very much in the habit of standing out in any crowd. God, I believe, is not at all interested in taking away the things that make you uniquely you.

      But, at the same time, God is working on Joseph’s life and working, in particular on that venomous envy that coils at the root of Joseph’s life. We discover this near the end of the story when the dream that Joseph had at the beginning is finally fulfilled and Joseph, ruler in Egypt, reveals himself to his brothers and they bow down before him. This is Joseph’s moment of triumph – that moment we all hope for when we get to say, “I told you so.”

      But surprisingly, and seemingly uncharacteristically, Joseph doesn’t do that. Here is what Joseph says to his brothers at this key moment: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here, but God; he has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”

      Compare that to the way that Joseph described his dreams to his brothers at the beginning of the story. Back then it was all about “me” and how everyone would give attention to “me.” Now when he speaks about everything that has happened and even as everyone is actually giving all of that attention to him, he is not at all interested in revelling in that attention. God has given a new perspective. Now Joseph is able to see and speak of God’s presence and God’s action in and through everything that has happened to him.

      Now, of course, what Joseph says does not exclude consideration of himself and his part in everything that has taken place. He says, “God sent me before you to preserve life.” He recognizes, to a certain extent that he had unique talents and insights and abilities that meant that he was maybe even the only person who could have played a part in what God’s intentions were. Joseph is still special and he still knows it. This is such an important part of his personality that God is not interested in taking it away from him.

      But what Joseph has gained is an incredible insight into how he, in his uniqueness, can be an essential part of what it is that God is doing in the world. This allows him to give all glory and praise to God when he sees God working in and through his life.

      This is, in fact, the special gift that a mature and redeemed Joseph – a mature person who is motivated by that need to be unique – can offer to the church and to the world. When they finally get to that point in their life when God has worked on them enough to purge away their envy, they are uniquely able to see where they can fit in with God’s plan. Unfortunately a lot of us (who are not like Joseph) can miss that and wander through life with no clear vision of how we can be a part of what it is that God is doing in the world. The incredibly valuable gift that the Josephs give us is a new vision of how each one of us can be an essential part of the work of God’s kingdom on earth. And honestly, if we don’t have that, we will never reach our full potential as the church in this world.

      What are some practical applications of Joseph’s story therefore? Well, first of all, it can teach us, when we come across people like Joseph (people who seem to have this deep need to be recognized and valued for being unique) in life or in the church, we can value them for who they are and for the insight they can give us. And if, as must be the case for some of us, you recognize some of Joseph’s traits in you, it can teach you to be open to allow God to work on the envy that may very well be hidden deep in your life so that you may become truly open to see how you can work together with God to see transformation for good in this world.

     

Hespeler, 19 February, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 32:13-32, 1 Timothy 4:1-5, Psalm 34:11-22

acob, the son of Isaac, was always driven by one thing: the need for success. It had started, for him, even in the womb. Jacob had been a twin with his brother Esau and, as it turns out, was fated to be born second in a world where the difference between being the firstborn and the second born was only everything. But do you think that Jacob was inclined to accept that second place position? Not that all! We are told that he fought for dominance even in the womb with his brother. And, even when Esau came out first, Jacob followed right after gr asping his heel.

      Faced with the seemingly overwhelming disadvantage of being born second, Jacob never gave up. First he persuaded his brother to sell him his birthright for the price of a few lentils and then, when for some strange reason, nobody would honour a contract made over seaming bowl of hot stew, Jacob went ahead and tricked his blind old father into giving him the blessing of the elder child instead.

      As a result, everybody hated Jacob (except his mother who was in on it with him). His big brother Esau even vowed that he would kill Jacob, but none of that mattered, you see, because Jacob had won. Sure he had to run for his life, but he had succeeded, that was clearly the only thing that mattered to him. While he was running, he had a famous dream about a ladder, a perfect symbol of the ladder of success that he was building his life around.

      And we all know people like that, don’t we? They seem to live a charmed life, going from success to ever greater success. They are attractive and charismatic. If they are in sales they can sell you just about anything. Many of them go into politics where they tend to advance to positions of ever more power and influence. You may be secretly jealous of them, of course, but you really can’t help but admire all that they achieve. They are the heroes of our modern age. They are the people that everyone wants to be.

      Of course, their need for success can run so deep that it becomes pathological. That can be devastating to them when success doesn’t come. Jacob went through that. When he ran away from his brother Esau, he landed in the country of Haran and he met this beautiful woman named Rachel. He fell in love with her right away which meant that he had to have her. His marriage to Rachel was to be his next success. But Rachel’s father, Laban, tricked him into marrying her less beautiful older sister, Leah instead.

      Oh, you can bet that Jacob was angry that he had been beaten like that! But a defeat like that will only make a man like Jacob more committed to win in the long run. And, in the end, after about fourteen years spent in his father-in-law Laban’s house­hold, he plundered the man of everything of value that he owned.

      Jacob left with both of Laban’s daughters (both Rachel and Leah) as his wives and their slaves as his concubines. They took the very best of Laban’s flocks and herds with them and even stole Laban’s family gods – precious idols that had been in the family forever. Even more important, Jacob left with the most important indicator of success in that ancient society: twelve fine sons. I am sure that, as Jacob watched Laban disappear in his rear view mirror, he said to himself, “Who won this time, old man!”

      The world seems to demand that we all set our hearts on the pursuit of success. After all, success in this world is often seen as the only measure of a person’s value. But there are some, like Jacob, who not only have a special gift for finding success but also a deep-seated need for it. The quest for success can be a very noble thing, of course, but Jacob’s story also reminds us that there is a dark side to being this type of person. It seems that Jacob’s need to win was so powerful that it pushed him to do things that were not exactly ethical.

      In particular, you have to admit, Jacob had a tendency to play fast and loose with the truth. He often got ahead by means of deception. It was by lying and pretending to be his own brother that he was able to trick his father into giving him the blessing. It was through trickery and deception that he was able to get control of the best of his father-in-law’s flocks and herds. In fact, when you look closely at every incident when Jacob made progress towards his goals, you will probably find that there was a point where he didn’t exactly tell the truth in order to get there.

      And that doesn’t just seem to be a part of Jacob’s story. It seems to be true of many people who, like him, are primarily motivated by the pursuit of success. I mean, think of it this way: what sort of professions do people go into who are driven by success? I think we would agree that a lot of them go into politics. Those who don’t often end up as very successful lawyers or salespeople or other kinds of high powered business people. These are the professions that will most feed people who need to succeed.

      Now, if I were to ask you what are the most dishonestprofessions, what do you suppose the answer would be? Chances are that, in any random group, you would come up with a list that included what: politics, law and used car sales. Now please understand me: I would never say that all politicians and all lawyers and all sales people are liars. They are not. I have known people in all of those categories who were nothing but honest, full of integrity and honour. But the perception is still there, isn’t it? At the very least, these are the sorts of professions that seem to push people to stretch the truth and speak in ways that only benefit themselves.

      Sometimes, these days, it seems as if we are all living in Jacob’s world – a world in which success is the only thing that matters and in which truth is usually the first casualty in the pursuit of that success. When I think of this in light of Jacob’s story, it actually seems inevitable. Once we had built our entire Western society around the goals of Jacob – the goals of worldly success – it was inevitable what we would sooner or later find ourselves in a society that had given up on the truth and retreated into the comfort and convenience of fake news, alternative facts and the post-truth world that we seem to be living in today.

      But the story of Jacob in the Bible isn’t just a story of a man, who is fairly comfortable lying and who is pursuing success with everything he’s got. His story is also about how God reached out to him and called him to embrace the fullness of who he had been created to be. As a result, Jacob isn’t just a representative of all those people who are driven by success but also a representation of who they can become.

      We meet Jacob in our reading this morning from the Book of Genesis when he has made a very momentous decision. He has made the decision to go back to where he came from – to revisit his own past. This can be a very risky thing to do for people who have lived their whole lives seeking success at all costs because you are likely to find yourself face to face with those you have deceived or hurt on the way up the ladder of success.

