Author: Scott McAndless

      

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Hespeler, 4 December, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Communion

Luke 6:37-45, Psalm 72:1-7, 18,19, Deuteronomy 15:7-11

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hat was the best Christmas dinner that you ever had? How would you describe it to me? I bet that if we were to put that question out as a general survey, we would get a great variety of answers. Some would speak of dinners from long ago, even from when they were small. Others would speak of one from recent memory. You would hear of menus and guest lists and decorations.

      But if you really pressed people to say what made it truly special, they would go beyond speaking of those things. They would start to speak of something very hard to describe: a warmth, a sparkle, a glow that somehow made the gathering that special – the kind of thing that is hard to pin down but that makes all the difference.

      It would be much the same thing if I were to ask you to describe to me your very best memory of a Christmas morning. There would be some who would focus on the presents that you received or perhaps that you gave. Others would focus on the people who were there, but most would talk about something that gave a special shine to everything that happened.

      That thing – that undefinable quality – is what is sometimes called the Christmas Spirit or even the magic of Christmas. It is a shared attitude that somehow has the ability to take fairly ordinary things – food, interactions, words – and make them truly exceptional. I am sure that every single one of us has felt that Christmas spirit at least one time or another, but we would be hard pressed to describe it exactly or to force it to appear when we wanted it to.

      There have been various attempts to portray this Christmas Spirit down through the years. Sometimes I think that, more than anything, that is what Santa Claus is – an attempt to draw a picture of Christmas Spirit. But, as much as I love Santa and what he represents, I think that someone else actually succeeded better in portraying what it is all about: Charles Dickens.

      In his classic tale, A Christmas Carol, the secon d ghost that visits Scrooge after midnight is called the Ghost of Christmas Present. But I would suggest to you that, more than anything else, he is a representation of the Christmas Spirit itself – a Christmas spirit that is reborn every twenty-fifth of December.

      The ghost wears a simple green robe, bordered with white fur that hangs loosely about its bare chest. Its feet are also bare and on its head is no other covering than a holly wreath. Its face is clear and joyful and girded round its middle is an antique rust-eaten scabbard that contains no sword.

      Most interestingly, however, as the ghost conveys Scrooge upon his nocturnal journey, he bears with him a flaming torch. The purpose of this torch is not merely to cast light upon the things that they are seeing but to produce a special incense. We discover the power of this incense as Scrooge and the Ghost visit a shop where the poor folk of the city have brought their Christmas dinners. These people are so poor that they do not have the means within their dwellings to cook and so they bring their dishes to a “Baker’s Shop.” I’m guessing, that these meals are pretty poor and simple fare.

      But, as Scrooge watches, the ghost (who is invisible to everyone but him) delights himself by lifting the cover off of each dish and sprinkling it liberally with the ash from his torch. It is an odd vision, but the meaning of it seems clear. The ash represents the power of the spirit of Christmas to transform. As the story continues, it becomes clear that the ghosts cannot just transform simple meals into Christmas feasts, it can also transform ordinary interactions into signs of peace on earth and goodwill to all and ordinary gatherings into joyous signs of the kingdom of God. And Christmas does have this power. I know that we have all experienced it at some point or another in our journey through Christmas past and present.

      I think that there is a spiritual truth to be found in this. Our tendency as human beings is to judge the value of the people and things that we see. When we do this, we tend to look at the surface of things. We’ll focus, for example, on the actual contents of the Christmas meal and how it was cooked, to judge how good it is. The torch of the Christmas Ghost reminds us that we must look deeper than the surface.

      Jesus would remind us of the same thing. “The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good,” he taught “and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.” His point is that you really cannot judge anything unless you can see the heart and not merely the surface of things.

      This is, of course, why Jesus taught that we should not judge at all. We are so inclined to look at the surface of things that we are blind to what really matters. Jesus suggested, wisely, that it is better to leave the judging up to God who can see the heart in all matters.

      But the lessons that Ebenezer Scrooge learns from the Ghost of Christmas Present are not limited to finding that warmth and joy of Christmas by looking to the heart of things. There is also a very dark and negative side to what he learns. Scrooge hasn’t just missed the joy of Christmas, he has also actively participated in judgement against the people of his city.

      Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol, two men enter Scrooge’s offices asking for his support in their charitable efforts on behalf of the poor. Scrooge’s answer is quite memorable. “Are there no prisons?” he wants to know. And he inquires likewise of the Union workhouses, the Treadmill and the Poor Law. These were the means by which England, in that era, dealt with poor – basically by punishing them for their poverty.

      The assumption you see (and this is an assumption that Scrooge himself clearly makes) is that the poor are responsible for their own misfortune – that they are poor because they have chosen to be idle. Thus Scrooge dismisses them by saying, “I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.” When the kind-hearted gentlemen inform Scrooge that some people would rather die than go to such places, Scrooge replies, “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

      I wish I could say that Scrooge was the only one to take such a cold-hearted attitude towards the poor, but I think that you know that such an attitude has far from disappeared since his days. In some ways, I would say, it is an attitude that is only on the rise in our times. And, what’s more, such an attitude does make a certain amount of sense. If you only look at the appearance of things – if you see someone not working (or not able to get a well enough paying job) it is easy to come to the conclusion that it must be because of some deficiency on their part – they haven’t tried hard enough or lack a work ethic. It is also the easiest conclusion to come to because it means that their problems don’t really have anything to do with you.

      But, as I say, it is only possible to think that when you look at the surface of things. Once you begin to see the heart of the people involved, you begin to realize that the causes of poverty are much more complicated than that and, what’s more, our own fates are much more intertwined with the fates of the poor than we ever suspected.

      It is Scrooge’s visit to the family of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, that makes it impossible for him to only look at the surface of that family’s poverty and troubles. In particular, his heart becomes drawn to the Cratchits’ young son, Tiny Tim, whose health is so poor that Scrooge asks the ghost whether he will live for long. The answer is far from encouraging which leads Ebenezer to beg for a different outcome. The ghost turns the old miser’s cold words back on him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” When you begin to see the heart instead of the surface of things, you realize how cruel our normal manner of thinking is. Scrooge is appalled at himself as we should be too.

