Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

Laughter

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, October 23rd, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 23 October, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Baptism

Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7, Psalm 126, Luke 6:20-21

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.

You get this kind of thing a lot in ancient books like the Bible. Ancient people really loved to tell stories about how people, places and things got their names and the punchlines of these stories were often amusing puns and wordplays. Sometimes people loved these kinds of stories so much that there would even be competing stories about where the name came from like we have here.

The really fun things about these stories is that they were usually created long after the actual naming took place and may have had little connection with what people were actually thinking at the time. Ancient people really didn’t have a clear idea of how words and names are invented. But that was fine because the stories were not really about how something got named. The stories were about deeper truths than that.

Take, for example, these two different stories about how Isaac got his name. One takes place just before the child is conceived and, in it, the laughter is there because the very idea that a woman as old as Sarah could have a child is too ridiculous. The second story takes place after the child has been born. The two stories, it seems to me, help us focus in on different aspects about what it means to bring a child into this world.

But since it is a little bit difficult for us to relate to a child named Yitschaq who was born thousands of years ago to an aged couple named Abraham and Sarah, it might be helpful to relate them to a child who we can actually see and hold and relate to. Let us think of these passages in relation to another child named Isaac born about six weeks ago. A lot of things may have changed in the world since the days of the original Yitschaq, but one thing that hasn’t changed is that, when children come into this world, they bring with them many challenges and problems, but also many blessings and a whole lot of laughter.

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.

Well, little Isaac who we welcomed into the life of this congregation this morning, was not born to a mother well past the age of childbearing, of course. But, at the same time, he didn’t necessarily come at the usual time for a child, at least according to our modern western culture.

Older cultures had very different ideas about when the ideal time was to have children, of course, but the expectation of modern society seems to be that children should ideally enter into the picture only after the parents’ lives have settled down and they have found a certain economic stability. The modern ideal is that this is only after the mother has had time to establish herself in some career or work. I don’t really know if that modern notion is as ideal as we all seem to think it is – for one thing, it tends to mean that women delay childbearing until other problems, such as infertility, begin to be an issue – but that seems to be how we have decided that it is supposed to be done.

And, no, the arrival of Isaac doesn’t really fit that cultural ideal. That is not to suggest, for one moment that he was not wanted. There are people here who looked forward to his arrival with all the love and expectations that have been there for any child ever born. It is certainly not to suggest that he isn’t loved. But the birth of any child always brings with it certain challenges and that is all the more true when it does not come with that culturally ideal timing and circumstance. I know that Isaac’s arrival will make it more difficult, for example, for his mother to complete all of her education and to set out on a path in her life that will build her own economic security. I mean, it is hard enough for any young person today to start out and to figure out what sort of work is going to still be there for them to do and get paid for even just a few years down the road. That can be a much more difficult road to travel down with a child. The struggles of life are real and we ought not to pretend they aren’t there.

But, and this is the beautiful part, in the story, Sarah doesn’t despair in the tent, she laughs. The laughter may be nervous about possible futures and it may reflect some uncertainty about what that future holds, but it is still laughter, which is a cousin to joy. There are times to worry about and especially to prepare for an uncertain future, but at the same time, it is important to see that God doesn’t just send us those challenges alone. They come mixed with blessing and laughter and I know that so much of that has already come with Isaac and that so much more is yet to come.

God also doesn’t send challenges to us in isolation. One of the greatest blessings that God gives to us is community and, honestly, how could any of us deal with the very real challenges of raising children in the modern world without a community to fall back on. One of the things that makes this event so joyful today is the tremendous amount of support that Isaac and his mother have from their family and their friends, including three godparents (which is perhaps a record here at St. Andrews) who have joyfully and lovingly stepped forward to make their own promises to support and love Isaac and to see that he comes to know the Gospel and finds his own path to live in it. This tremendous level of support means that any challenges will be more than overcome with laughter.

On top of that, of course, is the community of this congregation. We also have stepped forward in this sacrament of baptism to promise to give to Isaac every support that we can to help him grow into a man who can someday chose for himself how he serves God and lives according to God’s will in this world. That is, as far as I am concerned, the most important aspect of our celebration of baptism today and I hope it is something that we never lose sight of. Because of our commitment and our joining together with Isaac, his mother, his family and his friends, the joy and the laughter is only magnified because we all get to join in it together.

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.

And potential is absolutely something that we can celebrate in little Isaac here today. I’m not necessarily expecting that he is going to grow up to found an entirely new nation. I think that age for that has passed. But just look at him. Who knows what he might grow up to do or be? He is going to live in a world of wonders and of change that we can scarcely even imagine. I don’t know what new goodness will come into the world because of him, but it is something that I absolutely expect because this Isaac, like the Yitschaq of old, is a child of promise.

Those promises have been repeated here today. He is a child of God. He is beloved of the Most High. He has been claimed by all of his friends and extended family as a part of their family now. He has been claimed by this congregation as a child of this congregation with all of the promises that go with that.

Isaac, you named your child – Yitzchaq in Hebrew. How fitting that you called your child laughter. May he bring much laughter and joy to you, to your family, to this, your church, and to all who meet him. Laughter is a gift of God and any of us are fools if we fail to receive that gift with much thanksgiving.

#140CharacterSermon The story of Isaac teaches us children bring many challenges that become laughter, joy & blessings when we work together

Sermon Video:

Gird your loins

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 17th, 2016 in Minister

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.

Sermon Video:

In all circumstances

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 10th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, October 9, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Thanksgiving

Ephesians 5:15-20, 1 Thessalonians 5:12-25, Psalm 92

was at the store the other day and there was, up in the checkout line ahead of me, one of those customers. You know the type I’m talking about. He was complaining about everything. The cashier was moving too slow. He was pretty sure that the item he was buying had been advertised at a lower price. The stock was old, the people who worked there used to be nicer and the lines moved too slow because people spent too much time talking to the cashiers. This went on for a while until he finally they arrived at his real issue. The store didn’t have his favourite brand of something. Here he was being forced – forced, I tell you! – to purchase an inferior brand and, adding insult to injury, to pay full price for it.

“Oh how retail service has declined in Canada,” he exclaimed, “that I cannot get exactly what I want. If you people were at all a decent enterprise, you wouldn’t charge me for this item at all.” So he spoke and continued on in much the same vein while we, who stood behind him, waited with varying degrees of patience. The poor cashier who, I would note, had absolutely nothing to do with the things that had displeased him, dealt with him as much grace as any human could muster, but there was nothing that was in her power to please him. His demands were eventually escalated to a manager.