      That is, of course, the very thing that Jacob dreads in this passage. He knows that his brother Esau is waiting for him back at home. But Jacob has decided to do whatever he needs to do in order to seek reconciliation and make amends for the past. That is the first work that God wants to do in the life of you if you are like Jacob: help you to reconcile with the wounds you have caused people in your own past.

      This is not an easy process for Jacob – indeed he has to put everything that he has achieved in his life on the line for the sake of reconciliation (including his family which he sends on across the river ahead of him) but it is worth it, because it is the first step to the wholeness of that he needs.

      But there is an even more important task that waits for Jacob. Once he has done that – once he has determined to set out and confront his own past and put everything on the line – he is left all alone. “Jacob was left alone;” we are told, “and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” He now enters into the most important struggle: his own struggle with God.

      What is different about this wrestling match, however, is not how difficult his opponent is. Jacob has faced powerful opposition his whole life and triumphed. What is different this time, is what he is fighting for. Jacob, at this point in his life, is no longer fighting for the things he has devoted his life to: success, recognition, taking one more step up the ladder of life.

      This is how the climax of the wrestling match is described: Jacob is grappling with the stranger who actually appears to be losing. That is how powerful a fighter Jacob is. “Then [the stranger] said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’”

      What is Jacob struggling for now? He is fighting for a blessing first of all: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” And fighting for blessing is different than fighting for success. Jacob has finally realized that there are some things that God can give him that the world and success in the world cannot. He has realized the truth that Jesus put so well, “What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves.” (Luke 9:25) This is the work of maturity that God has done in Jacob’s life.

      Jacob, therefore, is not just fighting for a blessing, he is fighting for his self-identity. That is why he is given a new name in the midst of the wrestling match: “Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’” Jacob, after all this long journey and struggle finally understands who he is – who he has always been meant to be – the one who struggles with God. His struggle will no longer be only for success and advancement because he recognizes that blessing and knowing himself means more. And for whose sake does Jacob struggle now? Not merely for himself, I think, but for his family. The blessing he seeks is for all of them.

      I look around at the world today, and I see many who are oriented towards the never-ending quest for success and advancement. Some of them pursue it so relentlessly that they’ll sacrifice everything, even and especially the truth, in order to get there. Some, when the success that they have oriented themselves towards, doesn’t appear, retreat into lies and hide from the truth. We seem to have heard a lot about politicians doing that lately.

      The good news is that God doesn’t want to leave the Jacobs of this world to their own devices. God will do a work of transformation in them if only they will open themselves to it. This is the promise of the gospel. If you are someone who has sacrificed everything for the sake of worldly success and you find that there is still something missing, God would love to meet you by the side of the river – to wrestle with you over the mistakes and even the lies of your past – but he will do it in order to bring you hope and a blessing. It will be a blessing both for you and for the people you love.

      I am thankful for all of the Jacobs and all the great things that they achieve. What would the world be without them? But I also pray that they would open their hearts to hear the deeper blessing that their God has for them.

     

Hespeler, 12 February, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Luke 10:38-42, John 11:17-27, Psalm 12

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e all know a Martha. For that matter, many of us are Marthas. I hope you all recognize her type in our story this morning from the Gospel of Luke, but, just in case you’re not sure, let me lay out for you some of what I think that Martha’s backstory must have been.

      Martha was the oldest of three siblings. There was Martha, then her brother, Lazarus, and then the baby Mary. As often happens with the oldest child – maybe especially when the oldest is a girl – Martha was given a lot of responsibility early on. But of course, given the realities of the world that they lived in, the family pinned all of their hopes and dreams on the only son, on Lazarus. He was the one who had to succeed. Indeed his failure would destroy the fortunes of the entire family.

      And that was a problem because, from an early age, Lazarus was rather sickly. His lungs were weak; he always seemed to come down with fevers and spent as much time on his couch as he did learning a trade. Is it any surprise that Martha was the one who was always called upon to tend to him or to pick up the slack in the household when others were looking after him? Their parents, frankly, were at their wits end because of their worries for their son. If they lost him, they lost everything. And more often than not it was Martha that took care of them and helped them to calm down. She became like a mother to her own parents.

      And so it was that Martha, from a very early age, learned that there was one thing that he needed above all things. She needed to be needed. It was the one thing that gave meaning to her life, the one thing that she could not do without. And so Martha went to work to make sure that absolutely everyone needed her. No one could cook or clean or organize things better than Martha. In fact, she set things up so that nobody but her could figure out her system and do any of her work in her place. She made herself completely indispensable.

      When Martha’s parents fell sick, it was she who took care of them, of course. And when, in spite of her excellent care, they died, both of them within the space of about two weeks, she just automatically stepped into the parental role for her siblings. She did everything for Lazarus and Mary. And she was so good at everything she did that soon lots of other people were depending on her too – friends, neigh­bours, more distant relations. All any­one had to say to Martha was that they needed her and she could not resist. She served them.

      Don’t misunderstand me, she often regretted it later. She cursed herself for taking on too many tasks and trying to please too many people. How often did she berate herself? How often did she vow that next time she would just say no? But when she was there, faced with someone who needed her, she just couldn’t do it. Martha just needed… to be needed.

      So, now you know a little bit about Martha, do you recognize her? I’m that sure you have met her before. Some of you may even be her. I have certainly known many Marthas (and not all of them were women, by the way). I have especially known them in the life and the work of the church. They are the people who tend to do the lion’s share of the work in a given congregation. They are the people to whom you only need to say three small words, “I need you,” and they are there. The church, quite frankly, would probably not survive if it weren’t for the Marthas and I am frequently thankful for them.

      And we see Martha in action in our reading this morning in the Gospel of Luke. There are guests in her house – not just any guests, mind you but only the most famous preacher and wonderworker that has ever arisen in Galilee. And Martha is doing what she does best. She is bustling around the kitchen and the dining room and taking care of everyone, making herself indispensable. But there is a dark side – a bit of a bite to Martha in this story, isn’t there? And it is, in fact, the dark side that is common to all Marthas.

      In this story, Martha seems to snap suddenly. She has been taking care of everyone’s needs all afternoon – just like she always does – when she suddenly stops. She directs her complaint at Jesus even though she says she isn’t mad at him. “Lord,” she says, “do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.”

      I have known enough people like Martha to interpret what she says here. It may sound like she’s asking for help, but she isn’t exactly. First of all, Martha knows very well that, even if Jesus tells Mary to help her, that won’t make her happy because, let me tell you, Mary can’t do it right. She has never been able to do it as well as Martha. She’ll just get in the way. No, her message isn’t in the request for help, it is in her opening words, “Lord, do you not care?” She’s not looking for help, she is looking for sympathy, recognition and maybe even flattery. “Don’t you care that I am doing all this work all by myself because you’d better care!” She doesn’t just need to be needed, she needs the appreciation that comes with that.

      And I realize that appreciation is a good thing and that it is something that does us all good. (Always be generous in giving people appreciation; it will only sow good will.) But there is something dark going on in Martha in this passage. It is not just that she desires some appreciation, it is that she needs it. Her identity has become so caught up in being the one who helps that she needs the appreciation to know who she is.

      The problem at the heart of Martha’s life, in fact, is pride. I hesitate to call it by the name of pride because she does not suffer from the kind of egotistical self-centredness that we often associate with pride. Martha is the opposite of self-centred; she is selfless to a fault! But there is pride in what Martha is doing. She has taken on the self-image of the helper so completely that she has begun to believe that she and she alone is able to bring help. Everyone needs her but (and this is the sad part) she doesn’t need anyone. To believe that you don’t need anyone and that you cannot receive help from anyone is a particularly dangerous kind of pride, and it is the kind of pride to which Marthas are particularly susceptible.

