News Blog

St Andrews Annual General Meeting details

Posted by on Tuesday, November 20th, 2018 in Clerk of Session

The St Andrews' Annual General Meeting date is February 24th, 2019. You are cordially invited to join the celebration after worship on this day.

In acknowledgement of this date you should be aware that:
  • The financial meeting will be held prior to the AGM - on Wednesday February 20th.
  • The Annual Report will be released by January 20th.
  • All Committee reports, group reports or inclusions to the Annual Report need to be in the Church Office by January 10th in order to be included
  • The financial report will be available at the AGM. Depending on completion dates it may or may not be available in the Annual Report. Printed financial details of 2018 will be made available to everyone at the AGM.

The narrative budget format will be used again this year. We will have a potluck luncheon while discussing the opportunities and challenges of 2018.  This celebration will also allow us to decide a few motions that are mandated by the Book of Forms.

This important day needs your help to support St. Andrews' missions into the future. Help us move confidently by sharing your point of view.
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Why pray?

Posted by on Monday, November 19th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 18 November, 2018 © Scott McAndless
Matthew 6:5-8, James 2:14-17, Psalm 138
W
hy pray? That seems to be a question that people ask with increasing urgency these days. We are living in a time when “thoughts and prayers” have become a very unfortunate cliché. Every time there is a tragedy, every time a gunman walks into a school and opens fire or a man walks into a synagogue and starts mowing people down, it has become a part of the national liturgy.
     Political leaders, celebrities and religious officials send out their Facebook messages and tweets: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.” And people have caught on. They have recognized that “thoughts and prayers” has become a kind of a code – a code that seems to mean, “Let’s not do anything and, for God’s sake let’s not change anything just because some tragedy has occurred. Instead let us say something that makes it seem like we care.” It is amazing to see, but we are to be living in a time when praying for something, for many people, has become a synonym for doing nothing. And so, yes, people are asking, “Well then, why pray?”
   
  I’ll tell you I have certainly changed my own personal reaction to tragedies. Yes, I may pray as seems appropriate, but I now certainly think twice before posting anywhere that I am doing so because people now often read that as me just brushing off the tragedy.
     Even good, practic­ing Christians, for whom prayer is an essential part of their spiritual life, can’t help but ask the question from time to time. I mean, look at what Jesus says this morning in our reading from the gospel: “When you are praying,” he says “do not heap up empty phrases… for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” How can you read that and not ask the question, “Why should I bother praying if God already knows what I need, what I’m going to say and has probably already decided what he’s going to do about it anyway? Why pray?”
     These are just a couple of the reasons why the practice of prayer seems to have fallen into some disfavour in our times. But the problem, I suspect, is not with the practice itself but with our misunderstanding of the true nature of prayer. We live in a capitalist and consumer society. For that reason, I think that we have a strong tendency to understand just about everything in those terms. That is why we tend to think of prayer as a transaction – as something that we give in order to get something in return. And so we come to God and try to butter God up with our praise and worship, we may even make some vows and promises, and then, in return, we think we can at least hope that we have made God happy enough that he will give us what we ask for. But is that what prayer is?
     Prayer, in our thinking, is like a vending machine. You put in your money (or these days you tap your credit card), push a few buttons and you hope that you get what you asked for. Of course, some of us may experience prayer as a broken vending machine – one that doesn’t always seem to get what we want right – but it is a vending machine nonetheless.
     But I don’t think that is right. I think that Jesus is telling us that that is not what prayer is because, even while he tells us that God already knows what we need before we ask it, Jesus doesn’t suggest, even for a moment, that there is no point in asking. He sees value in the activity itself and it is a value that goes beyond the transaction that we tend to think of.
     But what is there beyond that transaction? There is, I think, conversation. When I pray and bring to my God the things that are on my heart or that are on the hearts of the people I pray for, I absolutely agree with what Jesus says – that I hardly need to tell God about those things in order for God to know them. God already knows them. But I also recognize a great value in speaking these things aloud – of saying them to God even if I do not dare to say them to anyone else. I need to vocalize them, I need to put those longings into words because I honestly sometimes don’t even realize what it is that I desire before I say it.
     I mean, who among us hasn’t done that? You go to a trusted friend who you want to help you with a problem that has been bothering you and the first thing you have to do is put that problem into words and as soon as you do so, you can actually see for yourself what the solution is. For example, I once had someone come to me with an ethical problem at work. A co-worker was doing something that was actually endangering the lives of some people and he wanted to know whether he should report it – what he should do. But here is the thing, by the time he had finished describing the dilemma, it was pretty clear he knew what he needed to do. He didn’t really need to be told. He maybe needed some encouragement but the answer was clear and all he really needed to do was put it all in words for someone. I just happened to be that safe someone. Prayer sometimes works exactly like that and God is only too happy to play that role in the conversation.
     But beyond conversation is something even more essential to the practice of prayer: there is participation. Prayer is not like the vending machine. It is not a transaction. When you ask God for something in prayer, God doesn’t just give it, God is more likely to say, “Wow, what an amazing and good thing to ask for, how can we make that happen together? That is the point that James is trying to get across when he says, “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
     I know that he is talking specifically about faith there, but what is prayer if it not a spoken expression of faith? God doesn’t merely grant the requests of our prayers, God enters into the journey towards the answer to that prayer. That is why the politician who sends out “thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy without having any intention of doing anything to change anything is not actually praying at all and may, in fact, have done nothing at all. It is also why prayer is a dangerous act because, when you truly pray and ask God for something good, God is only too likely to ask you to be a part of the fulfillment of that prayer.
     Why pray? There are many good reasons to pray. It is not fancy language or delivery that makes a prayer acceptable and effective. It is not length or frequency. But if we can make our prayers a conversation with God where we bring our whole selves to that conversation, if we can make our prayers a participation in what God is already doing and wants to do in the world, prayer actually can change the world. And that is why we pray.

