Sweaters for Syria

Canadian Lutheran World Relief (CLWR) began a drive to collect 10,000 sweaters for refugees from the Syrian civil war a short time back. Congregations were asked to collect sweaters and have them shipped to CLWR's headquarters in Winnipeg, Manitoba by October 31. The Canadian chain, Home Hardware, and a number of other business would be instrumental in shipping these sweaters to Winnipeg. The Anglican Bishop of the Diocese of Huron (centred in London, ON) asked his parishes to join in this drive.

Fr. Robert Clifford of Trinity Anglican Church in Aylmer and I decided we'd get going on this. Two weeks ago, we announced this drive to our congregations. This morning (Monday, October 28) we gathered all the sweaters together, boxed them up, and took them to Home Hardware in Aylmer.

The totals? Between our two churches and a number of contributions from the community after a photo appeared in the Aylmer Express... 441 sweaters, 44 coats/jackets, 3 blankets, 32 hats and toques, 4 scarves, and 25 pairs of gloves. This works out to about a sweater each for every member of St. John's.

I am astounded and grateful for this outpouring of generosity. Thank you to all who contributed and to all who assisted in the boxing and shipping! Thanks as well to Home Hardware for their assistance in Aylmer and nationwide.

This is just a PORTION of what was collected.

Everything had to be un-bagged, refolded, counted, and re-boxed for shipment.

We had wonderful helpers!

Fr. Robert boxes up the first of his boxes,

More...

Each box had to be inventoried with what and how many it contained, listed as
whatever number box of the total, and labelled for shipment to Winnipeg,

Although we asked for sweaters/sweatshirts only, blankets, jackets, scarves,
toques and a few caps, and gloves also appeared. Most were sent to CLWR,
although some lighter items (Spring and Summer clothes) went to a clothing ministry
for men in London and to the Bibles For Missions store, where the proceeds will
be used in education ministries among the First Nations.

The caravan begins.

Three vans and 12 boxes total... all for God's glory and the comfort of suffering people.

Reformation Sunday --- 27 October 2013

Romans 3:19-28

John 8:31-36

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift,

• Reformation Day can become the sort of festival where we congratulate ourselves for where the Church is. I can become a day to bask in the glow of the Gospel of freedom and the teachings of the reformers. For some, it is a day to strain our arms in patting ourselves on the back for what the Great Reformation achieved... as if we had anything to do with it.
• The youth bulletin for today contains a comic strip in which two characters are taking about the Reformation. The first asks what Luther was trying to reform to which the second replies that he was trying to reform the Church since it had lost sight of the Gospel. The first remarks that this is still true today. The second character says that the Church is always in need of reform. The other whispers “Do the Lutherans know that?”
• “Do the Lutherans know that?” That is a fair question. Do we hold that the Reformation is over? Do we believe that our Reformation is still going on?
• There were those in Luther's day who felt that he didn't go far enough. After all, he did retain a lot of the things of the Church at the time – the form of the service of Holy Communion, for example. Some of the other reformers and a number of Luther's own students counselled that all those things should be done away with. Comparatively Luther was no radical, despite what the powers of the Church might have said at the time.
• The Reformation that we are heirs to was not simply a reshuffling of the chairs in the sanctuary or a change in the dress of the minister or the addition of congregational singing to the worship service. If that's all it was, then the answer is clear: The Reformation has failed.
• The Reformation is far more than what the pastor wears, what language we use, or what the inside or the outside of the church building looks like. These are not central to the Reformation. They are what Reformation theologians and historians call “Adiaphora”... things that make no difference, things that are "...neither commanded nor forbidden in the Word of God."
• If these outward things, the things that most people see and experience are not the essence of the Reformation, what is?
• Our cartoon character hit the nail on the head: “The Church... had lost sight of the Gospel.” This is a danger we face constantly. This is also why we as a church world-wide, a church nation-wide, and a church as wide as these walls is constantly in need of reformation.
• The heart of the Gospel is what can be lost in the midst of all the trappings of what it means to be a Church – the vestments, the music, the committees, the budgets, the candles, the electric lights. As important as all these things might be, they pale next to the mission of the church, which is to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and tell that all have sinned and now all are justified by grace “as a gift... effective through faith” as Paul puts it.
• The hard edge of the Gospel is that all of us -all of us without exception- are sinners. We cannot save ourselves and no amount of good works, prayers, penances, indulgences, pilgrimages, pot-lucks, or fund drives will save us. None of us can reach God ourselves. Paul says “'no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” There is even a part of our theology that states all the attempts we might take to justify and save ourselves are sin themselves.
• That is the blade of the Gospel that puts us to death. The Good News of the Gospel is the word that raises us to new life. “...irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” This is the word that opens our tombs and brings us to the light and life of Jesus Christ. This is the Good News that encourages us and frees us to live our lives, not solely for ourselves but to live as Jesus Christ did – for the good of others and the good of the world.
• It is a strange contrast. We are sinners, unable to save ourselves and we are sinners for whom Christ died and rose. Sinners for whom he died out of love for us. It is vitally important that we remember that, for it is possible that our knowledge of our own sin and failure can overwhelm us, but it cannot overwhelm the love of God. And so we are free. ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’
• This is the heart of the Good News of Jesus Christ. So much of everything else is adiaphora, things neither commanded nor forbidden. It will take work and it will take reminding, but that is why we are the church – so we can support each other, remind each other, and show Jesus Christ to one another and to the world, the world God so loved “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

