Scott McAndless, Author at St. Andrews Hespeler

IV Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, August 28th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 28 August, 2016 © Scott McAndless

1 Corinthians 9:1-14, Deuteronomy 25:4, Psalm 8

he Bible, especially the Old Testament, is just chock full of rules, laws and commandments. They speak to every sort of situation and moral decision but, I’ve got to admit, I have always had a soft spot for those particular commandments that get very specific about the situation. The commandment that we read this morning about not muzzling your ox is a great example, but there is an even better one a few verses after that one.

The commandment goes like this: “If men get into a fight with one another, and the wife of one intervenes to rescue her husband from the grip of his opponent by reaching out and seizing his...” Okay, I just remembered why we don’t usually talk about this commandment. Let’s just say that she grabs him in a very specific place and leave it at that. But my point isn’t about where she grabs him. It is about how very specific the law is. It is so specific, in fact, that it seems extremely likely that this law was actually written in response to an actual incident. I mean, at some point there were two actual men fighting and the wife of one of them did some specific grabbing and someone was trying to figure out what the specific and reasonable punishment for that action was.

This particular commandment probably represents an actual judgement that was made in a particular case and it got recorded in the scriptures. (And, just for the record, I don’t find the judgement that is made to be particularly reasonable, as the woman ends up losing her hand, but that, also, is a whole other discussion.)

My question is this: what is the application of a very specific commandment like this? I mean, you are fine if the exact same situation arises in exactly the same way again; then you know what to do. But what if the circumstances aren’t exactly the same. What if three men are fighting instead of two? Do we need a whole different commandment to deal with that situation? And what if the woman doesn’t intentionally grab? What if she just brushes something accidentally? Is that a different case entirely? These are the sort of questions that you are often left with when you write you commandments that apply too specifically to certain situations.

And I think that these sorts of questions become more important when we turn from fighting men to the commandment that comes a few verses before it that we read this morning: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” This is a very specific commandment, but the situation that it speaks to was one that the people who first heard this commandment ran into a lot. You see, most of them were farmers and most of them grew grains like wheat or barley. And when you harvest grain, there are three key steps. You first cut the grain. Then you thresh it by beating the grain with something hard to loosen the chaff that covers the kernel. Then you winnow it or separate the kernels from the chaff, often by throwing it all into the air so that the wind can blow the chaff away while the kernels fall back to the ground.

But sometimes, with certain grains, it could take an awful lot of force to break the chaff away and so one of the best ways to accomplish that was by getting a big, heavy animal with hard hooves (like an ox) to step on it. This was called treading out the grain and it was a very common way to thresh your grain at harvest time.

So what we have in this commandment is a very specific regulation regarding how you ought to treat your ox while it was treading out your grain because, of course, there was an immediate problem whenever you did that. Oxen eat grain. They love it. So it is only natural for your ox to start snacking away at your crop while you are making it tread out your grain. You can see why you might want to prevent that by muzzling your ox while it is treading but this commandment says no, you cannot do that.

And I have absolutely no problem with this commandment. It seems all very reasonable to me that, if you are making your ox work that hard to harvest your crop, why not let him steal a few bites of good food along the way? My only problem is that it is so very specific. What happens, for example, if you don’t have an ox and use another animal to tread your grain: a horse, a cow or a bull? The command only says ox, so can you muzzle those other animals?

And, of course, since modern farmers don’t use animals to tread their grain at all but instead use a machine called a combine, that does all the cutting, threshing and winnowing at once, you could certainly argue that there is no modern application of the commandment. This commandment would therefore have no meaning or application for us today at all.

So is that correct? If we no longer do the specific thing that the commandment is talking about, we can just forget it? Does it simply not apply anymore? We’ll I don’t believe so. Yes, the world has changed and changed a great deal since the Bible was first written, and, while we may no longer live in the same way that the people in the Bible did, I will always believe that there are principles in these very specific commandments that still apply today.

On a very simple level, I am sure we would all agree that there is a principle at stake in this commandment concerning muzzling oxen that we can take and apply today. To not muzzle an ox while it is treading is to think about the needs of that ox. It is a way of being kind and not being cruel. So I don’t think that it would be an unreasonable application of this command to say that it teaches us that animal cruelty is wrong and that we should treat all animals who do anything for us with whatever kindness we can.

The Apostle Paul, was not a farmer who used oxen to tread his grain, but he read this commandment some fifteen hundred years after the time of Moses and clearly saw that it still had applications to his life. In fact, Paul read it and asked the question, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned?”

He was asking a rhetorical question. He was assuming that his readers would respond by saying, “No, Paul, of course God doesn’t really care about oxen.”

I am not so sure about that. I happen to believe that God’s compassion is not limited by anything and that God is just as capable of being concerned for oxen as God is for human beings. But Paul’s rhetorical question isn’t really about the welfare of oxen, it is a way of opening up the application of the commandment beyond oxen.

Paul suggests that the commandment applies to a situation he has been struggling with. He says that it applies to how sometimes people in his position, people who are preaching the gospel and offering leadership in the church, need support from the church to be able to continue to do what they do. Here they are, working hard, treading out the grain as it were, and are you going to deny them the opportunity to benefit from that work by eating some of the grain that they are threshing? Of course not.

And, of course, Paul’s application of this commandment is legitimate. It is okay to make the connection that, since God seems to care about oxen getting some benefit from their labour, God must also care about people who are working for the sake of the kingdom of God getting some benefit from their labour.

But you need to realize that Paul’s application of this commandment to the situation of people who work for the church also opens a can of worms. Do you realize that we are living today in a world where the very notion that people ought to be able to benefit from the fruit of their labour has become something of a controversial idea? Now, it shouldn’t be. It should be obvious that, when people work hard for anything worthwhile, they ought to be the first ones who get the benefit. But the world doesn’t always seem to work that way.

In fact, increasingly our world is set up according to a system where we are very careful to make sure that certain people get the benefit of the labour that is done, but those people are not necessarily the people who do the labouring. We have actually entered a time where we give priority, not to labour, but to investment. Much of the business and political world is oriented towards making sure of one thing above all: that those who invest money in various enterprises are the first to be able to profit from it.

It is actually amazing to think that we are living in an age when it is possible for someone to work at a full time job (or several part-time jobs) and be working 30, 40, 50 hours a week and not be earning enough to pay their rent and cover their expenses. Meanwhile, it is taken as a given that people who invest lots of money in things can get very rich without doing any labour at all – profiting, over all, from the labour of other people who may very well be underpaid.

And I realize, of course, that economic matters can be very complicated and if investors didn’t get good returns on their investments, they wouldn’t put money into them in the first place and then there wouldn’t even be jobs for people to work at and be underpaid. We do need people who are willing to invest in new enterprises and these investments do create a lot of good.

But I do think that we have a problem when you create situations where people are working hard and are still not getting enough benefit from their labours to make ends meet. I think that some of the balance between the needs of the labourers and the needs of the investors is off in our world today and that it may be time reset that balance.

Who are the oxen in our world today who are being muzzled, who are not receiving the benefit from their own labour that they deserve. In some cases, it may be the women who do the same job as men and who work just as hard at it (or maybe harder) and, according to statistics in Ontario are paid 31.5% less than their male counterparts.

In some cases the muzzled oxen may be the temporary foreign workers – agricultural workers for example – who everyone agrees work harder than Canadians usually doing jobs that Canadians won’t do. They are paid, of course, and usually better paid than they would be in their country of origin, but there are often other issues we shouldn’t ignore, especially when they do not enjoy the protections and security that they need.

Undoubtedly, the muzzled oxen in our world today may include the people in developing countries who make our clothing and shoes and assemble our electronics in conditions that are not safe for wages that keep them virtual indentured servants. Somebody is profiting from their labour, profiting very handsomely, but it is not the people who are doing the hard work.

These are but a few examples but I think they are important ones and they are a reminder to us that this ancient law constructed for a situation that simply does not arise in modern life still may have important things to say to us today.