Sermon Video:


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Sunday, November 18th.

Posted by on Wednesday, November 14th, 2018 in News

There's lots happening on Sunday and next week!

  • the Christian Education Committee is holding a bake sale after worship with the proceeds helping to maintain current programs and grow/start more.  The Holy Sherlocks Sunday School class have been busy preparing posters and they will be setting up and managing the bake sale.  I know there will be quite a few Christmas goodies available!
  • Bill & Margret Hunter and Yvonne Heaman will be speaking to us during worship to tell us about their most recent trip to Malawi. 
  • the sermon title is “Why Pray”
  • Special music will be given in praise by the Women’s Ensemble and Annette Denis 

Also, St. Andrew's is once again hosting the Music portion of "Music & Lights" this year, on Friday, November 23rd at 7:00 pm.  Our Youth Band is excited to be sharing some of their music with the community.

And, the Annual Senior’s Christmas Tea will be on Saturday, November 24th from 2:00 - 3:00 pm.  Don’t let the word “Senior” fool you, everyone is welcome to join us for the tea at St. Luke’s Place.  We have our Sunday School children serving and Joyful Sound! providing us with some seasonal music.


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Reflections at the conclusion of Transform 2018

Posted by on Sunday, November 11th, 2018 in Minister

The Transform Conference in Orillia Ontario was intended to be about just that: transformation. Some useful tools were offered but the point in coming together was not to get more tools that you might use to enhance your ministry. Stories of church growth and development were told and shared, but the point in coming together was not to take an incremental step in church size or programming.

The goal was transformation and that is a pretty ambitious goal when you think about it. If such a goal were to be fully realized, wouldn’t everyone have to go home as completely different people than the ones who came? Wouldn’t they have to return to churches that were soon radically different from the churches they left?

Well, I don’t think that that is what happened during our gathering, but I do think that the seeds of true transformation were offered and if those seeds are well tended, real transformation is possible.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, offered us a series of practices that could lead to transformation. Now, in some ways, that is not really anything new. I don’t know how many times I have been given a series of practices by an author or a speaker that the church ought to employ. Some of those lists have been helpful and useful, but I cannot really see that I have seen transformation come out of them.