      Scrooge’s final exchange with the Ghost of Christmas Present is the most disturbing. He detects two figures that are hiding underneath the skirts of the ghost. They are two children: a boy whose name is Ignorance and a girl whose name is Want and they are in an abominable state. They are, the ghost informs him, the children of all humanity and their terrible state isn’t just a threat to themselves but, if they are not saved, they will bring destruction on all humankind.

      “Have they no refuge or resource?”Scrooge cries out and in reply, the Ghost simply turns his own words back on him again: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Scrooge falls into despair, not only because the ghost forced him to look at the heart of matters but, by looking to the heart, he has come to realize that the plight of the poor is not just their problem but that it is a problem that affects all of us and threatens to doom us all. Want leads to ignorance and ignorance is deadly. If you let enough of the people fall into ignorance, they become a force in society. They will support tyrants and demagogues. Ignorance breeds more ignorance and it all spirals out of control. Scrooge has realized that the plight of the poor and forgotten ishis own plight as well.

      Dickens didn’t invent this idea, of course. The Bible recognized first that the plight of the whole of society is connected to the plight of its poorest members. That is why, in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses instructs the entire nation by saying, “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so.” This is not merely for the sake of those who are poor but for the blessing of all: “for on this account the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake.” There will always be poor among us, Moses warns us, the problem of poverty will never entirely go away, but God actually brings good out of it by creating an opening to blessing for all of us.

      Jesus echoes this idea when he teaches his followers and says, “give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

      The Ghost of Christmas Present teaches Scrooge a vital lesson. It teaches him that, by looking only at the surface of things, he has effectively blinded himself to the truth that surrounds him – the truth about what lies in the heart, especially in the hearts of the poor and forgotten, and the truth about how connected we really are.

      Christmas is a time when this habitual blindness is set aside. I have been amazed, for example, at the generosity that has been on display in this congregation and community over the last couple of weeks. You may have heard the story of a refugee family that showed up here about two weeks ago. It was the first real cold day of winter and they had sent their children to school that morning without any winter clothes because they just didn’t have any. We took them down to Hope Clothing and gave them as much as we could immediately and when there were a number of things still needed an urgent message was put out on Facebook.

      Do you realize that that message was shared 18 times that we know of and quickly seen by over 3000 people? And the response that we saw to that need was overwhelming both to our volunteers and to the family. People want to be generous. They want a way to look past the surface of the Syrian Refugee Crisis (which is a complex mess) and look to the heart of the people involved. Christmas is one good reason why they were willing to do that and the transforming power comes when we learn to see like that all year long. Dickens understood that. More importantly, so did Jesus.

      Will you allow the spirit of Christmas to transform you, not just during this Christmas Present but through the whole year that God places before you?

     

Hespeler, 27 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Isaiah 43:14-21, Philippians 3:4b-16, Psalm 51:1-12

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t will happen in just a little less than one month. People will go to bed filled with expectations. They will have sleep “with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.” The visions may vary from person to person. The kids w ill dream of presents and stockings bursting full. The adults, maybe, will dream of turkeys and stuffing and mashed potatoes. A huge number will dream of family, friends and loved ones coming together and what it will be like when they gather.

      Christmas, more than any other festival in our lives is full of expectations. That is as true today as it was almost two hundred years ago when Clement Moore wrote his famous poem and included that line about the sugarplums. And expectation can certainly be wonderful, but there can also be a downside to them.

      I remember the Christmas when I was about 10 years old or thereabouts when the reality of Christmas just didn’t measure up to my expectations. I guess that when I was younger than that, it wasn’t all that hard to simply be overwhelmed by the experience of opening presents and thinking about how awesome they were. But I clearly remember that year when I finished opening of my presents and I just wondered where that feeling of awe was. It wasn’t that my presents hadn’t been great – they had been. I had gotten exactly what I had asked for. It was just that that feeling of being overwhelmed by what I had received that I seemed to remember from when I was younger just wasn’t there. I was disappointed; I had been done in by my expectations.

      And I know that you don’t feel too bad for me about that. I’m sure that every child experiences that at some point and that it is a certain corrective to the infantile greediness that we experience at Christmas when we are really young. I learned and I adjusted and I think I’m the better for it. But there are other times when we are done in by our Christmas expectations and it is not necessarily a growning experience:

      A father, who has always poured his love and care into a family Christmas dinner and has always looked forward to that warm feeling of having everyone gathered around one table, finds his expectations thwarted this year. One son has a new girlfriend and it is really serious. He has been invited to spend the evening with her family and really wants to go. A daughter has joined the military and will be shipping out to Germany a week before Christmas. A second daughter just landed her first job as a paramedic and, as the low person on the totem pole has to work all the Christmas shifts this year. None of the kids will be home and, as proud as he is of his children and what they are doing, he can’t help but be bitter and angry all season long and make everyone around him miserable. His good, positive and wonderful memories of Christmases past seems to have made this Christmas almost not worth celebrating.

      In another part of town, a grandmother and matriarch of a large family has had to give up so many of the things that she has always done for her family this year. She just doesn’t have the stamina to cook the turkey, decorate the room and table, shop and wrap and do a thousand other things. Her children and grandchildren have very thoughtfully organized and parcelled out all the various tasks amongst themselves. She won’t have to do a thing but sit back and enjoy the holidays. She is so appreciative that she is doing her best to make them all feel miserable because their efforts aren’t exactly giving the results that she had in the past.

      And, lest you think that it is only good memories of past Christmas that can cause problems by building up expectations that are no longer realistic, consider these people for whom Christmas every year is a dark time:

·               The man whose father left his family one week after Christmas when he was only ten and who every year feels a deepening dread that he will lose the people he cares for as the season approaches.

·               The woman whose ex-husband drank too much every Christmas and who still feels the pain of his beatings every December 25.

·               The man who still plays out an angry discussion about politics that he was part of during a Christmas dinner ten years ago. He cannot let go of it!

