A Cross Called Hope (RCL Lent 2B, 1 March 2015)

RCL Lent 2B

1 March 2015

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Focus text:  Mark 8.31-38

Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist on the 1st.

A Cross Called ‘Hope’

            It’s no secret that I love books.  My love is so apparent that once, several weeks after doing a presentation in Nelson, I received the gift of t-shirt with a man surrounded by books.  The caption reads, ‘So many books.  So little time.’  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I have, over the years, cultivated a relationship with Hager Books on 41^st Avenue.  I rarely pop my head into the store without leaving with a book.

            A few years ago one of the staff took me aside and said, ‘I know the perfect book for you.’  She handed me a copy of William Dalrymple’s, From the Holy Mountain:  A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium.  Dalrymple is a Scottish travel writer and, in this book, he retraces the journey taken by Moschos, a Byzantine monk in 587 c.e.  Moschos’ journey took him to many important Christian communities in the Middle East in the century before the rise of Islam.  Dalrymple decided to retrace Moschos’ journey some fourteen hundred years later.

            As you can well imagine, the Middle East has changed since the days of Moschos and Dalrymple documents the decline and disappearance of Christian communities through the countries that once formed the heartland of Eastern Christianity.  One of the more poignant stories is that of a Christian woman who is the last Christian living in a small village in Turkey.  She is protected and cared for by a Muslim family who consider it their duty to ensure her safety and her well-being until she dies.

            As I have been watching events unfold in the Middle East over the past weeks and months, Dalrymple’s book kept re-appearing in my thoughts.  We are witnessing, I believe, an organized effort to rid the Middle East of its Christian population by whatever means seems most effective --- terror being the preferred option.  How this effort can be brought to an end without the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people, Muslims and Christians, I do not know.  What I do know is that it puts the cost of being a Christian into perspective.

            ³⁴ [Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  ³⁵ For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  (Mark 8.34-35 in The New Revised Standard Version)

            What does it mean to take up our cross in a world in which Christians have become targets of oppression and murder?  It must mean more than what we tend to say as people living in relative safety.  For example, how many of us have heard or have said, ‘That child is the cross I must bear’?  Or perhaps we’ve heard or said someone refer to some trivial difficulty in their life as the cross that they bear.  As I have struggled to understand this phrase, I realized that there must be something I was missing.  And then I found what I was looking for in Paul’s letter to the Romans.

            ¹⁸ For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is in store for us.  ¹⁹ The created universe is waiting with eager expectation for God’s [children] to be revealed.  ²⁰ It was made subject to frustration, not of its own choice but by the will of him who subjected it, yet with the hope ²¹ that the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and is to enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God.  ²² Up to the present, as we know, the whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth.  ²³ What is more, we also, to whom the Spirit is given as the [first fruits] of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we look forward eagerly to our adoption, our liberation from mortality.  ²⁴ It was with this hope that we were saved.  Now to see something is no longer to hope:  why hope for a what is already seen?  ²⁵ But if we hope for something we do not yet see, then we look forward to it eagerly and with patience.  (Romans 8.18-25 in The Revised English Bible, alt.)

            You and I are called to bear a cross called ‘hope’.  What we hope for is what Paul describes:  we hope that the whole universe, visible and invisible, human and non-human, known and unknown, will be freed from its shackles and enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God.  We hope that every person, Christian and non-Christian, believer and non-believer, will come to share in that fullness of life which is God’s intentions for all of us.

            Holding on to this hope in a world which sees daily the deaths and exile of innocent men, women and children is not easy.  Holding on to this hope in a world in which the rich are getting steadily richer and the poor steadily poorer is not easy.  Holding on to this hope in a world in which many consider people of faith part of the problem rather than as key to the solution is not easy.  Holding on to this hope in a world filled with charlatans who offer snake oil instead of truth, snappy answers rather than wisdom, is not easy.