Dr. Kim’s list is not necessarily hugely different from some others that I have seen and I can’t really say whether or not hers is the best or most exhaustive list. What is important about her approach is that she sees a sequence to them. You need to start with a particular practice and cannot successfully move on to the next one until you have entered into the first to a sufficient degree.

There seems to be a lot of wisdom in this approach, especially because the first practice that she begins with is lament – lament that is then followed by repentance and relinquishing power. I believe that she is right and one of the things that truly prevents our churches from being transformed into the image of Christ is our inadequate practice of lament.

Healing and Reconciling with Indigenous People

Let me give you one example that struck me hard during our time together.

I was blown away, yet again, by the depth of pain and suffering in the indigenous communities that are served by our church. One afternoon I had the privilege of participating in a First Nations healing circle and the pain that was expressed there was almost too much to listen to at times. I can’t imagine how people can live with it – broken down in mind, body and spirit. It was a true and deep experience of lament for those present in the circle.

I could not help but wonder why complete healing and reconciliation is so elusive, given such real pain and lamentation. In particular, why do we as settler people of European ancestry, struggle so much with being able to repent of past and present injustices and with letting go of certain power dynamics. What is lacking?

Well, Dr. Kim seems to be saying that, if we are having trouble with repentance and relinquishing power, it may be because there has not been sufficient lamentation.

But how could that be the problem? Canada’s Indigenous people have been lamenting their losses in various ways for about five centuries!

Ah, but that is just the point, what is lacking isn’t their lamentation but ours.

Our lamentation? What do we have to lament?! We had it great, we got the land, we got to be in charge and we received almost all of the benefits from the relationship between Indigenous people and settlers.

But we have to recognize that, for us even to begin the walk towards healing and reconciliation, it means giving up so many of those privileges and benefits that we have taken for granted for so very long. That is a loss – a real loss – and I don’t think we can properly process that loss without lamentation.

The problem is that most of that, most of what we enjoyed, was sinful in some way. We may not have realized it at the time, of course, but a lot of it was based on attitudes and ways of thinking that were just wrong and even evil.

And it just seems wrong to lament the loss of something that is evil. Isn’t that like former addicts lamenting the loss of that feeling of the “high” that the drugs gave them? So I think that, for this reason, we avoid such lamentation and maybe even try and pretend that we haven’t lost anything at all.

And that might just be our problem – we don’t lament, don’t acknowledge the loss, and so cannot move on to the next step in true healing and reconciliation. So here I go again. I will attempt to compose a lament for my people, the settler folk:

A Lament for the loss of the “White Man’s Burden”

O God, it was so sweet. We sailed into this place and right away we were able to take charge.

We brought our own concepts and ideas about things
     like who could own the land and how.

Our ideas won out.
     We got to set up everything in ways that were comfortable for us.


We got what we wanted: land, government, customs.
     We didn’t really even have to think about what others were losing in order for that to happen.

But that wasn't the best part; do you know what the best part was?
     We got to feel all virtuous about it.
          We were saving them.
              We were civilizing them.
                   We knew what was best for them.

And, yes, it was a lie, often an abominable lie. It was often only too obvious that it was, but we could believe it and believing it felt good – really good.

Any story you can tell yourself where you are the hero and obviously better than the others always feels good.

But God,
    It's not working anymore.

The lie ran into evidence, into reality and into people who were strong enough to stand up and object. We can't tell ourselves the fantasy anymore because deep down we know it is not true.

And we hate it. We don't think it is fair. It is like you have abandoned us, God, because we don't know how to be your people without enjoying special privileges.

We're mad, and it is getting in the way of us moving forward.

Yet you are God. In Christ, you have shown us how powerful it is
     to empty oneself
          to consider the needs of others as more important than our own
               to love.

If you are with us, maybe we can let it go.

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Transform 2018 Day 2 Reflection: Grief

Posted by on Saturday, November 10th, 2018 in Minister



Day two of the Transform 2018 Conference began with very meaningful and moving worship service that was led by the eight Canadian Presbyterian ministries that are focussed on Indigenous people and communities.