#140CharacterSermon Don't muzzle your ox while it's treading grain! Specific commands like that may still say important things to say to us

Ancient Commandments; Modern Applications: III Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, August 14th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 14 August, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Exodus 20:8-11, Deuteronomy 5:12-15, Luke 13:10-17, Genesis 1:27-2:3

“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” That has got to be the biblical commandment that, over my time working with the church, I have heard about the most. People bring this one up just out of the blue all the time.

“There was a time,” they will say, “when Sunday actually meant something. Everything would stop for one day. All the stores would be closed. The sports arenas were empty and everybody was so bloody bored that church looked downright exciting. <Sigh> Those were the days when, for those few golden hours, the church was definitely the least boring game in town.

“But these days,” people will go on, “Sunday is just another day. Everybody is working or, if they’re not working, they’re at the arena or the sports field or shopping. Everybody is so busy doing things that are interesting and even exciting. Is it any wonder that the church is having such a hard time?”

I mean, I may be exaggerating the position a little bit there, but I am not so sure that it is that far removed from how I have heard people talking about it. And there are some things behind those statements that we don’t usually examine and that I think we should.

It is assumed, for one thing, that we know what the purpose of the Sabbath law is – that a law requiring people to stop working for one day a week was created in order to bolster the practice of religion. That is why we assume that the law is about taking Sunday, the first day of the week, off when it is actually quite clearly about taking Saturday, the seventh day. We think that 3500 years ago, God told Moses to tell us to shut everything down for one day a week in order to make sure that people had no real alternative but to go to church on Sundays.

But that is clearly not what this law is about in the Bible. There are two main versions of the Sabbath law in the Bible, one in Exodus and one in Deuteronomy. The commandments are identical in what they order the people to do. The difference between the two versions is that they each give a reason for the law, but that they give two different reasons. According to Exodus, God gave the Sabbath law because “in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day.” So, according to Exodus, the reason why we rest one day a week has to do with creation itself – almost as if the need for rest is built into the very fabric of the universe.

Deuteronomy gives a very different rationale for the law: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,” it says, “and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand.” The reason in Deuteronomy has to do with the Israelites’ past experience with slavery. Basically, because they had been slaves, they aren’t to treat themselves or anyone else like a slave by forcing people to work seven days a week.

So the Bible is actually quite clear when it comes to the reason for the Sabbath law: it is about respect for creation and about respect for human liberty. Nowhere in the scriptures do you find any suggestion that the Sabbath was there to protect and promote religious institutions and yet Christians today seem to assume, that that is really all that it is for.

There is one other thing about how we speak of this commandment that troubles me. The only people I have ever heard who complain about people who don’t observe the Sabbath are people who go to church at least most of the time. People use it to complain about the behaviour of others – people who are not like them.

And that is actually one of my pet peeves about how we deal with biblical commandments in general. Anytime we believers start making a big deal about how other people – people who don’t believe like us – are not following a commandment, I don’t think that we are reading the commandments properly. The Bible states that the Law was given to the people of Israel as a blessing – as something that would allow them to live long and prosper in the land that the Lord their God was giving them. The commandments are for us, folks, and we really don’t get anywhere by complaining about others not following them.

As in many things, Jesus is the one who grasps the real purpose of the sabbath. When faced with the possibility of healing a woman whose body has been enslaved by pain on a Sabbath day, and also with the judgment of the religious folks of his doing healing work on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”

Jesus really couldn’t have been much clearer than that. He was right there – right in the middle of a religious gathering called a synagogue on a Saturday and he declared that the reason for Sabbath had nothing to do with the needs of that local religious institution and everything to do with the needs of this woman. And yet we continue to act as if the commandment is all about the place of religion in society.

So, the question is, if the commandment is not about the promotion of religion, what is it about? We have already seen a part of the answer to the question in the passages that we have briefly touched on. According to Exodus, the sabbath law is about respecting creation. According to Deuteronomy, it is about liberty from slavery. According to Jesus it is about healing. Those may sound like three very different reasons for why you ought to observe a Sabbath but I think that, if you put them all together, it can actually begin to make a lot of sense.

Sabbath, first of all, is about creation. It is about how you were made and about how we, as created beings, fit in with the whole of God’s wonderful creation. I think that this is something that is extremely important to realize given the world in which we find ourselves today. This world was created with certain built in cycles of work and rest. Until very recently in human history, for example, there were only so many hours in a day when human beings had enough light to do meaningful work. When the sun went down, you really didn’t have much choice but to take a break. The seasons of the year also had their natural cycles when there were times of heavy labour, but also times of rest and celebration.

But we were not satisfied with that. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we have sought to take control over those natural cycles built into nature. We have filled our once darkened nights with artificial light. We have set up artificial environments where people can work long hours at all times of the year.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when people looked at all of the technological advances that were coming and predicted a future when most work would be automated and the biggest problem we would have was figuring out what to do with all our leisure time. The opposite seems to have happened with technology mostly being used to wring ever more and more productivity out of workers. Now, thanks to the cell phone and mobile computing you can take your office with you wherever you go and fill more and more of your life with work.

And I know that these technological advancements have brought many blessings with them and that none of us would be interested in going back to a pre-industrial age when everything stopped when the sun went down, but I think that it is important to recognize that while this technology has reshaped the world around us, the basic human software hasn’t changed. We are still essentially the same biological beings that were designed to thrive in a world a thousand years before the invention of the lightbulb.

If we don’t build into our lives ways to stop, to turn off the technology and to rest, our bodies will find ways to make that rest happen in spite of us. We see it all the time: health crises, mental health problems, breakdowns. You think that the modern epidemics of depression, addiction, breakdown and more came out of nowhere? When you deny your created nature and force your body to live without the rest it is designed to need, your body will find a way to rest that will likely be much worse for you. The need to rest is, first of all, about respecting who you were created to be.

It is, second of all, about respecting the created world around us. Human beings have always harvested and used the resources of the earth, of course, and there is nothing wrong with that. But there were always cycles of rest built into the exploitation of the earth. Fields were left fallow for a time, precious materials were dug out of the ground at a pace limited by human strength and endurance, trees were not cut down faster than more could grow. But here again, our technology has changed the balance and we are able take and take from the earth with no breaks to feed our profits. But the need for sabbath, we are told, is built into the very structure of the earth and if we do not find ways for the earth itself to rest, we may well find ourselves paying for that in ways we will not like.

According to Deuteronomy, the reason for the Sabbath law is different, though. There it is about freedom from slavery. It may be historically about God giving freedom to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but I think that it's pretty clear that that is not the only application. The Sabbath law reminds us that, when we make life all about work and productivity and making money off of your labour and the labour of others, we do begin to rob people of their liberty.

And finally, according to Jesus, the Sabbath law is all about healing: “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” And with those very words, we already see a connection with the whole idea of freedom from slavery. Jesus chose to speak of the woman’s infirmity as a kind of slavery – a slavery to pain, fear and weakness. She also was a former Hebrew slave set free by God just like the others and if her illness was preventing her from living out her freedom, then Sabbath was not only an acceptable time to heal her, it was indeed the most fitting time ever.

Even more important, healing was about the wholeness of the sick person – about restoring her to the person she was created to be. That is, therefore, where the Sabbath law comes to its completeness: a person who is living in wholeness, according to her creator’s plan for her and free from any and all bondage.

Sabbath is not some gimmick to prop up religious institutions and practices. It is about us becoming the best free people we can possibly be – the people that God created us to be.

What then does it mean to apply this law to modern life? Somehow, I think, it is going to have to be about more than establishing certain rules for what you can and cannot do on certain days of the week. Rules can be helpful, of course, but they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.

The reality is, for better or worse, that we live in a world that never stops – that is always moving and working 24/7. That’s not likely to change. And part of this reality is that we are never going to convince our society to go back to a practice of not working for one day of the week. It is just not going to happen. But what we can do – what we must do – is embrace those opportunities for rest that we can find and create. We must not feel guilty for resting from our labours. It is part of who we were created to be. We must embrace priorities other than work and production because we were made to be free. We must rest because it is a first step to healing and wholeness.

#140CharacterSermon Sabbath #Commandment isn't about propping up religion. It's about respecting creation, freedom from slavery and healing.

Sermon Video:

Ancient Commandments; Modern Applications: II Thou shalt not destroy the trees therof.