            Bearing the cross called hope compels us to share this hope with people who sometimes think of us as well-meaning but delusional.  Their rejection weighs upon us.  Bearing the cross called hope compels us to do what we can to help a few even as we witness the suffering of many.  The frustration burdens us.  Sometimes, in our darker moments, we may even contemplate lifting the cross off our shoulders and finding some other way to face each day.

            But hope is what God has given us to carry.  Hope is what empowered Jesus to carry his own cross to his death.  Despite all the appearances to the contrary, God’s last word to us is ‘life’ not ‘death’.  When Muslims surround a Jewish synagogue in Norway, hope is renewed.  When a Muslim family in Turkey care for an aging Christian woman, hope is renewed.  The weight of the cross called hope is not the weight of despair in the face of this world’s pain.  The weight of the cross called hope is the weight of the glory promised to all God’s children.  It is a weight we gladly bear, in good times and in sad times, because it is the only weight worth carrying for the life of this world.

Would That All God's People Were Prophets

RCL Advent 2B

7 December 2014

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Click here to listen to the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist on the 7th.

            Over the course of hundreds of years the history of the Hebrew people was interpreted in a series of writings we now call the Hebrew Scriptures.  In those writings we learn that this history was shaped by forces from inside the people and from outside.  Three ‘inside’ institutions that were most influential were the monarchy, the priesthood and the prophets.  Of these three the oldest and most enduring institution was the prophets.

            It was only after the people had left Egypt and had begun their journey to the land of Canaan that the priesthood emerged to lead the corporate ritual life of the people.  It was only after the political crises of the early tribal confederacy, perhaps a century or two after the people arrived in Canaan, that the monarchy emerged.

            But it was Moses the prophet who led the people out of Egypt and towards the promised land.  It was Samuel the prophet who yielded to the cries of the people and anointed Saul and then David to be king.  When the Babylonians threatened the people and eventually destroyed Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, taking the monarchy and leadership of the people into exile, it was the prophets we know as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and eleven others who tended the embers of the Hebrew people and their covenant with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

            And closer to our own times, when the Romans occupied the land, turning the monarchs into a series of client kings and the priesthood into a cautious, self-preserving religious elite, God raised up other prophets.  One of these prophets emerged in the wilderness east of Jerusalem in the Jordan Valley, a man we know as John, who called the people to a renewed commitment to God.

            These prophets were agents of God who risked their reputations, their fortunes and their very lives to fulfill the ministry God had entrusted to them.  Although they were separated from each other by decades, by centuries and by political and religious contexts, they have many things in common.

            After all, what makes a prophet a prophet?  We sometimes think that a prophet is someone who predicts the future, a divine fortune-teller.  But that is not what the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the prophet John were.  Prophets are men and women who speak the word of God to the people of their own times and places.  The words of the prophets are meant to be heard in the midst of current events, even when they may suggest the future consequences of the actions of the present generation.

            A prophet, even those whose words are sometimes fierce, knows that the love of God for us and for all of creation is unrelenting and passionate.  Sometimes this love is expressed in words that are compassionate and nurturing.  Sometimes, when this love is sorely tested, God’s beloved people are left to experience the consequences of their poor choices.  Sometimes the prophet speak words of encouragement and offer insights into God’s purposes and visions of creation as God sees it and wills it to become.  At all times and in all places, this love seeks the ultimate good and well-being of the beloved.  As the writer of the letter to the Ephesians puts it, God acts in many and various ways so that “. . . all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ephesians 4.13).

            The prophet’s knowledge and dependence upon the steadfast love of God for us gives her or him hope.  Hope is the inevitable product of love.  When we are loved and love, we look at our times and our circumstances with new eyes.  Hope dares to believe that the present, with all of its conflicts and tragedies, with all of its uncertainties and disappointments, is not God’s last word to us.  The beauty and good that we glimpse and experience in the present anticipate and whet our appetite for the beauty and good that God intends for all creation on that day that shall so surely come.

