Sunday of Christ the King --- 24 November, 2013

Well, there's 2 feet/60cm of snow in our driveway (or there was - thanks to our wonderful neighbours) and we got stuck on our street coming out of our driveway (and got back in thanks to our neighours), so I didn't get to church to lead the service for Christ the King Sunday. I thank the members of my congregational council who said "Stay home and don't worry about it! This is Canada! It happens!" I thank God for them as well.
For all reading this, take this as your cyber-worship-service. Make a cup of your favourite hot beverage, read the sermon at leisure, and laugh at the snow. God be with you if you have to go out in this today.

Opening prayer for the day:

O God, our true life, to serve you is freedom, and to know you is unending joy. We worship you, we glorify you, we give thank to your for your great glory. Abide with us, reign in us, and make this world into a fit habitation for your divine majesty, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The readings:

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Colossians 1:11-20

Luke 23:33-43

This WAS to be my sermon:

When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left.

• This is no place for a king. Yet we are told that this is where Jesus is at his most royal. There is obviously a different sort of kingship here.
• We expect kings to be apart from the people, above the common. Yet here we see Jesus in the place where criminals were executed. Many Christian thinkers hold that this is where Jesus is most the king and is most powerful in his weakness. A number of theologians teach that Jesus reigns from the cross.
• This is not at all what we'd expect. In many ways, Jesus did what was expected of him as a member of the chosen people. He worshipped in the synagogue and the Temple, he knew the Scriptures and interpreted them, he prayed and listened to God, often going off by himself to pray all night.
• On the other hand, it seems that Jesus rarely did what was expected of him as a teacher and as Messiah. Teachers were expected to debate other teachers and teach their disciples and followers according to the conventional wisdom of the times, and that was something Jesus did not do. He taught in a fresh way that the people had never heard even though he stood firmly in the prophetic tradition of Israel. The Messiah was expected to be a figure of earthly political and military power and Jesus was not that.
• As to being the Son of God, that was not expected at all!
• Jesus taught and turned ideas of salvation, grace, righteousness, and God's love inside-out and upside-down. Just so, he turns the ideas of kingship inside-out and upside-down.
• He acts as no king would be expected to act. He is not jealous for his status or desirous of acclamation.
• He conquers, leads, and rules by the force of love rather than the force of arms.
• He desires to serve rather than to be served.
• He will endure hatred and even execution without seeking pay-back.
• He will find his followers from among those who might not be expected to follow and from among those who were rejected by those who considered themselves righteous. He looked to those who most needed his message
• He will fulfil the Law by holding to the spirit of the Law rather than the letter. He taught as one who knows the real value of the Law and how best to keep it.
• He will be one of his people.
• He will suffer what his people suffer.
• He will reign from the place where he appears weakest and his greatest action on behalf of his people would be considered absolute failure by many.
• This is not the style of king our world is used to. In fact, it is quite the opposite of the expected.
• Since Jesus is not the king or saviour or Messiah that was expected, his kingdom, his message and means of salvation, and his anointing as Messiah would not be as expected.
• In Luke's Gospel today, we see Jesus at what many might consider his least kingly. Part of us might think that way as well. We might want to see him handle things differently and have him act as we might want a king to act.
• So let's be truthful with ourselves. There are places and times in every life where we have expectations, some of which are unspoken. Those are the places and times that resist grace and the reality of who Jesus is. Those are the places where we have not learned to surrender to grace yet. And here the important word is “yet.”
• We are part of God's kingdom and we have been baptized, acknowledging Jesus as our king. Daily we renew our acknowledgement and faith. In this kingdom, we do not rest as subjects but we follow our king in his way – the way of humble service and love for one another and the world.
• If we want a model of how our discipleship might be, we need go no further than the end of our Gospel reading today. There Luke records Jesus' last conversation with another person as he dies on the cross. His words are those of forgiveness and hope in the most unforgiving and hopeless place anyone could imagine. He responds to the expressed faith of the crucified criminal with a statement that turns all things, even death, upside-down.
• Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."
• Christ is our King and he calls us to follow where he leads, walking in his path. If we think this is too hard for us, we can remember a line from a movie filmed not too long ago: In a world where carpenters rise from the dead, all things are possible.

I ask you to please remember to pray for the father of a good friend of mine who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and for his whole family.

"Are we having fun yet?"
Ice and snow, praise the Lord!

26th Sunday after Pentecost ---- 17 November 2013

Malachi 4:1-2a

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Luke 21:5-19

By your endurance you will gain your souls.