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, July 3rd, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 3 July, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Deuteronomy 20:10-20, Matthew 5:21-26, Psalm 72:1-14

Two days ago, Canadians everywhere stood up a little taller, threw their heads back a little further and stuck their chests out a bit more as their hearts swelled with some well-founded pride. But as they heard or sang the noble tones of the Canadian national anthem, it was quite possible that some felt a little stirring of frustration in their patriotic hearts because, if you have been paying any attention to national affairs lately, you know that there has been talk of that thing that fills the hearts of all Presbyterians with fear and dread. There has been talk of change.

Now, I have absolutely no intention of getting into the middle of a discussion about whether or not Canada ought to change the words of its national anthem. I’ll let others argue and fight over the virtues and vices of change. I just mention it (with some trepidation) because it leads us to an issue that I do want to raise. All the discussion has focussed our attention on one line that we all learned like this: “True patriot love in all thy sons command.” My question is this: whether or not we all want to be called “sons,” what does “true patriot love,” look like today and what does it mean to “stand on guard” for our country?

When those words we are presently disagreeing over were first added to the anthem (and, no, they aren’t actually the original English words, they were changed in 1914), at that time I think that people had a pretty clear understanding of what they thought “true patriot love” looked like. It seems very likely that that a reference to “sons” was added as a way to boost the recruiting of the young sons of Canada to go and stand on guard for their country in the battlefields of the Great War in Europe.

And, while I know that we would offer nothing but praise for the sons and daughters of Canada, past and present, who have served their country in the military, surely none of us would suggest that that is the only way to give patriotic service to your country. So I think, in the aftermath of Canada Day 2016, we have to be willing to ask what are the best ways for us to stand on guard for our country today.

There is a commandment in the Book of Deuteronomy that I think might be helpful to us as we think of these things. It comes in the midst of a section that is all about war, sieges and other not-so-pleasant stuff. There is a whole lot of it that would be absolutely unacceptable today: attacks, wholesale slaughter and mayhem.

I included that part of the passage, not because if find it admirable, but because it is a fair depiction of what people back then were dealing with. It was generally accepted that this was the kind of stuff you had to do in that world to stand on guard and preserve your country. Taking care of your country meant that there would be a difficult struggle in which some people would be hurt. I’m not saying that was wonderful or glorious; it was just how things were.

But I notice, in the midst of this struggle to build up their land, a curious law comes up. It is something that applies specifically to laying siege, a common part of war in the ancient world. When your enemies shut themselves up behind protective walls, the business of getting them out of their secure location could be very difficult indeed.

The law restricts where you can get wood from while conducting a siege because wood was always needed. Armies needed firewood, stockades, ladders, towers and a host of other things all made of wood – wood that they would commonly cut down from the surrounding countryside. “If you besiege a town for a long time,” the commandment states, “…you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down…. You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food.”

It is a very specific commandment very much tailored to the kinds of warfare that people engaged in at that time and to the materials that they used. On a very practical level, you might say that it has absolutely no application to modern life at all because, first of all, the besieging of cities almost never happens in modern warfare and, second of all, modern armies do not use hardly any wood for their arms or defences. So I guess we can just forget about this one, an ancient commandment that has absolutely no modern application.

Or does it? Maybe if it was just an arbitrary rule that God gave for no particular reason, we could say that. But I don’t happen to believe that God gives arbitrary rules. There is reasoning behind this commandment that we need to pay attention to. The prohibition is specifically against cutting fruit trees to obtain wood to besiege a city. In that part of the world, it would include plants like olive trees, fig trees, date palms and pomegranates trees. The thing that is special about fruit trees, of course, is that they produce food. But it is also very true that they were made of wood and wood could be very useful in a siege.

When you are conducting a siege, when you are in the midst of most any military situation, you are almost always dealing with a certain amount of desperation. The need for victory seems paramount in that situation and you feel the need to use whatever resources you have to feed that victory. The temptation to cut down any tree (fruit bearing or otherwise) when you need wood that desperately is very real.

But this commandment says no. Why? Well, understand this fact (a fact that ancient Israelites would have understood without being told): fruit trees require a long-term investment. Take olive trees for example – perhaps the most import fruit tree for them because olive oil provided their diet’s only source of fat, without which human beings cannot survive. Did you know that if you plant an olive tree and allow it to grow, it will not produce any olives at all for five or maybe six years? Thereafter it will produce a bigger and better crop every year until it is about fifty years old when it produces a truly abundant crop but also begins to die. Fruit trees such as olive trees take a long term commitment but if you let them grow undisturbed for many decades, they will bless you in great abundance.

So that is what this commandment is talking about. In that world, cutting down a fruit tree to get wood to besiege a city was about sacrificing years and years of abundant production of olives or figs or dates for the sake of the immediate need for victory in battle. An olive grove sacrificed in order to take a city was something that would take five decades – half a century – to replace.

Can I make a confession? When it comes to Biblical commandments, I always prefer to hear them in the King James Version of the Bible. Modern translations just don’t seem to cut it. So for me, this particular commandment will always sound like this: “thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them.” So I’m wondering, given what this commandment meant to the ancient Israelites (what it meant about not sacrificing long term blessings and life to seek short term gains), what would be a consistent application of it in our modern world. What does it mean today to “not destroy the trees thereof.”

What does it mean, for example, if you happen to run a company or corporation? I know that it’s tough to be in business today. And one of the things that makes it particularly tough is the unrelenting expectation of growth and profits. The company has to make money for its shareholders and the more it makes, the better the rewards for management. That is just what business is like these days, it seems.

What that means is that the returns for this quarter become the thing that you obsess over kind of like you might obsess over getting enough wood to win a siege if were in the middle of one. And when short term gains become the most important consideration, what do you do? Do you cut back on research and development, laying people off, in order to trim expenses this month because research and development may take years to come up with that new product that won’t bring profits until years after that? Do you fire all of your employees who have experience because they’re expensive and replace them with cheap temporary workers? Sure, the temps won’t care about the long term health of your company and will probably mess things up completely within a few years, but boy will the balance sheet look really good this quarter? Those are the kinds of things that companies find themselves doing as they prioritize short term gains. I suggest that what they are really doing is destroying the trees thereof.

And if it were just businesses who were so tragically focused on those short term needs, that would be trouble enough because, of course, these companies affect the lives of many people including their employees and the communities in which they are established until they decide to move to some other country where they can pay people less.

But this fixation on short terms needs infects more than just the business world. Even as I celebrated our country on Canada Day, I continued to be concerned with how our country has fallen into such thinking.

Too often, it seems national decision making has seemed to be all in service of that short term with little consideration for the long term costs. When, for example, the price of oil rose to unprecedented heights several years ago, our government saw this wonderful opportunity to create all kinds of prosperity in the economy. Huge amounts of money could be made, thousands of really well paid jobs could be created so all kinds of resources were dumped into and used up in the tar sands areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

And, don’t get me wrong, the benefits to the economy, to employment and to government revenues were fantastic. If there might be long-term losses in terms of the irreversible pollution of groundwater and surface water, environmental destruction and increases in greenhouse grass emissions, well those problems would be with us for the long term and we could deal with them later. That seemed to be the thinking. The short term gains made theoretical long term risks seem okay. Of course, the trade-off didn’t seem so great when the price of oil took a nosedive.

But that is exactly the kind of thinking that often dominates our political thinking. It is practically built into a system that is geared towards winning the next election cycle. That is why we must do our best to support those rare leaders who are willing to lift their heads up from the ground and look down the road to where our policies are leading us. Sadly, however, we often end up destroying the trees thereof instead.

As loyal Canadians, we promise to stand on guard for our country. We promise it every time we sing the anthem and nobody is talking about changing thosewords. But if we’re going to stand on guard for this country, we need to be willing to look beyond immediate threats and short term needs. To truly stand on guard for Canada means that we have to find a vision for long term greatness and prosperity. To do otherwise is simply to destroy the trees thereof.

And all of this continues to happen at all levels of society. In the church it is so easy to focus only on our immediate needs and not bother to look beyond that to the mission that God is calling us to in the world. But without a mission, without a vision for the long-term, the people will perish.