            Because the prophet is convinced of God’s steadfast love and inspired by that love to hope in God’s purposes for us, he or she can act in faith, daring to speak God’s word to the powerful and to the hopeless, to the faithful and to the seeker, to those who are for us and to those who are against us.  Faith is the choice to act as an agent of God’s purposes despite our doubts not because we have none.  During a time of political crisis, the prophet Habakkuk proclaimed that “(there) is still a vision for the appointed time; it will testify to the destined hour and will not prove false.  Though it delays, wait for it, for it will surely come before too long.” (Habakkuk 2.3)  Faith chooses to trust in that vision because of the love already made known to us and the hope that love engenders.

            In the Book of Numbers, Moses is described as having become overwhelmed by the obligations of his prophetic leadership.  God offers to share some of Moses’ prophetic authority with selected members of the community.  Two of those selected don’t arrive on time for the ritual, but they receive the power to prophesy nevertheless.  When Joshua protested this to Moses, the tired prophet responded, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.” (Numbers 11.29b)

            You and I, my friends, have been called to be a prophetic people.  By choosing to follow in the way of Jesus of Nazareth, we have chosen to be agents of God who speak God’s word to our times.  Unlike some voices in today’s world, our words are ones that arise from our conviction that God loves all humanity not just some.  Our words are sustained by our hope that God’s last word to all humanity is life in its fullness.  Our words are spoken in the faith that God’s purposes will be fulfilled.

            I cannot under-exaggerate the importance of this message in today’s society, even one as wealthy and relatively peaceful as ours here in Canada.  Despite our culture’s search for the ‘true meaning of Christmas’, that search continues to be misled by messages of over-consumption, fear and self-interest.  The material advances of the last century have not led to greater satisfaction nor to a stronger sense of our responsibility to care for one another with compassion and dignity.

            But throughout the world there are prophetic communities such as ours who dare to resist the pull of the message that ‘the one with the most toys at the end wins’.  Like John we invite people to look at the world with a new yet ancient perspective, a perspective rooted in our common humanity and in our common identity as children of God in whose image we are made and in whose likeness we are invited to live.  This, my sisters and brothers, is ‘the real meaning of Christmas’, a world in which we remain firm in the hope God has set before us, “. . . so that we and all (God’s) children shall be free, and the whole earth live to praise (God’s) name.  Amen.” (The Book of Alternative Services, 215)

Here We Have No Lasting City

RCL Easter 6C

5 May 2013

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Focus Text:  Deuteronomy 34.1-12

Click here for an audio recording of the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist on Sunday.

         In 1954 my father’s tour of duty in England was coming to an end.  He was asked where he would like to be re-assigned.  Since he had been raised in upstate New York, my father requested to be assigned at one of three Air Force bases located in New Hampshire and Maine, close to where my grandparents lived in the Hudson Valley.  When the orders arrived, my father must have had a moment of shock to discover that he, my mother and I were to travel to Colorado Springs, Colorado, a fair distance away from the northeastern United States.

         So off we went to Colorado where, in 1955, we were joined by my sister.  As my sister and I were growing up, our contact with grandparents, aunts and uncles was quite limited, but we were fortunate to be ‘adopted’ by older people with whom my mother and father worked, including a good number of folk from our parish church.

         One couple, Uncle Bill and Aunt Lil, as we called them, had a place in the old mining town of Cripple Creek, some thirty miles to the west as the crow flies, but a longer distance by mountain roads.  Cripple Creek had been the heart of the gold rush of the late 1850’s and early 1860’s.  By the 1890’s Cripple Creek was a bustling town, but by the time I was growing up, it had become a sleepy mountain town with a rough side and a genteel side.  When it rained, the dirt streets were littered with pieces of soft turquoise, not gem-quality but of immense value to a nine-year-old boy and his sister.

         Just outside of town stands Mt Pisgah.  In the days of my youth it had two claims to fame:  a famous graveyard containing the graves of many pioneers and prospectors and a magnificent view of the mountains of central and southern Colorado.  From its summit you can see the sharp profile of the Sangre de Christo mountains in the south and the Continental Divide further west.  But if you turn and look east, you see the pockmarks that are all that remain of the many gold mines dug by the prospectors.  These are the graves of the hopes of so many who thought that they were going to make a fortune and did not.  For some of the prospectors the holes they dug in the ground are the only legacy, the only sign that these men ever existed.

