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We are having lots of fun today, too!

Somewhere there must be a rule that camp week has to be the hottest week of the summer!

Flat Jesus joined us at a quiet time of Camp in Your Own Backyard!

Making and signing our Camp Contract and playing a bit more.

Camp in Your Own Backyard has started and we are having fun!

grew up in the church and so, from a very early age I was told about God. I heard about what God was like and what he wanted from me. I absorbed stories about God’s priorities and actions and I even learned how to speak to God in prayer. But I do not think that I can say that I actually met God in my early life in the church or in my family.

      No, I would have to say that the church taught me about God, but it was Canada that introduced me to God. At least that is how I think of it. For me, and I’m sure that this is true for many Canadians, I feel that the most authentic experiences of God that I have had have happened when I left behind the cities and found myself in Canada’s vast untamed wilderness – mostly, in my case, up in the Muskokas. Consider this:

      Have you been there, standing in a grove of trees, massive trunks around you on every side making you feel as if your strongest bones are like bendable twigs? Have you stood underneath the great green canopy, a vault more magnificent over your head than what any architect has achieved in any earthly cathedral or temple?

       Have you ever crawled out of your tent just as the sun peeks over the horizon in order to push your canoe out over the stillest and calmest waters in all creation? Have you heard the call of the loon echo across the water as the other birds begin their calls from the surrounding woods? And have you slowly and silently dipped your paddle into the water to make your bow cut through the thin wisps of fog and known them to be far holier than the all the clouds of incense that have ever poured from a golden jewel encrusted censer?

      But, most of all, have you ever gone out on cloudless and moonless night when you are far from any artificial source of light? Have you raised your eyes to the heavens and suddenly found yourself in the midst of a universe so vast that you knew you were nothing. And, at the same time, were the stars and the great river of the Milky Way so bright and so close that it seemed as if you would be able to touch them if only you managed to stretch your fingers a little higher? Have you heard the song of the stars just before dawn singing together – singing, it is to be admitted, at a frequency that cannot be detected by any human ear, and yet, all the same it is the most perfect and holy oratorio that ever could be.

      Have you done these things? I have. And I have seen the night sky light up with dozens of meteors in a few minutes, I have felt the power of an approaching thunderstorm and relished in the calm that has fallen after it has passed over. And I have seen God in seeing and experiencing all of these things.

      I suspect that many of you have had these kinds of experiences, though not in exactly the same ways that I have because such experience is intensely personal. And we are not alone. I believe that the very first place that human beings encountered God and knew themselves to be in the very presence of the divine was when they were confronted with the incredible beauty and majesty of nature.

      The Bible makes this point often. In the Book of Job, the main character is on a continual search for God. He desperately wants God to appear before him so that he can confront God with all of the bad things that God has allowed to happen to him. Job wants to judge God and he gets rather frustrated that God doesn’t show up. Nevertheless, Job admits that, if you look in the right places, God is not so hidden as he has been pretending: “ask the animals, and they will teach you;” he declares, “the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” Clearly the natural world has access to certain truths that escape the rest of us. “Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”

      This is the same truth that Jesus was trying to point out when he famously invited his disciples to “look at the birds of the air” and to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” Now the point in what both Job and Jesus is saying is not that the natural world will teach you theology – it will not explain to you all of the human ideas about who God is supposed to be and how God is supposed to act. What it will teach you is something much more important: that you can trust in God.

      I have done my studies in Bible, in theology and church history. I have learned all of the ways that human beings have developed to talk about God, about the trinity and the nature of salvation. I have engaged in endless discussions of theodicy – the same question the Job asks in his book, the question of how we can justify the things that God allows to happen – and have found answers that at least make some logical sense. These have been good discussions that have helped me to grow. But still I would argue, the greatest and most enduring lesson I ever had about God came from the woods, the lakes, the rivers and the vast open skies of Canada.

      I know that God is present everywhere and that there is truly no place where God is not fully present, but I will still insist that God is closer when I am in such places because this is not about what makes logical sense. This is about encountering God in your heart, not in your understanding.

      If you have ever been out in the woods or on the lakes and rivers or up in the mountains of Canada, I suspect you know exactly what I have been talking about. If you haven’t, then maybe you don’t. But I promise you that there is a truth in what I have been saying.

      The question is, if there is truth in it, what do we do with that truth? How can we apply it to our lives today? The first thing I would say is this: if God is uniquely experienced in the wildlands of Canada, then, for God’s sake, let us not cut ourselves off from such places.