• This passage used to scare the life out of me. I'd hear this in church on Sunday and wonder what it meant and how I fit in. As you can imagine, I was a rather impressionable kid and readings like this would stick with me for a long time. Talk of wars, earthquakes, famine, plagues, and signs in the sky could be very upsetting to me. Add to that a melancholy personality and a dash of Irish guilt and shame and you have quite a stew into which to stir Jesus' words on the end of the world.
• Today these words don't scare me quite so much. Maybe I've grown up some; I hope so. Not to say that these are not sharp words and that they are not easy to listen to.
• Jesus responds to his disciples admiration of the Temple in Jerusalem by saying all will be thrown down. Within 50 years of this discussion, the Temple would be destroyed by the Roman legions that had laid siege to the city during what became known as the Jewish-Roman War. Since Luke is writing after this event, the horror of the siege and the sack of Jerusalem is used to illustrate the coming persecution of the Christian Church and the continuing troubles of the world.
• Jesus tells his disciples that many will claim to be his return or to know of it. They are not to bother with such tales. Paul's letter to the Thessalonians reminds them that some among them are afraid that they have missed the Lord's return or are looking forward to it in idleness and mischief. Paul uses a term we know as “busybodies”, a term that means “unruly” or “out of ranks”. It is a term borrowed from the armies of the day, and it refers to a soldier who is out of formation and making a mess of the whole group.
• With this in mind, the words of Jesus have be misinterpreted in such a way that many have quit their jobs, left their families, and run to the hills to await the return of Jesus in the belief that the return was imminent. This happened a few years ago, you'll recall, when a preacher predicted Jesus' return to the point of giving the exact time to the minute. People gave up their fortunes and gave them to the preacher. Radio and TV ads were taken out, trucks were plastered with the message, and when the day came, nothing happened. It seems Jesus words hold quite true in our own day: Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, "I am he!' and, "The time is near!”
• Beyond this, we know the further truth of what Jesus said. We know persecution exists, a number of us through first hand experience. Our faith is presently an object of ridicule in various books and through a number of television personalities. Scandals continue to trouble the Church throughout the world. And the future is unclear – as it always has been.
• These fearful words might upset us. We might wonder how they could not upset us. If we were left to our own devices, we would be constantly upset. Indeed, we would be without hope. We're generally simple people without much earthly power and status... the sort of people who get crushed when the world rolls along.
• Thanks be to God, our hope is not in ourselves! Our hope is in God. As Psalm 121 says “Our help comes from the Lord... who made heaven and earth.” {“Unsere Hilfe stehet im Namen des Herrn, der Himmel und Erde gemacht hat.”}
• And with this, we recall that being a disciple of Christ does not make us immune to suffering and pain. It does not shield us from all that life might bring. What being a disciple does do is change our definition of the value of suffering and of life. Despite death, despite suffering, and despite fear, our help comes from the Lord.
• Faith sees us through whatever may come. We all know that almost anything may happen to us in this life. It is faith that assures us that our God stands with us no matter what may come. So we hold fast to God in faith and we hold fast to each other in love.
• There is a short saying that carries a lot of this meaning. It is distinctly Christian and quite comforting in that, even while admitting insecurity.
• It is a quote from Martin Luther and it is quite relevant to the issue at hand.                              “I know not the way God leads me, but well do I know my Guide.” 
• A more modern variation of this is:                                                                                                 “I don't know what tomorrow holds, but I know who holds tomorrow.”

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

25th Sunday after Pentecost 10 November 2013

Sunday's readings:

Job 19:23-27a

2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17

Luke 20:27-38

Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question...