      When Charles Dickens wrote his Christmas classic story about how people can change, especially at Christmas, he knew that the first thing that he had to deal with was the memories of Christmases past. They have a unique power to affect how we see and live out Christmas today. And they do that for each and every one of us.

      The first ghost that Ebenezer Scrooge meets after the warning he receives from Marley has long proved to be the hardest one for artists, animators and directors to illustrate. It is a ghost who is exceedingly hard to pin down. It’s face changes constantly to evoke figures from Ebenezer’s past and even the number of its arms and legs cannot be stated with certainty. This is a reflection of how our memories of the past affect us. They are rarely clear. Sometimes the happy events of the past are magnified (and any negative parts edited out) as we look back upon them with nostalgia. Negative events, for their part, have a tendency to grow worse as we look back on them. They are indistinct because we rarely have the courage to look back at our past memories without the adornment of our own fantasies and it is precisely for that reason that they have such power over us.

      The one feature of the Ghost of Christmas Past that is entirely clear is the light that burns like a flame from the top of his head. This light is the symbol of hope in Scrooge’s encounter with the ghost. By casting a clear light on all of the events of the past – good and bad – this light has the potential of exposing them in truth. Basically, Dickens is saying that, when we dare to examine the events of our past clearly – even if they are painful or too good to believe – we rob them of the power to destroy our present.

      So, for example, as we follow Scrooge’s journey through the past (which includes many a good memory such as the rauchaus Christmas party in Fezziwig’s shop) we discover among other things that his experience of want and poverty so deformed him that it made him into a man who loves money more than he loves humanity. It is a scar that runs deep.

      But this exposing light is so frightening to Scrooge. He cannot face it. As he jouneys through his past, Scrooge becomes ever more disturbed and fearful until at last he can take it no more. “Remove me!”Scrooge cries out to the ghost, “I cannot bear it! …Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!” And then, when the ghost does not comply, Scrooge does what we all do when we do not want to face our past clearly, he grabs the ghost’s hat which is in the form of a giant candle snuffer. He forces this cap down over the ghost’s head until he extinguishes the flame.

      The Ghost of Christmas Past is the only ghost that Scrooge has the power to banish. By extinguishing its light he makes it go away. And we too have that power. We can choose to extinguish the light the illuminates our own past and allows us to see it for what it truly was. We often do so because, like Scrooge, we are afraid to face the reality of our own past. We suppress it deep inside and think we have controlled it. We have not. We have only given it more power over us. Scrooge can only be free of the past that has enslaved him to the pursuit of money by facing this past, and so his trials will continue as he faces his other ghosts.

      Dickens’ Christmas Carol is a great work of literature and, as such, it contains great and universal truths – truths that we call in the church Gospel truths. The truth that he teaches about the past and its power to enslave us is also found in the Bible. We read two passages this morning that talk about how God would release us from the power of the past to deform us. In the Book of Isaiah, God implores the people of Israel, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” He is asking them to make sure that they aren’t trapped by their memories of the past. And the past he is talking about here is a good past; he is talking about the time when God saved them from the Egyptians by leading them through the Red Sea. In fact, the prophet describes those past events in some detail, speaking of “the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”

      But God is aware of how even memories of the most positive events can mess us up. When he says, “do not remember the former things,” he does not mean to repress them or to quench them, like Scrooge, with an exstiguisher cap. He actually invites the Israelites to examine the past closely by describing it. He’s talking about how trust in God can help to keep that past from controlling you or destroying you.

      The Apostle Paul says much the same thing in his letter to the Philippians, talking about how he forgets what lies behind and strains forward to what lies ahead. Here the past that might destroy him is not all good. It is more of a mixed bag. He talks about positive things like his heritage and education but also negative things like his past persecution of the church.

      The message, however is much the same. Paul is teaching us, by example, that we cannot allow the past to have power over us. He is not telling us to repress the past or our memory of it. On the contrary, he describes these things from his past in quite explicit detail: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”

      He knows these things intimately because he has not hesitated to examine them closely under the harsh light of reality. It likely made him uncomfortable as it made Scrooge uncomfortable but he would not snuff out the light of truth and it is precisely because of that that he has the freedom to strain forward to whatever God has put in front of him without being weighed down by his past.

      Sisters and brothers, I know that many of you are like Ebenezer Scrooge. I am not accusing you of being a miser or of being as cruel as him. That is not what I mean! But I am suggesting that many of you, like him, have allowed your memories of the past to have too much power over you to define you, to tell you what you can and cannot do and to overwhelm you with guilt or regret or grief or a host of other feelings that threaten to destroy you. Know that God wants to set you free from the power of your past to control and define you. That is why he sent Jesus into the world. That is what forgiveness and redemption and death and resurrection were all about: setting you free from all that.

      Will you trust God enough to take a lamp (or the light that shines from the head of the Ghost of Christmas past) and examine your past and see it for what it truly was so that God may set you from living under its power. That action was the first step towards making Ebenezer Scrooge the man that God had always meant him to be. It can be for you and for me as well.

     

Hespeler, 20 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Luke 8:1-3, Matthew 15:32-39, Psalm 1

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agdalena, I have decided that I want to speak to you today. On some long distant day, your parents will likely tell you the story of how they chose to give you your name. And the story they will tell you, I happen to know, will go something like this: When your mom was only a couple of weeks pregnant with you, your grandma got a phone call from your great Aunt Maggie who lived way out west. She had called to tell your grandma, before your mom had said a word, that your mom was pregnant and that she was going to have a girl.

      That event was what prompted your parents to name you after your great Aunt Maggie (whose full name, of course, is Magdalena). And I’m sure you can be proud of being named after her – a strong woman who is obviously sensitive to things that many of us are not.

      But I didn’t really want to talk to you about your Great Aunt Maggie today, but about another woman – maybe one of the strongest I have ever heard of – after whom you are also named. We know her, as Mary Magdalene, one of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

      Now, Mary Magdalene is a very important person in Christian tradition. Down through the centuries, all kinds of things have been said and written about her. She has often been identified as a prostitute or as that repentant woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. I wanted to tell you first of all, Magdalena, that there is absolutely no reason to think that Mary Magdalene was any of those things. At least, at no point does the Bible say any such things about her. These are all ideas that somehow became attached to the figure of Mary Magdalene in later church traditions.