      But it is even worse than that for Martha. It becomes clear that she has even concluded that she does not need God. If she had any inkling of how much she needed God, after all, where would she be? She would be right where Jesus tells her she ought to be: right beside her sister Mary at Jesus’ feet absorbing everything that he says like a sponge. But Martha, in her pride, has decided that she doesn’t need that.

      I have been deeply blessed throughout my life by many Marthas. Their service has so often been there to make life and work in the church bearable and meaningful. I would never presume to criticise a Martha because I do indeed appreciate them. But I have also known a few of them well enough to know that they often struggle as well. They struggle when they do too much, help too much and serve too much and so neglect their own needs. They struggle when they don’t receive the appreciation that they often deserve. And it can make them lash out like Martha does in front of Jesus. I also know that they often struggle to ask for help and mean it and that they have a hard time accepting help when it is offered.

      But do you want to hear something wonderful? I think that Jesus understood and appreciated Martha better than she even knew. He didn’t just rebuke her that day, he began to work in her for transformation. He didn’t seek to take her serving heart away from her, but he did help her with the pride that threatened to destroy that heart.

      These two sisters, Mary and Martha, are never again mentioned in the Gospel of Luke after that incident when Jesus was in their home, but they do surface later in the Gospel of John. The story in the Gospel of John must take place sometime later than the one in Luke because it comes near to the very end of Jesus’ ministry. So it turns out that we are given two distinct episodes out of Martha’s life: an earlier one when she had just started to know Jesus and another one very close to the end of his life. We get a chance to see what a difference Jesus had been able to make in her life.

      So what do we see in the more mature Martha in the story in the Gospel of John – the Martha who had had Jesus working in her life for a while. Jesus comes along this time at a much more difficult time for Martha and Mary. Their cherished brother, Lazarus, has died. Not only have they lost someone that they love, they have lost the one who is the security and hope of the family. If ever they needed help, they need it now. And the old Martha, the one we met in the Gospel of Luke was not very good at receiving help. What do we see now?

      When Jesus finally arrives, what happens? This time it is Mary who stays in the home but it is Martha who runs out of the house and straight to Jesus’ side. It is Martha who confesses to Jesus just how much she needs him – needed him four days ago in fact: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Even more important, it is Martha who proclaims an amazing trust in Jesus: “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

      What has happened to this woman? Rest assured that this is that same amazing woman that we met in the Gospel of Luke – a woman who knows how to take care of everyone’s needs. Why, I’ll bet that she has spent the last four days organizing funeral lunches and taking care of everyone who came to pay their respects. She still knows the joy that comes in serving others and being there to provide for them to the best of her ability. But her dealings with Jesus have also taught her something new – a humility that does not oppress her but actually makes her free to rest in being able to need another – in being able to need and trust Jesus.

      And, because she has grown so much, Martha is even ready to receive a fundamental truth about Jesus – one that few others were ready to hear at that point. “I am the resurrection and the life.” Jesus says to her. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” To this, Martha is also able to reply with a remarkable statement of faith: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

      Yes, the Marthas of this world are a wonderful gift to all of us. If you have a Martha in your life or in your circle of friends, you are truly blessed. Make sure them you appreciate them; it will mean a lot to them. But never forget that Jesus also has work that he wants to do in the life of the Marthas – in your life if you are one. Jesus wants to set you free from the burden of helping, that you might rest in him, learn to receive when you need to receive, and live in the joy of who God created you to be.

      Jesus did a marvelous work in the life of Martha. He still does that work today in the life of people like her. If you are a Martha, then practice trusting Jesus and admitting that you need Jesus. If you know or love a Martha, be patient with him or her as they learn that lesson. Expect miraculous transformation and I think you will see it.

     

Hespeler, 5 February, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Galatians 1:13-24, 2:11-14, Philippians 3:4b-11, Psalm 37:1-13

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aul of Tarsus was a very angry young man. When he first blasts onto the scene of the early Christian church in the Book of Acts he is described as “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” (Acts 9:1) His persecution of the church, which, by all the accounts, was ruthless and brutal, is probably the clearest example of what could happen when he allowed his anger to run away from him. But his anger was not, as we often assume, just connected to his rejection of what he saw as the new and heretical Christian faith.

      Even after Saul encountered the risen Jesus for himself, embraced the Christian faith and even changed his name and started to be known as Paul, his anger could still burn very hot and could be destructive even though his passion was now directed towards the positive message of the Christian gospel.

      We read this morning, in Paul’s own words, the account of the time that he got very, very angry with a man who may have been the most important person in the early church. Paul calls him, in his letter to the Galatians, Cephas. But that is just the Aramaic form of a nam e that you might be much more familiar with in Greek: Peter. Paul was arguing with none other than Simon Peter, one of the most revered leaders that Christianity ever had but Paul didn’t care. Peter had done something wrong and Paul didn’t hesitate to blow up at him in front of the church.

      There was another incident, reported later in the Book of Acts, when Paul got so mad at Barnabas, his very oldest Christian friend and separated from him over a disagreement. (Acts 15:39) These are just three examples and I could find more in Paul’s letters and in the stories about him, but I think that they do suggest an overall pattern of someone who had issues with anger.

      Now anger is something that all of have to deal with in our lives. We all get angry sometimes. And, I’m sure we’ve all said things or done things when we were angry that we’ve regretted later. But, for most of us, I’d even say for the majority of us, that is only an occasional problem. We may have other issues we struggle with in our lives, but anger is not at the top of the list.

      But there are some people for whom anger is the big issue in their life. It just always seems to keep coming up, messing things up and even influencing things like major decisions and the course of their life. For these people, anger isn’t just a sin; it is the sin – the sin that lies at the root of their life.

      Chances are you know or have known someone who has this kind of powerful anger in their life. Maybe, especially if their anger has brought a lot of destruction into their life, you have not been able to maintain a relationship with that person, but you have probably known one. Not everyone who struggles with this kind of anger necessarily sees it destroy their relationships. It is possible to find conversion and develop the fruit of cheerfulness and tranquility as did, I believe, the Apostle Paul, but the temptation to give into anger may yet persist.

      But you also need to understand that, when someone has anger like that, it doesn’t come from nowhere. People who really struggle with anger generally have certain things in common. For one thing, they tend to be perfectionists. They live with this really strong sense that the world ought to be a certain way – ought to be perfect – and the anger is often provoked by the world’s failure to live up to those, frankly unrealistic expectations.

      But, again, where does that need for perfection come from? Not all of us have that need or expectation. Well, often it begins with the expectations that were put upon such people from very early in their life. Maybe as children they were held to unrealistic standards of performance or behaviour. Maybe their parents or other key people in their life told them (either in words or in other ways) that their love for them was conditional on their performance which had to be perfect. Over time, that need for perfection becomes internalized and they begin to demand perfection from themselves and the world and get very angry at both when it is not found.

      So, generally speaking, there is a link between this root sin of anger and an internal drive towards perfection. If Paul is, as I have suggested, someone who had anger issues, can we see evidence of that perfectionism in his life? Absolutely! Paul himself admits as much in some of his letters. He writes this about his early life in his Letter to the Galatians: “I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” What is he saying? Not simply that he was a good Jew or even an excellent Jew. He is saying that he was like the best Jew that had ever been. That is the voice of a perfectionist.

      And that perfectionism wasn’t only present in Paul’s life, it was something that caused him endless trouble and even threatened to drive him mad sometimes. He speaks often about how, though he kept the Jewish law with excellence, he felt it as this great burden that overshadowed his whole life. He says that, if you are going to keep any part of the law then you have to keep all of it even down to the most insignificant regulation and that, if you even fail in keeping one small part of it, you are condemned and in a worse situation than if you had never tried at all. That is, in my mind, borderline crazy. But it is the kind of thinking that makes sense to a perfectionist.

      So Paul really does seem like a perfect example of someone for whom anger is the root sin in their life. And that is, I believe, good news for anyone who struggles with anger or who has someone that they love who struggles with anger. Sometimes we assume that there is no hope for such people – that their relationship with their anger brings too much destruction. Unless they basically stop being who they are, there is no hope. But here we have Paul, a saint, someone whom God clearly used to do much good and someone without whom the church would have been very different.