In many ways, this service set the tone for the entire day, especially as ministry after ministry talked about their experience of ongoing injustices -- things like residential schools, the sixties scoop, youth suicides, drug addiction, missing and murdered Indigenous women. The sorrow expressed was deep, but the worship that accompanied it was nevertheless beautiful as it appealed to the limitless love of God.

This worship let us directly into our first session with our speaker, Dr Grace Ji-Sun Kim, and it was what prompted her to spend some time talking about the Korean concept of Han (a concept that I had previously only encountered in an episode of The West Wing). Han, she explained, is the sadness and sorrow that is felt in response to systemic injustice. In Korean culture, Han is something that needs to be expressed and is often expressed very dramatic form, something that we often have trouble within Western cultures.

Reflections with a Mentor


This day included two mentor sessions -- break out groups for more personal discussion led by a chosen leader. Our group was particularly blessed to have Dr Grace Ji-Sun Kim as our leader (or, perhaps, did the organizers feel that we were most in need of her help?). Our discussion led me to some interesting thoughts about my own situation.

 Having spent a significant time during the day talking about grief-inducing situations in various places, I was led to reflect on my experience in my own situation. If often seems to me that one of the things that prevents our congregation from embracing the change and transformation that may be needed in our present time and place is that we are carrying too much grief.

 We grieve:

  • The church that used to be. We are hardly alone in this, but I note that many in our congregation carry a lot of grief over the way that things used to work in the church. They grieve the fact that we can no longer attract people in the ways we used to do. They grieve the loss congregational size and influence.
  • Two former ministers, both of whom recently passed away. One of those passings was particularly difficult as it was the most recent minister and he died under particularly tragic circumstances.
This grief seems to impact our present life in some powerful ways. After all, how can we possibly embrace all of the new ways the church needs to be and act if we are busy pining for the way things always used to be? How can we possibly appreciate the present leadership (especially if it is significantly different in terms of style and personality) if we can't stop missing the old leadership?

I shared these concerns with Grace and she suggested that one of the things that might help us to move through some of that grief would be a practice of lament. There does seem to be a lot of wisdom in that suggestion and it certainly suggests that my thoughts expressed in yesterday's blog post may have been on track. So I will try to follow through with her suggestion.

Here I'd like to present a first draft of a prayer of lament that I think could be particularly useful, not only to our congregation, but to many Presbyterian Congregations.

Lament for the 1970's

God, it used to be so simple.

All we had to do was put on a reasonably good quality program in a beautiful building and people would just come.

They would come because they wanted to,
     because everyone else was doing it,
          because it wasn't like they had anything else to do on a Sunday anyway.

And people used to volunteer, step forward to serve on committees,
to bake, to teach and they were happy to do so.

And, sure, maybe they had the time to do that because everyone in the household didn't need to be working at a job all the time, but it sure made finding the people to do the work of the church easier.

And people respected the church, and listened when we spoke and cared if we got upset.

God, why did you make all of that go away?
     Didn't you know that we liked it that way?
          Didn't you care?

We keep trying to bring those times back -- thinking that if only we make everything as much like things were back then as we can, everyone will just come back and it will all be good again.
We try and try but it just never seems to work.

Have you forgotten us?
     Are you angry?
          What did we do to deserve this?

Or maybe, God, just maybe, do you have a message for us in this painful thing?

Maybe you want to teach us something -- something about the new life in Christ, about faith and trust in you? We wonder.

We wonder...

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Operation Christmas Child

Posted by on Friday, November 9th, 2018 in News

The Athalie Read Group 

is going to assist with preparing boxes for shipping by Samaritan’s Purse for Operation Christmas Child on Friday November 30th. Operation Christmas Child is a hands on way for Canadians to bless struggling children in the developing world by filling shoeboxes with toys, hygiene items and school supplies. This is a fun way for parents and grandparents to teach children to care for and about others.