      It might even be that these negative images of Mary were intentionally connected to her by later church leaders as a kind of a smear campaign. You see, she was a little bit embarrassing to later Christians because it is pretty obvious that she was an important leader in the early church and, as time went by, an increasingly male-dominated church didn’t feel comfortable with the idea that women could even be leaders.

      So, Magdalena, ignore what later Christians and traditions said about Mary Magdalene and lets just concentrate on what the Bible says about her. It may not seem like there is a lot in the Bible, but I think that what there is you will find very interesting.

      The first thing that we know about her is her name: Mary Magdalene. And that name marks her already as someone rather unique. Most women in that world at that time would have used a name that indicated her relationship to some man in her life. So a normal name for someone like her should have been Mary, daughter of Jacob or Mary the mother of James or, as we have in an example in the passage we read from the Gospel of Luke, Joanna, the wife of Chuza. This was because women, in that world, were defined and limited by the men in their life. I’m not saying that it was right – I’m just saying that that was how it was.

      But Mary Magdalene doesn’t have that kind of name. Already that marks her as unusual – as a strong and independent woman who was able to make a mark on the world all by herself. Wouldn’t it be something to be named after a woman like that!

      But what is the meaning of her name if it is not a reference to some man. The last part of her name most likely refers to the place where she comes from. It means that she comes from the town of Magdala. And, as it turns out, that also tells us a lot about her because we have learned a few things about that place. Magdala, in the first century ad, was an important town on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. It would have been a fairly prosperous town when Mary was born there with three local industries: fishing, fish processing and textiles. In fact, Magdala was so prosperous that some of its citizens came together to build one of the very few stone synagogues to be found anywhere in the region at the time

      The name of the town, Magdala, meant tower. Some have suggested that the name referred to some tall structure in the town built for the drying of fish orfor some step in the process of dying clothes, but I suspect that the name actually came from something else. The most prominent geographical feature of the town was a cliff (the south end of Mount Arbel) that stood just outside of town. This distinctive cliff watched over the entire town like a protective bodyguard. Its distinctive form would have led fishermen like a beacon safely to their home harbour from far out over the lake. It even looked like a tower. So I believe that the south end of Mount Arbel gave the town its name.

      So there young Miryam grew up for her entire life under the shadow of that tower – the cliff of Mt. Arbel. And life must have been pretty good while she was young, but then, everything changed almost overnight. In the year 20 AD – that is, about ten years before a man named Jesus showed up on the scene – King Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, did something stunning. He totally reorganized his kingdom. He abandoned his capital city, which he had been building for years at a place called Sephoris, and decided to build a brand new capital in a brand new city that he called Tiberias.

Hespeler, 13 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless

John 7:37-39, Psalm 137, Ezekiel 47:1-12

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here is a river, called the Gihon, that flows to this day in the city of Jerusalem. It is a small stream, but a vital one, flowing, as it does, in a part of the world where water is scarce and a reliable source can mean the difference between life and death. It is also an unusual river because it is fed by a spring, the Gihon Spring, that is unlike most every other spring in the world. It doesn’t flow steadily, you see. It is an intermittent spring. At regular intervals it surges up and then it stops.

      The importance and uniqueness of this river probably had a lot to do with the beliefs that developed about it. And it seems that there were many such beliefs. The ancient Israelites almost certainly saw it as a holy place. This was not necessarily official doctrine, but it was a popular belief. It is, as I explained last week, identified as one of the four rivers that flowed from the original paradise. It was the place where they anointed their kings and a sign that God was with them. And there is even a story in the Gospel of John that indicates that they believed that, when the spring did periodically surge forth and fill a pool that had been constructed, the waters of the Gihon had healing power.

      The evidence seems to indicate, anyways, that this river (together with the nearby temple of Solomon) was one of the key places where these people experienced the presence of their God in some powerful ways. And we all have such places, don’t we? I know that our official theology states that the God who we believe in is not limited by time or by space. And one thing that that means is that there isn’t any particular spot on this earth, or even in the vast universe, where God is not. But that is not necessarily how it works in our experience.

      The truth is that those who have had significant experiences of God have generally found that such experiences are much easier to find (or to be surprised by) in particular places and at certain times. That is not to suggest that everyone has experiences of God in all the same places. For some, a beautiful church building such as this one where we find ourselves is the place where they have most consistently found God, but churches don’t necessarily work the same for everyone. I know many who would say that they are much more likely to encounter God walking in the woods or along a beach than in a church. But that does not change the fact that, for most of us, there will always be certain places in our world where God just seems to be closer.

      Well, one of those places for many ancient Israelites was the Gihon River in Jerusalem – a holy place that was maybe second only to the nearby temple of the Lord. And, as I say, it is wonderful to have places like that in your life. But there is also a risk that comes with that. What happens when you lose such places? Does that mean that you lose your God?

      This was not just a theoretical question for them. The time came when the City of Jerusalem was attacked and besieged by the armies of the king of Babylon and, despite the presence of the River Gihon within the strong walls of the city, the city could not hold out against the invaders. Jerusalem fell. It was sacked by the invaders and then reduced to rubble. Even the holy temple of the Lord, the home of Yahweh, was left as nothing but a pile of stones. And then the Babylonians did something worse, they took the people of the city and the surrounding countryside and forced them to march off to exile in Babylon which was like a world away.

      Of course this was a disaster on so many levels – devastation and loss that might feel familiar to modern day citizens of Syrian cities like Aleppo. But one particularly terrible aspect of this was the loss of those places where they had experienced their God. When you lose such places and especially when you are forcibly removed from the entire vicinity, does that mean that you lose your God too?