      And Paul didn’t need to stop being who he was in order for that to happen. Anger was still a part of his life, but now God used it in some positive ways – like in that disagreement with Peter when Paul’s anger at what he saw as Peter’s hypocrisy (for treating the Gentiles in the church one way when alone with them and another way when Christians from Jerusalem were visiting) gave Paul what he needed to forcefully confront Peter and take an important stand for the inclusion of Gentiles in the church. The anger itself wasn’t evil and Paul was learning to use it in constructive ways.

      Even more important, Paul didn’t lose that impulse towards perfection. It is something that comes through again and again in his letters to the churches. He doesn’t just ask for a good effort from himself and from the people he is corresponding with. He expects excellence. And, without that drive to perfection and where that drive led him in his conversations with his God, I can’t imagine that Paul would have been able to find the extraordinary insights into God and his relationship with that he did.

      Sometimes, when we see this tendency to explosive anger and perfectionism in someone, our reaction is to want to get rid of it. To tell someone (or yourself as the case may be) that anger isn’t allowed, that it must be suppressed or hidden or cast outside of a life. To people driven to perfection, we just tell them that they have to accept that the world isn’t going to be perfect. But I would like us to note that that is not how God did his work in Paul’s life. God didn’t ask Paul to stop being Paul but he did take the man that he was and his tendencies and brought about a conversion.

      The conversion of Saul of Tarsus to Christianity is recounted several times in the New Testament. We are told that he had this dramatic encounter with the risen Christ while travelling on the road to Damascus that turned him around from being a persecutor of the church to an enthusiastic supporter. But I am not just talking about that one dramatic day of conversion, I am talking about the work that Christ did in him over time – work that transformed the anger that lay at the root of his life.

      First of all, and starting in that Damascus Road encounter, Christ confronted him with grace. Here was Paul, pursuing what he was so sure was right and perfect for the faith of his people, and Christ confronted him with the fact that he was wrong – that he had gotten everything exactly wrong. Do you know what that feels like for a perfectionist? It was like Paul’s whole world fell apart in an instant. Falling short of perfection meant that he was a failure, that he would never be acceptable. Paul felt like a little boy who could never please his father – just like that little boy he had once been.

      But Christ didn’t leave Paul there. Christ accepted Paul at the very moment when he was most unacceptable from his perfectionist point of view. And not only that, Christ even called him to be his apostle and take his message to the far edges of the world. That shook the foundations of the assumptions that Paul had built his life on up until that point. If he didn’t have to be perfect in order to be acceptable, then what else was possible? Was it even possible that the most unacceptable kind of people to the Jews – that even the Gentles – could become acceptable too? Was it even possible that they could become acceptable without having to follow all the laws and the rules of the Old Testament – without even having to be circumcised?

      Yes, Paul was surprised by a grace so powerful that he dedicated the rest of his life to bringing the Gentiles into the faith. These people, whom he had once seen as outsiders, he now embraced as brothers and sisters. In a way, because of who he was and, especially who he had been, he was able to do more to make a place for them than anyone else ever could have. The anger never really went away from his life, but now it was directed against those who would treat these people as anything less than beloved children of God – even if those people were as important as the Apostle Peter.

      Paul didn’t stop being who he was – he became who he had always been meant to be. If you struggle with anger or if you love someone who struggles with anger, you need to understand that there is hope. God wants to do a wonderful work in your life or in the life of your loved one. Such people have the capacity to offer more in the way of grace and compassion and acceptance to outsiders or people who just don’t seem to measure up than anyone else. God uses them for a mighty work.

      And the only thing that is required for that to happen is for people to open their hearts up to God’s overwhelming grace – to learn that you are acceptable even though you are not perfect and never will be. You continue by learning to trust in God’s acceptance of you and by practicing accepting those that you meet – especially the ones who are far from perfect.

      I look around at the world today and see the power of anger and hatred especially of people who are different. Anger drove a young man into a mosque in Quebec City with a gun a week ago. Anger and fear caused chaos and more fear in airports around the United States. We can’t ignore the power of anger, but we don’t need to fear it because we have a God who, through Christ, can turn even the angriest into advocates of acceptance and inclusion that God can use. Just look at the Apostle Paul. Just look at yourself or the person you love. God needs you as you are, and redeems you as you are and converts even your sin into wonderful potential because God can do amazing things through you. This is the message and the promise that lies at the heart of the Christian gospel.

     

It turns out that there was.

Less than a week ago I was approached by some people in our National Offices (Justice Ministries) who were looking for someone to participate in an event on behalf of the Presbyterian Church: a dialogue between Christian Protestants and Shi'a Muslims to take place at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary. This three day event would see us engaging in a lively conversation on key issues concerning Muslims and Christians in the modern world.

I hadn't immediately responded to this request, wanting to give it some thought and prayer. To participate in this event will require me to prepare a paper on a specific topic and be ready to engage in the general discussions. And, well, Easter is coming; it can be a somewhat busy time!

After the events of this past weekend, though, I became convinced that my participation in this event is necessary -- even that God is calling me to do it. If recent events have taught us anything, it is that we need to do better at understanding and communicating with our Muslim neighbours. The peace and future of our world may well depend upon it. To exclude or act out in hate against a group of people simply because their faith is different from our own, is never going to make the world a better place. I want to help, not hurt.

So I have agreed to participate in a Shi'a Muslim - Christian Protestant Dialogue at Waterloo Lutheran Seminary on April 24-26, 2017. I will be preparing and presenting on the topic, "If God is merciful and rejects extremism, how do the faithful respond?" I will be speaking from my own Christian perspective. A Shi'a speaker will also present from his or her perspective. (I do not yet know who the other speaker is.) The papers written will also be submitted to be published both in English and in Farsi. Most importantly, we will all talk together. I pray we all leave the event with a better appreciation of one another.

That is what I am doing in response. Please pray for me as I pray for you and what you are doing to respond.

Hespeler, 22 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 4:1-15, 23-24, Matthew 18:21,22, Psalm 36

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ne of the complaints that you hear leveled against the church from time to time is that we never seem to talk about sin anymore. We love talking about grace and love and reconciliation – and that is fantastic – but where is that focus on faults and shortcomings that was so characteristic of the church in former days?

      And I will certainly agree that there is something to this complaint. I understand where the reluctance to talk about sin comes from – especially when it is a concept that has been so often misunderstood and even misused to gain control over people – but I also appreciate that if we do not have an understanding of sin and what it can do to us, our Christian faith will never reach its full potential.

      So I am going to dare to look closely at sin, its meaning and its power over the coming weeks. I do not necessarily feel like I have to approach the topic in the ways that Christians have always approached it. The Christian understanding of sin was largely defined way back in the fifth century by a thinker named Augustine of Hippo. It was Augustine, for example, who first came up with the idea of original sin and especially set up the close association between sin and sex that is still often made in the church to this very day.

      But I am a little less interested in what Augustine says about sin than I am in what the Bible has to say on the topic. And the Bible does say some surprising things. For example, if I were to ask you where in the Bible the idea of sin is first introduced, what would you say? Most would say, I suspect, that sin first enters the story of the Bible in the second and third chapter: in the story of the Garden of Eden. That is certainly what St. Augustine thought. But what if I told you that the Bible never uses the word sinto describe the events in that garden? I mean, yes, it does say that Adam and Eve disobeyed a commandment in that story and we may understand that as a sin, but Genesis doesn’t call it that.

      The first time the Bible brings up sin as an idea is in the fourth chapter of Genesis, in the passage we read this morning. It comes up in a conversation between God and Cain. Cain is upset with his little brother Abel. It is all wrapped up in a question of what makes an acceptable sacrifice that we don’t have time to get into here, but the basic problem seems to be that Cain thinks that God likes Abel more and he’s jealous. It really is a story about the worst case of sibling rivalry that you have ever heard of. God, clearly worried that Cain may be about to do something stupid, gives him a warning: “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

      And this little conversation, as I say, is the very first time that the topic of sin comes up in the Bible. And the concept that is introduced in this passage may not quite correspond to what you have always been taught on the subject. To start with, just think about how the idea of sin is portrayed in this little poem. Sin, we are told, is “lurking at the door” of Cain’s tent.