The manager, when she came, knew very well that the man was being unreasonable. You could see it in her face. But she also had little time and no appetite for conflict. So in short order, and much to the chagrin of everyone who stood behind him, the man had been given pretty much what he had wanted and, at the very least, he finally left us in peace.

But that is how it works, doesn’t it? The squeaky wheel is always the one that gets the grease. The person who raises their voice to complain is the most likely to get what they want. Many have concluded, therefore, that, if you do get a chance to complain about something, you better just go ahead and do it and get as much out of the situation as you possibly can.

After all, isn’t that what we are all here for – we’re supposed to get whatever we can out of this life. Money, possessions, satisfaction, enjoyment, affection – it’s only what I deserve. And if I’m not getting enough of that, well, it must be somebody’s fault and it is only natural that I should point that out and get them straightened out.

In such a world is there a place for thanksgiving? Well of course there is. We’ll all get together sometime later today (or maybe tomorrow) with the people that we are closest to us and we’ll probably eat too much food but it will be delicious. And then, as we sit around the table afterwards, in a turkey-induced semi-coma, we will talk about the things that we have purchased, the films and television shows we have watched and the experiences that we have collected since we last met. We may even recount those times where things didn’t quite go our way and how we complained and got satisfaction for our pains. (And, of course, if we didn’t get everything we wanted, it can also be satisfying to complain about that and get some sympathy.)

And yes, somewhere in the midst of all this we may remember to bow our heads for a few moments and saw some words of thanks for all this bounty. That’s what thanksgiving is, isn’t it?

Well, apparently not if you listen to the Apostle Paul and the people of the early church. In our two readings this morning, from the letters to the Ephesians and to the Thessalonians, we find the apostle closing his correspondence by giving a little bit of last minute advice. Think of these words as Christian life hacks – little things that you can do that make your Christian life better and easier to live out. These are not intended to be deep theological reflections so much as practical tips. So we have advice like do not get drunk on wine and instead to be filled with the Spirit, and to be patient with people especially if they are idlers, fainthearted or weak.

But there is one piece of advice that is common to both of these texts that particularly interests me today and it concerns, of course, thanksgiving. “Give thanks,”believers are admonished in Thessalonians while the Christians in Ephesus are told that it is all about “giving thanks to God the Father.” And I think that we would all agree that that is pretty good advice.

It reminds me of the lesson that were all taught by our mothers and our fathers. I think I can almost still hear my mother’s voice to this very day every time somebody offers me something that I would really like to receive. “Now, what do we say?” she would say as she held out the piece of candy and I would not get it until I managed to mumble a few words of thanks.

I know, I know, and I remember thinking it too at the time. “How can I be thankful for the candy if I haven’t actually received it yet – and won’t actually receive it at all unless I say thank you.” Is that a lesson about being truly thankful or actually a lesson in how to obtain candy? But I get why parents teach the lesson in that way and you probably could have caught me doing it with my own kids too.

The lesson, as our parents tried to teach it to us as kids at least, seemed to be that you actually will get more from people as you make your way through this world by being polite with them than you will by being rude and demanding. And that is a pretty good lesson for people to learn. If more people learned it (rather than the lesson of the checkout line which is that the best way to get what you want in this world is to complain and be insufferable until someone gives it to you) it seems to me that the world would be a nicer place to live in. But do note that it is still a lesson about getting things for yourself – really just another strategy for getting what you want. As life tips go, it is a good one but it still seems to be focussed on meeting your own individualistic needs at the heart just as so many things in our society are.

But is that the same lesson that we encounter in the advice that is offered at the end of these New Testament letters? Is Paul suggesting that these Christians ought to be thankful in order to get good stuff from God or from other people? I’m not so sure because, in both cases, he doesn’t just say, “give thanks.” In Ephesians it is, “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything.” In Thessalonians it is, “give thanks in all circumstances.”

That, my friends, is a whole different kind of thanksgiving than most of us practice most of the time – a very different kind from the kind that your parents taught you. It is, in fact, a kind of thanksgiving that makes no sense at all in the world that is so focussed on individualistic needs that we live in.

What does it mean? It means being thankful when you get what you need but also when you don’t get it. It means showing appreciation to people who have pleased you but also going out of your way to find things that you appreciate about people who don’t please you. Above all it means an attitude with which you approach the whole of life – an attitude which is the very opposite of this present world’s spirit which makes people focus on getting what they desire for themselves.

In fact, according to this world’s way of thinking, it is absolutely impossible to be thankful in all circumstances. I mean, sure, we can do it when all is going well or when we get at least some of what we want or need, but there is a long list of circumstances when thanks is definitely not in order. If you were a Syrian in Aleppo, would you be thankful for terrorists and bombs? If you were an abused person in a bad relationship, would you be thankful for the blows and bruises? If you were a Jew in Auschwitz, would you be thankful for Nazi propaganda and gas chambers? Of course not! There are some things in this world that we don’t just need to refuse to be thankful for but that we must reject and rage against and complain of!

So how are we supposed to apply this good advice to be thankful in all circumstances to circumstances like bombs, blows and gas chambers? Whatever we mean by being thankful in those kinds of circumstances it cannot mean that we let the terrorists or the abusers or the Nazis off the hook for the evil that they do. They must face the consequences of their crimes and we must do whatever we can to make sure that people are safe from the evil that they do.

But thanksgiving – biblical thanksgiving – isn’t about other people so much as it is about ourselves and about how we approach the world. Think about it. When we give thanks to God, for example, do we do it because God needs to hear our thanks in order to build up his own confidence and feel good about Godself? Of course not! I’m sure that God always appreciates the thanks that we offer, but God doesn’t need it and certainly doesn’t need it to know that he has done good; God is good. We offer thanks to God because we need it more than God does. We offer it because it changes us and how we interact with the world and with each other.

So, yes, when you encounter actual evil in this world, you must resist it and you are entirely permitted to complain about it because there is nothing wrong with expressing how you feel and if you don’t say anything, nothing may ever change. But being thankful in every circumstance means that you don’t need to get stuck there in the moment of the evil and you don’t need to let any resentment burn. You may have been victimized but learning to be thankful means that your identity is not limited to being a victim as can so often happen.

When, through these scriptures, God instructs you to be thankful in all circumstances, you should not think of it as another commandment to be obeyed. It is not a burden that is intended to weigh you down with responsibility. It doesn’t mean that you have to pretend to be thankful when you really don’t feel that way.