• As the Church year closes, the readings for worship turn to the end of all things. So we hear of the resurrection of the dead in our readings. The lectionary – the list of assigned readings - is set up that way. We close out the year by thinking about what is to come, until we are face to face once again with the proclamation of the coming of Christ, both in Advent and in the return.
• All of the readings look to this. Job speaks of the Resurrection and seeing God after all his troubles. Paul writes to the Thessalonians about standing fast in their faith and in the teachings Paul left for them. It appears that others had been telling them they were missing or had missed “the Day of the Lord.” Finally in Luke's Gospel, Jesus deals with the trick question of the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.
• The question posed by the Sadducees is a trick and a trap, but as with many questions, it reveals much about the asker. Since the Sadducees do not believe in a resurrection and any immortality for them comes from having children, they ask their question in a way that makes light of any believe in an afterlife. They assume that Jesus does believe in a resurrection and that his belief is such that the life to come is like the life led now.
• The Sadducees made the mistake of believing that Jesus believed that any resurrected life would be exactly like this life. Relationships would remain as they were; the rich would be rich and the poor remain poor. Marriages would endure. That then was the point where they hoped to catch Jesus. “In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her."
• Jesus quickly unmasks their trick and turns it around on them, using their own view of scripture to do so. “Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive."
• The Sadducees held that only the Torah, the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible were inspired. The rest – the Prophets, the Wisdom literature – were not inspired scripture and since they found no teaching of a resurrection in the Torah, they discounted it.
• Jesus sees through their scheme and says that things are and will be changed. What follows will not simply a continuation of what has preceded it. The resurrection will not be like the life before the resurrection of the dead.
• Now we don't exactly know what that entails either. We only have hints of what the resurrected life will be like. However, there are a few things we believe we know.
• We do not die and become angels. Jesus said they are like angels and the emphasis in on the “like.” There are folks even today that say we will be angels in heaven.
• We are born human beings and what God has created us to be, we will be. What that will be like is beyond us now.
• Jesus' own life on earth after the resurrection hold the hints. All we can safely say is that he was Jesus after the resurrection and he was different even as he remained who he was... and is.
• Beyond that (and even in that), we'd to well to avoid speculation beyond that. It's worthless at best and possibly spiritually dangerous. What is to come is absolutely unexpected. We'd also do well to take Paul's advise in his first Corinthian letter: But, as it is written,‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’  (I Cor. 2:9)
• So what is left? We believe in a resurrection of the dead. So what is there for us now?
• Even now, our lives are changed by the Gospel. We are not what we were and all of this is unexpected. We are heralds of the Kingdom that is coming and is already here. In the here and now, we proclaim the Kingdom of God in what we say and do, whether the Kingdom comes in fifteen minutes or in a thousand years.
• Here are the words of a modern theologian in our tradition which I feel ties this up well: “There are people who regard it as frivolous, and some Christians think it impious for anyone to hope and prepare for a better earthly future. They think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder, and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations. It may well be that the day of judgement will dawn tomorrow; and in that case, though not before, we shall gladly stop working for a better future.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

The Fall Bazaar - worth a look!

St. John's held it's Fall Bazaar this past Saturday, November 2. Items of all sorts were up for sale as well as jams, jellies, cookies, pastries, meat pies (which didn't last long), and cabbage rolls (which disappeared as quickly.) I've discovered that there are differences between the Lithuanian German style cabbage-rolls and the Transylvanian Saxon-style cabbage rolls, but I'd be hard pressed to point out the differences right now. Let's just say both are great!

A few photos were taken by our church's secretary, Johanna and I'll share them now.

The Jewelry table and the guardians there-of.

The cabbage roll assembly line - 84 dozen!

Our roster of great helpers! Thank you all!

All Saints Sunday --- 3 November 2013

(This sermon is rather short this week. On All Saints Sunday, St.John's remembers those who have passed away since last All Saints Sunday with the lighting of candles, the naming of the names, and the tolling of the bell - which broke during the tolling! We also had a Baptism this Sunday - an appropriate contrast of the passing into new life through water and the Word and the passing from this life to the next in the life of Jesus in all of us.) 

"But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever--forever and ever." 

We stand here today on the edge of the cliff with life on one side and death on the other. The month of November and the season of Autumn is like that. Since it is All Saints Sunday, we follow our tradition of remembering those who have passed away in the past year. We also celebrate today the Baptism of our new Christian, Grace. There is no secret here and there is a connection.

The connection is as simple as our child's name and as deep as all the mysteries of God. The connection is grace.

Today we celebrate grace for that is what being a saint is all about. Grace is the gift of God's own life, the life that leads to salvation and eternal life for us. It is not something we can earn. Nor is it something we can deserve, for we cannot come close to God by our own power or desire, by our own work or decision. It is gift and only gift.

When we remember those who have passed on – whether in this past year or in any year - with the lighting of candles, the naming of names, and the ringing of the church bell, we are celebrating God's grace in the lives of all these people and we also remember the grace of God shown and given to us where their lives touched ours.

When we look on this newest Christian, we are reminded that grace (as God's gift, and not just her personal name) is present as well. The Baptism of infants reminds us that our salvation is in the hands of God and God alone. Again, we see that salvation is a unmerited gift. We also see that our God's grace is given without regard to age.

Again, All Saints Sunday, as we celebrate it and especially as we celebrate it today -with both remembrance and baptism- lets us remember that saints are not simply those who have been inducted into a sort of “Hall of Fame” for the church, people whose lives are so unlike our own that they would never understand what we go through. The so-called “saints” were -and ARE- people like us, troubled, joyful, followed by success and failure as we are. The common factor again is grace, the life and love of God.

Everyone wants to see a saint, to see a person blessed by God, a person who reflects the light of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. So look in your heart and hold on to the memory of those who have passed over to the Lord. Read and learn about those people in history who reflected God's light and grace to the people of their time. Look on this little one we've baptized here today. Finally, look to your left and to your right and see the graced person, the saint next to you, behind you, in front of you... within you.

Grace is for everybody here, not just people in halos with church buildings named after them. Not just for Grace who rests here in innocence. Grace is for everybody! God be with us all.