True Patriot Love
Reflections on Christian Citizenship
Canada Day Propers
2 July 2017
Saint Faith’s Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on the 2nd of July.
Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 Eucharist on the 2nd of July.
John 15.12-17
[Jesus
said to his disciples,] “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I
have loved you. No one has greater love
than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command
you. I do not call you servants any
longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have
called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have
heard from my Father. You did not choose
me but I chose you. And I appointed you
to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you
whatever you ask him in my name. I am
giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
When Paula, David
and I crossed the border into Canada thirty years ago, we did not expect to
stay longer than three years. I had
taken the position at Vancouver School of Theology as the first step towards an
academic career in one of the seminaries of The Episcopal Church. But three years became six, two more children
were born and Paula began her own studies towards ordination. Nine years after arriving in Canada we found
ourselves at the Italian Cultural Centre becoming Canadian citizens.
But I have learned
that emigrating from one country to another does not mean that one is always
considered ‘home’. No matter how long
one lives in another country, no matter how strongly one attaches oneself to
that country, no matter how hard one tries to fit in, the immigrant is reminded
that he or she was not born here. Just
this past week as I was returning to Vancouver after attending a meeting with
the Bishop, the Regional Archdeacons and the Regional Deans in Sechelt, one of
my colleagues asked a question that reminded me of my ‘other-ness’. He asked whether I was planning a summer
visit to ‘my own country’. ‘I am already
in “my own country”’, I answered, ‘and I plan no visits to the United States in
the near future.’
No matter how long
we have lived in Canada, no matter how strongly we attach ourselves to this
beautiful and complex country, no matter how hard we try to fit in with the
culture of North American society, all Christians, regardless of the
theological ‘tribe’ or ‘family’ with which they identify, are ‘resident aliens’,
‘landed immigrants’ in a world which is and is not our ‘home and native land’. You may have once read a bumper sticker that
proclaims, ‘Think globally. Act locally.’ To my mind this describes the attitude that
Christians bring to the task of living as people who have ‘a different world in
view’, a world that has not yet been realized.
Think globally.
To be a Christian
is to belong to a movement that spans twenty centuries of human history, that
includes people of every ethnicity and culture and that gathers, transforms and
sends disciples on every continent. It
is a community that shares a common belief that God is the creator of all that
is, seen and unseen, that in Jesus of Nazareth God acts to redeem and reconcile
the world to God’s very self and that in the Spirit of wisdom and truth God
continues to act in us, through us and, sometimes, despite us. As Paul writes, ‘. . . for in Christ Jesus
[we] are all children of God through faith . . . . There is no longer Jew or
Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female;
for all of [us] one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3.26, 28) It is this shared identity which commits us
to look beyond national boundaries and tribal identities to seek the common
good for all God’s creatures.
To be a Christian
is to belong to a movement that is not afraid to look beyond the boundaries of
one’s own culture to discover how to become more fully human, to live more
fully in the likeness of God. When we
gather for worship, Sunday after Sunday, we listen to Scriptures originally
written in languages other than our own and intended to be read by people other
than ourselves. Yet we find in them
wisdom for the present and guidance for the future. We bring to our own communities experiences
and insights from other contexts and discover how they might enrich our own discipleship. Rarely does a year go by when one of you does
not bring something to me, perhaps a resource for worship or stewardship, which
finds itself becoming part of the mosaic of our life as a Christian community.
Act locally.
At the same time
Christians are not detached from the communities and cultures in which we
live. We bring our global perspective
into the choices we make and the priorities we set as we go about our
ministries. This mean we are always
engaging in what I might call ‘translation’.
We are also interpreting to our friends, families and neighbours what
the good news of God in Christ looks like in Metro Vancouver 2017. For us at Saint Faith’s it means that we made
a choice more than forty years ago to welcome the full and equal participation
of women in the leadership of our congregation, whether lay or ordained. We chose to participate in the liturgical
renewal of the Anglican Church of Canada from the very beginning and we
continue to do so in how we worship today.
No doubt we have much translation still to do so that we reach out to
those who have no faith and to those whose faith has cooled.
The hardest part of
being a Christian in the world, no matter where or when, is our vocation to
challenge our own culture when we fail to do justice, to love kindness and to
walk humbly with God. As we celebrate
the sesquicentennial of confederation, we are compelled by our faith to acknowledge
that we have yet to become ‘the just society’ that Pierre Elliot Trudeau spoke
of more than thirty years ago. We know
all too well our failures to honour and respect the indigenous peoples who have
dwelt in this land for millennia.
Although decades ago our federal parliament committed to eliminating
child poverty, British Columbians still live in a province with one of the
highest rates of child poverty in Canada.
These realities and others are only counsels of despair if we do not
remember to give thanks to God ‘whose power working in us can do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine’.
True Patriot Love
It is right and a
good and joyful thing that we celebrate one hundred and fifty years of
confederation this weekend. I give thanks
almost daily that Paula, David and I crossed the border and that we made the
choice in 1996 to become Canadian citizens.
Despite the occasional comments that remind me that I am an immigrant,
this is my home and I choose to identify myself as a Canadian over all the
other ‘identities’ I possess. Perhaps some
of you have similar stories to tell.
But the one thing
that none of us dare forget is that our primary identity is as members of
Christ’s body, disciples who follow the way of Jesus. This identity leads us to look beyond the
boundaries that seem to be popping up all over the world today. Christians do not build walls; we take them
down. Christians pray for
our political authorities; we do not pray to them. Christians know that true patriot love means
working to keep our countries faithful to the vision of God’s peaceable kingdom
even if that means challenging the status
quo.
We do this because
we are friends, friends of each other, friends of every human being. So, as God’s friends, let us clothe ourselves
with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience. Let us bear with one another and forgive
others as we ourselves have been forgiven.
May we clothe ourselves with love, so that our ‘fragile earth, our
island home’ may be bind together in perfect harmony. For we do not stand guard only for Canada, we
stand on guard for the world God has created, the world that God is redeeming,
the world that God is bringing into being.
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