Hespeler, 10 September, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:21-25, 2 Timothy 1:6-12, Psalm 78:1-8

M

any years ago, I spent a summer in the state of Kerala in South India where we spent a fair bit of time way out in the hill country far from any cities of any size. We stayed with some local people – members of a local Christian church – and it was a very eye opening experience. The region is relatively well-off compared to many areas in India, but it certainly seemed, to our western eyes, as if there were many people living in great poverty. Indoor plumbing was rare. The water was mostly unsafe to drink and, while there was electricity, it was very unreliable and would go off for long periods of time.

      For a while, we stayed in a simple farm on some rice fields. At night when the electricity was out, it got incredibly dark. We didn’t have flashlights (we hadn’t thought we would need them) so when we had to go anywhere at night (like, for example, to the bathroom which was in the field) we would generally take a candle with us. And I learned a few things on those nighttime walks that have very much stayed with me ever since.

      My first lesson might seem a little bit obvious, but I think that it needs to be said. The first thing that I learned while heading out over unknown and uneven fields in the pitch dark was that a lit candle was extremely valuable. The difference between going out there with a candle and going without one might mean getting completely lost, maybe falling and twisting an ankle or falling into an irrigation canal. At that moment, nothing was more important to me than being able to keep that candle lit.

      The second lesson was a bit of a surprise to me. When we went out into those fields, our first instinct was to do what you might do with a flashlight or like what you see in an old movie where someone carries a candle. You want to hold the candle up right in front of you like this. I learned very quickly that that did not work at all.

      The problem with doing that is obvious if you think about it. If you hold the candle in front of you, that means that all you can see is the flame. Everything else is completely dark and, in comparison, the flame is impossibly bright. Your night vision is completely ruined by the light in your eyes and you cannot see anything else. So you very quickly learn that you have to make sure that the candle shines anywhere but towards your eyes. One way to do that was to hold the candle up over your head or to the side so you were looking away from it.

      But my favourite solution was the one that was shown to me by the people who lived there. You would pick up a broken coconut shellad or to the side so you were looking away from it. But my favourite solution w (they were everywhere) and hold it over the candle between you and where you were going. The locals called it a “Kerala lamp.”Kerala lamp."nd where you were going. The locals called it a "ay from it. But my favourite solution w It worked really well and had the added advantage of blocking the wind somewhat from blowing out your candle.

      Now, if you had lived centuries ago – before electricity and at a time when candles and lamps were rare and expensive and difficult to light because there weren’t even any matches, you would probably know everything that I had to learn about walking with a candle at night. But you and I have lived all our lives in a very different world. We may have used candles and even oil lamps before, but because we have always lived in a world where you don’t usually have to depend on such things to actually find your way in the dark, there is a sense in which we don’t actually know how they work even though we may think we do.

      That means that, when we hear Jesus talk about lamps and what to do with them, it may not be quite as obvious to us what Jesus meant by what he said as it was to the people who first heard him say it and who never saw an electric light in their life.

      For example, when Jesus said, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” They would have immediately understood how important a lamp could be. These were people who lived almost half their lives in the light and the other half almost completely in darkness. When the sun came up in the morning, they began to live and work. But when the sun went down their world went completely dark. Yes, they had lamps, but every moment they kept a lamp lit meant burning precious oil that represented many hours of labour growing, picking and pressing olives. It was also oil that, if it wasn’t burned up, represented an essential part of their diet. Every ounce of oil burned was oil that could not be eaten. So you can be sure that these people did not light their lamps lightly or without reason.

      Light in the darkness – something that we pretty much take for granted – was something extraordinarily precious and rare to them. And when Jesus started talking to them in a parable about lamps and what to do with them, they would have immediately assumed that he was talking about something very precious and rare.

      The thing that Jesus was comparing to a lamp, I think it is clear when you look at the whole context in the Gospel of Mark, was the good news message of the kingdom of God – the message of God’s grace and love and what we do in response to that message. So the people who heard him talk about this lamp would have understood that to receive the message of the gospel was a precious and rare gift.

