Category: Minister

Minister’s blog

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

Posted by 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
S
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?


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Why I am Running

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

Posted by 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:

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Hallelujah, Benediction Song

Posted by 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,
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,
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,
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,    



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

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

Hespeler, 12 June, 2016 © Scott McAndless
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 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?
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Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is within you?

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

Hespeler, 5 June, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Communion, New Members
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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Was Jesus and “atheist” because he taught that God is a circle dance?

Posted by on Monday, May 23rd, 2016 in Minister

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Hespeler, 22 May, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Trinity Sunday
John 17:1-4, 20-24, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Philippians 2:1-11
I
f you are ever invited to a Greek wedding, you ought to expect that a number of great things are about to happen to you. You can be sure that you are going to have a great time. You can be sure that there’s going to be excellent food and excellent wine and probably healthy servings of Uzo. There will be people yelling “Opa!” and (warning) some dishes may be broken. But, best of all, you can also be sure that, somewhere in among the celebration, the music will start and people will stand up and form a circle and begin to dance.
        The circle dance has been a part of Greek culture for a very long time. It is almost something that is programmed into the people themselves. A celebration, for them, is just not complete until at least three people (it cannot be done with two) have stood in a circle and danced around each other, in and out, in a constantly changing circle. They do the intricate steps, move in and out, under and over. The dancers begin to move faster and faster in perfect harmony until it is like the individuals fade away and it seems that all you can see is the blur of movement that makes up the whole. No one knows how old the circle dance is, but we can be pretty sure that it is at least as old as the Cappadocian Fathers.
        The Cappadocian Fathers were three important church theologians who lived in the middle of the late fourth century of the common era in Cappadocia – a region in the centre of modern Turkey. Their names, just in case you want to find them in your great Christian theologian trading cards collection, are Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. And it is important to note one other thing about these three learned men: they may have lived in the territory we call Turkey, but they were ethnically and culturally Greek. This is actually quite important as you will see.

