Lent 5 - Year C
John 12:1-8

“The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume”

How bright is the lamp? 

How powerful is your space heater? 

How potent is the perfume? 

How able are any of these to fill a room with light or heat or fragrance?  Somebody out there knows the maths and can hold forth on Lumens or British Thermal Units to explain it.  I certainly can’t.

How much is too much?  Rooms can be overheated.  Lights can be too bright.  If you’ve ever sat in a movie theatre, with a group of ladies of a certain generation on their night out together behind you, you know that perfume can be too strong.

Is this what Judas is griping about - that Mary has cracked open a one-pint alabaster jar of expensive imported perfume?  It’s too much, he says, not only wrong but unnecessary!  We might have spent money differently and in a less extravagant fashion.  This comment earns Judas a direct rebuke from Jesus in the story and a critical side note from John the Evangelist which rubbishes his character and his motives.  What John knows (and what you know) is what Jesus reveals just prior to the last supper:  Judas is on the wrong side of the fence – as critics sometimes are.  He feigns an attitude of care but fears the loss of his control.

Who is in control?  These are little people, remember.  They are not the big beasts of their generation.  Moreover, they stand at the beginning of a chapter in Jesus’ earthly life where nobody but God is in control.  The anointing at Bethany is the overture to the Passion Narrative in John’s Gospel as well as Mark’s and Matthew's Gospels.  It is the starting gun.  From this point on, everybody from Judas to Peter, to Pontius Pilate and the High Priest plays the role that has been chosen for him and the son of God goes to the cross as it has been written. 

She’s done it before - Mary of Bethany.  She correctly discerns what the right attitude in such circumstances might be – the “one thing [which] is needful” in this prelude to Christ’s Passion.   It alone makes sense at the beginning of a week which will see their world turned upside down.   It takes the form of an extravagant and overt act of adoration, of love and of worship. Wordlessly she draws attention to the One in their midst who is giving himself for the life of the world

It is a gift beyond argument, dispute and objection. 

It is the small planet settling into orbit around the grander sphere.

It is the servant bringing the fruits of the harvest to the master. 

She has understood. 
And have you? 

Worship is not a periodic obligation, sparing and conservative (perhaps even self-serving) like one of Judas' disbursements.   It is the pouring out of our substance at Jesus’ feet as a response to what he has accomplished for us.  Even the worship of little people like ourselves has its own power over powerlessness.  It fills the room.

The Canadian House of Bishops' Statement on the Marriage Canon

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.”
Sharing their own struggles “might be helpful as they [CoGS members] were thinking about process,” she said.
- See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

The announcement came first in a statement on the 29th of February from the Canadian House of Bishops to the Council of General Synod following the bishop's meeting (Feb 23rd-26th) in Nova Scotia.  With respect to a first reading of a revision to the Marriage Canon to be discussed at General Synod in July of this year, it was ascertained, during the bishops' meeting together, that:

...the draft resolution to change the Marriage Canon to accommodate the marriage of same-sex partners is not likely to pass in the Order of Bishops by the canonical requirement of a 2/3rds majority in each Order. 

 The bishops' statement continued on to state:

We continue to wonder whether a legislative procedure is the most helpful way of dealing with these matters.

This was followed by an article in the Anglican Journal on the 2nd of March which served as a springboard not only for those variously dismayed or encouraged by the the fact that fewer than 2/3rds of our bishops might vote to pass such a revision but also for those who felt that the process of Synodical discussion was being "torpedoed" by a bishops' straw poll released five months prior to General Synod as well as for some who believed the bishops' statement to be an example of good sense and fair warning.

If the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada as a whole proves differently minded from the House of Bishops at the end of a long and honest debate this summer, then the House of Bishops would be faced with a quandary.   It will be interesting to see what transpires. It’s not a critical moment which can be palliated ahead of time or felt by degrees or introduced gently in increments. It is in July and not at the end of February that a failure to achieve a 2/3rds majority in the Canadian House of Bishops would need to be demonstrated with opinions revealed and the rationale behind those opinions expressed (in the lead up to the vote) on the floor of Synod by bishops on both sides of the issue along with those caught in the messy muddle in the middle.

This is as it should be.

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.”
Sharing their own struggles “might be helpful as they [CoGS members] were thinking about process,” she said.
- See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.”
Sharing their own struggles “might be helpful as they [CoGS members] were thinking about process,” she said.
- See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpu

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.” - See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.”
Sharing their own struggles “might be helpful as they [CoGS members] were thinking about process,” she said.
- See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

I was told by one of my undergraduate professors that "in many ways" almost always precedes a statement of dubious or uncertain value.  It should really be interpreted to mean "in not very many ways".  Bishop Jane Alexander of Edmonton has stated, that "in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the Church”.   This needs to be tested.  If it's true then  it must be taken for granted that our Bishops will be participants in the synodical process, that they will listen and that they will gather in small groups with priests, deacons and lay people to whom they bear some accountability for their public reasoning.  They will navigate points of view which are not their own.  They could, potentially, change their minds.  In a synodical system the constituent parts do, in fact, speak for the whole in terms of the passage of such a canonical revision.   Legislation will not pass unless it passes at every level.  At the very least, though, the other two houses must be allowed make up their mind.

I think an expression by the House of Bishops to the CoGS that, as it stands in the context of its closed door meeting at the end of February, a 2/3rds majority should in no way be assumed in July, or is even unlikely, probably constitutes due diligence on its part.  I’m glad such a statement was made.  It seems a fair "heads up" to those involved in preparing the discussions.

But that’s as far as it goes.

that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, - See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

The statement by the bishops and the follow-up article in the Anglican Journal gave voice to suggestions for something other than a legislative process – something other than the open discussion, the private conversations and the voting by orders which have accompanied every other change in liturgy, doctrinal development and ecclesial practice undertaken by the Anglican Church of Canada. 