      But that is not how we generally talk about sin, is it? We usually talk about sin as an internal struggle – it is something that I feel inside of me that draws me towards something that I shouldn’t do. Here in Genesis – in the first reference to the very idea of sin – everything seems to be the other way around. Sin, far from being inside Cain is outside of him. It is lurking outside his tent flap like some kind of wild beast that is looking to attack and devour him.

      But that is not even the most surprising thing about this passage. It actually says something so unexpected about sin that modern translators of the Bible have actually had trouble accepting what it says. The original text of the Bible doesn’t actually say what we read this morning: “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” I looked it up in the original Hebrew text of the Bible and the correct translation should actually not be “you must master it,” but “you shall master it.”God is not warning Cain that he should tryto triumph over sin; he is promising him that he will.

      I think I understand why the translators of the New Revised Standard Version mistranslated that verse the way they did. They were kind of stuck thinking about sin the way that they had always been taught to think about it – the way that Christian theology had taught them to think about it. In particular, they were thinking of sin as this force within you that is ultimately irresistible – that you can try to resist but you are doomed to fail.

      It is true that you can find passages in the Bible that speak of sin in such terms. But this passage, near the beginning of the Book of Genesis is actually not one of them. This teaches me that the Bible does not speak about the problem of sin in just one way. The Bible uses different images to talk about sin. Here, in Genesis, sin is like a wild animal that is trying attack us and to have mastery over us but, God reminds us, sin’s triumph is not inevitable.

      Sometimes that way that we talk about sin actually lays the groundwork for its ultimate triumph over us. When we think of it as this irresistible force within us that is always going to have its way, that is exactly what happens. But here, in this passage, God seems to be suggesting that we don’t have to think of it that way and maybe if we didn’t, sin would not have so much power over us.

      But this story of Cain is even more important in that it outlines pretty clearly what the power and consequences of sin really are. God tells Cain that sin is out to get him but that Cain is actually able to triumph over it. But Cain does not triumph. He allows the beast lurking at his door to master him. The immediate consequence of this is a murder. Resentment leads to hatred and, because Cain does not manage to be the master of his hatred, hatred leads to murder.

      The message seems to be that sin, as the Bible introduces it, is primarily about hatred and violence. But the worse part of it is that it is something that only begets more violence. It works like this: Cain is mad at Abel and kills him. That is the first act of violence – the very first in all history according to the biblical view. But this one act of violence leads to another. First, God tells Cain that, because he has polluted the ground by pouring his brother’s blood into it, the ground will now be in revolt against him. Though Cain is a farmer, he will now find the very earth rebelling against him and refusing to produce its crops. The ground is responding to Cain’s violence by threatening the very life of Cain and his family.

      Cain complains – says that this is too much punishment – that he will be forced to wander the earth as a vagabond if the ground will not produce for him. But I don’t think that God is saying that this is a punishment. I believe that God is saying it is a consequence.

      And, what’s more, there are further consequences to come. Because Cain is now a social outsider, everyone will feel free to kill him. But to this God says no. Cain is marked now, God says, and because of that, if anyone harms Cain, there will be seven more killed in vengeance. But this also is not divine punishment. God is not saying that God will kill seven if Cain is killed, only that seven will be killed.

      What is being described in this passage is a vendetta. It is a Hatfield and McCoy type situation. Cain will found a clan and that clan will be the one to take vengeance if anything happens to him. They will kill seven to avenge the death of any of their clan in order to make people think twice about hurting one of theirs. God is not saying that this is good; he is just saying that that is how it is going to be from now on. Cain has only started the ball rolling by killing one. God is warning that the killing won’t stop there.

      And indeed it won’t because, as we read on in this same chapter (after skipping a few long and hard to pronounce names), we land on a character five generations descended from Cain. His name is Lamech and he is the great great great grandson of Cain. So what is now happening five generations later? Well, Lamech, a character about whom we are told almost nothing, is boasting to his wives and this is what he says: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

      Do you understand what Lamech is saying here? In five generations, the killing has only grown more out of control. Cain killed one. Vengeance for Cain and his generation would have been seven times. But, by Lamech’s time, not even that is enough. Vengeance has grown until now it is seventy-seven deaths for one (or you could even translate it as seventy times seven). What we have here in this passage is a picture of sin as violence spinning ever further out of control. One death is only the beginning. Surely it will continue to spiral on until all are dead.

      There is a powerful picture of sin in this passage and it is a picture of vengeance leading to violence spiraling ever further and further out of control – spinning so quickly that it is frightening. That is the kind of power of sin that we are talking about. Worse, it is a power this is still all too present in this world. This is the monster that was lurking at Cain’s door and that still lurks at our own to this very day. What is being described in this passage is frightening but we all know deep down that it is a very real force in our world – a force very much holding sway in places like Syria, Israel/Palestine, major cities like Chicago and Detroit.

      The only ray of hope I see in this passage is the promise that God gives to Cain. “sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you,” God says, “but you shall master it.” Sin may be a frightful beast, but its defeat is guaranteed. But how can that be? Surely we cannot win that battle alone. Only with God’s help can we defeat the power of sin. And we believe that such help has been sent to us, particularly in the person of Jesus who broke down that never-ending cycle of hate and violence by becoming the ultimate victim of both and hate and violence through his death on the cross.

      Yes this is the same Jesus who said, when asked by Peter how many times he had to forgive someone, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” And that one can also be translated as “seventy times seven.” Do you think that it is a coincidence that Jesus’ answer to Peter echoes Lamech’s statement of vengeance? I don’t think so! I believe that Jesus was speaking directly to the story of Cain and of Lamech. What Jesus was saying was that there is only one answer to the problem of sin in this world which is a problem of hatred and violence spiraling out of control. And Jesus is that answer. Forgiveness isthat answer. Cain and Lamech can kill seven times. Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin and the commanders of Isis can kill seventy-seven times in vengeance. Alt-Right agitators and Klu Klux Klansmen can kill seventy times seven for every perceived slight. That is the way of this world – that the way of sin.

      But do you know what you can do? Jesus is saying that you can forgive. And you can forgive again and again even up to 490 times. (That’s seventy times seven; I did the math.) And you know what that makes you? It makes you a follower of Jesus. It makes you part of the solution, part of the kingdom of God and part of what Jesus came to accomplish. Forgiveness isn’t just something that we do when we feel sorry for someone; it is the antidote to sin. And you can be part of changing the conversation in this world from violence to hope. It is that simple; that is what Jesus was saying.

      I think that this story in Genesis is a really helpful story about sin. It is one that teaches us new ways of thinking about sin and destroying its power. There is a lot more I would like to say on the topic and hope to look in more detail in weeks to come. But hope in the face of violence spinning out of control is a great place to start.

     

Hespeler, 15 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:1-9, James 1:19-27, Psalm 116:1-8

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esus, like many good speakers, had certain catch-phrases that he would use over and over again in his preaching and storytelling. One of his favourite lines, for example, was “the first shall be last and the last first.” It comes up so often in the discourses of Jesus in the gospels and in varying contexts (usually as the punchline of a parable) that it seems reasonable to conclude that it was one of those phrases that Jesus threw around all the time.

      But there was another phrase that Jesus must have used even more – one that just seems to have slipped out all the time – not necessarily as a part of the parable or story he was telling but almost like punctuation or emphasis. That saying was, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”

      It is an odd phrase when you think about it. I mean, very few people don’t have ears. Barring some birth defects, tragic accidents or the madness of Dutch post-Impressionist painters, ears are pretty much universal. Everyone listening to Jesus had ears which would make the saying seem like nonsense. But obviously Jesus didn’t keep saying this as a nonsense phrase. It is, in some ways, an expression of Jesus’ own frustrations. Here he was communicating vital truths that, as far as he was concerned, were quite clear. He was illustrating those truths with stories and parables that were really quite easy to understand and yet people weren’t getting his point.