In our personal lives, even there, God would encourage you to lift up your eyes and look at where you are going and not get bogged down by the needs of the moment. God is wise, he knows that if we can’t do that, we will end up destroying the trees thereof.

There is great wisdom in this ancient commandment. Though it was written for a very different people living in a very different world, it can certainly apply to many things today. I believe that its concern for looking beyond the needs of the moment comes directly from God through the scripture. There are so many reasons why we continue to need to be cautious about cutting down the trees thereof.

#TodaysTweetableTruth "Don't destroy the trees thereof" Standing on guard for Canada means guarding longterm life, not just shortterm needs.

Sermon Video:

How do we apply, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord they God in vain,” today?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Sunday, June 26th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 26 June, 2016 © Scott McAndless

Exodus 20:1-7, Matthew 5:17-20, 33-37, Psalm 119:1-8

omewhere around 3500 years ago (as the story is told) there was a group of tribes wandering together through the desert when they encountered their God in a pretty remarkable way. And the God that they met in that desert apparently had some clear ideas about how ancient tribal people like them needed to live their lives and what they had to do. And so God gave them commandments – rules that they were supposed to live by. Even more important, he promised them that if they lived according to these rules they would be blessed and live good lives in a land to which he would lead them.

And they were good commandments and wise commandments. But they were also tailor-made for tribal people living somewhere about 3500 years ago. What I mean is that, for them, the application of the commandments was usually pretty straightforward. The situations that they came across in their normal lives were pretty much anticipated by the commands.

But today the world has changed. We don’t live as desert nomads or tribal people anymore, yet we still revere those ancient commandments. They are part of our Scriptures. Though, as followers of Christ, we don’t believe that we are justified by following commands (we are justified by grace through faith) we would still like to know that we are on the right side of these commandments, at least as much as we can be. But the application of a 3500 year old commandment may not always be so obvious in the world today.

For example, this morning we read one of the big ten – one that many Christians look at with a great deal of seriousness. It goes, in the best known translation of the King James Version, like this: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.”

What did this commandment mean to the ancient tribal people who first received it and passed it on? It is a little hard to know. For one thing, they lived in a pre-literate society – a society in which very few people (if any) had any experience with the written word. And we know that pre-literate people thought about words very differently from how we do. The spoken word, for them, had remarkable almost magical power to shape reality. Words were alive. They sprang into being when they were spoken and they lived as long as people heard them and repeated them. Understand that we don’t see words in quite the same way that they did.

And it wasn’t just words. Names, in particular, had great power for them. The name of a person and how it was used was able to define and limit the power and influence that person had in the community. So the people who first heard this commandment had a pretty clear understanding of what it meant to take the name of their God and to use it in vain – to use the power of that name to support things that they had no business applying it to.

Application of the commandment was pretty straightforward for them. But, as you may have noticed, people have struggled with the specific application ever since – especially as people have sought to live it out in very different cultures where words don’t have quite the same powers and where names don’t quite mean as much as they once did.

For example, when Ancient Judaism went through a massive cultural shift (when they transformed from a largely illiterate society to one where reading and writing were valued and taught to everyone – which didn’t happen, by the way, until after the time of Christ – Jews began to apply this commandment in a very particular way. They became so worried about the possibility that they might misuse the name of God – perhaps even by accident – that they stopped using it altogether.

To this very day most Jews will not pronounce the name of God at all. When the ancient Hebrew name of God, which was probably pronounced something like Yahweh appears in the Scriptures, they simply will not read the name aloud and will substitute another word altogether. Many will even refuse to pronounce the English word God and the translations of that word into other languages too. I cannot think that it was ever the intent of the commandment in the original context to outlaw the pronunciation of certain syllables, but that is how later Jews made their peace with this commandment, perhaps out of an overabundance of caution.

And then, of course, there is the question of how Christians have dealt with it. I think if you were to ask most Christians today what it means to “Take the name of the Lord in vain,” they would probably say it has something to do with what we call cursing. They would say that it means that certain words and phrases are just out of bounds – at least in certain contexts. For example, it is not that we can’t say the name of God or the name of Jesus Christ but I certainly know Christians who frown on people saying, “Oh my God,” or “Jesus Christ,” when they are not actually praying, in church or in the midst of a theological discussion. In many ways, it is a similar response to the Jewish one except that, instead of not saying the name of God at all, we are just really careful about when we say it.

Of course, many will also push this just a little bit farther and apply this commandment to inappropriate speech in general. As you may have been told, there are certain words in the English language that you are just not supposed to say. They are words that are so bad, apparently, that I dare not tell you what they are – especially not here and now. Comedian George Carlin called them the seven words that you cannot say on television. You can’t say them in church either. I hope I don’t need to give you more information than that.

There is nothing wrong with the words themselves. They are just sets of sounds – the same sounds that are used in other languages with no offence. And they are not even strange or innovative words. They are, in fact, among the oldest words in the English language. People have been saying them for a very long time. Nor is there anything necessarily offensive in the meaning of the words. We have other words that we use to refer to the same things that are quite acceptable. Nevertheless, I know many Christians who would extend the rule about “taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain” to the use of such words.

So is that what it is really about – prohibiting the use of certain syllables? If the original commandment reflects, in any way, the real concerns of the eternal God, I have my doubts that God has that much of a grudge against certain words and certain syllables in certain languages. Words and manners of speaking are, above all, cultural matters. Certain words and expressions are acceptable within certain cultures and others are not.

While I am a great lover of the English language and would very much like to hear people use the language better than they do these days, I am very much aware that this comes from my own cultural bias. I know that, as a middle class white man who is a lifelong Christian, I have learned a bias against certain ways of speaking.

And some of this is actually problematic. There can be a not so subtle racism to it. Some of the words and phrases that we might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain” are simply expressions that belong to a culture that is not our own: maybe the black inner-city culture, another generation or another economic group. I think we are on dangerous grounds when we begin to treat cultural differences as matters of morality. So I really have some questions about how we have traditionally treated this particular commandment.

But I do believe that even ancient commandments like this one matter. I do believe that, in this commandment, there is wisdom that we need to figure out how to follow if we are going to thrive in the world today. That is what these commandments are for. So is there a way to understand and live out this commandment without becoming obsessed with certain words, certain combinations of sounds and certain syllables? It is a commandment that is intended, clearly, to instruct our speech, but, as far as I am concerned, it has to be about more than just the surface or the incidental sounds of that speech.

Remember that ancient people did believe in the power of words, especially in the power of a name to shape and to change reality. In this, they may well have been wiser than us. Words are more powerful than we often realize. What if this commandment was given to caution us more about how we speak than it was to prohibit certain words and sounds? Is that a radical idea?

Let’s say that you have issues with certain people in your community – people who are different from you in some way. It happens often enough. Maybe you struggle to understand a people who come from a different race, a different culture or background. Maybe it is because they are new to your place and don’t understand you or people like you. That is understandable. It is a thing that happens often enough in this world and that we all have to work through from time to time. I don’t necessarily see a problem with that, if you are working on it.

But what if, instead of working towards greater understanding, you just decide that it is you against them (whoever they are). And, what’s more, you decide that God is on your side against them. Suddenly, because you have adopted this mode of speaking, understanding has become impossible. Do you know what you have done? You have just taken the powerful name of God and applied it to an empty thing. You have taken the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

In fact, if you reject anybody, it doesn’t matter who they are, who is simply being the person that God created them to be, who is just trying to be true to themselves even though that may be uncomfortable to you, what have you done? Were they not created in the image of God just as you were? If you are denying who they are, are you not also denying the image of God within them? And if you are doing that, aren’t you taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?

If you use God and the name of God, to accomplish something that serves yourself above all else, if you use that name to convince people to hate others and go to war against them, if you use the name of God to demonize people just because you don’t see things like they do, are you not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?

If you say “God bless my country” to the exclusion of all others, if you demand that God make your team win the game, if you proclaim that God is on your side, are you not making your country, your team and your side to be the master over your God? Are you not taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain?

What we say matters. The ancient Israelites certainly got that right. You can do more harm with a few misplaced words than you can do without just about anything. This powerful commandment could go a long way towards teaching us to be cautious about using the name of God to achieve our own goals, gain our own power or to bring other groups or individuals down.