         I searched in vain this week to find out why this mountain was called ‘Mt Pisgah’, the same name that is sometimes used for the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised Land he was not permitted to enter.  Did my Mt Pisgah earn its name during the heyday of the gold rush when hopes were high and Cripple Creek seemed to be a ‘promised land’?  Perhaps it was only called Mt Pisgah as the boom went bust and people came to realize that they were not to enter the land of promise.  Of course, it could be both at once, but the mystery continues.

        Of the many stories in the Bible, this story has always had an effect on me.  Here is Moses, liberator of the people of Israel, giver of the law, leader in the wilderness, cut off from the promise towards which he has been working for forty years if the chronology of the Bible is to be relieved.  There is the land, flowing with milk and honey, just within his reach, but he is denied entry.  When he dies, there will be no grave, no monument to which people may travel to honour his memory.  Or is there a legacy we do not readily recognize?

         Moses’ legacy is found in the Torah and in the people to whom God has entrusted the Torah.  In generations to come the land will be lost, regained, occupied, lost and restored again.  In generations to come the Temple will be built, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed once again.  But one thing remains constant, even in the midst of the successes and failures, the victories and defeats, the moments of greatness and the moments of persecution --- the Torah as God’s revealed word to the people and the people as the agents of that word in time and space.  Moses’ legacy is less a sacred place than it is a way of walking with God through the chances and changes of human history.

         For the early apostolic community, the only legacy worth creating was the legacy to be found in a people committed to following Jesus as ‘the way, the truth and the life’.  We hear in today’s reading from Acts the story of Paul’s call to cross the waters that divided Asia from Europe and to begin the Christian mission that led eventually to the first missionaries crossing the English Channel.  We are Paul’s legacy, not some monument in stone, not even a tomb.  We live in the spirit of the writer of the letter to the Hebrews who penned these words to his community:  “For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” (Hebrews 13.14).  As much as each one of us seeks a legacy, a lasting sign that we have lived, loved and mattered, the truth is that our only legacy as Christians is a movement not a place.

         This does not mean that we treat our places of worship with contempt nor does it mean that we do not need bases from which we strike out to take care of our neighbours and neighbourhoods, from which we offer care for those in any need or trouble.  It does mean, however, that we must always be prepared to leave these beloved places behind if we find ourselves called to move on, to travel towards that city that is to come, as followers of Christ, our way, our truth and our life.

         For just a moment let us think of our dear friend, Sally Baker, who died on Friday at the age of 92.  When she was born in 1921, women had only just been recognized as ‘persons’ in Canadian law and granted the vote.  When she was born in 1921, Anglicans could still speak about ministry among ‘savage’ and ‘uncivilized’ peoples, a ministry to be led by young university-educated white males.  But Sally knew how to travel and follow the way, the truth and the life.  She embraced the many changes that our Christian community has undergone; I dare say, she reveled in them.  What will be her legacy among us?  We shall be her legacy, a people who are not afraid to journey on towards the promised land of God’s future.

         Each one of us will face our own moment on Mt Pisgah.  We shall look from its heights and may experience a moment of sadness as we realize that we have not arrived at the destination towards which we thought we had been striving all our lives.  Perhaps we may feel like the miners of Cripple Creek who looked down upon the graves in which their hopes of riches lie buried.  But I hope that when that time comes for me and for each one of us, we shall be like Moses.  We shall look upon the promised land of God’s future and rejoice to see God’s people continuing their journey towards it, sustained by all that each one of us has contributed to that journey and guided by the Spirit who leads us ever onwards.  And we shall rest secure, knowing that God will come and find us to bring us to that promised land in the fullness of time.  Amen.

Just Say 'Yes'!