      I wonder how much we recognize how very valuable the knowledge of that message is. We have been told certain things about God and how God deals with humanity. We have been shown, in the person of Jesus Christ, that the power of love is able to overcome the greatest and darkest powers in this world. Do you realize how many people in our society today have no access to such good news – who are simply living out their existence with no reason to hope that anything might ever change in this world?

      Now, I am not one to go around saying that we, as Presbyterian Christians, have exclusive access to these truths. I tend to believe that they are truths that God reveals to various people in various ways in our world and that people can perhaps even come to them by various paths and even through different faiths. But I would definitely agree with the sentiment of our reading this morning from the letter to Timothy: “Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord.” We have received a testimony about the God revealed by Jesus Christ that we should not hesitate to be proud of. It is a message that has the power to change lives for the good – even to transform the world. That is the light that we are talking about in this passage.

      So the question now becomes, if we have this light, what do we do with it. Jesus says, “Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?” Now the very idea of lighting a lamp and then hiding it underneath a basket or a bed is perfectly ridiculous and Jesus knows it. First of all, there is a practical problem that if you put your burning lamp underneath a woven basket you will probably catch the thing on fire and end up burning your house down. But, even more than that, what would be the point of lighting a lamp, burning up your precious oil, and then not even allowing it to shine on anything? It would be a stupid waste of resources.

      So what does Jesus mean when he says that you would never do such foolish things? What is he trying to say about the message of the good news about God? That brings me to the second lesson I learned wandering around the pitch black hills of Kerala in South India with nothing but a candle to guide me. I learned that a candle you hold out in front of you as you walk is as good as useless. In the blackness, if you can see the flame of your lamp, you cannot see anything else. In other words, the candle is only really helpful if it shines on other things and people, not directly on you.

      I believe that this was the truth Jesus was trying to get at by talking about hiding your lamp once you had lit it. He was pointing out the simple fact that the only reason you would light a lamp was if you were going to let it shine on something. It needed to shine on your book or on your path or on the thing that you were working on or there was simply no point in lighting it at all and it was merely a waste.

      What that means in terms of the church and that whole task of being the light of the world is that this incredible message that we have of God’s grace and love and renewal needs to shine on something other than us or we will be guilty of squandering and wasting it.

      But let me ask you, how do we usually let the light shine in the life of the church? Most often, I would suggest to you, we do it like I held up the candle the first time I went out walking in the rice fields at night. We hold it up right in front of us. We see this amazing light, we celebrate and worship God for it, and we revel in how God has loved us and saved us and given us reason to hope.

      All of that is well and good as far as it goes but there is a problem. So long as you are holding up that light before your own eyes, it is all that you can see. You blind yourself to everything but that light. You cannot see, for example, the struggles that other people are going through, you cannot see the injustices that they have to deal with. And that is precisely the problem that we seem to run into far too often in the church today – the suffering that people outside of the church go through becomes invisible to us. I think that that is what Jesus means when he talks about putting your light under a basket – it means shining the light in a way that it really only shines for your own sake.

      What does it mean for us to be the light of the world in the church? It means that we are not meant to keep this light – this message – to ourselves. Instead of shining it in our own eyes, we must hold it up above our heads so our eyes are not on the light but on the world that God so loved. And when we are tempted to keep it only for ourselves and use it only to serve ourselves, we must grab hold of a coconut shell, and set it between us and the light forcing ourselves to look elsewhere. The coconut shell is the example of Christ who came to live the message of life, not for his own sake but so clearly for the sake of everyone else that he laid his own life down in its service.

      As you go out into the world following the service today, therefore, I would invite you to take with you the light of the knowledge of Christ that you have obtained in this church and throughout your Christian life. But carry it like this – like a Kerala lamp – so that you may allow the love and grace, forgiveness and hope of Christ to shine on others before it shines on yourself. I’ll warn you, that may mean that you find yourself thinking about the needs of others before you think of your own needs, that you may spend more energy on compassion than you do on judgement and that you maean for us to be the light of the worldhat Jesus means when he talks about the ligng through, the y feel more deeply the struggles of others that you observe. In other words, you might just become more Christlike.