What do we do with this commandment? Traditionally we just use it to police polite language. I am not so sure that the great Lawgiver would be impressed with how we use it. If we really took the application of this commandment to heart, I believe it would lead us to a new concern for how use our language about God for good and not for ill in this world.

#TodaysTweetableTruth Taking the name of the Lord thy God in vain: about outlawing bad words or how we use God to achieve selfcentred goals?

Why I am Running

Posted by Scott McAndless on Tuesday, June 21st, 2016 in Minister

I am not a runner. I never have been.

Yep, that was me.

Do you remember that kid, the one back in middle school who, every time the class was told to run a few laps of the track or to head out across country - that one kid who fell right to the back of the pack, who pulled up with a stitch in the side, who was panting like a dog?

That kid was me.

To this day, though I enjoy being active, I probably would not choose running as an enjoyable activity. I've heard of people who derive a great deal of pleasure from running. I have heard of what is called a "runner's high," but I can't say I have ever experienced it. Nevertheless, I am planning to run 10 km this fall.

Why am I running?

The Event

I am running because the Rev. Jeff Veenstra Memorial Walk-a-thon in support of Presbyterian World Service and Development (Better known as the Jeff-a-thon will be held on Sunday October 16, 2016 at Crieff Hills Community in Puslinch, ON,

The Man and his Passion for a Better World

I am running because this event is being held in memory of a really extraordinary man and (though I didn't know him for long) a good friend. There were many great things about Jeff Veenstra, but one of them was definitely the great passion he had to build a better world. He believed in the work of Presbyterian World Service and Development and was committed to their dream of a world where justice, sustainable development and hope could thrive. His passion for the work inspires me to do what I can to support it.

The Cause

The particular cause that the Jeff-a-thon will support is a Child and Maternal Health project in Malawi and Afghanistan.

Read more about the initiative HERE

I am very excited to be supporting such a project because it is with mothers and their children that the creation of a better world can begin, especially in such parts of the world where women, in particular, have so much going against them. This is a project that will demonstrably make a difference in tangible ways and help to build a much better future. What's more, the project is also supported by the Canadian Government which means that many donations will be matched by the government, effectively doubling our impact.

So here is what I'm going to do

I'm going to run.

I will run in the Jeff-a-thon on October 16. I have a lot of work to do before I can manage to run for 10 km. My body will have to learn a lot about strength and endurance. Maybe I'll even discover what a runner's high is between now and then. But I want to do it so I am going to work towards that goal.

And here is what (I hope) you're going to do

Well, first of all, you can run or walk too. Everyone is more than welcome to participate in the Jeff-a-thon. For information on how to sign up, look HERE.

Secondly, whether you participate yourself or not, you're going to sponsor my run, aren't you? You're going to sponsor it because chances to do so much good for the world so easily don't come around that often, do they? You're going to sponsor me because you want to find out if I can run 10 km too, don't you?

How are you going to do it?

Well, if I'm going to see you between now and next October, I'll have a sponsorship sheet with me and you can sign up with me when I see you. Donations of $20 or more will be receipted on request.

If I'm not going to see you face to face, though, you are not out of luck. Just follow this link:

https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/st-andrews-hespeler-presbyterian-church/

Select "Jeff-a-thon: Scott McAndless" from the drop-down box, fill in your amount and credit card information and your are done. Canada Helps will take care of receipts and everything. It is so easy you could do it right now. In fact, why don't you just go ahead and do it. I'll wait.

...

Hi, welcome back. Wasn't that easy?

Thanks so much for your support!

Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is Abba?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, June 20th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 19, June 2016 © Scott McAndless
Galatians 4:1-7, Luke 11:9-13, Psalm 103:1-14

            Long before the time of Jesus, it was not uncommon for people to use father language to talk about God and about various gods. Take the Romans, they loved to use father language to talk about their gods. The ruler of all the Roman gods was a fellow named Jupiter and his name actually meant “Father God” in primitive Latin. In addition, the Roman emperors were also worshipped as gods by the Romans because they were the so-called fathers of the nation.
      But when the Romans spoke about their gods as being fathers, they had a very particular idea of fatherhood in mind. Fatherhood, in ancient Rome, meant one thing above all: authority. The Latin name for a male head of a family was paterfamilias: father of the family. And a paterfamiliaswas not just a warm and fuzzy dad figure sitting in a La-Z-Boy, wearing slippers and reading a newspaper. For the Romans, he was a man who had ultimate authority over every single person in his household.
      And when I say ultimate, I mean ultimate. A paterfamilias could expect complete and utter obedience from everyone under his charge. If he didn’t get it, he was not just permitted but actually required to discipline family members with what we would call torture. He could do things like beat them, whip them, imprison and starve them and be praised for it. In fact, if he chose to kill them, that was considered to be his business. All of this makes me feel like maybe Father’s Day was not the really the fun lighthearted event in ancient Rome that it is for us. Rather than sending cards that said, “Happy Father’s Day to the world’s greatest dad,” they probably said, “Revered Patriarch, please don’t kill me today!”
      So, when the ancient Romans and many other ancient peoples (including ancient Jews) spoke of God using the word Father, the word carried all of that baggage with it. When they addressed their Father God, they were speaking to a God who was a tyrant, a God who ruled over his people with an iron fist and who didn’t pull back from torturing and even smiting them. It was God as paterfamilias.
      And when people address God as Father to this very day, the word may still carry a lot of the same baggage. I certainly do know some people who feel very uncomfortable with the idea of addressing God as Father. In some cases, of course, that may be because they have had some very negative experiences with the father figures in their own life. You can understand that, of course. If the only experience you have had with a father is abuse or violence or worse, you are not going to take any comfort from calling God your father. You’ll probably have a hard time believing that God is any better than the fathers you have known.
      But that’s not the only problem that people have. You may have had nothing but the best experiences with your own father but you could still have some good reasons not to want to call God by that name just because of all the ways in which male dominance in society have kept women down and treated them like second class citizens. Addressing God as Father can certainly make him into the figurehead of that whole system of male dominance and so responsible for all of the ills that have come out of it.
     Jesus used Father imagery all the time when he was talking about God. But there is good reason to think that, when he called God Father, he did not mean what most of the people of his age meant by the word. For one thing, Jesus didn’t use the normal word in his language for Father when talking about God. The usual word for father in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, was ab, and it had all the associations with authority and power that a word like paterfamilias had in Latin. But Jesus didn’t call God ab, he called him abba.
      How do we know that? Of course, it is hard to be sure what word for father Jesus used because we don’t have his words in his original language. The Gospels were written in Greek and so most everything that Jesus said was translated into Greek. And most of the time, when Jesus says Father in the gospels, it is translated with the usual Greek word for father. But once, in the Gospel of Mark (when Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane) the word just isn’t translated. Jesus’ original Aramaic word, Abba, suddenly and unexpectedly appears in his prayer. There are very few Aramaic words that appear in the New Testament, so it is very significant that this word appears at this very moment when Jesus is at his most vulnerable and honest, praying to God.
      There is another indication. Twice in his letters, the apostle Paul tells us about a prayer that was prayed by the early church, and the prayer went like this: “Abba, Father.” What he is telling us is that even after Christianity spread into areas where the only language was Greek – where nobody could even understand a word of Aramaic, the church continued to address God as Abba even though nobody knew what the word meant and so they appended the Greek word for Fatherso people would at least understand. Why would they do that, why would they continue to use an obscure Aramaic word unless it was something that had been passed down to them from Jesus himself. These are the things that tell me that Jesus was in the habit of calling God abba. I also believe that he was the first one ever to dare to use that title for God.
      So, what is the significance of Jesus using that word. As I said, abba was not the usual word for father. It was the familiarword that you would use in your family when you were speaking to your father. You may have had people tell you that it was a word that only a small child would use for his or her father – the equivalent to the English “Daddy,” or “Papa” – but that is not quite right. Abba was not exclusively used by infants. Unlike “daddy,” it was commonly used by children of all ages (including adults) to speak to their fathers.
      Sometimes (thinking that abba meant daddy) people have suggested that Jesus used the word abba in order to imply that our relationship with God is one of childlike dependence and intimacy. Although there is an intimacy to his use of the word, it is actually not meant to imply an infantile dependence.
      So what did Jesus mean by the word? What I see is this: Jesus went out of his way to avoid using the common and general word for a father in his society when he was talking about God. I believe that he did that precisely because that word was closely associated with the patriarchal system of absolute authority and power vested in male figures. Jesus was convinced that God had no support for such systems. It was why, for example, he urged his followers to “call no one your father on earth.” (Matthew 23:9) So, by refusing to use the usual word for father that people usually used when talking about God, Jesus was making a strong statement that God had no part in such a system of dominance, authority and power.
      That is the first thing that Jesus means by using this word abba, it was a way of saying who God was not. But there is also a positive meaning in Jesus’ choice to use this word. It was the word, as I said, that was commonly used by families within the household to refer to the father of the family. And I think that, as a household word, it may have been chosen to direct our attention towards a different role that a father had in that society.
      Though it is true that ancient Jews, like most ancient Mediterranean people, tended to think of fathers primarily as those authority figures who had absolute power even over the lives of every person in their household, there was another side to the role of a father in Jewish tradition. Not only did he have authority over the household, he also bore the burden of the wellbeing of the entire household.
      Families were very large and very complicated in Ancient Israel. A typical family was not made up of a simple nuclear family of mother, father, and children that we are familiar with. A family would often include many generations and many branches of an extended family all living under one roof. In addition, servants and any livestock were also considered to be members of the family. And the father of the family, the householder, was the one person who had care for all of those people.
      It was the job of the householder to ensure that every person under his roof had what they needed to survive and thrive. Can you imagine how difficult a job that was? It wasn’t just a matter of equally sharing out the resources of the household because, of course, there are always those who have special needs and requirements if they are going to be their best. Being a father, therefore, was a heavy burden of care and hard decisions. And there was a strong tradition in Ancient Israel of speak of God as one who took that kind of care of all his people – the householder of a entire nation. As it says in the Psalm, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lordhas compassion for those who fear him.”
      So, when Jesus chose to use the name Abba, the name used exclusively inside the household for God, I suspect that he was making a point of portraying God as that kind of householder – one who takes tender care of the needs of every person in his household. This is exactly how Jesus portrayed God at every opportunity – a God who provides for the needs of his people, who takes care of them and looks out in particular for those who are in special need: the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged. This is how he taught his disciples to trust in God as their Father: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
      So, while Jesus was very comfortable addressing God as Father, he seems to have gone out of his way to present an understanding of God as Father that was at odds with the patriarchal assumptions of the society around this. I’ve got to admit that I have some trouble with how some people promote the idea of God as Father – especially if they are using it as a way to impose male dominance in society. It is refreshing to know that, even in his day, Jesus resisted that idea.