Take a good look at the people who cross your path who are the complainers – who look at everything that happens to them as another reason to complain and to demand that someone do something to satisfy them. Look at those who will take any excuse to cast themselves as the victim and who make that victimhood a part of their identity. Oh, I’ll admit it, they may sometimes get the things that they are looking for when they complain, but, over time, they also become entrapped within that identity. Victimhood becomes part of who they are. The experience of satisfaction becomes limited to them getting the things that they desire and so they become robbed of true satisfaction.

By teaching you to be thankful in all circumstances, what your God and Father wants to do for you is to set you free from that. God wants you to experience joy and a spirit of gratefulness that is not limited by the circumstances that you might encounter in life. By choosing to be thankful in all circumstances, you no longer need to be controlled by those circumstances. You are free.

I invite you, on this Thanksgiving Sunday, to experiment with this very powerful thing called thanksgiving. It may not happen today, but it will probably happen soon enough that something will not work out as you may have hoped. There will be some hiccup, some problem in your well laid plans. You will have two choices, you can seek to get whatever you can out of the situation by complaining or being miserable enough to other people to make them do what you want, or you can choose to practice a kind of thanksgiving you can make in any circumstance – the kind that sets you free from the circumstances of life by saying that they have no control over you. On this Thanksgiving Sunday, I encourage you to choose thanksgiving.

#140CharacterSermon Being thankful in all circumstances sets us free from the power of our circumstances 2 control us & define us as victims

I am very excited to announce…

Posted by Scott McAndless on Thursday, October 6th, 2016 in Minister

I am very excited to announce that this summer I took a fair bit of my vacation time to finish the second draft of a book that God laid on my heart a couple of years ago.

The book is called, "The Seven Demons of Miryam of Magdala," and it is a work of historical fiction, set in Galilee in the opening decades of the common era. It is a short book (54,000 words, 164 pages) but it is one that I hope will help people see the story of Jesus of Nazareth from some very interesting new angles.

All 164 pages, if you can make them out.

The Table of Contents

I am, at this point, looking for some colleagues to look at what I have written and give me some critical feedback. I would especially appreciate some feedback from my female colleagues (when you read the book, you'll understand why).

I am sure that, after this second draft, the text still contains some spelling, grammar and stylistic errors as well as typos but I am not necessarily looking for proofreading at this point. That will come after.

So if you would be willing to help me at this critical point, please message me privately. I will be happy to send you a copy in pdf format or any other digital format you ask for. The copy I send you is DRM free and yours to keep, but I will ask you to commit to the following:

To give me your feedback.
Not to give it to anyone else without my permission.
Not to accuse me of being a heretic yet. (Please just point out any heresy that you see and give me a chance to address it or correct it.)

This book is a labour of love and I would love to be able to share it with you and, perhaps, with the world.

Gathered into One Loaf

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, October 3rd, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 2 October, 2016 © Scott McAndless – World Communion

1 Corinthians 10:14-22, Luke 14:15-24, Psalm 104:1-15

ou are all familiar enough with the gospels and the letters and other writings that make up what we call the New Testament. This little collection of books is the most important source that we have for understanding the early Christians and how they worked out their life and faith together. This morning I would like to introduce you to one other document that you really ought to know about. It is called the Teaching of the Twelve and also goes by the name of The Didache, which is the Greek word for teaching.

The Didache is a very old document – some scholars think that parts of it may well be older than parts of the New Testament. It is also a very important document for a few reasons. It may well contain genuine traditions that go all the way back to the very words of Jesus – traditions that are independent of the gospels. It contains, for example, a version of the Lord’s Prayer that is slightly different from the one that is found in the Gospel of Matthew and from the one that is in the Gospel of Luke. It seems likely that the writers of the Didache did not get their version of The Lord’s Prayer from the Gospels but from an independent tradition passed down to them from some other source – ultimately from Jesus himself.

But the book actually gives us more than just insights into the original wording of Jesus’ prayer. It also gives us a glance into the worship practices of the early church. In fact, a great deal of the book is clearly focussed directly on the worship and other customs of a certain group of churches in a certain area. Most of the scholars I have read seem to believe that they were made up of second or third generation Christians in Galilee or in nearby Syria.

I find this fascinating because it gives us what is perhaps the very first glimpse we have (outside of the Bible and not influenced by any of the Biblical writings) of how the first church actually lived and worshipped. In other words, if you want to know what the earliest Christians actually thought they were accomplishing when they ate communion or performed a baptism, the Didache may be one of the very best sources that we have.

The Didache has, for example, a prayer of thanksgiving that was to be prayed whenever the community gathered to eat what we would call the Lord’s Supper or Communion or the Eucharist, but which they seemed to call simply the Thanksgiving Meal. As these prayers are probably the oldest communion prayers in existence (and they are nice and brief) I have decided to use them as our communion prayers this morning. I think they can teach us a lot about what they thought about communion that might challenge how we think about it today.

You see, when we gather to celebrate communion, there are certain things that we say about what we are doing and there are certain images that we use. We usually say, for example, that this meal is about the death of Jesus. In particular, we associate the bread with the broken body of Jesus and the wine with the spilt blood of Jesus. The imagery we often use is the imagery of a sacrifice or an atoning death. And we also look forward to the return, someday of Christ.

I don’t know how much you pay attention to the prayers that you have heard ministers like me praying before communion services but, if you do, those are the kinds of images that we you’ll hear us use over and over again because that is what we believe that communion is about – remembering and re-enacting those things.

But if you listen to the prayers that I use today from the Didache, you will not hear any of that imagery. The prayers of those ancient Galilean or Syrian Christians speak of Jesus Christ and talk about how he reveals God to us, of course, but they do not make any reference to his death at all. There is absolutely no talk of sacrifice or atonement nor even any reference to the return of Christ.

Now, I am not suggesting that the Christian churches of the Didache community did not believe these things about Jesus and his death. Of course they did and there are references in other parts of the book to these truths. And they may well even have believed that the Thanksgiving Feasts that they shared had important connections to the meaning of the death of Jesus (though there is some evidence to suggest that this particular connection may have first been made by the Apostle Paul). You certainly cannot prove that they didn’t believe something just because they didn’t mention it in this very important prayer.

But it does suggest something. It does suggest that, when they gathered to eat this meal, they did put the emphasis in some rather different places than where we put it when we gather. And maybe we can learn something from the imagery that they used when they ate this meal.