      I know that can be hard for some of us to do. Modern life seems to conspire to cut us off from the natural environment. It is quite possible for huge numbers of people to go through their days without encountering a truly natural setting – to encounter no growing things that have not been made to grow according to some human plan. But I would suggest to you that if you do not have the time or the means to spend some quality time surrounded by nature, you need to find the time and create the means. Your spiritual life – not to mention your general health – will only improve.

      Of course, one of the reasons why many of us have trouble encountering nature is that it is disappearing in too many ways. Yes, there are enormous swaths of it here in Canada – places where you can travel all day without seeing a human-made structure. But our ability to affect and damage even those huge swaths of land has grown until it is out of control. Our energy and mining projects are destroying habitats. Our consumption patterns are affecting the climate and we need to think carefully about what we do in response to that.

      I know that both Job and Jesus said that you could look at nature and see in it the proof that God knows how to take care of all his creatures including us. But we have taken the wrong lesson from that. We have thought that it meant that we could just go and take and take and take from nature as if it were an inexhaustible resource that we could never deplete or destroy. That was never the message and thinking that way has taken us to a dangerous place.

      What Jesus and Job were talking about was living in relationship with the natural world – entering into a conversation with the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. These things can only teach us that our heavenly Father is looking out for us when we don’t see them as something merely to exploit to enrich ourselves. If the natural world doesn’t teach us some humility, doesn’t teach us to say, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” then we have clearly missed the lesson.

      So I do believe that another application of these passages is to rethink our relationship with the natural world – to learn not to see it as something merely to be exploited or as something that will just absorb our waste. This, too, is a way of finding God in the woods, lakes, rivers and mountains.

      The second verse of O Canada is rarely sung, but I’m told that it goes like this, “O Canada! Where pines and maples grow. Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow. How dear to us thy broad domain, From East to Western sea. Thou land of hope for all who toil! Thou True North, strong and free!” And it is certainly true that this natural beauty is something we find very dear indeed. But it is more than that too. It is a place where God has made Godself known to us – where God draws near for those who have eyes to see him. For this we give thanks, but for this we also pray, “God keep our land glorious, free and alive with such beauty.”

     

This summer our Sunday School project is to take Flat Jesus with us and see how far he gets.  If you don't have your Flat Jesus drop in to church and pick one up!  This isn't just for Sunday School students, it's for everyone!  When you snap that picture, please send it to me so I can post it.  

Thanks, Joni  ([email protected])

Hespeler, 9 July, 2017 © Scott McAndless

Exodus 12:33, Psalm 136:1-3, 10-21, Deuteronomy 26:1-11

n the passage we read this morning from the Book of Deuteronomy, we are given an account of an ancient Israelite harvest festival. When the people harvested their crops, they were to take the first portion of that produce and present it as a gift to the Lord. This was a common practice in the ancient world and local temples of many different go ds in many different places depended on it for major support.

      Something that is unique about this harvest festival as described in Deuteronomy, though, is the speech that every Israelite male was to repeat as he gave his gift, a speech that began, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” From there the worshipper went on to tell the whole story of the people of Israel through their slavery in Egypt and how, through Moses, God saved them from slavery and brought them out through the wilderness and into the land that he had promised to that wandering Aramean ancestor. It is quite a story to have every single male citizen tell once a year; you have to wonder what all of that is about.

      I have a bit of an idea. You know that story of the origins of the people of Israel? It is a great story, but here’s the thing: it probably didn’t happen exactly like that. I mean, it never does – there is always a difference between the story that a people tells about where they came from and how it actually went down.

      Even the Bible occasionally admits as much. This morning we read an account of the moment when the children of Israel left the land of Egypt. You all know what that moment is supposed to look like. It is a big dramatic scene in the movie, The Ten Commandments. All of the Jews are gathered around – one people united together around their common ethnic and cultural identity, ready to set out to search for freedom together.

      Except, the Book of Exodus lets it slip that it wasn’t exactly like that. lets it slip that it wasn' onelike. It is a big dramatic like. It is a big dramatic It says that, when the Israelites were ready to leave Egypt, “a mixed crowd also went up with them.” What? I don’t remember seeing that in the Ten Commandments! But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Ancient Egypt, the most powerful empire in the world at that time, was a slave economy and it drew its slave population from all the regions around it. Of course all these slaves resented their captivity. Of course they longed to be free! Any opening, any loosening of Egypt’s brutal regime would have been seen as a reason to hope for escape. Of course as many slaves as could have managed to would have joined any such exodus.

      But what does that do to the story? It certainly muddies the story of the origin of the people of Israel that we have been told. It suggests that maybe they weren’t all descended from one common ancestor. I mean, sure there could have been a core group that traced their origins back to a certain tribe, but the Bible suggests here that others may have attached themselves to this group and come to join them in the worship of their God and in other customs. That is, after all, realistically what happens in the origins of most national identities.