#TodaysTweetableTruth Jesus called God Abba – a rejection of patriarchy and control, an embrace of the image of the caring householder.


As to the challenges of being a father today – of caring and giving support to the people under your care and charge, I find encouragement from Jesus’ use of the image. Fathers you aren’t alone, you have someone who understands your struggles to take care of the people under your charge. Fatherless, you aren’t fatherless – there is one who is looking after you. Those abused or kept down by systems of patriarchy or sexism, you are not neglected either. Whether or not you are comfortable thinking of God as father or not, there is a householder who truly cares about what you need.
      If you were like me, you were appalled and distressed and maybe depressed when you heard about the terrible events that unfolded in Orlando, Florida one week ago. The largest mass shooting in American History not carried out by the military. And one of the worst things about it is that it seems as if the crime was specifically targeted at a sexual minority group which had specifically gathered in one of the few places where they felt safe in society – destroying any sense of that safety.
      I’m wondering, what can Jesus’ teaching about God as “Abba” say to us about such a terrible tragedy? Let me suggest this: if our God were merely a father – a kind of heavenly paterfamilias – who was all about authority and power, all about right and wrong, then I would be particularly discouraged today because that would mean that our only response to such a tragedy would be judgment and punishment. Some, I know, would be inclined to judge the victims in their minority status. I cannot do that. I cannot see (especially right now) how Christian judgement of sexual minorities who do not harm or rape anybody has made the world a better place. Judgement in that case only seems to make things worse. Some would focus on judging the criminal assassin and the communities that he has been associated with. That is little better, perhaps, but it is not good enough and as far as I can see and judgement alone will not make anything better.
      But if God is “Abba,” how can that change our response? If God is Abba, if God is the householder who is burdened with the wellbeing of everyone within his earthly household, then God’s first question when looking at each one of us is not, “What have you done wrong that I may punish you?” It is, “What do you need. What are the special challenges you are dealing with that keep you from thriving?” That is a very different question and provides a very different orientation to us as we seek to make a difference in our world, especially with groups that have been targeted because of who they are and what makes them different. If God is Abba, this is something that gives me hope for a better world.

Sermon Video:

Hallelujah, Benediction Song

Posted by Scott McAndless on Wednesday, June 15th, 2016 in Minister

This Sunday I will complete a series of sermons where I have been examining some of the strange and wonderful things that Jesus taught about God. I'm not sure how many have noticed this, but as a part of this series I have been writing a benediction for each service to be sung by the congregation. Each benediction has gone with the radical teaching of Jesus (or his disciples) that we have been talking about.

All of these have been sung to the tune of Sinclair's Hallelujah (#294 in the Presbyterian Book of Praise).

Here is a YouTube video of the music (though we sang it much faster than that!): Sinclair's Hallelujah

As the series now comes to an end, I would like to present all of the verses that I have written. I keep singing them, I hope you might too:

1. God is Spirit so we worship

God in spirit and in truth.

Holy places are wherever

God our wounded hearts does soothe.

2. God is Father, Son and Spirit,

Three in one and one in three,

Like a dance that spins forever

Throughout all eternity.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

3. God is calling us to mission:

“Clothe the naked, Feed the starving.

Then your healing times are coming

And your darkness is dispersing.”

4. God’s not watching from a distance

God is present, here belonging.

When we pray we know God hears us

And joins in our deepest longing.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

5. God’s committed to the outcasts,

The forgotten and the poorest,

To a kingdom where the lowest

Exchange places with the greatest.

6. God is Abba, like a Father

Who will all his family nourish,

Giving to each one according

To their needs that they may flourish.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,

Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is insurgent?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, June 13th, 2016 in Minister

Luke 6:20-31, Matthew 5:1-16, Isaiah 1:10-18

If you were given the chance to invent a god – a god that everyone else would have to acknowledge, worship and obey – what would your god look like? What would be important to your god? Well, that would probably depend, wouldn’t it? It would depend on you and what your priorities were.

If you were a committed vegetarian, for example, the god you would invent would probably be very likely to get judgy about people killing animals for food. If your greatest passion this summer was for your country to win more Olympic medals, then you might invent a god who closely followed the games and cared about the outcomes. If you were poor, you might invent a god who called for the rich to give away some of their wealth to the poor but if you were rich – oh, if you were rich – you can be very sure that the god that you would invent would be very keen on making sure that rich folks got to keep whatever was theirs.

Now you might say that it is a little bit silly to talk like that about a god that someone invents because you don’t get to invent God. God just is and it is up to us to come to terms with the God that we discover in the scriptures and in other places. And of course that is true.

But you are kidding yourself if you think that human beings have not had a role in shaping the ways in which God has been pictured, imagined and talked about down through the ages. Humanity may have been created in God’s image, but the reality is that humanity then turned around and imagined God according to their creation. This was inevitable because we had no language and no concepts that could possibly grasp the true nature of God. We had to define him in terms we could relate to.

But while, to a certain degree, every human who has ever thought about God has engaged in this project of imagining God in their own image, some have had certain advantages. Men, for example, have historically had a much bigger hand in creating the imagery and stories about God which is probably why people have traditionally been far more likely to think of God as male and interested in keeping men in charge of things.

Wealthy and powerful people in general have also always had ways of making sure that their particular images of God get the most attention. They have done it by being patrons of the temples and religious institutions, by being patrons of the arts, by sponsoring prophets and other preachers. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. This way of doing things has brought with it some of the most beautiful architecture, art, music and words ever created in the history of the world under the patronage of wealthy folks for the sake of religion.