      This was an especially urgent question in ancient times because people tended to think of their gods in very simple ways. Most ancient gods were seen as being tied to particular places. The gods of Egypt, for example, were the gods of Egypt. It was just assumed that they had no power once you left the Nile Valley. And as far as the people of Israel knew, their God was the same – after all, the question of whether the God of Israel could be present in other lands had simply never come up before. So, as far as they knew, when they left Mount Zion and the Gihon River, they would not be cut off from their God forever.

      In fact, they did find their God in Babylon when they got there which was probably a big surprise. It led them to rethink everything they knew about God and was an important step towards the understanding we have of a God who is not limited by time and space. But they didn’t know that when they left. As far as they knew, when they left the Gihon, they were leaving their God.

      One of the people who lived through that dramatic experience was a man named Ezekiel. He was a prophet and he saw the disaster coming and that there was nothing that could stop it. And Ezekiel was very concerned about what it meant that the people might lose their God. He even had a vision where he saw a great cloud of glory, which represented the presence of God, depart from the temple, seemingly forever. (Ezekiel 11:22)

      But, though God gave Ezekiel a heads up about what was coming, he also sent other messages his way – messages of hope and of new beginnings. Ezekiel had many visions during this difficult time but one of them has proved the most enduring and meaningful. Even as the temple was being threated and destroyed (or perhaps had already been destroyed – it is hard to establish exactly when he had his visions) Ezekiel received a vision of a new temple that included, as we read this morning, a renewed Gihon River.

      It is his glorious vision of the river that particularly interests me today. The river he sees is a little different from the actual Gihon River. As Ezekiel sees it, it no longer flows from near the temple mount but from the very threshold of the temple itself, but that is clearly a symbolic change and we may recognize it as the Gihon.

      I believe that, if you want to understand what this vision meant to Ezekiel, you have to enter into his frame of mind. What did the loss of the temple mount and of the river – these places where he and his people had met with God – mean to him? We can’t know exactly what it felt like to him, of course, but I think that we can find some ways to sympathize. I know that many of us have felt a similar sense of loss in and through the life of the church in recent decades.

      You see, one of the realities that we cannot simply avoid dealing with in the church these days is change. Across the board, churches are changing and adapting their worship and their programs and activities. Many don’t like it, I realize, but it seems to be inevitable for a number of reasons. Some churches do resist all change, of course. They’d rather die than change, they say in word and in deed. They often get what they wish for and die all the quicker as unchanged as possible, but, of course, death is a kind of change too so it really does seem that change is inescapable these days.

      The fear of change has become so powerful that it is driving political change. I don’t know how to explain the events that took place in the United States this past week without understanding it in terms of huge numbers of people voting as a block to turn back the clock on change that has been taking place in society. But even such a desperate reaction and backlash will not slow the pace of change. It will overtake us all. The Babylonian army that is bringing the change of everything is outside the gate and I don’t care how high Trump builds his wall, he won’t be able to keep it out.

      The big problem we have with change is the same problem that Ezekiel and his friends were dealing with. We, like they, have learned to know God in certain places and at certain times. And, of course, churches on Sunday mornings and at other key moments have traditionally been one of these places where we have encountered God. The church has been our River Gihon and Holy Temple Mount. But the pace of change means that these holy places have become strange to us and we may even have lost some of them. The natural fear is that the loss of these places will mean that we have lost God.

      But Ezekiel’s vision of the Gihon, as I say, is a comfort. So what does his vision say that might be helpful to us in times of such change? Well first of all, Ezekiel’s vision of a new Gihon springs, “from below the threshold of the temple.” It is a promise of God’s ongoing presence with the people. They may destroy the temple, it might be razed to the ground, and the course of the river may be fouled, but the spring will pour forth its water again.

      And notice that the river, as Ezekiel sees it, no longer has that intermittent flow that he and all the people of Jerusalem would have been used to. Now it flows steadily and without interruption. This is surely a sign to us of God’s constancy for us during times of change. Everything else may change but God remains the same.

Hespeler, 6 November, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Genesis 2:8-17, John 5:1-9, Psalm 46

T

he second chapter of the Book of Genesis describes a garden – a place of idyllic existence where, the Bible says, humanity first came into being. This garden was perfect – the only place where all life (human and animal alike) lived together in peace and harmony. But the story goes on from there to tell us that the garden was lost and that humanity will never be able to enter it again as long as this world exists.

      The loss of the garden has been a powerful idea that has possessed many people down through the ages who have sought for a way to get back to it. Some have sought to do it by questing after the tree of knowledge of good and evil – seeking to reclaim the garden by expanding human understanding. But they have not got us there yet by that route and sometimes have led us far astray.

      But what if we could find it in another way – what if it were a place on the map? I mean not a literal location that you could just punch into your GPS and drive to, but what if the geographical description in Genesis was meant to point us to a metaphorical place where we can find it in this world. The garden is said to be in a very particular (if unusual) place: “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden,” it says, “and from there it divides and becomes four branches.” The four branches are given names, some of which seem familiar. They are, Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates.

      Now, half of those rivers are immediately recognizable. Tigris and Euphrates are the two great rivers that flow through the land of Mesopotamia, which means the land between the two rivers. They flow today through the country of Iraq and they mark the place where archeologists tell us that human civilization first came into being at a place called Sumer.

      The other two rivers are harder to recognize. Since half of the rivers would have been well known to the people who first heard this story, the assumption is that the other half would have been as well. The first river called Pishon – a name totally unknown otherwise – and we’re told that it flows in a land called Havilah which is also unknown. But then it says that, in the place the Pishon flows, there is gold, bdellium and onyx stone. Since bdellium (a precious resin) is only found in sub-Saharan Africa and onyx was a precious stone commonly used in Ancient Egypt, some have suggest that Pishon must be another name for the River Nile which starts its course in sub-Saharan Africa and flows through the rich valleys of Egypt. The Nile would fit well in the company of the Tigris and the Euphrates as Egypt was the second great civilization of the ancient world.