        The really hot topic, in the days of the Cappadocian Fathers, was the trinity. The puzzle was basically this: Jesus and the New Testament writers had described their experience of God in a surprising and unprecedented way. Though they had experienced the unity of God – had known that God was one – they had specifically experienced God in three distinct ways: as God the Father and Creator, as God the Son and Redeemer and as God the Spirit and Sustainer. Though the Bible never actually says, not in so many words, that God is three in one and one in three, some sort of Trinitarian formul­a­tion was really the only way to make sense of what the Bible did say about God.  
        So, by the time the Cappadocian Fathers came along, the basic Trinitarian notion of God – one God experienced as Father, Son and Holy Spirit had been pretty well established. What the Cappadocians were trying to do was wrap their minds around how the various persons of the trinity related to each other and to us human beings. They were wise enough to realize that their poor human words could never precisely describe the functioning of the divine. What they did feel that they could do, however, was find a metaphor. They could paint some sort of picture and say, well, God is something like this.
        And they did come up with a metaphor. They said that God was a perichoresis. Perichoresis is a Greek word that means rotation. And, if you listen to the way that these men described God as a rotation (and you remember that they were Greek) it becomes clear that the specific kind of rotation they were thinking of was a circle dance.
        Now, let me ask you, when you hear me (or someone else) say or do something “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” what sort of picture does that draw in your imagination? I’ll bet that, for most of you, if you were forced to draw a picture of that formulation, you would come up with some sort of image of three static figures – perhaps an old man with a beard, a younger man who looks something like Jesus and some sort of a ghost or perhaps a dove to represent the Spirit.
        That is what we tend to do when talking about the trinity. We imagine three distinct persons and then we try to find a way to blend them together. I’ve heard people talk about how one individual may play different roles in their life. One woman, for example, can be a mother in one part of her life, a daughter in another and a sister in another. I’ve heard people talk about the three parts of an egg – the yolk, the white and the shell. These are all attempts to wrap our human minds around a concept of the divine that cannot be understood with the human mind. They are metaphors that can be sometimes helpful to us in our understanding and imaginations and that can sometimes be very unhelpful.
        Imagining God as a circle dance is, in essence, just one more metaphor among many others, but this metaphor may be more helpful than some of the others. While most of the other ways we imagine the trinity seem to be static, the image of a dance is all about movement. After all, if you put three people together in the centre of a dance floor and they just stand there – if they do not dance – they remain separate beings. But if they start to move in concert with each other, you suddenly have something new on that dance floor: you have the dance. And when you put some really good dancers together, they can produce something that is better and greater and more beautiful than anything that the individual dancers could ever do on their own. The wholeof the dance is greater than the sum of its individual parts: the dancers.
        So imagine God this way. God is what is present when the individual members of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) start to dance together. God, as such, does not have any existence apart from the dance, nor does God need to exist apart from the dance because it has been ongoing from before the very beginning of creation and it will never end.
        You can also understand just about everything that the Bible tells us about God or the persons of the trinity as movements in a great cosmic dance. We hear of God the Father who creates, chooses, blesses, judges and sometimes punishes. These are all steps in a dance towards and away from humanity and this world and its issues.
        We read about God the Son who is begotten of the Father, who, in our reading from the Gospel this morning is sent into this world, who in the Letter to the Philippians, empties himself, takes on the form of slave and becomes fully human. We have his death, resurrection and ultimate exaltation at the right hand of God. These are all steps in and out and around humanity and ultimately encompassing the whole of creation.
        The movements of the Holy Spirit, though not particularly featured in our readings this morning, may also be seen in terms of dance steps. From the movement of the Spirit over the face of the waters at the very beginning of creation to the descending like a dove upon Jesus at the time of his baptism to the Spirit coming like tongues of fire upon the church at Pentecost and working and moving within believers everywhere bringing us together and making us one, God’s Holy Spirit is found dancing among us, in us and through us.
        Now every dancer in this great circle dance of the trinity has his own steps and her own movements. (Gender, by the way, really doesn’t matter very much when you are discussing matters of the nature of God. Gender is a human construct.) But here is why it matters that you think of the trinity as a circle dance. Each movement alone is really nothing without the coordinated movement of the others. Only when they move in concert with each other does any of it make any sense. So it is with the trinity. None of the actions of God throughout the history of the world make any sense unless you see them within the internal relationship of the dancers of the trinity.
        So when, for example, Jesus talks about his own relationship with God to his disciples in the Gospel of John – when he talks about the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son – we see that the dance between the Father and the Son is so intricate that you can scarcely define the one without reference to the other. “Father,” Jesus says, “the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” It is like the glory of the one cannot exist without the glory of the other. They are in continual exchange of glory, love and grace within that unbroken dance. This, above all is what makes them who they are.
        Jesus goes on to say, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This stresses the unity, the oneness of God but, interestingly, it seems to be a oneness that we are only able to know because of a dance move where the Father sends the Son away. A movement of sending the Son away from the Father would seem, you would think, to separate, not unite, the deity, but here we are told that it actually reinforces the unity of God. That is because the sending is a move in the great dance – a move towards humanity which is the most important movement of all.  
        But that is not the most interesting thing about all this that I see as I read this prayer of Jesus, who is praying for the church in the Gospel of John. Jesus repeats over and over again that God is one in this passage. But he also makes it clear that this unity of God is not exclusive to God. In fact, practically every time that Jesus refers to the oneness of God, he also seems to pivot that immediately to speak of our unity as the church.
        For example, Jesus says, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. “ He is saying that the ultimate proof of the oneness of God is not to be found in theological discussion or intellectual speculation about the nature of God, but rather in our own personal experience of unity in the church. If we are one with each other, that is the only thing that can give us a glimpse of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
        In other words, if the trinity is a circle dance it is the kind of circle dance that you do not understand and you are not meant to experience as a spectator. In order to get the concept of God that is presented in this image, you have to get up on your metaphorical feet and enter the dance for yourself. It is the practical things that we do for one another to support and help each other that allows us to even get a sense of how God operates as one.
        All of our attempts to intellectually understand and explain the nature and the internal relationship of the trinity will fail. We cannot describe it or explain it. Our human brains are not big enough to comprehend it. Our human language has not the words to express it. But we can experience it. We can experience it by choosing to care for one another, learn from one another and accept one another despite all of our differences and all of the things that could divide us. Do that, and you enter the dance together with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and once you are in the dance, you don’t need to explain these things because you are part of them and they are part of you.
        So if you want to understand the nature of the trinity, don’t try and reduce it to words and explanations. That will always fall far short. Get on with the hard work of caring for one another and loving one another.
        I think the Cappadocian Fathers may have been onto something when they chose to describe God as a circle dance. Of course, it was a radically different way of understanding God from what anyone had ever said before. Some found it so strange that they would accuse the Christians of being atheists because their concept of God was so different from what anyone had ever thought of before. Did the Cappadocian Fathers care about that? No, somehow I think that they were far too busy dancing with the divine.