22nd Sunday after Pentecost ---- 20 October 2013

Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

• Jacob is a man in trouble. Just why he is in so much trouble needs a bit of explanation.
• Jacob has tricked his way through life. He cheated his brother, Esau, out of his heritage for a bowl of stew. He took their father Issac's blessing by deceit. He was cheated by his father-in-law over the woman he wanted to marry. He has a lot of stuff – possessions – but no friends. Now, Jacob receives word that Esau is coming after him with 400 men, so Jacob is awfully afraid. Still he remains the trickster; He sends a huge bribe of livestock and tells his servants to drive the animals toward Esau, but to keep the various animals in separate groups so that Esau has to encounter wave after wave of gifts of livestock. Then he sends his family across the stream, while he waited alone. He is trying to save his family from destruction and massacre, although he is willing to die himself.
• Then comes the mysterious part of the story. While he waits through the night, “a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” They wrestle and Jacob will not give in, even though “the man” cheats by punching him in the hip! Before he lets “the man” go, he desires a blessing. Surprisingly, the blessing comes in the shape of a new name for Jacob and the mysterious response to the question, “Please tell me your name.”
• The “man” also comes out of nowhere, for no conceivable reason. This whole wrestling incident seems to have nothing to do with the predicament that Jacob is in, but it has everything to do with it.
• At the bank of the stream, Jacob is reduced to nothing. His riches are gone. His wives and children are sent away. His bag of tricks is empty. He is face to face with himself, just as he is. And in that, he is face to face with God. So they wrestle. Jacob might have tried to trick God by surrendering but not really meaning it. But in that he'd only be attempting to trick himself. Jacob might have chosen the other path and abandoned everything, walking away from his past and his God. He did neither; He stayed and struggled.
• In that struggle, he was crippled and blessed. He received a new name that described the new person he had become. His wound would be a constant reminder of the presence of God in his life. Jacob could no longer trick the universe. He could no longer be Jacob the trickster, Jacob the “grabber”. (That's approximately what his name means.) Now he would be “Israel”, the one who struggles with God. He would limp for the rest of his life and he would know the reality of God for the rest of his life.
• If we have had to contend with God in our lives, we might have received the same blessing as Jacob/Israel.
• In the face of troubles and terrors, or in the light of success and congratulations (which can sometimes be more dangerous), we might be reduced to exactly who we are and nothing more. Then we are face to face with God. We can try to falsely surrender or we could walk away... or we could wrestle. In the wrestling, we find our real opponent is God, who is not so much wrestling as trying to keep us from hurting ourselves.
• It may seem strange to equate this sort of struggling and wrestling with fidelity, yet it takes a great faith to not give up the struggle.
• Jacob did not give up without a blessing. Only when he had received a blessing and a new identity, did he surrender the struggle.
• The persistent widow from the Gospel of Luke shows the same sort of fidelity. She would not give up until she had received justice from the judge of her case. She could have submitted to his lack of judgement or she might have given up the struggle. In the end, she prevailed against the unjust judge by pestering him to the point where he feared he would be shamed in public. Our reading has him saying I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming. That's a wonderful line. It's great because it has been tremendously sanitized by the translators. The original Greek says something like this: “I will grant her justice, so that she won't give me a black eye!”
• This widow would not give up until she received her due. Jacob would not give up the struggle until he became Israel.
• Since the parable in the Gospel story is paired with the story of Jacob, they both say something about the Kingdom of God. The message could be just this simple: Have faith. Persevere. Keep praying and don't give up. A blessing is coming and it might be better than you could expect. God will not give up the struggle with you.
• When you feel despair and abandonment, keep on struggling and praying. If it is God you content with, God remains close, even if we kick and squirm like an infant in the arms of the child's mother.
• Finally, if the judge who respected neither man nor God would give justice to the persistent (read that as pestering) woman, what could we expect from our loving God? Hear the words of the Gospel: And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.
   