      There is a word that appears in the ancient documents and inscriptions of that part of the world at about that period of time – in the writings of people such as the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Sumerians and others. They speak of a group of people that they call the “Apiru.” They do not speak highly of them. The context seems to indicate that this word meant slave, nomad or bandit somewhat interchangeably. Apparently this word, Apiru, was loosely applied, to roving bands of troublemakers. It doesn’t seem to indicate any specific ethnic group so much as a social designation of generally undesirable people.

      Well, the theory is that this ancient word, apiru, is actually the origin of the word Hebrew. You see, that is how outsiders would have seen the people who came to be known as the Hebrews (or the Israelites) when they first appeared on the historical stage – as a loose collection of slaves, nomads and general troublemakers. In some ways, that was who they were, but over time they did manage to forge a common identity, particularly as they went through some powerful experiences of God together.

      And one of the keys to their development of that common identity was the telling of the stories of those experiences of God. Without the stories, the experiences didn’t make sense. So that explains why it was considered so important that every Israelite tell the story regularly. That was why every individual, whether directly descended from Abraham or not, needed to stand before the priest and say, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…”

      That is how a national identity always works. The actual history of how a people come to be living together in a land is always messy. People usually enter into the land as individuals. Some might be raiders, exiles, slaves or refugees. Others arrive as rulers, investors or entrepreneurs. But once they are there, the only way that they can find an identity beyond their particular tribe or group is by telling common stories that they all share. That is the process that we see at work in the passage in Deuteronomy and, frankly, in many of the national stories told throughout the Old Testament. It’s not that the stories aren’t true, it is that they are more than just true – that people found meaning in them beyond the literal meaning of the story.

      This question of identity is also important to Canadians as we continue to celebrate 150 years and more of history. People sometimes complain that there is just no clear Canadian sense of national identity. Sometimes we simply define ourselves by what we are not: specifically that we are not Americans. We play up minor little quirks like the way we pronounce the last letter of the alphabet (and, yes, of course it has to be “zed”), or a rather unique way of saying “out and about” that we have that everybody but us can hear. And of course we will go on about peculiar passions like Tim Horton’s coffee, hockey and beer that actually tastes like something. But we don’t seem to feel as if all of that, put together, really amounts to what you would call a solid national identity.

      Our Old Testament story teaches us that national identities don’t just happen. They are formed, sometimes intentionally, through shared stories.o what you woudsomething. onounce the last letterere is just no clear Canadas of that nation and adopting them a If Canada is lacking when it comes to a strong sense of national identity, is that because it is lacking when it comes to things to be proud of? Of course not! There are so many achievements that we can celebrate in the areas of science, art, sport, policies and so much more.

      What we may lack, however, is that sense of a shared narrative. Canadians have come from many backgrounds and individual stories. The First Nations were here like just about forever and everyone else entered as an immigrant, refugee, exile or transient. We talk about all of that forming a great cultural mosaic and there is certainly a great richness and beauty in that diversity. But if we can’t find a way to tell a story of this nation that everyone can feel a part of, it will not be enough.

      That is, I think the real genius of the story that is prescribed in Deuteronomy. It is the kind of story that anyone should be able to find themselves in. I mean, not everyone may have a literal wandering Aramean – the actual Abraham – as their ancestor, but they probably have a wandering Scotsman expelled from his farmland to make way for sheep, or a starving Irishman desperately looking for something to fill his stomach with after the potato crop has failed.

      Not everyone might have had the Egyptians treat them harshly and afflict them, by imposing hard labour on them, but there are many who suffered under various forms of modern day slavery, who fled repressive regimes and unlivable conditions to find freedom.

      Not everyone might have experienced God delivering them “with terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders,” though I know that some have. But every single one of us has experienced the joy of coming to live in “this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” and a land overflowing with the beauty and bounty that God has placed in it for our wise use.

      I guess that what I am saying is that there is a story of what it means to be Canadian and to love this country and to know it to be your home, but it is not necessarily the story that they keep telling us. This year, in honour of Canada’s 150^th birthday, the CBC created an extended documentary called, “The Story of Us,” that attempted to do what I have been talking about and offer Canadians a common story that we could all share.

      As you have probably heard, the series was sharply criticised from many quarters. People complained that it contained many historical inaccuracies, that various groups were given stereotypical representations, that entire communities were written out of the story altogether. Some of these flaws, I think, were unavoidable. You can’t tell a good national story without being inaccurate sometimes, and you cannot include every group in the story. These things alone shouldn’t have derailed the project.