But another result of this is also that the dominant image of God in our society is of a God who tends to share the priorities and interests of the wealthy and powerful. For example, back in the Middle Ages, it was the accepted doctrine and teaching of the Catholic Church that God had assigned to every member of society a place. God had made some to be kings, others to be lords and masters and priests, some to be merchants. But the vast majority of the people, God had made to be peasants and serfs and to live in poverty as they served the needs of everyone else.

“The great chain of being,” they called it, and taught that its links wound all the way from highest heaven to the lowest beast on earth. Everyone had a place and everyone had better stay in that place or else! When the church preached that such a picture of society was God’s will, that made people who questioned the way that society worked or who demanded change not only dangerous rebels but also even more dangerous heretics.

Now, things have, I will admit, improved a great deal since the Middle Ages. We now believe in things like social mobility and reject the idea of a class system. But I’m not sure that, for most people, the overall picture of God’s priorities has changed all that much. So, while people no longer believe that God ordained a great chain of being as an unchangeable order for society, they tend to still believe that God is totally invested in the present order of things. God, we seem to assume, wants people just to be happy with how things are and not to ask for a great deal in terms of change. The rich get to keep all their stuff – after all, doesn’t God say, “thou shalt not steal” – and the poor should just keep their heads down and work hard and maybe eventually they’ll get rich too.

God, we assume, is a conservative God, not necessarily a capital C political party Conservative God (though there are some who assume that) – but at least conservative in the sense that he wants to conserve the present social order of things – doesn’t want troublemakers to rock the boat or seek to change things. This idea is so taken for granted that anytime anyone does anything that challenges the present social order of things our very first reaction is often to think that there is something amoral or even atheistic about that person.

But that God (the God invested in the status quo) was not the God that Jesus believed in. The God that Jesus proclaimed was a God who was not invested in the present social order of things but was rather committed to upsetting that order. One of Jesus’ favourite sayings, one that he seems to have repeated on many occasions was, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” You simply could not find a way to call for a complete reversal of the order of society in fewer words than that. Jesus proclaimed something that he called the kingdom of God which was, if you listen closely to what he actually said, mostly about transforming society into a place where, well, the first were last and the last were first.

But perhaps there is no place where Jesus laid out his vision of a transformed society more clearly than in the passage we read this morning from the Gospel of Luke that I call the Blessings and Curses of Jesus of Nazareth. This is Luke’s version of the much more famous passage known as the Beatitudes in the Gospel of Matthew. People often prefer Matthew’s presentation of these sayings because it is possible to read those sayings in a purely spiritual way. I mean, it can make a certain amount of sense to think of those who are “poor in spirit” or those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” as being blessed because those sound like spiritual conditions. They don’t need to have anything to do with real economic poverty or actual physical hunger.

But the version in Luke’s Gospel is not going to let us off the hook so easily. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus speaks far more plainly. Those who are blessed, he says, are the poor, the hungry and those who are weeping. And, just in case we miss the point, Jesus goes on from there to state even more starkly that those who are rich, well-fed and laughing are cursed. We can’t just write this off and say that Jesus was only talking about spiritual truths and realities here. He was talking about a God who was passionately committed to bring about serious social change.

That was the God that Jesus believed in and whose kingdom he proclaimed. And, make no mistake, it was not the same God that his enemies believed in. The Jewish rulers and priests did not believe in a God who was determined to bless the poor and curse the rich. They were pretty sure that God was committed to making sure that the rulers kept their wealth and the priests kept their power. And the Romans especially didn’t believe in the kind of God that Jesus did. Their gods were quite committed to making sure that Rome got richer while everyone else remained poorer.

It was the refusal of Jesus to acknowledge this God of Rome and the Jewish rulers, more than anything else, that got him arrested and killed. If Jesus had restricted himself to only teaching spiritual truths and speaking about a life after death with no real economic and social implications for here and now, they might have mocked him, marginalized him, even locked him up, but they wouldn’t have bothered to kill him. But to believe in a God who wants to bring about change in how things work, that is the most dangerous kind of belief there is.

I think it is very important for us to acknowledge how very radical the God that Jesus was talking about was: an insurgent God rather than the God we have always heard of – the one who is interested in keeping everything in good order. But there is a real question here about what it means to follow Jesus’ example and to serve the God that he proclaimed.

There is one thing that I am sure that it does not mean. It doesn’t mean that we support all movements that seek to bring about social change. There have been many movements throughout history that have set out to bring social change, and many of them have sought to use any and all means to create that change including violence.

Jesus could have created that kind of movement. He was living in a time when his nation of Israel was occupied by a brutal occupying Roman army. He could have called for armed revolt and revolution but he explicitly rejected any idea of bringing change through violence. “Bless those who curse you,” he taught, “pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” But just because he would not resort to violence did not mean that he didn’t expect things to change. It was just that he had no faith that violence could bring that change. It could only make things worse. Only God and the grace of God shown through us can transform society.

But actually it is because we believe in a God who is committed to a transformation of society that we are freed from the need to resort to violence to bring about change. Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who, in his day, achieved some enormous social change in American society and, inspired by the example of Jesus, he did it without resorting to violence. It wasn’t easy. There were many times when his followers wanted to give up on the nonviolent approach and fight back. One of the things that he said that gave people hope was this, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

What he was saying was that our faith in a God who is committed to justice – to the creation of a society where there is equality and opportunity for all – means that we don’t think we have to bring it about by ourselves. We don’t have to rush that change or make it to happen through violence. We can even take violence and persecution directed towards us with patience and endurance because we trust that, though it may take time (the arc of the universe is long), God will make sure it ends up with things being more just rather than less.

It is quite possible for people to grow up in the church, hear people talking about God all the time, and yet come away with the notion that God is only really interested in maintaining the status quo and making sure that nobody makes any waves by asking for change. A lot of people seem to think that such a God is the only God there is. But I am afraid that I cannot believe in such a God any more. I am not alone. There are too many people who are saying, I’m not going to believe in that God. What is the use of a God who is not going to let anything change? This is, as far as I can see, one of the reasons why atheism is a growing movement in the world today.

This is a dangerous trend, but not merely because people are abandoning God. It is dangerous because of where it may lead our society. When people no longer believe in a God who makes sure that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, they start to feel like they are the ones who have to make sure that it bends that way. And when people start to feel that way, it is not long before they start to resort to things like violence to make sure it happens. We cannot afford that.

So, yes, I think it is vitally important that we proclaim today the God that Jesus knew – a God committed to social change towards justice. The consequences of any other approach are too dangerous to consider.

#TodaysTweetableTruth Jesus' God is committed to social change towards justice. That is why we have #hope & don't need 2 resort 2 #violence.

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What we miss when we read the Lord’s Prayer in translation

Posted by Scott McAndless on Thursday, June 9th, 2016 in Minister

I have spent some time reflecting on the Lord's Prayer this week - especially the opening word in the original language: "Father" (because I'm working on a sermon for Father's Day).

Now, I am hardly what you would call a Greek scholar. What I learned in school is a bit rusty, but I was struck by some of the things that you see when you read it in the original language. The prayer, as it originally appears in the Gospel of Matthew is in Greek, although Jesus himself likely spoke Aramaic and would have prayed in that language.

The prayer, at least as it appears in Greek, has a poetic structure that is simply impossible to get across in an English translation. When you read it in the original, you see that most of the prayers and petitions are written in parallel phrases.

The first word is "Father." The second word is "of us." From there the prayer seems to bounce back and forth from the deeds of God to the needs of humanity - from the concerns of heaven to the concerns of earth.

The pattern is repeated too many times for it just to be an accident. I think that Jesus (or his Greek translator) wanted us to understand something from this structure. But unfortunately, we English readers can't see this structure. That is why I created this graphic which lays out the Lord's Prayer by maintaining (for the most part) the actual word order in the Greek.

Can you see the structure? What do you think we are supposed to learn from it?

Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is within you?

Posted by Scott McAndless on Monday, June 6th, 2016 in Minister

Psalm 139:1-12, Matthew 6:5-15, Romans 8:26-27

There is one very big assumption that lies behind all of our religious and spiritual practices. It is an assumption that is so taken for granted that I think we almost forget that it’s there. The assumption is this: we assume that God exists out there somewhere.