There were two prayers that they prayed. The first one was over the cup and they prayed, “We thank You, our Father, For the Holy Vine of David Your servant, Whom You made known to us through Your Servant Jesus; May the glory be Yours forever.” That was it. The prayer is based on the image of the making of wine itself which begins with the vine and the grapes that grow upon it. For the Didache Christians the wine (and the vine that it grew on) was a symbol of their connection with their hope. It connected them with the promises made to King David of a kingdom that would last forever – promises that they believed had been fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah and the son of David. That symbolism of the connecting vine is not one that we generally use when we take the cup but it is one that I think we might learn from.

But I am particularly interested today (on this World Communion Sunday) in the prayer that they prayed over the loaf: “We thank You, our Father, For the life and knowledge Which You made known to us through Your Servant Jesus; May the glory be Yours forever. As this broken bread was scattered over the mountains, And was gathered together to become one, So let Your Church be gathered together From the ends of the earth into Your kingdom; for the glory and power are Yours through Jesus Christ forever.”

For them, the bread seemed to point to two things. First of all, it spoke to them of everything that they had learned and seen in the life and teachings of Jesus. There is no direct reference to his death (which is where we put the emphasis) but rather the focus seems to be on his life.

The second focus of their prayer, however, is on an image – the image of the creation of the loaf itself. They notice that the loaf began its life spread over the mountains. This is actually one of the things that indicates to us that the Didache may have had its origins in Galilee. The best place to grow grain in Galilee was in the hill country and many of the hills were called mountains. So this prayer evokes the image of the grain growing on the mountaintops, being harvested and ground and then baked together into one loaf.

Why is this important? Because it suggests to us what it actually meant to these earliest Christians when they gathered and shared this kind of meal together. It was not primarily, for them, a feast of the dead and resurrected Christ. I mean, yes, they believed in the importance of the death of Jesus and the truth of his resurrection, but when they ate this meal that was not the first thing that came to mind. The image of the grain harvested from many hilltops and then baked into one loaf was, for them, what it all came down to.

It was a feast, first and foremost, of the unity of the church. I believe that that was at the very foundation of the feast. Even the Apostle Paul – who may have been the first one to make the connection between communion and the death of Christ – tells us that, before anything else, it is about our unity with one another. Since the authentic letters of Paul are actually the first written books of the New Testament (they were almost certainly written before any of the gospels), Paul was the first person to give us a written account of the Last Supper and to say what it meant. Yes, he said that he received that account from others who had told it to him, but he was the first one to set it down in a form that endured. So he was the one who first told us, in the eleventh chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, that Jesus said that the meaning of the bread was, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

But before Paul ever told us that, he told us in the tenth chapter of the same letter, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”So even before Paul proclaimed that the bread was the body of Christ, he also declared that the loaf was the body of the church and that eating it together was a sign of our unity. He knew that the unity came first. The experience of the resurrection was the centrepiece of Christian faith, but Paul knew that he believers would never experience the power of the resurrection until they had found unity with one another.

What that means, my sisters and my brothers, is this: this feast is the feast of the resurrected Christ. When we eat this bread and drink this cup we do proclaim the death of Christ until he comes. It is also true that, when we eat and drink this sacred meal, the risen Jesus has promised to be present with us in it – truly present. But here is the problem: none of us can know that and none of us can experience that until we are united in one body as a church. Unity comes first.

So before this bread is broken like this body of Jesus was broken on the cross, you need to understand something about it. Before this bread becomes, for us, the body of Christ, it has to become the body of the church. You are the church – all of you. You make the church not because you are all the same but precisely because you are all so different.

We are those grains who start out spread far and wide over the mountaintops. We all sprouted where we were. We all grew into faith in our own way because of our unique circumstances and experiences. Some of you brought wounds and hurts into the life of the church. Some of you brought strengths and wonderful gifts. Most of us brought a mixture of both the positives and negatives. We came as we were and we remain as we are.

But though we started out in life spread far and wide over the hills and dales, we are all ground together into one bag of flour and then we have all been baked into one loaf. All of us come from different backgrounds and life experiences and here we have come together to be one. As you can imagine, that naturally leads to problems and clashes. We sometimes fail to understand one another because we are speaking out of our very different backgrounds and experiences and hurts. We sometime fail to appreciate one another because we are all so different. But we are only the church when we become that one loaf – when we finally realize that our differences make us stronger and tastier. The diversity among us makes this loaf delicious and full of good nutrients.

When we finally realize that and embrace one another despite being all so different, we are finally ready to experience the fullness of Christ among us. That kind of unity doesn’t come naturally to us. We often have to work at valuing people for who they are rather than for the things about them that are convenient to us. We often have to work at listening and truly hearing one another. The promise is that, when we do that, the presence of the risen Jesus will always be made clear.

That is what it means as we take this loaf, that was once spread far and wide over the mountaintops but has now come together as one loaf and is become the church. Only when we become that church, can the bread become the body of Christ who is present with us when we break it.

#140CharacterSermon When we take #communion, we become united, despite our differences, in 1 loaf so that 1 loaf can become Christ among us.

Sermon Video:

Come and See

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, September 18th, 2016 in Minister

*Hespeler, 18 September, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Psalm 40:1-11, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, John 4:16-42

ast Sunday I took a rather critical look at how we often assume that the church is supposed to grow. I noted that we usually seem to operate under an “If you build it, they will come,” philosophy. We think that we just need to build a church – not just put up a building, of course, but also create worship services and programs and ministries – but we just seem to assume that if we do all that, people will just come.

Because we assume (probably without thinking too much) that that is how it supposed to work, when things don’t work out that way – when people don’t come or don’t show up in the ways that they maybe once did, we also assume that we know what the problem is: there must be something wrong with what we have built. We easily fall into criticism of how things are in the church and often our reflex is to try and turn back the clock. We think that if we can restore the building or the worship or the programs to what they used to be when more people came, they will just show up again.

But I suspect that there is something wrong with our reasoning. Oh, I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with loving and taking reasonable care of our church buildings. And of course we need to bring the best that we can to our worship services and most everything else that we do in the church. I’m just wondering why we think that anyone would come just because we do that, especially when we are living in an age when people seem to be naturally suspicious of institutions in general and especially of religious institutions – in a time when “polished” and “professional” are often seen as synonyms for “phony” and “hypocritical.”

Jesus didn’t do it that way. We see his approach to ministry very clearly in our reading from the Gospel of John this morning. He had apparently decided that some Samaritans, people from the region that lay in between Judea and Galilee and was populated with people who were generally scorned by Jews, needed to hear about what he was doing. His disciples probably wouldn’t have agreed that Samaritans deserved a place in this kingdom of God that Jesus was building, but Jesus had apparently decided to include them.