      In fact, when you think about it that way, it suggests a very powerful symbolic meaning for this description of the Garden of Eden. The passage states that, out of the original garden and the things that happened there, there flowed the three of the great rivers of the ancient world – Tigris, Euphrates and Nile. And these three rivers were the cradle of human civilization itself in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This suggests to me that maybe the story of the garden was not intended to explain the origin of the human species so much as it was intended to explain the origin of human civilization.

      Think of the symbolism of the story of Eden. The humans are expelled from the garden, an idyllic rural existence, by their choice to pursue the tree of knowledge. Civilization is marked by the quest for knowledge and calls on people to move from a rural lifestyle into the city.

      Civilization has brought so many blessings, of course, but that relentless search for knowledge has also created many problems (nuclear proliferation and climate change are two that come to mind) that may destroy us in the long run. In many ways the loss of the garden, that loss of connection with the land has also been very costly. These three rivers may give us an angle on the story of the Garden of Eden that can help us to explore those very issues which are still important today as we still search for the garden that we have lost.

      But that brings us to the fourth river, the Gihon. It has long proven the hardest to identify. There has been a lot of speculation about the identity of the Gihon down through the centuries. Some have also associated it with the Nile River (or a branch of the Nile) as well because it is said to have flowed through the land of Cush and Cush is an ancient name for the land that we call Ethiopia. But there is another possibility that comes from the name of the river itself. The name comes from a Hebrew root that means “to burst forth,” which doesn’t sound like a good name for a river so much as for a spring which might be the source of a river.

      And it just so happens that there was a spring that fed a river that was called Gihon – a spring that was very well known to the people who first heard this story in the Book of Genesis. It was a small spring that flowed from a spot very close to a mountain called Zion. This spring was extremely important to the ancient Israelites because it made that mountain into a good and defensible spot where you might build a fortress and a city. The city that they built there was called Jerusalem, the city of David and his capital.

      The spring mattered because a decent water supply was so hard to come by in that part of the world. It made it possible, for example, for the city of Jerusalem to withstand many attacks and sieges over the centuries, something that is celebrated in the Psalm we read this morning (which was likely written as a national celebration when the city had survived an attack): “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.” The river celebrated in that Psalm is none other than the Gihon and it describes the river as a sign of the presence of God in the city.

      Now, traditionally, interpreters have hesitated to identify the river Gihon that is said to flow from Eden in Genesis with the Gihon that flowed in the city of Jerusalem. In fact, I cannot find any commentary that even suggests that they are intended to be the same river. You can probably guess why. People have had a hard time seeing how this tiny stream in Jerusalem belongs in the same league as mighty and historically significant rivers like Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. Jerusalem, as a centre of civilization, is also hard to compare with the much larger ancient cities of Mesopotamia and the Nile valley. If the Gihon is just a small stream in Jerusalem, it doesn’t seem to belong in the company of the other rivers of Eden.

      But here is the thing: the description of the rivers of Eden never really made sense geographically speaking. Rivers simply do not work like they are described in this passage – especially with several rivers dividing off from one original river and then somehow flowing to various far-flung corners of the world. But that is okay because I don’t think that this description was ever meant to be taken as pointing to a literal geographical location.

      The people who first heard and repeated this story did not hear it as a story about something that happened a long time ago in a remote geographical location. It was a story that was part of their daily lives and, if they could look over and see a stream, flowing by the streets of Jerusalem, and recognize that stream as a river that once flowed from Eden, that would have said some significant things to them about the world that God created and their place in it.

      For one thing, it gave them a sense that they had a place among the great nations and empires of the earth. They looked at the great powers of the world such as Babylon (which lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates) and Egypt along the Nile and they could say, “Yeah, but look at us! We’ve got a river of Eden that flows through our city too. We too are one of the world’s great civilizations.” It was a matter of national pride and identity.

      But the connection between the Gihon River that they knew and the Gihon River of Eden was about more than that. They saw it as a point of connection between their daily lives and the ideal world promised in the original story of the garden.

      Here is the thing that I have noticed. The Gihon River of Jerusalem is rarely named in the Bible but there are many passages and stories about this river. The river flows right through the whole Bible though you may have never noticed it. In fact, the very last chapter of the Book of Revelations – of the whole Bible – includes a description of a river that flows from the throne of God in the new heavenly city of Jerusalem – a new Gihon. It is the final comforting image of the Bible. Isn’t it interesting to think that the Bible both begins and ends on the banks of the River Gihon?

      In our reading from the Gospel of John this morning, we find ourselves at the Pool of Beth-zatha – a pool in Jerusalem that was fed, in the time of Jesus, by the spring of the River Gihon. In this story we learn that, by the time of Jesus, the people of Jerusalem had come to believe that the waters of that stream had healing and restorative powers when the spring burst forth and stirred the water. Did they come to that belief because somewhere in their ancient traditions they connected this stream in Jerusalem to the ancient waters of Eden and the wholeness that humanity had known there? Did they believe that those waters had a healing power because of that connection?

      Of course, maybe that doesn’t matter because in the story in the Gospel of John, the Gihon waters prove unnecessary and Jesus himself is able to heal the invalid. Perhaps that tells us that Jesus himself is a stronger connection to the wholeness of Eden than any stream could be.

      I don’t know if Eden in the Book of Genesis was ever intended to be understood as a literal place that once existed. I don’t know if the events that we are told took place there were meant to be taken literally or symbolically. But I do know this: the story of Eden is true because it tells me so much about what it means to be human in this world. One thing it speaks to me about is that sense of what we have lost as humans on this planet. I believe that we should be able to live together in peace and harmony. I believe that there is no good reason why everyone in this world should not have enough to get by. I know that war and all of the destruction it brings shouldn’t happen – it doesn’t make sense. And there is this disconnect between how I think the world should be and how it actually is. I long for Eden – that perfect picture of what it should be – and I do not find it. I’ve never seen the garden and yet I miss it.

      Traditionally, Christians have thought of Eden as totally cut off from the present world. It is a garden found in the remote past at the beginning of the world or in a remote future (a garden restored) at the end. But I am beginning to suspect that the Israelites didn’t see it that way. They walked through the streets of Jerusalem and saw, right there, a stream that was, for them, a river of Eden. The garden wasn’t remote for them, it was right there.