     

Hespeler, 3 September 2017 © Scott McAndless

Mark 4:1-9, Acts 2:37-42, Psalm 126:1-6

h, there you are. You’re the new sower that we hired, aren’t you? Glad to have you working with us. Let me just say I hope you work out better than that last guy. What a sloppy worker he was! I mean, you wouldn’t believe this guy. We gave him a bag with like a hundred seeds in it and sent him out into the field. And what does he do? He starts throwing the seeds all over the place willy-nilly. They’re all flying around and about twenty-five of them fall on the path. Yes, you heard me right: on a hard packed path where nothing can grow. And what happens: they just sit there, wasted, until eventually some birds come along and eat them all. Twenty-five seeds just wasted! Do you realize what seeds cost these days and yet apparently this guy thinks that they are for the birds.

      Oh but wait a minute because that was only the beginning. He’s still flinging the seed everywhere and another twenty-five seeds fall on the rocky ground. Now I know that might seem alright at first because these seeds sprout up almost immediately. The rocky ground turns green with life but just when you see them growing and you start dreaming of all the crops that you are going to be able to reap what happens: the sun rises and it burns hot. The crops that grew among the rocks didn’t take enough time to put down a decent root system and they can’t stand the heat. They all turn brown and die. More seeds are gone.

      Then, to cap it all off, this so-called expert sower just happens to fling the next twenty-five seeds right among the thorns. Right in the middle of them! Now even I know that you can’t grow any good crops in there and, even if you could, who is going to go in there to try and harvest them? Not me, I’ll tell you that! So those seeds were effectively wasted too.

      So, you look like a smart young person. I’m sure you can figure out what all of this means: this guy has just thrown away seventy-five of the precious one hundred seeds that we gave him. Do we look like we are made of seeds? No, I’ll tell you, we are not.

      And, of course, that also means that out of all the seeds we gave him, only twenty-five of them ended up in the good soil. And, sure, those seeds grew and produced – in fact, some of them thirty, some of them sixty and some of them even a hundred times as much in the way of crops. So, when we had harvested it all, we did end up with 1,580 grains, but that is hardly the point. Think of what was wasted on the way to that harvest!

      But now you’re here. I can see that you are the kind of worker who will be much more careful at what you’re doing. So here are your seeds. Off you go… What? Oh yes, I know that there aren’t very many seeds in your sack. In fact, I know exactly how many seeds you’ve got there. I gave you exactly twenty-five seeds. That is a much as actually grew with the last guy. The other seeds we gave him obviously didn’t matter. Just don’t be wasteful like him and I’m sure that we’ll all get along and it will all turn out just fine.

      I can’t shake the thought that that is exactly the lesson that we would take from Jesus’ famous parable of the sower today. Jesus told the story (as he told most of his stories) to illustrate what the kingdom of God is and how it works. In particular, he seems to have been trying to show people how, on earth, the kingdom of God grows. But when we hear it, being conditioned by modern society with ideals of production and constant growth, our attention jumps right to the end of the story.

      At the end we hear that the seeds that were planted multiplied and produced many more times the grain than was planted. That, we assume, was the whole point of the enterprise: producing explosive numerical growth. We usually want to apply that directly to the church, of course, and may even assume that what Jesus was trying to say was that the church should always be expanding in size – multiplying in size thirty, sixty and even a hundredfold.

      But if you look at the story that Jesus told, that couldn’t have been his only point. He is talking about seeds in this parable – seeds that are cast into the ground. Do you really think that punch line of a story about seeds would be, “the seeds grew”? That is like telling a story about a driver who drives someplace or a cook who makes a meal. The ending is just expected.

      No the interesting part of the story – the part that would have caught people’s attention – was the part that looks like failure to us. Jesus spends much more time describing how it happens that seeds don’t grow when they are sown than he does describing growth. And indeed, the way that he tells the story, three times as many of the seeds end up not growing than end up growing. So why did Jesus direct our attention where he did?

