Working on the Puzzle: Thoughts on Founders' Day 2021 (12 September 2021)

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

            When I was more actively involved in the work of the Anglican Church of Canada in the wider national context, I spent a lot of time travelling and staying in various conference and retreat centres across the country.  One of the retreat centres we frequently used was run by a community of religious sisters.

            In one of the common areas of the convent there was always a large table with a jigsaw puzzle in progress.  In the evenings anyone who was in residence could pull up a chair and contribute to the work in progress.  Often there would be other groups meeting at the convent as well and the puzzle became a gathering place for folks from different parts of the country and from different working groups of the church.  Every once and a while one or more of the sisters would stop by and join in.

            Everyone knew the process.  First, work on the frame of the puzzle.  Then bring together little islands of interlocking pieces and coordinate their location by referring to the box top.  As this is being done, someone might discover a piece that links one island to another.  Piece by piece the puzzle emerges.

            Putting a jigsaw puzzle together has two benefits.  The benefit we most often think of is completing the puzzle itself.  But the other benefit is working with other people on the project.  Some folks are really skilled at creating those little islands, while other have the knack of finding the links that connect one island to another.  As we work on the puzzle, we chat and learn from one another.  It helps that we do have a clear goal and the box top offers a bird’s eye view of what we’re working towards.  In the working together new relationships are forged, new friendships emerge and new possibilities wait to be discovered.

            In many ways the life of faith takes place within the age-old human adventure of working on the vast jigsaw puzzle we know as the kosmos, the universe and all things visible and invisible.  Over the course of millennia we have been able to construct a significant part of the frame of the puzzle, though much still remains to be done.  We’ve been able to piece together some clusters of the puzzle, those islands that bring us closer to grasping the whole picture.  Then there are those ‘eureka’ moments when some one finds the piece or pieces that connect islands together, expanding our knowledge.

            Throughout all these millennia we have benefitted not only from the data we have gleaned and the knowledge we have gained.  We have benefitted from the process of working together on the puzzle.  Millions of people, some known to us, most unknown to us, have collaborated by bringing their hearts, minds, hearts and intuitions to the task.  While I would never deny the importance of history’s geniuses to this human endeavour, I would affirm that whatever knowledge we have gained, whatever wisdom we have nurtured, has been a corporate and collaborative effort of the wonderful but often annoying diversity of human beings.

            What is true of our study of the universe is equally true of the life of Christian communities over the past two thousand years.  We’ve been piecing together the puzzle of the kingdom of God, the reality of life in communion with God in the here and now, for a long time.  That puzzle is not yet completed and there are times, I must confess, when I fear that there are some pieces missing.  But perhaps the most important thing is that what we’re doing is corporate and collaborate.  To use a familiar saying, the journey, the piecing together of the puzzle, is enriches us as much as reaching our destination, God’s promised reign of justice and peace.

            We will always need new eyes to help up see what God is doing, new ears to hear what God is saying, new hearts to beat with God’s love and compassion, and new voices to speak God’s word afresh in ways understood by those who have been hurt by the life of faith, by those who don’t miss this life, by those who have never experienced it and by those who are curious about who we are and what we are doing.  The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is the emerging kingdom of God are human beings in whom the glory of God is just waiting to be revealed.

            Today Clara joins us at the table where we are working together to put together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is God’s kingdom.  She brings her own gifts to join with those of the whole Christian community in this long work of restoring balance to the world and renewing the lives of all its creatures.  So pull up a chair for Clara and let’s see what we can discover together about the God who doing more than we can ask or imagine.

Hear. Read. Mark. Learn. Inwardly Digest.

 

 

RCL Proper 23B

5 September 2021

 

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

 

            I grew up in an Anglican environment.  Often I would hear adults punctuate a point made in a conversation by saying, ‘Hear.  Read.  Mark.  Learn.  And inwardly digest.’  I understood the gist of the words even if they sounded a bit odd.  But, as all children know full well, adults do have funny ways of speaking.

 

            Then, one Sunday when I was twelve or thirteen – so it must have been the 2^nd Sunday of Advent – our priest began the eucharist by offering the following prayer:

 

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.  Amen.  (BCP 1928, 92)

 

I almost jumped out of my seat.  There it was, the source of those odd words I had heard so often and it was the Prayer Book!  And its message was an exhortation to pay attention to the Bible.  As I thought back to all the times I had heard the phrase used, there was a slight sense that my elders had almost been saying something blasphemous.