      What might change, do you think, if we began to think in the same way? What if we could look out the door here, at the Speed River that flows just over there, and see it as a river of Eden. It might give us some hope that the dysfunction of this world isn’t fated to be, that Eden is just over there.

      What if every river is a river of Eden? What if we all could find our way there by following them back? It is an intriguing idea and one that I hope to continue to explore as we continue this journey to the biblical Gihon next Sunday.

     

Hespeler, 23 October, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

f you are going to understand the two stories that we read from the Book of Genesis this morning, you need to learn the meaning of one Hebrew word. If you do not know this word, you totally miss the point of both of the stories. The word is yitschaq and it is the Hebrew word for laughing. It has been suggested that it might be an onomatopoetic word – that is, a word that sounds like the thing that it describes (you know, like the word quack sounds like the noise a duck makes and the word bark, like the noise of a dog). Apparently, to an ancient Hebrew ear, laughter sounded a little bit like somebody going “yitschaq, yitschaq, yitschaq.” I guess that some ancient Hebrews just had weird laughs.

      That Hebrew word is important because laughter is an important theme in both stories we read this morning. In one, Sarah laughs in her tent when she hears an angel promise her husband that she will have a child even though she is far too old to do so. She laughs because the promise is so impossible as to be ridiculous and later she denies having laughed. In the second story, when the promised child is actually born, Sarah laughs again for the absurdity of her having a child in her old age but she is also laughing for joy.

      Why is laughter so important in these stories? It is important because of the name of the child who is born. His name, in Hebrew, is Yitschaq; his name islaughter. The English form of that name, that we are a little more familiar with, is Isaac. So what we basically have in these two stories are two different accounts of how Isaac got his name.

      In the first story, Sarah, hiding in the tent and listening to God’s promise, laughs. We are told that her laughter springs from what she says to herself: “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” She laughs because, though she greatly desires a child and long has done so, it is just not supposed to happen at this point in her life.

      Perhaps she laughs because she realizes that having a child at this point in her life would also bring with it some very particular challenges. How are you supposed to take care of a baby if you are dealing with the typical challenges of old age for example: arthritis? reduced stamina? Heart conditions? How do you deal with the long sleepless nights when you have all of that going on? How is she supposed to even feed her child if, as it says in Genesis, it has “ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” Would a mother even be able to produce milk in such a state? The real challenges of parenthood are only amplified when a child arrives unexpectedly and at a time that is not considered normal according to the culture.

      In the Book of Genesis, Sarah’s laughter after her son has been born seems a little bit different than in the first story. “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me,” She says. “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.” This seems more of a laughter of pure joy than anything else. It still seems a bit ridiculous to her that she should have a child in this season of her life, of course, but any apprehension seems to have dissolved away into pure joy.

      I do rather feel that we are much more in the frame of mind of the second story here today. I can sense the laughter, the love and joy that surrounds Isaac and his family today. Perhaps some of Sarah’s joy in the Genesis story comes because she is now more focussed on the future than on the past or the present. She looks at this little child that she cradles to her breast and sees, not the troubles and complications that will come with raising him, but the sheer potential that is in him. In the Biblical Yitschaq’s case, that potential is huge because God has promised that, in this little baby’s skin lies, not only the future of one life but of an entire nation. Sarah can already imagine the nation that Yitschaq will become and that will inherit all of the promises that God has already given to Abraham and Sarah themselves.

Hespeler, 16 October, 2016 © Scott McAndless – The Jeff-a-thon

1 Kings 18:41-46, Isaiah 40:27-31, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

n Saturday, May 28 at 7:56 am, I did something that I had never imagined that I would do in all my life of my own free will. I stepped out of my front door and started to run and didn’t stop running until I had travelled about four kilometers. I ran through the arena parking lot down the streets, down the long path through woods to Queen St, I ran along Queen St. right in front of the church here, on through Forbes Park and up the trails that run through Woodland Park. And there, after about 4 kilometers as I said, and half way up what has to be one of the steepest hills in all Hespeler (that I foolishly took at a run), I stopped. My breath was ragged, I was carrying a great weight upon my chest and my legs and even (much to my surprise) my arms felt like lead. The muscles in my limbs would continue to be sore for a couple of days.

      Why did I put myself through that? When I describe it like that, it really doesn’t sound like a very fun way to spend your Saturday morning. Well, I probably don’t need to tell most of you why I did it because you have already heard me say that I had made a decision that I wanted to run in the Jeff-a-thon and had set as a goal to run the full 10 km distance and do it in an hour. I’m not going to go over the reasons here today for why I felt that the Jeff-a-thon was a good enough reason for me to change what had been, up until that point, a very successful strict no running policy. You’ll have lots of chances to hear about that when you come out to Crieff Hills this afternoon.

      But the process of getting from that morning back at the end of May to the place where I am now – ready and confident that I can do what I set out to do this very afternoon – has been an interesting journey to say the least and I believe that there are some spiritual lessons in that journey for all of us today.

      I don’t pretend to be an amazing athlete. I don’t pretend to have a better grasp of training to run than lots of other people who could probably give you much better advice than me. But I can say that, over the last few months, I have learned how to run. I would even say that I have changed my identity from being a non-runner to being a runner because I know that this afternoon will not be my last run. I don’t know how I am going to do it through the coming winter, but I do know that I am going to continue running, that it is now a necessary part of my life. And it is something that actually gives me a new way of looking at parts of the New Testament.

      As you may have noticed, there is a long tradition in Christian preaching of preachers and teachers seeking to bring out spiritual truths with analogies and metaphors related to sports. In fact, you are Canadians, I’ll bet that you have heard hundreds – maybe thousands – of sermons that are built around hockey metaphors. So many, in fact, that it might surprise you to learn that the Bible doesn’t actually say anything about hockey at all. I mean, it’s incredible – almost as if no one had ever heard of Canada’s favourite sport when the Bible was being written. So no hockey at all, but would it surprise you to learn that there is one sport that is used as an analogy of the Christian life in the New Testament not once but four times?