So what does Jesus do? We’ll he certainly doesn’t employ our usual “If you build it” strategy. He doesn’t come into town and set up a preaching point or a ministry. He certainly doesn’t put up a building or set up an administrative structure and wait for Samaritans to come to him. What had does do is wander into town and sit down by the well.

Why does he sit down there? We might not quite realize the important role that a well played in an ancient town because that we live in a day of municipal water systems and indoor plumbing. Water, for us, is mostly a private and individual matter. But in the ancient world, a visit to the well was a necessary part of everyone’s day and it also tended to be the centre of the social life of the community.

So what would be the modern equivalent of sitting down by the town well? It was the place that everyone visited several times a day, where everyone, especially the common folks had to come and fill their vessels. It would have also naturally been the place where conversation, debate and common gossip were shared.

Where is Jesus sitting down? He’s sitting in the local pub, the corner coffee shop, the arena, the mall. Think of any spot in modern cities where people tend to gather and interact: that is where Jesus just sat down. He did the very opposite of setting up a special place for religious gatherings and waiting for people to come and join you there.

I have thought about that in terms of the expectations that are often put upon people in my position in the church. People seem to expect that I should spend a substantial amount of my time sitting in an office or standing around in other places in the church building waiting for people to come to me with their problems, needs or questions. If I were really following Jesus’ example, shouldn’t I be sitting at the well – wherever the people are. Aren’t the most important hours of my weeks the ones that I spend in the café or the park or, dare I say it, in the bar?

I may do other work or even meet with church folks while I’m there – I’m not suggesting that need to neglect my duties. Nor am I suggesting that I chase people around asking them if they have heard about Jesus. Jesus himself didn’t do that. He only spoke to the woman he met there at first to ask her for some water. No, it is more a question of being there and being open and ready to talk with people about anything – whether it be about the problems they have been having with their plumbing, the weather or the eternal state of their or my soul.

And, even more important than that, it is not about what I or other people in myposition do, as much as it is about how we all live out our Christian lives. It is easy for us to embrace our Christian identity in a place like this where we’ve built a special institution outside of the general culture. We can easily talk Christian and act Christian when we are gathered together with our own kind. But how often do we think about what it means to wear our Christian identity and our allegiance to Christ at the town well? That is where it actually matters.

But Jesus is actually only one example for us in this particular story; there is another – the woman at the well. She is, in fact, the model of what it is to be a Christian in a time like the one in which we live. This is clear because it is only through her that all of the other people who live there come to know Jesus. Before the story is over, she has brought huge numbers of her friends and neighbours to meet Jesus.

Now, when I call her a model for us, please note what that doesn’t mean. She is obviously a thoughtful and intelligent woman, but she is not really a woman who has got her life all sorted out. In fact, Jesus tells her (and she doesn’t disagree) that she has had five husbands and is living, unmarried with a sixth man. This would have been seen as a disastrous and quite immoral life situation in such a time and place. And, while Jesus doesn’t condemn her for this (he merely points it out to her), she and the others around her obviously look upon this with a certain amount of shame. For whatever reason (and it need not be her own fault) she just hasn’t managed to get her life together very well.

But obviously whatever has gone wrong in her life up until that point, none of it prevents her from very effectively brings all kinds of people to Jesus and to be part of what he is doing. “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” She eagerly says to anyone who will listen. And if you want to know the truth about how the church grows, that is it right there. It grows when people don’t hesitate to say, “Come and see.”

This is one clear result that you will find in all studies that are done on churches that are growing. The churches may differ greatly in a number of ways, but they generally have one thing in common: the people of the church are actively involved in inviting other people into the church. New people hardly ever just show up on their own at the church; the vast majority of new visitors and new members come in as guests of somebody who has been there a while. I’m not talking about people doing hard-sell evangelism, by the way. It is not that people are out there preaching at people or condemning them for not coming or for who they are. I’m just talking about people naturally sharing a key concern of their life with the people that they know and care for. That is how churches grow.

And I know that we hesitate to do that. And I even understand some of the reasons why we hesitate to it – after all, I find myself hesitating sometimes too. We see the reason in the story of this Samaritan woman. As she goes out, she does say, “Come and see,” but she can’t stop there. The full quote is, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” and that really is saying a whole lot more, isn’t it? Because, in the case of this woman, “everything I have ever done!” includes a lot of things that reflect poorly on her in the community. By saying such a thing, she is actually opening herself up for her neighbours to insult her, abuse her and mock her.

What I am saying is that inviting people to come and see what we have received from Jesus means becoming vulnerable with people. It means that they might mock you or judge you. It especially means being willing to share what Jesus has done for you to heal you or give you forgiveness. That is what this woman does with her neighbours. But, to do that means that you are admitting where you need or have needed healing and that means admitting your weakness or grief or sickness. And it also means being willing to admit that you have sinned or failed. That is not easy. Many of us spend our lives desperately trying to hide such things.

So I do understand where the hesitation comes from. It just seems so much safer to us if we just hide all of that personal stuff from the people we meet throughout the week. So it doesn’t come easy but sometimes the things that don’t come easy are the things that we find most worthwhile in the long run.

That is certainly what Jesus discovers. You see, all this time that Jesus has been talking with this woman by the well, the disciples have been off to the local famers’ market to pick up something for Jesus and themselves to eat. Just after the woman leaves Jesus to go and invite her neighbours to come and see, the disciples finally return bearing the food they have found. But Jesus doesn’t want it. He’s not hungry, he says, even though he hasn’t had a decent meal in a few days. Of course they wonder why and Jesus explains it to them by speaking about what he has just been doing in these terms: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.”

Jesus is not talking about physical food here, of course. He hasn’t had any of that. What he is saying is that, even though it can be difficult to be that vulnerable with people, it is also remarkably rewarding. There are many blessings to be had by being willing to open yourself up to other people – blessings that rebound back onto you regardless of whether the people you are talking to find their way towards the church or not.

That is the freeing thing in all of this. It is not as if it is up to you to bring people into the church. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. But if you do practice that kind of truth telling with yourselves and others that Jesus and the woman do in this story, you give people an opportunity to decide for themselves where they want to be.

That’s what the people of Samaria do at the end of the story. They say, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.” Everyone must decide for themselves where they want to give their allegiance. It is not your job to persuade anybody. What you can do, however, is invite them to come and see for themselves.

So will you do that this week? Would you be willing to reveal a little bit of yourself to one person this week and admit what you have gained from your ties to Jesus and his church? You might find that such openness nourishes you in some surprising ways.