#TodaysTweetableTruth 1 image that helps describe the trinity is a circle dance, an image you can grasp by entering into that dance yourself
                
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It is like an IV hooked up directly to your ears with a constant drip of wisdom

Posted by on Monday, May 16th, 2016 in Minister

About a year and a half ago, my doctor suggested to me (rather firmly) that I really needed to lose some weight. I fortunately took his advice seriously and decided to make some changes in my lifestyle. One of the key changes that I made was to become much more active. The activity that suited me best and that gave me the most pleasure was walking. I bought a step tracker and over time set a goal of walking about fourteen and a half kilometers a day.

I have greatly enjoyed it and feel much better and healthier overall. But I might not have stuck to it as well as I have if had not had something to stimulate my mind while I was exercising my body.

Walking with other people has its own rewards, of course and I love those times. But I also look forward to those times when I am walking alone because I tend to listen to podcasts.

I was realizing the other day that these podcasts I have been listening to pretty much every day have been an extraordinary blessing to me. They have helped me to grow and learn. They have made me laugh and cry. Sometimes, when I am walking, it is like I have an intravenous hooked to my ears and it is feeding me a constant drip of wisdom, hope and new perspectives. I have grown to love my podcasts.

I do have one problem, though. I listen to them so often that I run out of fresh podcasts on a regular basis and end up going through old reruns. So I thought I would take the opportunity to share the podcasts that have been a particular blessing to me with my friends so they might have the chance to try them out. I'm also selfishly hoping that others will take the opportunity to share their favourites with me so that I might find some new ones to love.

Here are the podcasts that have been a consistent blessing to me. I know that many of them are already well known and popular, but that doesn't mean that everyone has heard of them. I myself hadn't heard of some of the best known until recently. Hope that they might be the blessing to you that they have been to me:

Canadaland, Canadaland Commons, Canadaland Shortcuts

This trio of podcasts is always interesting, engaging and challenging. Canadaland exists primarily to engage critically with Canadian media and often has very important comments to make on how our media works (and fails to work) in this country. It also generally helps to keep me informed of what is going on in our country and what the challenges and needs of the day are. Sadly, I often don't seem to get this awareness from anyplace else.








The Liturgists Podcast

The Liturgists do very good work raising and discussing issues in progressive Christianity. They will push you to think about your Christian faith in new and challenging ways. Some of their episodes on topics like LGBTQ issues and Racism have been extremely moving and uplifting.












Ask Science Mike

Science Mike (Mike McHarge) is one of the liturgists on the Liturgists Podcast and I enjoyed his wisdom for the longest time before I realized that he had his own podcast where he answers people's questions on science, faith and life. He has a marvelous perspective as a science geek who has a very thorough understanding of things like physics, neurology and sociology. He started out as a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church, when through a time as an atheist before returning to faith as a sort of a post-orthodox Christian mystic. All I can say is that it all make for very interesting podcast episodes.





The Robcast

I am assuming that Rob Bell's Robcast is the best known of all the podcasts mentioned here so I probably don't need to say too much about it. Let me just say that I haven't enjoyed all of the episodes I've listened to, but the ones that I just loved have been so amazing that they would make up for listening to many many hours of less inspiring stuff.











History in the Bible Podcast

 Okay, I just love how Garry Stevens says, "All the history in all the books in all the Bibles." He is mostly just running through the narratives of the Hebrew Bible - retelling the story in ways I can relate to. It is helpful because he will often remind me of something in those narratives that I have missed or forgotten. From time to time he will launch into an explanation of the critical work that has been done on the Bible from a scholarly point of view. A lot of this is what I learned in my studies, of course, but I never mind the review and, often enough, I learn something that I missed or have forgotten.






The Memory Palace

Nobody but nobody can tell a story from history better than Nate DiMeo. I mostly listen because I'd love to be able to learn to tell a story like him.




















So there they are, the podcasts that have most helped me to learn and grow over the last year or so. I am so thankful for the work that these people do and how they make it available to everyone to just download and listen.

So what are yours? What do you listen to and how have they changed your life?
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Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is Spirit?