 

            In truth they had not been taking the name of the Prayer Book in vain; they had been applying words that had become part of their spiritual DNA to the matters of importance.  They had been doing what participating in worship is meant to do:  what we say and do in public worship is to become embedded and embodied in what we say and do in our lives outside of the formal worship of the Christian community.

 

            At the heart of the worshipping Christian community is the proclamation of the Scriptures.  It is so important that, in the Anglican tradition, we do not entrust what is to be read on a Sunday to the whim of the presider or preacher.  If worship is meant to shape our daily lives and if the Scriptures are the heart of that worship, then what Scriptures are to be read is a concern not just of the congregation but of the wider church, whether understood to be a diocese or a national church.  Our hope is that, despite the varying personalities of Anglican parishes, we are united Sunday after Sunday in our hearing the same texts so that we can be united in common witness.

 

            This morning we’ve just heard three texts that share a common thread, something that does not always happen in the lectionary for the Sundays after Pentecost.

• In Proverbs the writer, in simple and direct words, reminds us that how we respond to those who are poor is not only a matter of character but of divine concern.  
• In James the writer, in words that are painfully true in our day, declares that inequality may be a social reality, but it is not a quality of the kingdom of God as that kingdom is shown in how local Christian communities live and serve.
• In Mark the writer, describing a situation that could apply to numerous places in our world today, describes how a foreign, non-Jewish woman, three categories that should exclude her from Jesus’ mission as then understood, will not be quiet and expects Jesus to act as one who tears down the walls of division between foreigner and native, Jew and non-Jew, male and female, ‘us’ versus ‘them’ by doing what God sent him into the world to do.

 

These are the texts I entered into the draft bulletin for today; these are the texts I’ve been pondering all week; these are the texts we’ve heard.

 

            These are the texts that I had in my mind as I attend a meeting of the City of New Westminster’s Land Use and Planning Committee on Monday.  On Monday we presented our revised property development proposal made necessary by our failure to secure funding for non-market, affordable rental units, long a central component of our redevelopment plan.  When all was said and done, BC Housing was only able to fund some 20% of the units contained in the application they received for funding from the Community Housing Fund and our units weren’t in the 20%.

 

            The Land Use and Planning Committee approved the recommendations of the City Planning Staff that our application process continue forward, good news for all of us, but the Committee’s approval was not unanimous nor without questions.  Let me name three.

• How will our property re-development benefit the common good of the City?
• How will our property re-development contribute to reconciliation with the First Nations on whose traditional lands we live, work and worship?
• How will our property re-development serve the needs of families, especially younger families?

 

As I left the meeting and as I continued to hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest both the comments of the Committee and the Scriptures for today, it seemed and still seems to me that we are being asked by both to ‘embrace and ever hold fast’ the hope that what we are doing embodies God’s mission here on the banks of the Fraser River and in the heart of New Westminster.

 

            We all know that we live in a culture where religious communities such as ours are sometimes deemed irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst.  We respond to these attitudes by doing what we do best:  providing a holy place where people can gather to be transformed both by serving and being served so that they can then be sent out for mission.  Some will be members of our Christian community, while many others will not.  But this is what it means to be committed to the common good.

 

            We all know that our society is plagued by inequalities such as those caused by poverty, by prejudice, by structural racism, to name but a few.  Christ came to break such barriers and to bring us into that unity God meant us to share, a unity where the variety of our gifts, personal and communal, strengthen our common humanity.  How can we, as a Christian community, be an agent of reconciliation in how we move forward in the physical re-development of this property?

 

            We all know that we are surrounded by younger families who are struggling to make ends meet, whether financial or social.  I think that we all want something more than one more impersonal tower block here; we want a genuine community that cares for young and old alike.  

            We have heard the Scriptures.  We have read them.  We are marking them.  We are learning them.  We are inwardly digesting them.  And, in the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to listen to the voices of our City and to the voices of the Scriptures so that our re-development embodies what the Spirit is saying to the Church, to us here and now.