      I suspect that the bigger problem was the assumptions that they made about what a national story was supposed to be – a notion that they may have picked up from our neighbours to the south. Maybe they thought that the story was supposed only to be about the winners, the triumphs and the accomplishments. These things are a great part of it, to be sure, but I don’t necessarily think that they are the heart. So many who have come to love this country, have not come to do so through their triumphs but through their struggles. They found refuge here. They found safety and hope when the world elsewhere had offered them little of either.

      Many First Nations people, for example, have hardly had an experience with the Canadian government that has been joyful and affirming but have developed and displayed a deep love and commitment to this country and have worked at calling us to be our best. That is an essential part of Canada’s story and it stirs my heart more than many a tale of victory on the Plains of Abraham or on the banks of the Red River.

      A colleague of mine, Rev. Tony Boonstra recently posted a rewrite of the passage we read from Deuteronomy this morning. I was amazed to see someone else thinking along the same lines that I was, so I can’t think of a better way to close this morning than by sharing Tony’s take on a what a story of Canada is:

      My great, great, great grandfather was a feudal serf, eking out a living for his family, literally by the sweat of his brow. There were numerous children and the family clan grew in number.

      We suffered severe deprivation under the feudal system and were grievously persecuted during the time of the Reformation. Our family was torn apart; some who remained true to the Roman Catholic faith; some who joined the Protestants under the leadership of Prince William of Orange.

      During the Industrial Revolution, we experienced the bitter pain caused by the tremendous social upheaval. Then in the beginning part of the 20th century, we suffered scarcity of basic essentials during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. This was hardly past when we suffered humiliation and the loss of freedom under the German occupation during World War II.

      Many times in desperation we cried out to God. In time, He chose to lead a few of us in number, to a land flowing with milk and honey, a country we affectionately call Canada. For a generation we remained quiet and to ourselves getting used to what for us were foreign traditions and uncommon values.

      But now we have come to bring our first fruits. We have chosen to share in the responsibility of making this country a welcome haven and home for all its citizens. And so today we bring our gifts, our ideas, our values, our dreams, our story, and we offer them freely in gratitude to Creator God, who so lavishly has entrusted to our care, the whole word.

      We covenant with you to make Canada a country where all people are given the respect they deserve, where people are given the freedom to embrace the values and traditions that are dear to them. We want Canada to be a country where the beauty of all God created is appreciated and where all people are valued for the unique beings they are.

ho here has a Canadian passport? If you travel, you know that it is one of the most valuable things that you can carry with you – more important than money or your phone or your insurance. And do you know why? Because of what you find printed in gold on the cover of that passport. There you will find the coat of arms of the Dominion of Canada. The presence of that coat of arms is an indication that, wherever you may travel, you are under the aid and protection of the Canadian crown.

      A coat of arms is, therefore, a very powerful symbol, or, if you prefer, a set of symbols because every element in the arms carries a great deal of meaning. But there are two particular elements I want to focus on today – specifically the words. First of all, there is a ribbon that runs about the main shield upon which are words that you can just barely make out. The words, in Latin, are “desiderantes meliorem patriam,” which means “desiring a better country.” These words are actually the motto of the Order of Canada – that select group of people who have been honoured by the government for their extraordinary contribution to our country.

      The words should sound familiar to you today, though, because they are taken from one of our scripture readings this morning: “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” Those words were taken from the Letter to the Hebrews as a motto for the Order of Canada. You can see why such a motto is fitting. The people who most often make the biggest contribution to a country like Canada are those who are not merely satisfied with how things are but who dream of making something better. We are all the beneficiaries of their spirit.

Hespeler, 25 June, 2017 © Scott McAndless – Aboriginal Sunday

Joshua 9:1-20, Deuteronomy 28:1-6, 15-19

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nd it came to pass that a settler people came even unto this land and found that it was a rich and good – a land that was flowing with beaver pelts and lumber and many fish. And they knew that God had given this land to be a possession for them and for their children and for their children’s children until they became a people as numerous as the stars in the sky.

      And lo there were nations that were in this land that God had given to the settlers. And these nations, the Iroquois, the Algonquin, the Cree, the Anishinaabe and many others heard of these settlers. But somehow they did not get the memo which said that God had given the land even unto them. And so these nations, each in their own way, sought t

      And yes, there were some of the nations who found that it was impossible to live with these settlers among them and they chose to fight and protect the land of their ancestors. They were quickly and easily defeated.