#140CharacterSermon It’s risky to invite people to come & see Jesus. It makes us vulnerable. But it’s an activity that brings many blessings

Sermon Video ZS

A funny thing happened on the way home from Presbytery last night…

Posted by Scott McAndless on Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 in Minister

Last night was Presbytery night in the Waterloo-Wellington and, as is usually the case, it was a meeting that had its ups and downs -- its high points and its low points.

After adjournment, as happens in many Presbyteries I am sure, some of the members made arrangements to break up a long drive home by stopping off at a local watering hole to talk over (and commiserate over) the events of the evening.

About seven members ended up sitting around a table in a bar. Just by chance, they all happened to be male and they all happened to be clergy.

We talked together and toasted various discussion points from earlier in the evening. We toasted the committees and agencies of the Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church with good will towards all. We were enjoying one another's company.

The place was mostly empty but there was a friendly group over at the bar -- paramedics, it turned out, at the end of their shift. We interacted a bit and they made a few comments about how we were all dressed alike (we all had short sleeved dress shirts open at the collar. I would't have thought much about it but they called it our "uniform").

Uniform?

Anyways, they were talking together for a while. Little did we suspect that they where overhearing our conversation and speculating. They had decided that, whatever we did, we were all in the same line of work and were trying to figure it what that line was.

Finally they could stand it no longer and interrupted us to ask us what we did.

We, of course, refused to answer until they had told us what their guesses were.

Based on how we were dressed and what they had heard us talking about, they guessed that we were:

1) Zehr's executives gathering after a long day of strategy meetings. (Zehr's is a grocery chain in our part of Ontario.)

2) Failing that, perhaps we all worked in the deli department at Zehr's.

3) Accountants

4) A bunch of museum curators.

The honest truth, those were their guesses.

Don't know whether to laugh that they were so far off base...

or cry because they were so close to the truth.

One month to the Jeff-a-thon

Posted by Scott McAndless on Wednesday, September 14th, 2016 in Minister

This morning, with about one month to go before the Jeff-a-thon I met with Herb Gale of Knox Church in Guelph at Crieff Hills on the site where the event will take place. It was a beautiful morning on a most beautiful site. We were going to try out the course of the Jeff-a-thon.

We started running and did a couple of laps around a bigger course than the walkathon will actually take place on

Herb set our pace (slower than I'm used to) and it was a wonderful beautiful start as the sun came up. On our first lap we scared at least three very big deer off of our path.

After about four kilometers we ran into some vagabond named Lawrence Pentalow who actually straightened us out about what the actual route will be:

After 5 kilometers, Herb said that he had done what he could do and left me. I continued (at a faster pace) for another 3.25 kilometers. It was a wonderful morning and I can't wait to see you all at the Jeff-a-thon on October 16. The path is a joy to run though I must admit that there is a bit more up and down than I expected. (You can see the graph above.)

Remember why I am running!

(Here's how I looked when I was done)

If you build it, they will come (or How does the church grow?)

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, September 11th, 2016 in Minister

Zechariah 6:9-15, Mark 13:1-8, Psalm 48

isten, Heldai, Tobijah, and Jedaiah, we’ve got a problem and we need to talk about it. Our religion is in trouble. Yes, we have religious freedom and people are able to worship as they choose, but they just don’t seem to be choosing our religion anymore, at least not like they once did. Oh, there was a time when people would come together in places like this and lift up their voices in prayer and worship. It was the place to be and everyone felt like they were a part of something that mattered.

But then the world changed. Now, all of a sudden it seems that people have other places that they need to be. Their lives are in other places like Babylon and Persia and they don’t seem to need the old ways of their ancestors anymore.

But don’t you worry, Heldai, Tobijah and Jedaiah, because we have a plan. We’re going to get a bunch of supplies together and raise some funds and we’re going to build us a temple. And it will be the biggest, best and most beautiful temple that you have ever seen. And then we’re going to set up the best of worship services, festivals and sacrifices in that holy space. You’ll see, when we do that, people will come from all over the place to see and to be part of it.

So, what do you say, Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, will you give us a donation of, say, 20,000 talents each so that we can build it? If you do, and if we build it, they will surely come.

That is essentially the pitch of the prophet Zechariah in our reading from the book that bears his name this morning. The issue he is dealing with is the same issue that we are dealing with in the church today: the general decline of traditional religious institutions.

And, make no mistake, that is what we are dealing with. We are living in a time that has seen the fastest decline in affiliation to all religion that has ever been seen in Western society. The statistics and social science are undeniable. The decline is no longer seen just in certain denominations or certain theological points of view. All are declining. It is not just so-called liberal churches for example. In fact, for about a decade now the fastest declining denomination in the United States of America has been the ultra-conservative Southern Baptist Church.

Some people don’t see the decline, of course, because there are, always have been and always will be significant exceptions – specific churches and groups of churches that see dynamic growth. You can definitely find those churches in most cities and we ought to study them and learn from them.

They are not all, by the way, churches that have the same theology. Some of them are extremely conservative and some extremely liberal with all the shades in between. The defining characteristic of a growing church is no longer its theological bent, but there are certainly other factors that do matter.

This decline is made all the more dramatic because it is part of a generational shift. The incoming generation, often called the “millennials” and the generation that is coming up after them (that nobody has named yet) is the least engaged in religion ever.

I don’t tell you all of this because I think it is a reason to despair or give up on the church. I actually feel that, more than anything, these are hopeful signs and that God is using these sorts of cultural changes to renew his church so that it will be strong and ready to meet the challenges of the future. But, in order to find that strength, one thing is necessary. We need to respond to these challenges in the best ways possible.

What we read this morning from the Book of Zechariah is one possible response to a very similar situation. The prophet is concerned because of the decline of the traditional religion of the people of Israel. The reasons for this decline are different – have come mostly because of a major disruption of the entire society and culture by an enforced exile of the people to Babylon. But the challenge is very similar.

Zechariah’s response is to say, “We need to build something really impressive here.” He is trying to rally the people to build a temple. And he encourages them to do so by making a promise: “Those who are far off shall come and help to build the temple of the Lord; and you shall know that the Lord of hosts has sent me to you. This will happen if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God.”The promise is a promise from God through the prophet and the promise is, “If you build it, they will come.”

And that seems to be the solution that people most often go to. If the institution has fallen on hard times, people’s automatic response is to say, “Let’s build up the institution and make it beautiful and impressive and that is what will make everyone want to be part of it. And I will admit that there are times when that kind of approach is the one that works. It seems to have worked (at least to a certain degree) in Zechariah’s time. People did return and there was a renewal of the faith of Israel. I suspect that the terrible cultural loss that was the Babylonian exile left people hungry for the stability that a new temple institution promised.