Posted by on Sunday, May 15th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 15 May, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Pentecost
John 4:7-24, Galatians 5:16-26, Acts 2:17-21
I
f you were to ask me the question, “Do you believe in God? I would answer that question without a moment of hesitation: “Do I believe in God? Yes, of course I believe in God.” In fact, that is kind of the obvious answer for someone in my position to give. It is an answer so obvious that, in general, nobody would even bother to ask the question.
      In fact, being a Christian is one of the things that offers me continual assurance that, yes, there is a God because, you know, sometimes I look around at the world and I see everything that goes wrong and it does make me wonder. When I do start to wonder like that, the thing that often reassures me that there is a God who exists and cares is what I have heard and learned from Jesus.
      That is why I was surprised to learn recently that one of the really big problems that ancient pagans had with Christians back in the bad old days of the Roman Empire was that they considered us to be atheists.
      I mean, you could say a lot of bad things about Christians. We have our flaws and shortcomings and failures. But not believing in God? I wouldn’t call that one of them.

     So I’ve thought about that accusation over the last little while. I’ve thought about it a lot. Why would pagan Romans accuse Christians of being atheists? And I get, of course, that the pagans were a bit upset that the Christians wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of their gods. But this was about more than just a question of Christians refusing to recognize Jupiter or Mars or Mercury. To tell the truth, the traditional Roman religions had been on the decline for years before the Christians ever showed up on the scene.
      No, this wasn’t just about protecting the status or worship of any particular gods. This was about the Christians challenging the very concept of divinity that the Greco-Roman world had. The problem was that the Christians were a-theists. The problem was that they did not believe in theos, which was the Greek word for the concept of divinity.
      And, you know what, in that sense, I think that the critics of Christianity may have been right. Starting with the very words of Jesus and continuing through the life of the early church, the Christians had ways of talking about and interacting with God that totally blew that Greek concept away. If you listened – I mean really listened – to Jesus and his disciples you simply would not have been able to conceive of God in the same way again.  
      Think, for example, of the way that Jesus speaks of God in our reading this morning from the Gospel of John. Jesus is engaged in a conversation with a Samaritan woman about matters of religion. Jesus has just said something to her that has made her realize that she is not just talking to an ordinary person – that he can somehow speak for God. And her immediate response is to ask him a religious question: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but [Jews like] you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
      The question she is asking is a theistic question. It is the kind of question that Romans might ask about their gods. Where is the best place to worship Jupiter, they might ask. The name of the god might be different but the concern is exactly the same. There are all kinds of assumptions behind a question like that. She is assuming that God requires a certain sort of worship from us. She is assuming that place matters when it comes to such worship. Even more important, she is assuming that worship, properly done in proper places, will influence God to act in certain ways.
      And everyone in that world at that time would have expected Jesus to jump into that argument and explain to the woman exactly why it was right and good to worship God only in a particular place – in the temple in Jerusalem. Because if anybody in that world knew anything about gods (and this includes both Jews and Gentiles) they knew that it was vastly important that you access those gods in the right ways and in the right places.
      But, while Jesus does acknowledge that, historically speaking, Jerusalem is the place for accessing God, he also says that that is no longer true now. In fact, he announces a brand new insight into the nature of God: “God is spirit,” he says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And there, right there, you have one good explanation for why people accused Jesus’ followers of being atheists.
      You see, the whole development of religion is one of the ways in humans have always dealt with the basic fears that come with life in this very unpredictable world. I mean, who can stand going through this world and just not knowing what terrible thing might happen next? Sickness and disease, war and pestilence, accidents and all kinds of other terrible things that can go wrong seem to shadow our every moment of existence as human beings on this planet. And, most terrifying of all, so much of it seems to happen for no apparent reason.
      And so people looked to their gods to explain these things and especially to find a way to control all of the terrible and frightening things that seem to happen in this world. Religion developed as a way to control the things that happen to us by controlling the gods who make these things happen. Holy sites were chosen, temples were built and priests are consecrated to manage all of the ways that the gods were manipulated with rituals and sacrifices to influence them and make things happen in certain ways. I think that this is true of any religion including Judaism and even Christianity in many of its forms.
      But when Jesus declared that it didn’t really matter where you worship God – whether in Jerusalem or Samaria – because God was spirit, he was really declaring but he didn’t believe in that kind of God – the kind of God who could be manipulated with our religion.