Each member of the Athalie Read Group packs a shoebox and we invite the congregation to do the same. Instructions for packing boxes can be found at samaritanspurse.ca You can choose the gender and age of the child you want to receive your shoebox. A donation of $10 is needed to cover the cost of shipping. 
Please have your shoebox to the church by Sunday, November 25th.  The shoeboxes will be dedicated during our worship service by Rev. Scott McAndless.
Your contribution is greatly appreciated.
The Athalie Read Group.


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Transform 2018 Day 1 Reflection: Lament

Posted by on Thursday, November 8th, 2018 in Minister

I am at the Presbyterian Church in Canada's Transform 2018 Conference in Orillia for a few days. This is the first of what is expected to be a yearly conference with the goals of helping participants to:
  • Embrace a missional culture that encourages initiative and risk-taking
  • Discover new ways of nurturing faithful, vibrant and generous ministry
  • Encourage generous investment in the mission to which God calls us
  • Build relational connections that embody Christ’s missions
I would just like to take the opportunity while I am here to share some reflections and thoughts. Here is what struck me after only the first few hours.

This evening our keynote speaker, Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim, mostly took the time to introduce herself and her story -- setting the remarks that she will make during the rest of the time in a context. She also introduced some themes that will be highlighted.

Lament


One of the themes she introduced briefly was lament, stating, as I have often thought, that lament is a practice that we need to rediscover in the church. One of the things she said was that, while you will almost always see a prayer of confession in a Presbyterian worship service, you never see a communal prayer of lament. That set me to thinking about confession:
  • Communal confession and communal lament are both part of our Biblical tradition, and yet we regularly practice one but not the other. Do not both have a place. In fact, you could even argue that lament is more important than confession in our tradition, at least if we are to judge by the numbers: there are many more psalms of lament than of confession in the Book of Psalms.
  • I have not felt good about the way we do confession in church for some time. That is not because I don't think there is a place for confession -- there is. It is just the way that communal confessions are written that bothers me. Most prayers of confession seem to be based on models and ideas of thinking about God that don't really work for me. They portray God as a somewhat distant being who is only interested in judging us. If you asked me to describe the God that I have come to know through Jesus Christ, that is not what my description would be, yet that is the God we always seem to pray to when it comes time to confess. I do sometimes try to go out of my way to write prayers of confession the introduce different ways of talking about God and our estrangement from God, but that often seems to be hard work -- going against the grain of people's expectations of what a confession should be.
  • Some people (especially young people) have communicated to me that the prayers of confession are the part of worship that most irritates them, probably because they see the hypocrisy of addressing a God in our confession that does not fit the God we are trying to describe in the rest of the service.
It also got me thinking about lament:
  • We really need to lament these days. There are so many things that are happening for which the only proper response (at least initially) is lament. When 11 worshippers are gunned down in a synagogue (for example) we want to respond in our worship, of course. And we do so in our prayers of confession ("Lord, forgive us for the anti-semitism that we hold in our hearts..."), in our prayers of intercession ("Lord, bring healing and hope to the wounded, comfort to the grieving, repentance to those so motivated by hatred..."), and in the sermon. That is all good, but we also have a real need to lament in that situation; we need to be able to say, "Lord, why did this happen, why do things like this keep happening! Why don't you stop it!! Are you there, do you care!" We need all of those responses and they are all biblical.
  • Most (though not all) biblical laments do end with an expression of hope in which the worshipper usually comes to reaffirm trust in God. This would be as essential to a communal prayer of lament in a church as an assurance of pardon is in a prayer of confession.
And so I am looking for ways to make communal lament a regular part of worship. I am willing to even lay off a bit on the prayers of confession to make room for this. I am thinking, at the moment, of alternating between prayers of confession one week and prayers of lament for whatever might have gone wrong in the world the next week. Of course, such a regular pattern might sometimes be interrupted when particularly lamentable events happen in the world, which, unfortunately, seems to happen all too frequently these days.

Anyways, I think it might be a worthwhile experiment to introduce more communal lament.