      Jesus was pointing out that it is one thing to have ears and to be able to hear what somebody is saying but it can be quite another thing to listen. Hearing is a passive thing. Hearing is actually something that can be very hard to keep from doing. If you are in the vicinity of a noise or of someone speaking, you can’t help but hear it unless you do something to prevent it like plugging your ears or shutting off your hearing aids.

      Listening, on the other hand, is active. You don’t listen to something unless you choose to do so. Listening means attending to what is being said and acting in response. Jesus’ frustration was that people were hearing what he was saying but that something that was preventing them from actively listening. Often it was be­cause they did not want to actually hear the truths that he was teaching and they certain­ly didn’t want to change their lives because of what they heard. It was just easier for them to hear what he was saying without actually listen­ing because, if they listened they’d probably have to change in ways they didn’t want to.

      And if Jesus were here today, would he continue to repeat that same saying? Would he be as frustrated with us over our tendency to hear without listening? I am afraid he probably would because things really haven’t changed all that much.

      I wanted to start out this New Year by preaching about the resolutions that I’d like to make and that I’d like to see more people make that might create a real difference in the world. I’ve talked so far about resolving to leave some time and space to grieve losses and I’ve talked about being committed to the truth. I think that the third resolution that we could make that would make a real difference in our world is to learn to listen. I would even go so far as to say that the failure to listen is creating a number of crises in our world.

      Take, for example, two of the most surprising political developments of the past year: the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump. Neither of those political developments were supposed to happen. They defied polling but also were contrary to what the “elites” and political “experts” and establishment said should happen. They are also events that will likely have some far-reaching effects on where the world goes from here for good or ill (and I don’t really have an agenda at the moment to say whether it will be good or ill).

      But I think that we can say a little bit about why things unravelled the way that they did. Many people did not cast their vote because they were making a positive selection of a candidate or an agenda. Many, perhaps the majority, were voting to reject instead and what they were rejecting were the opinions of the elites, the experts and the establishment political leaders. The widespread perspective was that the elites and establishment didn’t care about the needs of the great majority of people and had not listened to them and their needs for a long time. Some really big things – world-changing things happened this past year because a lot of people felt like they were not being listened to. When I say that the failure of listening is important, that is the kind of thing that I am referring to.

      But it is not just something that we see happening in big political events and movements. It is a something that affects people’s personal lives and struggles. How many people go through their daily lives without ever getting the sense that anyone is truly listening to them? How many have to pay money to go to a psychologist or counsellor just to have someone actually sit there and listen to them talk.

      And what a difference that can make! I am not trying to put down the professions (like counselling and psychiatric analysis) that have a big element of listening to them. Such a level of listening does not come without a great deal of learning and practice and it truly can bring a great deal of healing into a person’s life. And there are definitely many people who will not be able to find the healing that they need without making use of such professional counsellors. No one should ever be ashamed if they need to access them. But I cannot help but think that such professions would be much less desperately needed if only more people put in the effort to really listen to people at all the various times in their lives where they really need someone to just listen to them.

      And one place where listening is surely lacking is in the church and it is precisely on that point that Jesus was expressing his frustration with the people in his favourite saying. People of faith have the opportunity to hear the word of God, but how often do we listen? We believe that God speaks through the life and example of Jesus Christ. We believe that God speaks through the scriptures that bear witness to Christ. We believe that God speaks through the sermon. And this speaking is not something that is frozen in time. We don’t say, for example, that God spoke (past tense) when the Bible was first written. The word of God is nothing if it is not living and active in the present moment. So God speaks; that is not and has never been the problem. The problem is that we don’t listen.

      So we really do need to work on our listening. How could we do it? How could we become a people who take the task of listening seriously? Well the first thing we need to recognize is that simple truth that was behind that saying of Jesus – that there is a difference between hearing and listening and that just because you have heard what somebody is saying, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have listened to them. Hearing is passive but listening is active.

      So how can we learn to be listeners? Well, I’ll start with one piece of advice that should be obvious, shouldn’t need to be said, but I’m afraid that it does need to be said. Listening means, first of all, giving undivided attention which means that when someone is speaking you turn off the phone, close the book, turn off the television or do whatever you need to do to shut out any distractions. If we are not willing to do that, we will not progress very far in our quest to learn to listen.

      The next piece of advice I am going to steal from the Letter of James. “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak.” Our own speaking is one thing that most often gets in the way of our effective listening. How often, when you are hearing someone speak, is your brain engaged, not with what they are saying, but with your own speaking. You are thinking of what you are going to say in response to them – perhaps to defend yourself or to further your own agenda at the expense of their needs. This is a symptom of what James would call being “quick to speak.” It is not actually measured by how many words you say or how soon you say them but rather by how much brain power you devote to your own agenda.

      Listening, real listening, is about being willing to put aside your own agenda in service to the needs of another person and, let me tell you, it is something that you have to work at. It does not come naturally and most of us will only be able to accomplish it by being incredibly disciplined in our minds.

      One thing that can help us to do this is the use of a practice of active listening. The next time when you have a chance to actually sit down and listen to someone, try this: say nothing. If you have to say anything, let it be to ask questions and make sure that they are questions that are focussed on what the other person has said and that help you to understanding their concerns.

      You can ask questions like, “It sounds to me like you are saying this event made you feel frightened or excited or whatever it sounded like they were feeling. Is that correct?” You can ask questions like, “What were you trying to do?” “Why are you interested in that topic?” and questions that focus on their personal background in whatever topic is being discussed. These kinds of questions will, more than anything else, convince someone that your really are focussed on what they have to say. And, what’s more, actually help you to be focussed on that very thing.

      One mistake that people often make, and in my experience it is often (but not always) men who do this, is to think that listening means that you are trying to fix whatever you perceive to be wrong about the other person. If someone is describing a situation that they are dealing with, for example, you may jump to the conclusion that they are telling you about a problem and you break in and tell them what they should do to solve it. “Well, you see, all you need to do is report your co-worker to management and let them deal with her.” Or, if you perceive that there is some kind of flaw in the person you are talking to, you break in with a prescription for how they ought to change. “You just need to be more assertive,” or something like that.

      But trying to fix people or their problems (unless that it what they are asking you to do) is not really listening to them because what you are actually doing is attending to your own agenda. You are trying to solve their problems and get them out of the way so that the focus can return to you and your needs. Most often what people need is for someone to listen to them, perhaps be sympathetic or understanding. Maybe then – maybe after they have been fully heard – you can work on solutions or changes together, but nothing important will ever happen until they have been heard.

      Listening is not easy. It doesn’t come naturally to most of us. But, precisely because it is so rare, it is an extraordinary and sometime life-changing thing. So I resolve to work on listening this year. I hope you might too because how much could the world change if people only really listened.

     

Hespeler, 8 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Ephesians 4:17-25, Psalm 43, John 8:31-38

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s you may have heard, the Oxford English Dictionary chooses a word of the year for every year that goes by – one word to capture the spirit of the age and mark significant trends in society. You may have also heard that the word that they chose for 2016 was, “post-truth.” They did not choose this word lightly or subjectively. They noted that the use of this word had grown enormously over the last 12 months – appearing 2000 percent more often in articles published over the last year.

      The word, they say, is often used in the phrase “post-truth politics’’ and it has to do with the fact that we are living in a time in which truth has become largely irrelevant. The dictionary defines it as an adjective that relates to “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

      Of course, the reason why this idea of “post-truth” has become so important is because it has driven events in a powerful way. We saw it in the Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom where the side that was campaigning to see the UK exit the European Union kept going on and on about all of the money that Great Britain was sending away to the European government in Brussels and how that money would be used to improve health services when they won. After the vote was over, they admitted that it that simply a slogan with no actual reality behind it and amazingly it didn’t seem to matter – at least it certainly didn’t change anything.