It is an assumption that goes with the very idea of existence. Existence, as an idea, implies existence within a certain space. Now, of course, we may not know where that “somewhere” is in the case of God. We would actually resist being very specific about the place where God exists because we’re really not very sure about that.

People used to talk about God being “up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re as comfortable with that phrase anymore. People used to mean it literally. They actually imagined God as being right up there – just beyond the solid blue dome of the sky looking down upon us – but we got a little bit too sophisticated (what with things like space exploration and satellites and such) to think about it that way anymore. So we tend to be careful not to be too specific about where God is out there, but everything we do in our religion assumes that God is somewhere.

This assumption has driven most religious activities for millennia. The things that human beings do in our temples and our churches – rituals, sacrifices, hymns, prayers – have all been carefully designed to attract the attention of whatever deities people have worshipped and to persuade those gods to send their blessing, salvation and healing our way.

In ancient times this might have been something as simple as sending the smoke of your offering up into the sky as this giant beacon to attract God’s attention with both sight and smell. There are places in the Bible that talk about sacrifices in exactly those terms. As ancient societies developed, worship practices became more sophisticated. Some cultures developed musical and dance traditions. The Greeks invented theater which was, in its origins, a sacred practice that was meant to earn the favour of the gods with performances. In fact, most forms of art had their origins in the attempts of humans to get their gods to pay attention. It is one of the great contributions of religion to human culture. In fact, if religion never gave us anything more than the music of Mozart and the paintings of Da Vinci, that would be enough to say that the whole enterprise was worthwhile.

And then, of course, there are the prayers that are such an essential part of our spiritual and religious practices. Prayer is, generally, seen as a way of communicating with a God who exists somewhere out there. Somehow, it seems, God is out there monitoring the things that we say – especially when we take on certain religious postures or enter religious places. When you get on your knees and clasp your hands and bow your head, it is like you are putting out an antenna to better transmit your signal. When we enter together into a place like this and enter into prayer with one another, it is like we are entering into a broadcasting booth – into the heart of spiritual equipment that has been designed to boost and amplify signals by joining them all together.

Of course, one of the other things that we do to get God to notice us is the same kind of thing that we do in most any social situation. When you want to be noticed in your social group, what you usually try to do is make sure that you stand out from the group in some meaningful way. We try to be better or stronger or wittier or sometimes needier than everyone else and think that that will get us more attention. Sometimes it even works. When we apply that logic to our relations to a God who is somewhere else, people often try to get God’s attention by being better or more righteous or more pious than other people.

This is how it has always been – how religion has always worked. And it has always been based on that one key assumption that God exists out there somewhere and that we need to make contact with God. But what if that assumption – the one that all religion is built on – is false?

I know what you’re thinking: that’s blasphemy. That is a denial of God because if God doesn’t exist somewhere then God doesn’t exist at all and that is atheism.

Well, if that is what atheism is, then it might just make Jesus an atheist. Now, of course, Jesus believed in God – he talked about God and trusting in God all the time. But Jesus certainly had some very interesting ideas about how we were supposed to connect with that God. In particular he had some very strong ideas about religious practices and especially about prayer.

Jesus taught his disciples, “whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” Now, part of what Jesus is saying there is that he really has no patience with people who use external displays of religiosity and piety as a way to advance themselves and their standing within the community. This kind of thing was very common in Jesus’ time and he absolutely found it annoying and hypocritical.

But there is something more in this teaching of Jesus than just a disdain of hypocrisy. I mean, yes, Jesus dislikes how people are more interested in impressing other people than they are in connecting with God, but he seems to be equally concerned that the God that they are looking to connect with is not where they think God is. God is not out there but rather in here. God is not in public but rather in secret. So Jesus goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”

The God that Jesus is talking about here is completely different from the general concept of God that is and has been common throughout most of human history. Now, that is not to say that Jesus is the first or indeed the only one to conceive of God this way. The God that Jesus is talking about is the same God who is described in the Psalm that we read this morning. In it the Psalmist fantasizes about going somewhere to escape the presence of God and discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that there isn’t any such place: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”

What he is describing here are the limits of the entire universe as they were understood at that time. They saw everything that existed as a three-tiered universe – like a three layer cake with heaven on top, the earth in the middle and Sheol or the place of the dead underneath. They thought that the universe began in the place where the sun rose in the morning in the east and ended where it went down in the sea to the west. So the author is imagining an impossible journey to the extreme limits of the universe as he sees it.

If we were to map what this Psalm is saying onto our modern understanding of the limits of the universe we would have to say something like, “If I descend into the black hole that is at the centre of the Milky Way you are there; if I travel to the edge of the galaxy at the farthest end of the universe, you are there. If I travel back in time to the moment of the Big Bang or move ahead to watch the last light in the universe go out, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” The picture is very clearly of a God who is present in every conceivable corner, and a number of inconceivable corners, of the known and unknown universe.

Think of it this way: God is not merely a being who exists somewhere. God is being itself. Even better, God is the source of all being – the very foundation of all existence.

So the notion that God, rather than merely being someplace, is actually everyplace is certainly older than the time of Jesus. But it seems to me that Jesus, displaying a unique understanding of the true nature of God, finally explained to us the true implications of such a concept of God.

Jesus is explaining in this passage that communication with the divine is simply not what we have always assumed. Most especially, it is not communication with some external being who communicates with us from a distance. The God we worship doesn’t need our religious practices and prayers in the traditional way that we have thought of them because God is not at a distance from us.

So Jesus rightly says that when you have a need or a request or a concern, you don’t need to tell God about it because God isn’t someplace else looking on while you try and explain to him what you need. If God is to be found everywhere, then God is to be found within you. In fact, Jesus is saying, God already knows what you need and what is really bothering you far better than you do.

Of course, you may ask, if God is really that present within you, then why pray at all? That is a very good question. The fact of the matter is that God doesn’t need our prayers. For that matter, God doesn’t need any of our religion. Does God need our praise? Does God need us to say, “How great thou art?” Of course not, God already knows how great God art. God doesn’t need any of it. So why do we do it? We do it because we need it – in fact, we need it desperately.

We need to pray, not to fill God in on what is going on, but because we need to verbalize the things that we struggle with. We need to come to terms with them so that healing can begin. And sometimes, when we don’t have the words for what we need and all we can do is groan in our pain or grief, we need to do that. But God is not some distant and detached observer as we do that. When we are in that prayer, God enters into the words or the griefs or the feelings with us. That’s what Paul means when he writes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

So more than anything, prayer, like many of the spiritual or religious practices that we engage in, is about opening ourselves up to the God who is already present with us in our longings, fears and woundedness. It is about making ourselves aware that we are not alone in what we face.

I do believe that God hears and answers our prayers. I do believe that God does heal us when healing is what we need (though, of course, healing can take many forms and we may not always get the kind of healing that we think that we need). But what I don’t believe is that God does any of this as some external being who is separated from us by time and space. God is not some being hanging around on some cloud somewhere who occasionally tunes into our prayers and, when he feels like it, decides to send some miracle in our direction. That is not the God that Jesus believed in. That is not the God that Paul worshipped. Nor is it the God that the writer of Psalm 139 discovered to his amazement.

But it is the God that most human beings throughout most of human history have imagined themselves dealing with. I think that we are increasingly finding ourselves in an age, however, where such a concept of God will no longer work for many people.

But that is okay, because we can see God in a radically different way – the way that Jesus actually spoke of his father in heaven. We have a God who doesn’t need to exist in any particular place – a God who we can just know is with us. That was all that ever really mattered.

Let this concept of God challenge the way that you pray and transform the ways that you practice your spirituality. Let it set you free. I know many people who tell me that they are afraid to pray or to try out other spiritual practices such as meditation or contemplation because they are worried that they will not do it right. Be reassured that there is no right way of doing such things because God is not watching you from some distance judging the quality of your prayers. God is within you participating in your prayers and that is what makes them worthy.

#TodaysTweetableTruth God's not out there someplace. God's with us & that should transform our prayers, faith & all our spiritual practices.

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