      Well, if Jesus was telling this as a parable of the kingdom of God (and I think he was) then I think he was trying to tell us something very important about the kingdom. It was, of course, a story about growth because the seeds that are planted in the good soil do experience some tremendous growth. So one of the applications of this parable would be to say that we ought to expect that growth – all kinds of growth – should be a sign that the kingdom of God is present.

      To apply that to the church, yes, we should expect that growth should be a regular dynamic of the church. The church should grow and should be a place where people grow. Now, that may not always mean numerical growth or growth in membership. That is certainly something that many churches in many places struggle with these days. But, over the long term, as long as the church is a place where people are experiencing personal growth and so long as the commitment to mission is growing, the church should naturally be a place that is drawing more people unto itself.

      But, as I say, Jesus spends a lot more time talking about the seeds that don’t grow so I suspect that he might also be trying to teach us about the things that get in the way of the growth of the kingdom of God. The sower in his story is wildly wasteful. As we have noticed already, he literally wastes three-quarters of his seeds by throwing them in places where they cannot grow and produce. I suspect that many of the listeners who heard Jesus tell this parable, most of whom would have had firsthand farming experience, would have remarked on this point. I mean, I know that no matter how careful you are at sowing (even with modern farming equipment) you cannot prevent having some of your seeds land in places where you don’t want them to be, but this guy truly is ridiculous.

      It is so exaggerated that I think it just might be Jesus’ point. I think he is saying that the kingdom of God cannot grow if we are not sufficiently wasteful in the ways that we share it. Unfortunately, that is precisely the lesson that we most often resist in the life of the church today.

      For example, it is not uncommon for the leadership of a church that is heavily involved in mission and outreach to the community to run into lots of criticism from the congregation for such an emphasis. This happens because church people notice that the people in the community who are served by that mission are unlikely to show up and add to the membership of the church. Statistically this seems to be how it works. Very few of the people who are given help by the church – food, clothing, counselling and so on – will ever show up and participate in the life of the church.

      I mean there are exceptions to that and it is wonderful to have such people in our churches, but it is true you are very unlikely to grow the church very much by adding the people who are the primary focus of the local mission. They are just not very likely to come. And so church people will complain: “Why are we spending so much time and effort and money supporting these people in the community who won’t ever come to church and who, if they did, likely wouldn’t be able to help support the church anyway?” It’s like casting seeds on the path, they’ll say, it is all wasted.

      I have also heard people talk about ministry to young people in much the same way. Youth ministry can be expensive after all. You may have to pay youth leaders. You usually need to make a fairly large investment in terms of money and space and energy to create programs that will attract young people. And that often creates a problem for the church folk because there is no guarantee that those young people will remain and become a long-term part of the congregation. In fact, it is kind of unlikely.

      After all, the younger generation today are more mobile than any previous generation in the history of our society. They will likely move as they pursue educational and employment opportunities and as other things change in their life. This is especially true for many of our churches that are located in places where there are no post-secondary education opportunities. It is also true (and this is something that is true in all denominations and all theological wings) that young people today are more likely to drop out of faith altogether than were any previous generation.

      So a lot of church folk today look at youth ministry and don’t see it as a very good investment – it seems highly unlikely to bring much return in the way of growth – and so they will not make it easy for those church leaders who want to make it a priority. They feel as if youth ministry is just throwing our seeds on the shallow ground where we might see some short-term growth but it will never last.

      In fact, generally speaking, if you put any energy and resources in the church into efforts to communicate and connect with people who do not come to church, you will likely get pushback from the people who do come. After all, the vast majority of people you reach out to in those ways will not come and will certainly never become regular attenders. They already have lives that are filled with so many other things. They are like seeds that fall onto ground where they are surrounded by weeds and thorns. Why would you spend anything to invest in that?

      Those are just a few examples but there are many more. People just seem to make this assumption that the key way for the church to grow is to put the most money and the most energy into taking care of the people who are there and, if there is going to be any attracting of new people, those people who are wanted are people who are just like the people who are already there. The assumption seems to be that you need to spend all your time taking care of those seeds that have already fallen on the good soil. After all, aren’t they the ones most likely to grow and produce good fruit?