      And so it came to pass that the settler people began to believe that it would be an easy thing for them to possess this land that had been given to them. Surely the nations of the land would be quickly defeated or die from diseases before very long. Surely their “inferior” culture and “primitive” rituals and beliefs would be swiftly assimilated into the much “superior” culture and religion of the settler people. They took this to be an inescapable truth. Of course, their total dominance and possession of everything was assured.

      But there was a problem for the short term. Sure, the people of these nations were certain to disappear and melt away eventually, but that would take time – maybe a few generations. But for right now, there were still too many of them and they were living on land that the people wanted for various reasons. They were looking for a solution.

               

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      But, despite all of this, it became clear that the people of the nations were not disappearing and would not disappear. All of this made the settler people complain against their leaders. “Why should we continue to abide by the terms of the treaties that we made with them?” they asked.

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ne of the most amazing people I have ever met is the Rev. Margaret Mullin. She is the minister of Place of Hope Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg. She is also a trained and recognized First Nations elder who has been given the name “Thundering Eagle Woman.” She is of mixed heritage – Scotch/Irish and Ojibway – and so she has a unique perspective on what it means to be part of both what I have been calling the settler people and the people of the nations.

      When I met Margaret, she talked to us quite a bit about the meaning of treaties. First Nations people often see the treaties that their ancestors entered into as an essential part of their identity for good and for ill. This is not all that surprising because those treaties have a big impact on their daily lives. They tell them where they can live, what they can do on the land and what limits their livelihood. They greatly influence their choices regarding things like marriage, child rearing and custody. Many First Nations people carry status cards that define their rights and benefits based on the treaty terms negotiated by their ancestors.

      The treaties all also have a great influence on how non-native people see First Nations people. Honestly, they are also the basis of many of the complaints and stereotypes that you hear.

      What we miss, Margaret taught me, is the fact that there are always two sides of a treaty. What we miss is the idea that, if the First Nations are a treaty people, then so are we. For we too live day in and day out under the effects of these treaties. Most Canadians live on land that was acquired through a treaty. That is not precisely true here in Waterloo Region, of course. The land that most of us live on is part of the HaldimandTractt – land that originally belonged to three different nations. But the land was later given to the Six Nations of the Iroquois by the British Crown in appreciation for their extraordinary bravery and loyalty during the American Revolution.

      So this land wasn’t part of a treaty but it was won by the Six Nations at exceptional cost. And, once they had it, their battle was not over for the government absolutely refused to allow them to set up any businesses on their land. The Iroquois wanted to become entrepreneurs like what they had observed in European society but the government absolutely refused to let them operate any business. The government didn’t even want to allow them to sell the land unless it was to another member of the Six Nations who couldn’t use it for business. They had to fight yet again just to be able to sell it to the people who eventually sold it to you and me. So we may not be living on treaty land here but we are living on land that First Nations people fought for and died for again and again and we are a part of that story of the land.

      So it is not just First Nations people, we are all treaty people. It is just that we have often not been aware of it. And there is cost, but also a benefit of being a treaty people. The cost, as the Israelites learned in the time of Joshua, is that you have to keep the terms of the treaty even if the people do not behave as you thought they would. The Israelites understood that the consequences of breaking a treaty were serious. After all their relationship with God was based on a treaty – the covenant, they called it – and it was drilled into them that, as we read this morning, that many curses would follow on the breaking of that treaty. This was true of any treaty and these curses would have been recited when the Israelites made a treaty with anyone including the Gibeonites.

      So God taught them to respect and keep the terms of a treaty. But it was also not just a question of avoiding punishment. There were abundant blessings that were available to all oath keepers. We see that in the first part of the responsive reading we made this morning. Treaties are hard, there will often be times when we do not want to live up to the promises made in them and it may be costly to do so, but God’s promise is that when we do so, the blessings that come to all will far outweigh any costs.

      I would suggest, therefore, that we all start thinking of ourselves as a treaty people. Canada is a nation built through talks and treaties – not so much by wars and battles. And that is a very good thing, not only because of what we have been able to build in this country together, but because there is blessing that God offers to those who keep their oaths and promises at all cost. Those blessings should be Canada’s always. And indeed the blessings that First Nations people have brought to this country are abundant and amazing. They have contributed to our culture, our science, our communal life in more ways than we could possibly list. For this, we ought to be thankful to God.

      Of course there is much work to do. Of course, there are still many ways in which we, as a people, fail to keep to the intentions of the treaties that we entered into. When opportunities to profit arise, we are far too ready to conveniently forget what has been promised. The message of the passage in Joshua, however, is the God is watching, God cares. God often even uses the promises we make that we maybe didn’t completely understand at the time, to bring good thing to us. God works in some amazing ways.