      And, it must be said, that this was a very dangerous thing for him to say because what was at stake was not only the question of where one might worship God. Religion, in all of its forms, has built up these complex power structures over the centuries. If the priests and religious leaders are able to manipulate the gods and so control the terrible things that may happen in this world, then they are extraordinarily powerful and they can use that power as leverage in other areas of life. That’s how religion becomes a powerful tool for manipulating whole populations and for amassing great wealth, which is what it has been for much of human history.
      But Jesus, with one short phrase, “God is Spirit,”throws all of that carefully developed power structure to the wind. And I almost mean that literally. There was just one word – both in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke and in the Greek language of the gospel – one word that was used to speak of both spirit and wind. Pneuma, in Greek, is a word that mean both spirit and wind. Ruach, in Hebrew also means both spirit and wind. So when Jesus calls God spirit he is also calling God wind and, as Jesus says elsewhere in this same gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
      Jesus was saying that, if God is spirit, then God is about as easy to nail down and control as the wind. And I realize that we, as modern people do have a better understanding of where the wind comes from and where it goes, than did the people of Jesus’ time. We know about atmospheric pressures and air currents and how they can influence and change the flows of the wind. But all our knowledge has not brought us to the place where we can make it blow when, where and as hard as we want it to. If we could do that, we would have shut down the fire in Fort McMurray so easily, but we can’t. If the goal of our relgion is to bring God under our control and get him to behave and make life play out as we want, we will be sorely disappointed.
      Religion has always had one other goal other than the controlling of the gods. It has also been very useful (especially for those who are most powerful in society) as a way to control populations. Religion has been used to make people to behave in certain ways, to make sure that they don’t ask for too much in the way of change or reform. The fear of the gods and the promise of the religious power structure to control the divine powers in this world has been used to impose laws and standards of behaviour on people and to teach them that they must tolerate the present structures of the world rather than to ask for change.
      This power too is destroyed by that one simple phrase, “God is spirit.” We see that in our reading from the letter of Paul to the church in Galatia where Paul writes, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” If God is spirit then God is not outside of you telling you through laws and words and scriptures how you ought to behave, God is within you prompting your behaviour in quite unpredictable ways.
      Now it must be said that the Christian church has had a troubled history with that declaration of the absolute freedom of believers that is proclaimed in passages like this one. The church has sought to govern over the actions and even the thoughts of its people through laws and rules and power structures, but the original declaraton of your freedom remains there in the scriptures and so, I pray, it will never be forgotten by God’s people.  
      So, with just three words, “God is spirit,” Jesus really does do a lot to destroy the traditional ways in which people have imagined God and how they have tended to work out their relationshiop with God. It is, I believe, one reason why, in those early centuries, people saw how the Christians lived and declared that they were dangerous atheists – people who did not believe in God in the ways you were supposed to believe in God.
      Now, it is it is important to note that Jesus, in saying such things, is not throwing us into the chaos of a Godless world where anything could go wrong at any moment and nothing has any meaning. Jesus does still believe in God, and the God that he does believe in is clearly a God who is extraordinarily gracious and kind and caring. It is a God who he speaks of, above all, as Abba – a word that we will examine in more detail in several weeks. So clearly, it is not Jesus’ intention to leave us with the impression that we are stuck going through life in a dangerous universe where anything can go wrong and nothing ever makes any sense. There is a God and we can trust that God is gracious. It is just that we cannot expect to control that God through our religious practices. We do those things for different reasons.
      In the same way, Paul insists, our freedom from the obligation to follow the law does not make us immoral and dangerous people who will inevitably degenerate into the worse excesses of behaviour. He insists that God, as spirit within us, prompts us to the highest of impulses, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
      So do not be afraid of those three words, “God is spirit,” and where they will lead us. But they definitely disturb the ways in which the world has learned to think about God. I think it was one of the things that led to that anti-Christian accusation of atheist. Though Jesus seems to have been clear on this matter, it seems that the church has long struggled with such a view of God. It seems to be easier to fall into the old ways of thinking about and relating to God. All it seems to cost us is our freedom – our freedom from law and from fear.
      Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get so hung up on the radical ways in which Jesus spoke about God that it would transform us? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the outside world looked at us and said, “I’ve never seen a people who believed in a God like that! Doesn’t remind me of any God I’ve ever heard of.” And then, maybe, they would ask to learn more about the God that we worship.
       

         #TodaysTweetableTruth #Jesus said God=Spirit, presenting view of God so new it seemed atheistic. What if we had such a radical view of God? 

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