Of course, there were complaints, there always are. “This new temple just isn’t like the old one.” People got nostalgic for the “good old days.” That is something that always seems to happen whenever you try that “if you build it” approach to institutional growth. Nothing ever seems to measure up to the “good old days.” That is definitely the kind of complaint that we hear all the time in the church to this very day. But, when the conditions are right, it certainly can be true that, if you build it, they will come.

I don’t believe that we are living in such a time, though. In our gospel reading this morning, we catch Jesus at a very interesting moment. Jesus, we are told in the first verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, has just left the temple. This will be, by the way, the last time that he ever leaves the temple in this Gospel. He will never enter it again. And he clearly does not leave it on the best of terms. He has already effectively shut down the temple’s revenue stream by stopping the people who are buying and selling and changing money. And he only just finished expressing his disgust at the hypocrisy and the favouritism towards the rich that he sees in the place.

His leaving the temple institution at this moment is not just a matter of stage direction. It is an act that is full of meaning. In fact, his leaving the institution of the temple is analogous to the exit from the church of some people in our own day because they have become disillusioned with the institutional church due to the failings or hypocrisy that they have seen.

And the disciples see what Jesus is doing. Of course they do. And it is distressing to them that this man whom they love and respect should turn his back on the central institution of Jewish religion and culture. So what do they do? They try to give him a reason to stay around, just like we try to do when we see people drifting away from the church.

And what is the reason they offer? “Look, Teacher,” they say, “what large stones and what large buildings!” Take careful note of what they are doing here because it is the very same thing that we do all the time. They think that the way to get Jesus to stay within the institutions of the Jewish faith is by drawing his attention to what has been built and how impressive it is. They are saying, “They have built it, you should come.”

Obviously this approach doesn’t work with Jesus. In fact, it sets him off on a rant that will go on through the rest of the chapter – a rant in which he basically says, “Stones? Is that the best you can do? You think that stones will impress me? I’ll tell you something, in no time there won’t be one stone left on top of another in this place.” His message is that the “if you build it” approach may even lead to the fall of the institution and that even more than that will fall apart.

The passage in Zechariah does teach us that there are times when you can accomplish a lot with an “if you build it, they will come” approach. It is a necessary approach when you are living in times, like Zechariah was, when the basic cultural infrastructure of a society has been taken apart. But Jesus was not living in such a time. The issue in his day was that abuse and hypocrisy had called the institutions themselves into question. This was something that Jesus specialized in pointing out. In such times, people will not come just because you build it.

I believe that we are living in such times today. Certainly many people have the same reaction to institutions as Jesus did. When they begin to lose their relevance and luster, the impulse is to leave and to predict that the stones will not stand for long one on top of the other. One thing that that means for the church of the present and the near future is that we cannot count on people coming just because we build it, which is a problem for the church because that seems to be our biggest growth strategy.

Jesus didn’t grow the movement around him by building anything. Did you ever think about that? He built no buildings and didn’t even establish any sort of formalized structure. He didn’t even establish any rituals or worship liturgies apart from the two very simple sacraments (the Lord’s Supper and baptism) and one prayer. He established some leaders but no power structures. All of those trappings of institutionalism came later as the church struggled to create institutions out of what Jesus had begun.

But, while Jesus didn’t have any real “building project,” he still managed to get people excited about being part of what he was doing and involved in working towards changing the world. That is why I do not think that we ought to be worried about the future of the church. Yes, it is true that people will not come to the church these days just because we have built it, but that does not mean that they won’t come. We need to approach the invitation more like Jesus did.

We will look deeper into the approach that Jesus took next week, but the basic idea is pretty simple. Jesus could have waited for people to come to him, but he just didn’t. Do you remember the time when Jesus made a big splash in Capernaum. He healed a woman in the synagogue, cast out a few demons and by the end of the day people were lining up at the door of Simon Peter’s house where Jesus was staying to see him. He could have stayed there and waited for people from all over Galilee to come to him. Peter’s house could have become the church that he built. That was even what Peter was expecting him to do and when Jesus disappeared the next morning he hunted Jesus down and angrily demanded that he come back and stay.

But Jesus said no. Jesus said he had to go out to where the people were, he and all of his disciples. He had to take the kingdom of God to where they were and not wait for them to come to where he had built some institution of the kingdom of God. He had to invite them to come and see.

I know that the other approach sounds so much easier to us. If we could just build it – you know, maintain this beautiful building and our amazing programs and activities and people would just come. We wouldn’t have to engage them. We wouldn’t have to tell people where were were and what we did on Sunday mornings, those who were so inclined would just come on their own. But we are not living in a time when it works like that. We are living in an age when some churches grow but none of them grow just by virtue of being there. We are living in the age where it falls to all believers to let others know that they can come and see.

#140CharacterSermon “If you build it, they will come.” Not how church growth works in an age when people view institutions with suspicion.

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Ancient Commandments; Modern Applications: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, September 4th, 2016 in Minister

Exodus 20:1-6, Psalm 97, Romans 1:18-25

have spent some time over these summer months looking at some of the key commandments of the Old Testament and asking how, if at all, they apply to the lives that we live today in a very different world from the one that first received the commandments.

I have saved what I think is the most essential commandment – the one that might just lie at the heart of all of the rest – until the end. The commandment that prohibits the worship of idols is actually quite simple and straightforward, but its very simplicity is what has made it hard for people to follow it. The command says simply this in the best known King James Version: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.”

It is specifically a prohibition against making representative art by carving something out of metal, wood or stone. If you wanted to be very literal minded, you could argue that making images by melting and molding or by drawing on pieces of paper or other media are okay and that the commandment only prohibits engraved images. But that doesn’t seem to be the spirit of the commandment. The idea seems to be that any sort of representational art is simply not acceptable.

All of those people who have taken this commandment as part of their heritage – that includes Jews, Muslims and Christians – have had their own ideas about how to observe this commandment. Conservative Jews have tended to look with suspicion on any sort of artwork that represents something that you could recognize. Muslims have even more strongly rejected such art, to such a degree that the only acceptable art in strict Islamic culture is calligraphy – that is, beautifully written texts, ideally of the Koran.

Christians, as in many things, have taken their own approach. They have often ended up arguing and disagreeing over this commandment and what it allows more than any other group. Some of the earliest Christian traditions that fed into what we call today the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches strongly embraced the use of art work as a way of promoting their faith and as a teaching tool for the faithful. That is why the churches of those traditions are often full of beautiful works of art that depict various heroes of the faith and stories from the Bible and from Christian history.