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I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God.

Posted by on Wednesday, November 7th, 2018 in Minister

Hespeler, 4 November, 2018 © Scott McAndless – Baptism
Luke 1:8-20, Daniel 9:20-23, Psalm 91:1-16
Z
echariah was a priest – not an important one, not one of those wealthy priests who lived in the big houses in the prosperous Upper City. They had money and political connections and were famously corrupt. They were in so deep with the enemy – with the Romans – that the people had nothing but scorn for them anymore. But big important priests like that; they wouldn’t have had anything to do with Zechariah or his wife Elizabeth.
      Zechariah was just a low-level priest who would never be rich or powerful but he took his position seriously. It was his job, when his turn came around, to stand in the temple, to stand in a place where he was uniquely in the presence of God, and to carry all of the hopes and the dreams and the burdens of the people to the very throne of God. That is an awesome responsibility especially in times of great trouble, and Zechariah certainly lived in times of great trouble.
      We are told that one day when Zechariah was in the temple and making an offering of incense – a burning of sweet smoke that went straight up into heaven as an image of the prayers of all the people rising up to the very presence of God – that “the whole assembly of the people was praying outside.” Can you imagine that? This is just a low-level nobody priest offering a bit of incense and yet for this everyone seems to be there. The people have gathered, I suspect, because they know that Zechariah is a man of integrity and honour unlike most of the priestly leadership in the city. And so the people seem to have recognized that this is a unique opportunity to have the concerns that weigh on their hearts lifted up to God through this man that they can trust.
      What were they praying for? I can only imagine that they were praying for religious and spiritual renewal, for political change that would allow the people some breathing room in their own land. I’m sure they were praying for hope in a time when there seemed to be a lot of hopelessness.
      Now all of that – all of the hopes and expectations of a people – was a lot for one man like Zechariah to bear. But that was only the half of it. As is often the case with those that God calls upon to minister to his people, Zechariah was dealing with his own issues. He carried his own personal sorrow that, even after years of trying, he and his wife Elizabeth had been unable to have a child. This was a personal sorrow that no words could express and that was made even worse by the insensitive comments of people who just didn’t understand.
      Now, of course, Zechariah did not go into the temple with the intention of praying about that personal crisis. That was not what he was called to do in his position. But that sorrow was so much a part of him that there was no way he could leave it outside of the room when he offered up his prayers.
      That is the situation that we find ourselves in at the beginning of our reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke. And into that extraordinary situation comes an extraordinary presence. He appears right beside the altar of incense with these words, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.”
      Now, I will leave it to you to figure out why my mind first turned to a passage of scripture in which Gabriel appears in the Gospel of Luke on a day when we have the privilege of baptizing an infant by the name of Gabriel Lucas. But, having made that connection, I must say that I find the situation that is set up in this passage a rather compelling one for our time.
      My friends, we are living in a time when “the whole assembly of the people is praying outside the sanctuary.” We are living in a time when people are losing confidence in the religious institutions of our society, and not without some good reason. Just like in the days of Zechariah, we have seen religious leadership that has not inspired a great deal of confidence. The scandals are too many to mention. The Roman Catholic Church seems to be practically drowning in the sexual abuse scandals lately. Evangelical leaders have also seemed to be ready to sell their souls for political gain. (Take the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network who recently said that an arms deal is more important than the death of a journalist. Can you imagine that: a Christian teacher saying but the death of one man matters less than thirty pieces of silver? That goes against the very foundation of our faith!)
      Those are just a couple of examples, but the overall trend regarding the attitude towards religion is quite clear in our time. Yet, remarkably, even while people are turning their backs on religious institutions, interest in spiritual matters is only growing, as is belief in God and in the afterlife. People, in other words, are still praying in their own way, but they are praying outside the sanctuary because they are unsure whether they can trust those who are inside the sanctuary. It is at times such as this, that what we need most are people of integrity like Zechariah and Elizabeth to come forward to offer the incense of prayer and service before the Lord. It is when we need people like their son, John, who will be known as John the Baptist.