      And then, as we in Canada looked on, the American election rolled out with a post-truth approach taking centre stage. Now, I am not naive. I realize that politicians have been lying and stretching the truth to win elections probably ever since the Greeks first invented democracy. But something unprecedented went on in that vote. As one news organization documented it exhaustively, one of the candidates was saying something that was either partially or completely untrue 70 percent of the time that he opened his mouth. But what was really unprecedented was not necessarily the number of lies but how little they mattered. In fact, you might even make the case that telling the truth was far more likely to get you defeated than telling lies.

      But the post-truth reality is not just found in politics. It was actually even more important to journalism. With traditional news media failing all over the place (especially, sadly, in Canada) we saw a powerful new kind of media come on strong as news stories that were blatantly false – that could easily be proved as false with a moment’s research – spread far and wide and were read and largely believed by more people than ever saw much more important legitimate news stories. For example, a story that reported that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump as president was read by millions of people and widely believed even though all you had to do was google the Vatican website to know that it was fake.

      The people at Oxford were right, I think, to underline the importance of post-truth as a significant development in our day. Lies are nothing new; they have always existed and they have always been powerful. But we are dealing with something new here – something that will undoubtedly shape our society in significant ways. I am not concerned, at least for the moment, with what this means for the careers of particular politicians. I am more concerned with why it has become so powerful at this particular moment in time.

      It doesn’t seem to make sense. We live in an age when people have more information available at their fingertips (literally) than ever before in the history of the world. Never has it been easier for people to do the necessary research to discover the truth or lack of it behind any story, but people seem less inclined to do it than ever. What we have seen is that people are far more likely to connect to and share a story that just feels right to them or that confirms what they have already decided is true about the world. Even more important, a well-established fact or truth that is inconvenient to them or that means that they will have to change their mind or something about their life, they will be very likely to dismiss out of hand.

      Truth, it turns out, is simply a lot harder than we all thought that it was. We thought that all you had to do was expose the truth, make it accessible to people and the truth would just prevail from there. Apparently it doesn’t just work like that, at least not anymore.

      I decided that I would start out this New Year of 2017 by preaching about the kind of resolutions that we could make that would actually matter. I realize, of course, that New Year’s resolutions have a bad track record. For years millions of people have been making vows on the first of January with the best of intentions that just don’t seem to carry until the end of the month. The impulse is good, but the follow-through just seems to be lacking. But, I thought, what if we worked on changing the underlying attitude rather than just focussing on the outward actions. Maybe that would lead to real and lasting change.

      And, given some of the events that have unravelled in politics and media in the past year, it would seem that a dedication to truth is one attitude that we definitely need to be working on. In particular, it would seem that Christians need to be working on it. I would like to be able to say that Christians should be immune to the lures of the post-truth era, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, it would seem that Christians (in general – I’m sure present company is excepted) have fallen victim to this more often than the general population.

      I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and, over the years, had a number of courses at Victoria College. Every time I would enter into that beautiful old building, I would look up and see the words that were inscribed over the entrance: “The truth shall make you free,” it said. It is, I assumed, at least the unofficial motto of Victoria College. I wonder how many students who have looked at those words over the decades and were inspired by them know where those words come from. It might surprise many of them to know that that inscription is actually quoting Jesus of Nazareth as reported in the Gospel of John. I’ll bet that, if you went to that University campus today and asked the students, many of them would tell you that the last place they would look to find the “truth” would be in religion or the Bible or Christianity. That is, to a certain extent, a result of the general cynicism of our age but part of that is also on us as Christians. Christians have had a certain history (maybe especially in recent years, of being more interested in being right or in getting their way than that are in being committed to the truth no matter what.

      But what Jesus says in that passage in John is something that goes to the heart of our faith. Jesus really believed that anything that he came to reveal and represent was not at odds with the fundamental truths of the universe. To embrace the truth was to embrace him, of course, but truth was not exclusive to the revelation in Christ. All truth that might be discovered in this world (even truth that would be discovered in future centuries by the scientific method) was part of that larger idea of truth.

      Even more important, Jesus declared that there was a connection between truth and freedom – that those who remained dedicated to truth would remain free while those who didn’t care about it would become slaves. This is a very clear warning and one that we need to take very seriously.

      I think that this is something that we see very clearly in what is apparently our modern post-truth reality. Because we are now in an era where people don’t seem to care about the facts behind a report so long as it feels right and reaffirms their previously conceived notions, the population is just that much easier to manipulate so that they act and vote in the ways that the people who are publishing the fake news want. I don’t think that there is any doubt that this kind of manipulation with falsehood did play a role (though it would be hard to quantify how much) in some of the surprising political outcomes in the past year including the Brexit vote, the American election, Italy, Greece, Turkey and a number of other places.

      If people were willing to look further than their Facebook feed to figure out whether a story was true or not, the populations would not be so easily manipulated. I wouldn’t say that any of this has yet led us to a place where we are literally enslaved to the whims of powerful masters or that that will necessarily happen, but I will say that I am more concerned that that could happen than I would have been a year ago.

      In such a world, I would suggest that one of the resolutions that we as Christian people – as people of faith – should make at the beginning of this New Year is to be committed to what is true. We, the followers of Jesus really ought to be the first to make such a commitment. But what would such a resolution really look like. How would we work it out in practical terms?

      Well, first of all, being committed to truth means valuing what is true more than our own comfort. We have all experienced, I am sure, that discomfort and resistance that often comes with being confronted with a truth that we have not heard before or that contradicts what we had previously believed. It is irritating and annoying and it is often just so much easier to simply reject the new information out of hand. I am sure that I have often been guilty of that as have many of you. It is a human reaction, but it is not the reaction of someone who is truly dedicated to the truth. Being such a people means being willing to consider new truths, especially those that come in a convincing way, even if they are uncomfortable or inconvenient and maybe especially when they mean you have to rethink everything that you had always taken for granted. Jesus never promised that the truth would be easy, only that it would set you free.

      Being committed to the truth means being willing to use the critical mind that God has given you. I know that sometimes people think that having faith means that you should never have to deal with any doubts or questions. But that is not faith. That is simply certitude – often a foolish certitude because the truth is rarely that simple. In many ways, not having any doubts or questions is the opposite of having faith. Faith is actually about a relationship of trust between you and God and no truly healthy relationship can ever come when you are afraid to entertain questions or doubts. So use that brain that God gave you to ask questions and to seek answers that make sense to you. We ought not to be afraid to engage in such quests for true understanding because God can never be at odds with truth. Questing earnestly for truth can always be a part of your journey towards God.

      Being committed to truth also means, Jesus tells us, being committed to freedom. If ever you find yourself being drawn to a story because it just feels right to you, a good question to ask is if this story is leading you closer to freedom or to slavery. Is someone manipulating me with this story? That is always a question worth examining. If they are, chances are that they are not dealing in an entirely truthful way.

      It would seem that our world is in desperate need of someone to lead us into a dedication to what is true. My dream is that the Christian church could be a key leader in this journey towards a commitment to truth whatever the cost. To do so would be faithful to the calling and example of Jesus. To do so might just help to change the world in a way that truly matters.

     

Hespeler, 1 January, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Lamentations 1:1-7, Matthew 2:16-16, Psalm 44

t is a good thing, I suppose, that God made sure that Jesus, Mary and Joseph got out of Bethlehem before King Herod’s murderous men arrived. Three innocent lives were saved and, even more important, everything that the Messiah had been sent to accomplish was saved. But most people who read this part of the story (which, of course, we often don’t read at Christmas time because who wants to dwell on such things!) – those who do read it can’t help but ask: “Excuse me, but what about all of those other children two years old and under? Couldn’t they have been saved too?”