21st Sunday after Pentecost --- October 13, 2013

As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, they called out, saying, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"

• In the time of Jesus, no one was more an outsider, more rejected, more unwanted than lepers. They were not permitted to work, to live with their families, or to associate with anyone other than other lepers. Once the disease was discovered, they were immediately removed from all society. The fear of contamination and of becoming “unclean” was so strong that the leper had to live where no one else would live, such as in a cemetery. Their families could leave food for them but they were not allowed to see or speak to them.
• This leprosy could be the disease as we understand it today or it could be some other sort of skin disease; the Old Testament says a house could have leprosy. This could be the case for Naaman, the Aramean general mentioned in our first reading. He may have had some other sort of skin disease,which would permit him to rise to such a powerful office outside of Israel. Yet, in spite of this power and authority, Naaman remains an outsider and a lesser person who could never do what he might want to, because of his condition.
• The ten lepers in our Gospel reading are even further removed from society. They have to “keep their distance” and ask Jesus to cleanse them from far away. Jesus tells them to fulfil what the Law requires, namely to show themselves to the priests of the Temple and undergo the ritual cleansing that the Law required for them to reenter society.
• All ten were made clean, but only one – a Samaritan – returned to give praise to God and to thank Jesus. Jesus asks where the other nine are. He acknowledges that the grateful man is made well and sends him on his way.
• We don't know what happened to the other nine, except that they were made clean. Did they see the priests? Did they go home? Did they return later to find Jesus gone? Did they relapse? We don't know and we'll never know. Their fate is not what is the issue here.
• Jesus once again sets himself on the side of those who are rejected and set outside the borders of what is acceptable and righteous. He reaches out in compassion to those who are unacceptable in his society, even to those who are doubly unacceptable, such as the Samaritan leper living in Judea.
• Let's think for a moment. Who are the lepers of our own time? I think that very few of us here have met what would be considered true lepers, the sufferers of Hanson's disease. Yet we have all met those who are figuratively lepers – the poor, the lost, the less-than-clean, the foreigner, even those who don't fit in anywhere even in their own society. The list could go on and on.
• From this miracle story, we can understand something about the relationship of Jesus to those who exist on the margins and borders of our community, those who are not acceptable and so are invisible or disliked or avoided. These are the people who look or act or sound or smell strange and have no seat at the table. It appears that it is Jesus who would sit with them. It is just these people who most crave the Kingdom of God and it is to just these people that Jesus came bringing the Kingdom.
• There is another point of view to be added here. Just as Jesus preached the Kingdom of God and healed those around him to let them glimpse that Kingdom, so we too are in need of that Gospel message and that Gospel healing.
• Are there not parts of each of us – our lives, our memories, our ways of thinking or acting – that we would just as soon leave behind? Each of us have our faults and failings, so aren't there “lepers” in each of us? Aren't there out-casts within every one of us? Don't we have parts of ourselves that we rather leave invisible and disliked and avoided? I could list them but that's useless; we know ourselves well enough to acknowledge down deep what we'd rather not acknowledge. Like a piece of paper or on a larger scale, our society, each of us has margins into which we've pushed the unacceptable, the unwanted, those parts of us least often seen and most in need of healing.
• We can see from today's Gospel that Jesus is not afraid of the margins or those who live there. In the same way, he is not afraid of our margins or borderlands, those wild and wooly places where the most troubling and troublesome parts of us are made to live. He does not mind meeting us right there where we most need him and probably might be most troubled about seeing him.
• It just might be that meeting him right where we hide most and hurt most that we will find a new reservoir of love and gratitude and faith.
• The Samaritan leper returned to praise God, to express his gratitude to Jesus, and to experience once again the wholeness that Jesus had brought to him. In a way, this was his Thanksgiving Day. So it will be for us when we recognize that Jesus has come to our hurting places, our leprosy, bringing healing and support. Then all that is left for us to do is say “thank you.”

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.