When the Protestant Church came along, there was initially a big reaction against the use of art in churches. Some early Protestants banished all artwork from their churches. The Presbyterians were absolutely one such denomination and the earliest Presbyterian Churches were emptied of all sculptures and the walls were whitewashed. The windows might have colourful stained glass but did not represent anything.

And, as you can imagine, Presbyterians thought they were so much better than everyone else because they didn’t have any artwork while other groups, like the Roman Catholics, tended to see things the other way around and thought they were so much better because they used art work in good ways. That is what we often do with commandments, of course, use them as reasons to put other people down and lift ourselves up. And, honestly, if that’s all we get out of a commandment like this one, I am quite sure that we’ve missed the point.

Is this commandment really about banning artwork? Or is artwork just the surface of a deeper problem that it is trying to get us to deal with?

I have a hard time believing that art itself is the problem. When I think of all of the good that has come out of the ability of very talented human beings to beautifully render the world that they experience, I know that art is a blessing – a divine blessing given by God. This is true of both sacred and secular art.

I know that I would not have the same appreciation of God my creator if I had not spent time contemplating some of my favourite paintings by Monet, Van Gough and Da Vinci. I remember an afternoon spent in a university library in New Jersey where I contemplated a painting of a very angry Jesus that probably taught me more about my saviour than all the studies I have ever read of the Gospels. Art is able to speak to us about earthly things and divine things in ways that words cannot approach. The problem, I am certain, is not art itself. The problem has to do with what we do with the things that we create with our artistry.

Of course, when this commandment was first spoken, it was spoken to people living in a different world. It was a world where it was common to believe, not in one universal God, but in a great variety of gods. Even more important, people believed that, when they made statues and carvings and representations of these gods, it gave them a certain amount of power and influence over them. These idols could be easily manipulated by sacrifices, magic words or rituals with the statues.

The target of this commandment was not the statues and artistic representations themselves but the attitude that generally went with them. What God is saying with this commandment is that he is not a god like these other gods that the people have been used to. He will not be captured within a statue or carving. God will not be manipulated or forced to behave in ways that people may want.

So actually, if all you do with this commandment is read it literally and don’t allow people to make statues, carvings or other works of representational art, you have actually missed the point of it because it is quite possible to ban all of those things and yet still hold onto the attitude that you can use earthly things to try to manipulate God. Idols in the ancient world may have been exclusively made out of statues and carvings but human beings have been infinitely creative when it comes to creating idols.

So let us consider some of the idols that people do use today. What are those things that are made by human hands or minds, that may be good or beautiful in themselves but that people then take and think that they give them the power to say what God will do?

We are in this world surrounded by things and events that just happen and that have no apparant meaning in themselves. But we, as human beings have the ability to look at these seeming random events and find patterns and meaning in them. To take one simple example from recent newspaper headlines, let’s say that somebody invents a brand new item of swimwear for women – a suit that covers the entire body except for the face, feet and hands – and calls it a Burkini. This is, on one level, just a fairly random event. Someone creates a new product and starts selling it – something that happens every single day.

But people don’t just see it as a random event, do they? They see all kinds of meaning in it whether that meaning was intended or not. Some see it as a new symbol of freedom for women because it allows women who come from a culture of extreme modesty the freedom to go to the beach that they didn’t have before. Others, of course, see a symbol of the repression of women and the opposite of freedom. And, of course, there are certainly those who see the burkini as a symbol of much darker things such as terrorism. And so very quickly the idea of the burkini has become much bigger and more laden with meaning than the thing itself. This is something that we human beings do very well. And sometimes the idea of a thing becomes so large that the idea begins to define the thing. That is when we are in the territory of idolatry.

Take the idea of doctrine for example. Doctrine is just a fancy word that means a list of things that people of faith believe. It is, for example, a doctrine of our church that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Another doctrine: we believe that we are saved by grace through faith and not by our works. And doctrines are very good and beautiful. Good doctrine is also true.

But doctrine, no matter how good or true it is, can also become an idol. When you use it, for example, to feel superior to others who might believe differently from you, it becomes a graven image that serves your own desires rather than driving you to become a better person. And when your understanding of your doctrine begins to define God for you in a way that prevents God from acting outside of the box that you have made for him so that God can no longer surprise you or challange your view of the world, you have created an image of your God that is no less immovable than any ancient statue of stone or wood.

Here is another thought: if doctrine can become an idol, so can Scripture. Here, once again, the Bible is a good thing. It is a gift from God to us, given for our benefit and blessing. The Bible is both true and beautiful. And if you are using the Scriptures to teach and challenge yourself to go deeper into your knowledge of God and of yourself, you are using it well. But not everyone uses the Scriptures in that way.

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is authoritative and that it is inspired by God. But we often forget the connection between those two things. The Bible is authoritative because it is inspired by God. In other words, the Bible is not authoritative in itself but it derives that authority from God. God is the ultimate authority and the Scriptures only have authority because they point to that ulimate. The problem comes because the Bible is a defined, earthly thing that people can own and know and master. It is possible for a human being to memorize the whole of the Bible – to know every word of it because it is an earthly object. Not many people know it that well, of course. Few know it as well as they think they do, but it is at least theoretically possible to gain a mastery over this book.

The problem comes when people take their knowledge of this book (whether it is complete or not) and begin to act as if they know the Truth (with a capital T) because they know this book.

I remember when I was much younger thinking in exactly this way – thinking that it was possible for me to always be right. I thought it was simple. All I needed to do was to know what the Bible said about every subject that mattered. If I could quote the Bible, I would always be in the right. It was a very childish and naive worldview of course. The truth can never be reduced down to a single quote and the Bible doesn’t always speak with one voice on all matters anyways, but that was how I thought it worked and many people still think that way today.

When we do that, when we take our mastery of this book and turn it into the mastery of the truth and of the God that it points to, we turn this good thing that is the Bible into a dangerous idol. Yes God inspired the Bible, but whatever that means (and the question of what inspiration is and how it works is a huge question) if God were ever to allow the Bible to define and limit God, at that moment, God would cease to be God. Anytime we take the Bible and think that it defines God and especially when we use our understanding of the Bible to exalt ourselves over others, we are making unto ourselves a graven image.

There is a reason for this commandment. It was given to a people who had a very simple and graphic idea what an idol was. We are not particularly tempted to make idols like they would have thought of them. But that does not mean that we don’t have ways of taking our creations – especially our ideas – and turning them into very powerful idols in their own way.

#140CharacterSermon We have this way of turning our ideas into idols that seek to confine and limit God. This is foolish and dangerous..

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