      We modern people are not the first to be scandalized at these events. From ancient times, this little episode has been called by the name, “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” and considered to be one of the more scandalous events told in the Bible. In thousands of years, nobody has been able to come up with any good reason why innocent children should have been left to be slaughtered apparently just to cover the escape of the Christ child.

      But, as awful as this story is, the Bible simply does not stop to explain it. God apparently knows that it’s coming – is able to send Joseph a very explicit warning in a dream – but doesn’t do anything to save any other children, and yet the Bible offers not a single word of explanation.

      But that is, unfortunately, how the world generally works. Tragedies do happen. Crimes against humanity are committed. Terrible disasters take place and as much as we grasp for an answer to the question of why, we often just don’t get it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t an answer, of course, just that it isn’t coming our way.

      And we hardly have to go travelling back in time two thousand years to find such a reason to be scandalized. I know that we are standing here on the very threshold of a new year, 2017, and that all kinds of people have been looking back at the year that just passed with a real spirit of “good riddance.” I know that lots of people have wonderful things that happened for them or for the people they loved in 2016, but the overwhelming story that seems to have been told on the year was pretty negative. We lost huge numbers of beloved cele­brities and some of them in pretty shocking ways. The story of Aleppo and most of Syria went from bad to much, much worse. Many people are incredibly disturbed by the global turn in politics to what seems to be a particularly dangerous brand of right wing populism. So, while we’re not talking about events as egregious as the slaughter of the innocents here, we can understand the idea of not looking back on the recent past with a great deal of nostalgia.

      So what are we to think of the idea that the Bible lets the slaughter of the innocents go by without a commentary? It would be a big problem, I think, if it did. But, the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t. Yes, it is true that the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t pause to explain the slaughter, but it does do, I think, something much more important: it pauses to lament. This is the commentary on the events that it does make: “Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’”

      This is actually a remarkably significant response to a tragedy, but we might not recognize it as such because we live in a society that does not really acknowledge the importance of the activity known as grieving.

      Oh, we do recognize that it is necessary, from time to time, to give some people a certain amount of time and space to grieve a significant loss. People are allowed, for example, to take some carefully restricted time off of work when someone they love has died. We tolerate a certain number of tears, a limited amount of time when a grieving person may indulge in a reasonable amount of melancholy. But we don’t really have a whole lot of patience for that kind of thing. If people let it go on for what we consider to be “too long,” we don’t have any trouble telling them so.

      Even as we engage in pop psychology which talks about the various stages of grief that people have been observed to go through, we tend to turn that into a prescription for where people are supposed to be in their process of grief – telling people, “Don’t you think that you have spent enough time engaging in ‘anger’ and ‘bargaining’; isn’t it time that you moved on to ‘acceptance”?”

      Underneath all of our thinking on the subject seems to be the assumption that grief is actually a sign of weakness and that we really ought to put it aside as quickly as possible so that we can get back to being productive contributors to the economy. And this is probably especially true when it comes to our response to negative events and horrible crimes such as the slaughter of the innocents. The time spent mourning the disaster is considered to be wasted time and the assumption is that it really only gets in the way of the work of retaliation which usually includes declaring some sort of war upon the people or ideas that are held responsible for the disaster. (Think, for example, of how western nations dealt with the terrorist act on September 11, 2001. That was the pattern.)

      And, frankly, the people who wrote the Bible (such as the writer of the Gospel of Matthew) would look at our attitudes and find us extremely foolish. They recognized that grief was extremely important work; work that (if it wasn’t done) would definitely get in the way of the kinds of solutions and responses that were actually helpful. You see, they understood some things about the human condition that we seem to have forgotten.

      It works this way. We human beings have been designed by God in some pretty ingenious ways. I happen to believe that the particular mechanism that God used to design us was the process that modern science has come to call evolution and because of that, science has given us some wonderful new tools to understand that design. One thing that has become clear, for example, is that we have been designed to prioritize survival. What that means is that, when you are faced with a dangerous or traumatic situation or when people or things that are important to you are taken away, there is a process that takes over your brain in order to help you to survive that.

      The part of your brain that takes care of this is actually a fairly primitive part – a part that you can also find in far less sophisticated animals than humans. But that is fine because higher brain power is not what is needed immediately in that kind of situation.

      When you are threatened, your brain knows that what you actually need is not to waste a lot of brain power analyzing what is happening to you or even making sense of it all. Instead your brain concentrates on two key things. First, its priority is to make sure that you simply survive. This primitive part of your brain takes over and leads you through your initial response. In a situation of threat, that may mean helping you to fight back or, if that is not the best solution, run away from the situation. In a situation of loss, that means doing whatever you need to do to get through the loss.

      The other job that is very important at such moments is memory storage. Very clear and precise memories of the traumatic situation are stored in a part of your brain called the amygdala. These memories are not analyzed or interpreted, they are just stored there as episodes in living colour. This is also a matter of survival, of course, because once you have survived a dangerous situation, the important thing to do is to remember precisely how you did it because you may face such a situation again. This is why the memories of traumatic events are often so clear and vibrant even though you don’t really want to remember them at all. This is how we have been marvellously and beautifully designed for survival by a loving God.

      But there is one problem with this design. It means that, after you have gone through a certain amount of loss, danger or trauma (things that are an inevitable part of life) you end up with these powerful and clear memories stored up in your amygdala. But, as they are not particularly pleasant memories, the tendency is to avoid them, keep them locked up and pretend that they are not there. But they are so powerful that they do not stay locked up forever and they don’t just go away. So the more you try to repress them, the more they manage to sneak out. They are often triggered in unexpected ways and that means that you can continue to react to the trauma or loss that you have suffered long after the original events in ways that can be destructive to yourself or others.

      There is only one known solution to this problem and it is in a process that has also been graciously provided to us by God. That process is called grief. Going through grief is something that human beings have been doing since the dawn of civilization and probably long before. It is an activity that was very well known and seen as an essential part of life throughout Biblical times and, in fact, every scripture passage that we read this morning was an example of someone working through their grief by putting it into words.

      We read from the Book of Lamentations which is an entire book that was devoted to someone (traditionally identified as the Prophet Jeremiah) expressing his grief over the destruction of the City of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Our psalm reading this morning is an example of an ancient communal exercise of grief as all the people come together before God to mourn something that they had all lost: a national defeat or setback. And then, of course, we have Rachel weeping for her children in the Gospel of Matthew: the ancient matriarch of the nation of Israel mourning for her lost children down through the ages.

      Grief work is so important because what it does is takes those memories of trauma and loss that you have stored up in your brain – in your amygdala – and actually allows you to move them into a different part of your brain where they can actually be analyzed and given meaning. This is how you were designed to deal with these memories – to wait until the crisis is over and then take the time to take out those memories that you stored up in the time of loss or danger and figure out how they fit into the overall story of your life. This is exactly the kind of process we see people going through – with God’s understanding and help – in these biblical passages and similar ones to those we read this morning.

      So when we see the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, and Rachel the ancient Matriarch and God himself joining together to mourn the terrible events of the slaughter of the innocents, this is not a failure to respond. It is a very important response. It is about processing such terrible events, finding their meaning and taking serious steps to destroy the power of such terror (which is, of course, what the entire rest of the gospel story is all about).

      It is the first day of January, a day, traditionally, to make resolutions – to decide what changes you would like to make in your life in this New Year. That is why I have decided to spend several sermons this January talking about some resolutions we could make for 2017 that could really make a difference for good.

      I would suggest that the first and maybe most important resolution you could make for this New Year is to practice some good grief. After all, how can you possibly do better at anything in this year that is coming until you first put aside the negative things, the losses and the disappointments of 2016 and, as I say, people seem to be saying that there have been a lot of them. Don’t be afraid to deal with what you have lost or feared in this past year. Don’t be afraid to grieve and mourn in whatever ways are necessary to you despite what anyone may have to say about it. Most of all don’t be afraid to ask for help as you go through such processes if you need it. May 2017 be a time of great blessing, especially, maybe, as you learn to grieve whatever there was in 2016 that needs to be grieved.