      Who are those people that God will use? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that some of them are here today. Perhaps God will use Gabriel’s parents. I do know, for one thing, that God has put a calling on his father’s life. I don’t think that he has quite figured out how and in what kind of ministry, but there is a lot of evidence that God has something for Matt to do in the church. But it is not just those who are specifically called to the ministry of the church that God needs to use at such times. All of us must ask the question: Does God have something for me to do in the work of renewal in these times of great change?
      But there is something that seems to happen as soon as someone asks that question. Everyone agrees that something needs to be done. Everyone agrees that the system is not working and that we need some real change, but they also immediately begin to think of all the reasons why they cannot be the one to bring about that change. Why? Because they’ve got their own problems – they’ve got their own stuff that they’re dealing with. Everybody can say that because everybody does. And that is an excellent explanation for why the real change that is needed often never materializes: people are just too busy dealing with their own problems.
      But here is what I see going on in our passage from the Gospel of Luke: Zechariah could have said that too. Zechariah was dealing with a terrible personal tragedy and he could very well have said, “Because I am busy carrying this terrible weight of my and my wife’s infertility, there is absolutely no way that I could possibly carry all of the hopes of the people before God. But Zechariah didn’t say that. Zechariah took all of his personal pain with him and he went and he offered up the incense before God on behalf of all the people.
      And here is the really beautiful part: Zechariah didn’t go into that temple to pray to God for his own personal pain. Though he could never hide the pain that he bore in his heart, he did not say a word about infertility as he offered the incense. He took the prayers of all the people and not his own need. But where does God meet Zechariah? Right in his personal pain. “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard,” Gabriel says. “Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.” God ministers to the minister in need.
      But here is where we discover how amazing our God is. Yes, God ministers to Zechariah in his need. Yes God answers the prayer of his heart, but in the answer to Zechariah’s prayer, we also see the seed of the answer to the prayers of the people. “You will have joy and gladness,” Gabriel begins, confirming that this is absolutely a gift for Zechariah and Elizabeth. But the blessings do not end there: “and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord... He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
      I find an incredible comfort in this part of the story. If you have ever felt that you cannot be part of what it is that God is doing in this world because you have your own problems that you are dealing with, remember the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Remember that you have a God who would love to minister to you in order that the whole world might be blessed.
      I have been blessed to know a little bit of the story and the journey of Gabriel’s parents and what brought them to this point in their life. I won’t go into it here, but I know that they have had their struggles as many of us do. And God has ministered to them in those struggles. God has brought them through all of that and then brought them together to be a blessing to each other and has now given them this extraordinary blessing in their beautiful son.
      That is their blessing and their gift from God and we wish them so much joy in it. But looking at the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, I cannot help but think that God has a plan to multiply those blessings from there. I am no Angel Gabriel; I do not stand in the presence of God and so I don’t know exactly how those blessings may come. I do suspect that God might do with them as he often does and that the very things that they have struggled with may become the seeds of their ministry. I cannot forget the calling that Matt has testified that God has put on his life and I cannot stop thinking that the very things that he has struggled with in his life may give him a unique ministry in the lives of others who struggle with similar things. I don’t know the particulars but I do know that God has an uncanny ability to find a way to make that kind of thing happen.
      We live in interesting times – times when “the whole assembly of the people” is praying outside the sanctuary. The hunger and the thirst for new life and new hope – the hope that can be found in the gospel – is there in the people, but they are also not inclined to trust the institutions of religion to help them find that hope. That might seem discouraging, but it is not. Yes, if we just continue on in the churches with business as usual and we resist all change, chances are that the whole assembly of the people will remain praying outside.

      But I don’t think God will allow that, God will call people from among us – maybe you, maybe Matt, maybe me – and God will use those people to enable us to take some bold steps. It will come. It may have already started, after all hasn’t Gabriel come to us today from standing in the presence of God. So offer up the incense of your prayers. God is alive and God ministers to all who struggle among us. In God’s ministry to each of us are the true seeds of the renewal we need.
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