      I believe that Jesus told this parable of the sower for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons was to counter those very kinds of complaints. His promise was that the kingdom of God will grow, but in order for that growth to occur, a certain wastefulness is actually necessary. You have to sow broadly. You have to share liberally and even extravagantly without thinking about what you’ll get back for your investment. And if you attempt to cut back on the sowing that seems wasteful – the seeds that fall on the path or on the shallow ground or among the thorns – you will actually impinge on the growth that God wants to make happen even on the good soil, the growth ofappen, the grown th grown the the growth ing that seems wasteful -- the mise ss eople who are not going to tment the kingdom of God among you.

Flat Jesus apparently loves to travel, explore and learn!

Wow, Flat Jesus has been spotted in a lot of places!  From viewing a rainbow, to looking at the pretty Cambridge views, to The Big Apple, camping & Quebec, he's been busy travelling this month.

Flat Jesus was recently spotted at the Westben Music Festival in Campbellford!

s all Canadians know, our much-loved Canadian national anthem was first written in 1880 in the French language. The words were written by Adolphe-Basile Routier. It was only decades later that the anthem appeared in English with lyrics by Robert Stanley Weir.

      Weir’s lyrics have since been changed and edited a number of times – most significantly when the anthem was officially adopted in 1980 and there is still talk of editing them to this very day. But, since they were first written – for 137 years now – the original French lyrics have never changed.

      If you only speak English, you may have always assumed that the words in French said pretty much the same thing as the words in English – after all, both languages start with the words, “O Canada.” But, if you assumed that, you would be wrong. Robert Stanley Weir didn’t translate the anthem so much as he completely rewrote it. There are significant differences between the content of the French and the English anthems. For example, the French anthem is much more religious with references to Christian faith and even to the Christian cross. Th e English anthem, for its part, contained no references to God at all until it was revised in 1980 to include the words, “God keep our land…”

      The two versions also take a different angle on the singers’ relationship to the country of Canada. In English, as you may have noticed, the anthem focusses a lot on what we can do for our country – on how we owe it, for example “true patriot love.” Most important of all though, the anthem becomes a declaration and promise that we will “stand on guard” for Canada. That must be really important because we repeat it three times and it is the stirring climax of the whole song: “O Canada we stand on guard for thee!”

      There is none of that in Routier’s original French text. There the focus is not on what we do for our country but rather on what our country does for us. This is especially clear in that same climaxing phrase which, in French, is, “Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.” That translates as, “And your valour steeped in faith Will protect our homes and our rights.”

      So you might say that in English, the singers stand on guard for the country while in French the country stands on guard for the singers. And, honestly, I don’t really think that one of those is better than the other. We actually need both approaches. I believe (with some apologies to John F. Kennedy) that healthy nationalism is always found in the balance between asking what you can do for your country and appreciating what your country does for you.

      But there is one thing that particularly strikes me about that final line in the French anthem and that is how relevant it is today, 137 years after it was first written and 150 years after Confederation. The final promise is poignant: Canada will protect our homes and will protect our rights but I’m sure that even when those words were written there was a recognition that there could be a clash between those two things – a clash that has only become a bigger issue in modern times.

      How many times have we been told, in the last few years, that in order to protect our homes and our way of life, we would have to give up rights and liberties? How many times has a commitment to protecting rights and freedoms – especially the right to a fair trial, the right to have representation, the right to not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment – been criticised as being soft on terrorism and as something that puts us all in danger. This has all come to a head in the last week or so as the Omar Khadr case and settlement has erupted again in the news.

      It is often portrayed as a choice: we can have one or the other. We can have security or we can have rights but, because of the terrible dangers at work in the world today, we can no longer have both. In the case of Khadr, I guess the message is that we can either defend his rights or we can be safe but it can’t be both. It seems rather timely that our National Anthem can remind us, every time we hear it, that we have actually been promised that we can and should have both.

      I don’t think that it should be a choice. Both of those things – both rights and security – are extremely important and valuable. We shouldn’t have to compromise either of them but there is one very good reason why we think we do. The reason is fear. When people are afraid, of course they are going to begin to believe that that the need for security far outweighs the need to protect rights. And when they are terrified, they will not even think sensibly about what actually makes them secure.