The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost -- 6 October 2013

The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, "Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

• There's a problem with today's reading: it is taken out of context. It is comparable to walking by someone's house and hearing horrible yelling and shrieking from inside. We might knock on the door and ask what is wrong. We might call the police and let them handle it. Or we might keep on walking and try to forget what we'd heard, hoping not to read anything about about it in the next issue of the Express. The trouble is we don't know what went before. Was it an argument? A fight with an intruder? A mental health problem? Or was it a private rehearsal for the latest play?
• The Lectionary -the book of assigned readings- takes Luke's Gospel and offers these two statements by Jesus, about the “size” of faith and about being “worthless slaves” without any hint of what went before. In the previous verses, Jesus counsels the disciples to forgive when they are asked, even if the asking comes multiple times. Did the disciples mutter among themselves and say something like “Easy for you to say! You've got faith to give away! We need more than we've got now.”
• Jesus' response to his disciples (who are oddly referred to as “the apostles”) is what we are given today.
• Even without wondering about the editing of the passages, we are left with two sayings.
• In the first, Jesus says faith “... the size of a mustard seed” could make amazing things happen. Why someone would want to transplant a mulberry tree in the sea is not the question. That could be exaggeration, like “I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.” It's done to make a point about the nature of faith and trust rather than to reflect a reality of the Kingdom of God. Would any of us hold that the Kingdom of God is upheld by mulberry trees in the Mediterranean?
• The second saying seems to have to do with how a person might treat their slaves – something none of us here have any experience of. Since this was spoken to the disciples, it applies to them in some way. Was Jesus warning them about expecting praise and adulation from the world or other disciples for doing what was expected of them? Or was he cautioning them not to think more of themselves for being disciples and doing what disciples do? It would be hard for us to say and it is still for us to hear.
• Still, there is a common human tendency to focus on ourselves. We all like to be the hero and have parades in our honour. We crave approval to some extent or other. Even in our spiritual life, we want to be recognized and seen as “spiritual” and godly. To be told that in our discipleship, we might not expect to be praised for our discipleship and every little prayer, work, or expression of faith, could be quite a come-down.
• Think of it this way; most of our lives are quite ordinary. It is just in this “ordinary discipleship” that we find our lives with Jesus. It is this “ordinary discipleship” that is expected of us. Such “ordinary discipleship” may mean surrender to the often-unknown will of God and the search for the presence of God in the everyday.
• In asking “Increase our faith”, some might desire a faith that brings a certain kind of certainty, perhaps even superiority. For them, whether they know it or not, faith becomes an accomplish-ment, a “work” to use the well-known Lutheran term. Others might seek a faith that involves mystical experiences, a faith that works like a drug and helps them get through life's ordinary challenges. Still others may aspire to faith that serves as an antidote to struggle. Looking at it in this way as some preachers might tell us, enough faith can conquer doubt, illness, even economic hardship.
• So then, mustard seed faith and what we might call “modest discipleship” may be just what we need. By God's grace, discipleship requires neither unshakable confidence or spectacular accomplishments. Luke's Jesus does indeed make extraordinary demands of his disciples, demands that seem unfair and far beyond our abilities.
• Yet sometimes discipleship requires ordinary and daily practices of fidelity and service. No fire-works, no parades, no circus, just solid discipline and consistency for the long run. Sometimes discipleship will seem boring, but this is how we live our lives each day. And we will find God with us in doing what we do. Faith is made for us and for our everyday lives. Come what may, it will just be enough to be a servant of the Most High God and to have the amount of faith needed to see us to the next morning, whether or not we see miracles, whether or not we have no doubts, and whether or not trees are transplanted into the sea.
  
  
  (At this point my prepared sermon ended and I went on to tell a story.)
  
  
  Yesterday, I had the privledge of taking part in the reenactment of the battle of the Thames out in Thamesville. It was the 200th anniversary of the battle. It was also the place where Tecumseh died and his dream of a First Nations nation, independant of Britain or the US, on North American soil, died as well. The event was remarkable in two ways. First, there was cavalry. Second was a odd moment. At the end of the battle reenactment, all the reenactors stand at "mourn arms" with muskets reversed and hands folded on the musket butt while the fife and drum corps played a lament for the fallen and then a First Nations drum group and singers sang a Native lament. While this was taking place, wave after wave of geese flew over us on their way south, drowning out the music, drumming, and singing with their honking.
  After this was all over and we returned to camp, a good friend of mine said to me "It was the spirits of those who died, saluting us for remembering them." I later said it was a graced moment. Was it a miracle? Was it a coincidence? Who can say? The difference between a miracle and a coincidence often depends on where you are standing at the moment. Grace and God's life can be found in the everyday things of life, as we do what we are called to do, without fanfare or great thanks. Grace in the ordinary is quite a worthwhile thing.