      That sport is running. It is a metaphor used once in the Letter to Hebrews and three separate times in the writings of the Apostle Paul. I find it quite amazing that on three different occasions, Paul was looking for some image that would illustrate the kind of life that he was calling his disciples to live and each time Paul chose to write about running. It actually makes me suspect that either Paul was a runner himself or that he was a big fan of what actually was the most popular sport in the ancient Greek-speaking world.

      So I thought that maybe it was about time that someone preached a sermon on the sport of running and what might have to teach us about the Christian life. I would like to think that, over the past few months, I have learned a little bit about running. What lessons are there in what I have learned that we could all apply to how we live out our lives as Christians in the modern world?

      Of all the things that the Apostle Paul says about running, the one idea that he keeps coming back to is the idea of having a goal or aim in your running. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes, “Then I laid before them… the gospel… in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain.” To the Philippians he writes, “I can boast on the day of Christ that I did not run in vain.” And finally, in the passage we read this morning, he says, “I do not run aimlessly.”

      Now, I think that it is very fair to say that, if you are running in a race and you do not have the slightest idea of where the finish line is, you are not going to win that race. That much is obvious when you are running. But Paul is not talking about winning a foot race in this passage but about how to conduct your life as a Christian. So what, about that, can we apply to the life of Christian faith? I think it is true that many of us (and I will readily include myself in this) do often seek to live out our Christian life without thinking too much about our aims and goals in it. It is so easy to just develop certain habits of prayer and devotion, church attendance and activities and think that to do these things is what it means to be a Christian. And it is not that these are bad activities. These are very good habits to be in, but it can be so easy for us to lose sight of why we do these things. And when that happens, we begin to make the activities themselves the goal.

      Have you ever heard people in church, when challenged to explain why they do certain things in certain ways, respond like this: “Well, that’s how we have always done it”? No, I’ve never heard that in a church either! Well, if, by chance, you ever do hear it, it might just be a sign that you are not as aware of the purpose of being a church as you need to be. The purpose of the Christian life is clear (even if the question of how we achieve that purpose may adapt and change). We are here to build up the kingdom of God. We are here to proclaim good news to the world in word and in deed. Paul uses the image of the runner to remind us that we must ever keep that aim in view in everything that we do.

      The second thing that Paul talks about in the sport of running is dedication. “Athletes exercise self-control in all things,” he says. After that he lays out in practical terms exactly what that sort of self-control looks like: “I punish my body and enslave it,”he says.

      Again, this is not something that I can really say that I understood until I seriously started to train to run 10 kilometres. I have learned that it is one thing to run 3, 4 and even 5 kilometers, but that it is quite another to run 7, 8, 9 and 10. At some point you are going to hit that place where your body is going to be crying out that it can go no further and do no more and you are only going to get more out of yourself if you push beyond what your body wants, effectively making your body a slave to your will.

      That level of dedication seems to be difficult for many people to find these days. One of the reasons why we find it so hard, I believe, is because of the way we turn everything into an opportunity to shop. Do you realize that there is an unprecedented interest in fitness in our society and much of it is driven by the growth of activity trackers like Fitbits, Apple Watches and other similar devices? People are collectively spending millions of dollars these days on these sorts of devices.

      And the growth in the use of these devices has gotten to a point where researchers are able to study the impact that they are having on our overall health and fitness. And do you know what they are finding? They are finding that there really isn’t much correlation between the sales of fitbits and health and weight loss. It is not helping very much.

      And you know why that is? It because we have fallen into this habit of thinking that the way we solve all of our problems is by buying things. And so when you want to lose weight or get healthier, you just go out and buy a gym membership or a fitbit and you’re done and everything has been taken care of. Oh it is not as if I have to actually go to the gym or walk more than a few feet is it? Haven’t I already done enough by spending my money to get healthier? Shouldn’t what I bought do all the rest?

      Can you see the problem with this approach? These devices are terrific and they certainly can help you in your quest for better health, but the device itself doesn’t solve anything for you. Without some commitment and dedication, it is actually totally useless.

      And we actually have the same problem with the Christian life as well. We are often tempted to replace dedication with consumerism. Here’s an example for you: did you realize that the Bible has long been one of the best selling books in the world and Bible sales have remained strong despite many other changes in society. The book sells like hotcakes. But here is another statistic: while the Bible still sells like crazy, knowledge of what the Bible actually says and contains continues to drop like a stone. It turns out that the world’s best selling book just happens to be one of the world’s least read books.

      What is going on? Isn’t it obvious? People are treating Bibles like fitbits and gym memberships. When they want to get a little bit of spirituality or religion, what do they do? They go out and buy a Bible – a nice one, a special version that promises to make all kinds of applications to their life for them. They buy the Bible, bring it home and throw it on the shelf and they are done. Read it? Why would I bother reading it? Isn’t it enough that I spent so much money to get it? Once again, the Bible is a terrific tool and a great help, but without a bit of commitment and dedication it really cannot ever amount to anything.

      There is one other connection that Paul makes between the sport of running and the Christian life: the reward. Runners do it, he says, “to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one.” He is referring, of course, to the kinds of prizes that were commonly handed out to winners of races in the ancient world which were wreathes woven out of various kinds of foliage. The wreathes themselves had little value and were only prized because they represented the glory that came to the victor. Paul seizes on the perishability of these wreathes in order to contrast them to the prize that comes with the Christian life that we do receive here and now but that also is able to endure far beyond the confines of this world.

      The rewards of physical running (even if you never win an important race like at the Olympics) are real. They can change your life in so many positive ways. How much more the rewards of a Christian life well lived, especially when those rewards endure long after an Olympic gold medal has turned to dust.

      So, yes, think of your Christian life as a race. Keep the goals of that life – the finish line – ever in view. Let commitment and dedication to those goals ever keep you moving towards them. Remember the prize that is yours today but that will endure for you forever. Run the race with endurance.

      #140CharacterSermon Christian life is like a race: keep goals ever clear b4 you, practice discipline and commitment, claim an eternal prize.