      And terror is the deliberate strategy that has been deployed against us. No wonder our thinking gets out of whack! But most ironically, it seems that our craving for security might just be the things that undoes us. At least, that’s what Jeremiah would say and probably Jesus too.

      The Prophet Jeremiah lived in very troubled times – times of great fear and terror. The people most to fear in Jeremiah’s day were the Babylonians – who came, interestingly enough, from the same places that the terrorists of ISIS have their centres of power today. Babylon was an empire that was dead set on conquering the world and could be remarkably cruel while doing so. Of course when the Babylonians set their sights on conquering Jerusalem, people were terrified.

      I think that Jeremiah understood their fear but what he had a problem with was what they did in response. He told them to stay where they were and ride it out, promising that it would be rough and scary in the short term but that God would see them through and re-establish the nation. But they said, “No, we will go to the land of Egypt, where we shall not see war, or hear the sound of the trumpet, or be hungry for bread, and there we will stay.”

      There is a neurological reason why we do this by the way. There is one particular part of your brain, called the amygdala, that is in charge of powerful reactions like fear and anger. When you are truly terrified of something, this powerful part of your brain takes charge of everything. You were created this way so that you would be able to react quickly and save yourself from a truly dangerous situation.

      But one thing that means is that when you are afraid, your brain does not prioritize the work of another part of your brain – the prefrontal cortex – that specializes in analysis and logical thinking. Your sophisticated, logical thinking machine is literally starved of the energy it needs to operate when you are afraid. Now that may be a very helpful thing when you are faced with an immediate danger – when you are being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger and all you can do is either fight back or run away – but it does mean that people will react in quite irrational ways when they are afraid of something that is not quite so immediate or when they are afraid of a more abstract idea like terrorism or foreigners that they have never met.

      That does explain why the Israelites might run to Egypt because they were afraid of Babylon even though it was actually a much more dangerous thing to do than remain where they were and deal with the Babylonians. They were not thinking straight because they were so afraid.

      But think of how it might also explain the actions of Canadians and Americans in the present international environment. We have been made to feel afraid. Some of that terror has been created very intentionally by those who are called terrorists because terror is really the only tool they have. They intentionally cause events to take place that will make us feel the most afraid – making the places that once felt safe feel unsafe.

      But it is not only the terrorists who make us afraid. Sometimes our own leaders will go out of the way to stoke our fears or to direct our fear against particular groups who are different. They will usually do this as a way of gaining more power or something else for themselves because, believe me, they know very well what both Jesus and Jeremiah knew, that people don’t necessarily think through what they are giving away (and especially what rights and freedoms they are giving away) when they are afraid.

      So, in short, fear and terror have this way of throwing off that delicate balance between protecting our homes and our rights. They make us much more inclined to sacrifice our rights and freedoms because all we can think of is our need for security.

      And the worst part of that is what Jesus points out: “Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” When you give up everything for security, you not only lose your rights and freedoms, it doesn’t even actually make you safer. It can even make you less safe. This is because a society where there are no freedoms and no rights is a society in which more and more people will give up on hope for the future. This easily becomes a society where lots of hopeless people start to resort to things like crime or violence. A world where people have given up their rights is a world that easily becomes more dangerous for everybody.

      “O Canada… your valour steeped in faith Will protect our homes and our rights.” I am personally glad that those original words have remained unchanged for 137 years. I would be very concerned indeed if, at some point, we began only to celebrate how Canada protects our homes. I believe that with prayer for our country and with an understanding that we cannot allow fear to distort the way that we deal with our own rights and freedoms and the rights and freedoms of the most vulnerable among us, Canada can and will continue to protect both our homes and our rights for many years to come.

     

Thursday morning we were looking rather nervously at a rather menacing sky but by the time the afternoon came around skies cleared and we had so much fun at the splash pad and playing in Forbes Park.

Flat Jesus is a baseball fan. Apparently he was upset when the Jays lost to the Detroit Tigers!