Advent 4C

23 December 2012

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Propers:  Micah 5.2-4; Psalm 80.1-7; Hebrews 10.5-10; Luke 1.39-55

For an audio file of the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist please click here.

As businesses prepare us for the Christmas season of buying and wish-fulfillment, we are surrounded by images of Mary, Joseph and the Christ-child.  But there are other stories that are key to the story of Bethlehem that the commercial world finds uninteresting.

In today’s gospel we hear told the story of Mary’s visit to her cousin, Elizabeth, who is also expecting the birth of her first child.  Both Mary and Elizabeth are women who have said ‘yes’ to God’s invitation to be part of God’s on-going story, the story of how God invites men and women to participate with God in the healing of creation, the restoration of creation to its proper and intended relationship with God.

Let’s think of Elizabeth and Zechariah for a moment.  They are childless and, given Zechariah’s role as a priest, this is a catastrophe.  In the culture of the time Zechariah would have every reason to divorce Elizabeth in order to marry another woman who might bear him a son.  But, for whatever reason, Zechariah does not do this and the couple prepares themselves for the ending of their days without a child.

Then God, through an angel, speaks to Zechariah and promises that he and his wife will have a child.  As impossible as this seems, Zechariah returns home and within a short time a child is conceived.  Yet there is no ‘happy’ ending to this story.  Zechariah and Elizabeth know that their child, John, will be dedicated to the Lord, celibate and will be the messenger of the one who is to come.  They realize that they are part of a story that God began in creation and that has not yet reached its conclusion.  By saying ‘yes’ to God, they have agreed to a supporting role in what God is doing, even if that means their own dreams may not be realized as they had hoped when they were younger.

Throughout Advent the church’s message to its people through the Scriptures has been this:  Say ‘yes’ to God.  Say ‘yes’ to participating in God’s work of reconciliation and life.  But how will we know that we are saying ‘yes’ to God rather than a figment of our imagination.

• If you and I feel drawn to deepen our commitment to prayer and to study, then it is very likely that the voice we hear is God’s.  Just say ‘yes’.
• If you and I feel drawn to resist an evil in our personal lives, in our families or in our communities, then it is very likely that the voice we hear is God’s.  Just say ‘yes’.
• If you and I feel drawn to share our faith with another person, to share why we are Christians, then it is very likely that the voice we hear is God’s.  Just say ‘yes’.
• If you and I are invited to serve our communities and neighbours in new ways, then it is very likely that the voice we hear is God’s.  Just say ‘yes’.
• If you and I are being awakened to a new way of upholding the dignity of every human being and the integrity of creation, then it is very likely that the voice we hear is God’s.  Just say ‘yes’.

Every day and every moment God is speaking to each and every one of us, just as God spoke to Zechariah and Elizabeth, just as God spoke to Joseph and Mary.  Sometimes God speak to us through the Scriptures.  Sometimes God’s voice is that of a friend or a family member or a trusted advisor.  Sometimes the divine voice speaks through literature or film or music.  But God speaks and then leans forward, hand cupping ear, to await our response.  Just say ‘yes’.

Are there risks to saying ‘yes’?  Yes, there are risks.  We risk being caught up in a story that is not entirely of our making, a story that has many more chapters to go.  But it is the only story worth telling and the only story worth living.  It is the story of an ancient love that is found in every human heart, an ancient love that breaks down barriers and creates life, even in the darkness of the soul’s winter.

Recently one of my former students sent a Christmas card with a poem by Dom Helder Camara, a Brazilian Roman Catholic theologian.

In the middle of the night

when stark night was darkest,

then you chose to come.

God’s resplendent first-born

sent to make us one.

The voice of doom protests:

“All these words about justice,

love and peace ---

all these naïve words

will buckle beneath the weigh of a reality

which is brutal and bitter; ever more bitter.”

It is true, Lord, it is midnight upon the earth,

moonless night and starved of stars.

But can we forget the you,

the Son of God,

chose to be born precisely at midnight?

When we say ‘yes’ to God, light shines in the darkness and the glory of God shines round about us.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.