A gulf between the mind of the bishops and the rest of General Synod would be a valuable datum should that prove to be the case in July.  As uncomfortable as it might be it would nonetheless be the truth.  It would be good to know.

The bishops decided, Alexander said, that they should communicate their own dividedness on the issue in advance of the next meeting of CoGS, scheduled March 10-13, because “in many ways the House of Bishops is a microcosm of the church, so it’s not just us who were feeling ripped in a whole lot of different directions about it, but it’s going to be the same for everyone who comes to General Synod.”
Sharing their own struggles “might be helpful as they [CoGS members] were thinking about process,” she said.
- See more at: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/-bishops-statement-an-attempt-to-be-forthright-and-honest#sthash.gRMGiEbl.dpuf

Lent 4 - Year C                                                                       
Luke 15:1-3. 11b-32                          

Put yourselves in the shoes of one of the characters in this Sunday's parable of the Lost Son:  Which boy are you, then?  You might identify more with the father  – your choice could well reflect the things which have happened to you in the course of your life.  When the Pharisees gathered at the margins of the crowd listening to Jesus speak they noted with dismay how many outcasts and misfits had gathered to listen.  Jesus set the Pharisees more or less this very task:  Who are you in this story?

One of the two boys went off the rails, taking a piece of the family fortune with him.  He came back recently with his hat in his hand after months of indignity, pain and deprivation.  Life “off the rails” proved a dreadful combination of place and circumstance which the boy still cannot describe without tears.  

The father welcomed the lost younger son.  This he did joyfully, extravagantly and with generosity.  He didn't spare his own dignity and even endured being cast as an old fool for the way he ran out on bandy legs to meet the boy when he was still a fair way down the road.  Ridiculous?   Old and foolish?  The only feeling he can remember was the palpable joy and anticipation at having the boy whom he loved and thought he’d lost back at the family table.  That was feeling enough for one day.

The old man now reasons gently with his older son who is mightily put out by his father’s public welcome of the prodigal and is boycotting the homecoming party.  His father was forced to get up and leave the festive table to go outside where his son was lingering under a tree, livid with rage and humiliation.  He speaks slowly to him.  It’s not that the older boy is stupid, mind.   There is, nonetheless, something quite basic that he has not understood. 

What should a father share with a son ?  What does a son inherit?  Is it an inventory of barns, grazing lands, outbuildings, servants and equipment?  When we are strong and in control we might concentrate the goods of the father in our own possession without sharing much of his character. What sort of inheritance is that?  The estate is ours by right.  A jury of our peers would agree.  So what?  If the point of our belonging is that somebody else does not belong, then what does that say about us?  Cold calculations always cast the realm of feelings to one side but this story cannot be divorced from the father’s feelings for the one who is lost - it is the heart and engine of this parable.  It is love and not right which makes the world go round.  

Children are a perpetual worry.  The day of great risk for the prodigal is over.  As we speak now he is in the house wiping a bit of grease from his chin and raising a cup to his lips.  He has been restored to the table.  It is love and concern for the older brother which motivates the father's second trip of the day and all his hushed remonstrations in the garden with a son who, curiously, has everything and nothing at the same time.    

The day of risk for that boy has just begun.  

Lent 3 - Year C                                                                                                               
Exodus 3:1-15

Moses had landed on his feet.  He'd escaped a murder charge in Egypt and was now in the process of working on his pension.  He'd met a young woman in the neighbouring land of Midian, married her and had gone to work for her dad Jethro as a shepherd.   On the day in question he was following the sheep along a straight desert track toward better grazing land further up.  Jethro’s sheep would one day be his sheep.   These flocks, this country and this life would be his flocks, his country and his life.  Egypt was all behind him and even more remote was the intrigue of having been a Hebrew hidden like a guilty secret within the household of Pharaoh.  It was a complicated life this Moses had led and one filled with risks since his childhood.

In Midian, though, everything had "come up roses".

Brick fits onto brick.  That’s how the wall gets built.  Chapter is added to chapter until the apogee is reached and the story then can coast to a respectable end.  Moses needed only to keep his eye on the ball.  It was not complicated.  One foot needed to go in front of another.   Those fat sheep must be directed down the straight path. That’s all.  Nothing else.

This would be a good place as any for you to insert your *sigh*.   Do it here.  For at this moment something twinkled on the horizon as a bush spontaneously ignited into flame.   The story of Moses’ commissioning by God and the whole story of the Exodus - the pivotal chapter in Israel’s history – did not debut with God commanding Moses to take off his shoes in front of the burning bush or explaining to him how he would be sent back to Egypt to rescue his people.   It actually began a few lines earlier with Moses’ own fateful words to himself:

"I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up."

Curiosity kills the cat but it also ushers in new epochs in history.   It changes the fortunes of those who allow themselves the luxury or the lunacy of not looking straight ahead.  Were you chided by teachers, coaches and well-meaning uncles about not following the straight line?  Would you not have been further ahead if you'd refined your resources, purified and concentrated your materials?  "Straighten the lines of your progress..  Above all, don’t get distracted"!  

God constantly stands in the midst of the settled paths of prophets, patriarchs and initiates to the Communion of Saints.  Our iconography has a tendency to depict our heroes with resolute and slightly elevated gazes as they stare intently at their goals.   But - before they were ever useful to God by being resolute and unshakable they were useful to him because they could be distracted - distracted from their day jobs and unstuck from all their several necessary trajectories.   God could depend on them to shift their gaze from their desks and direct it out the window. 

Lent 2 - Year C
Luke 13:31-35                                                                                     

The verb – thelo (to wish, want or desire) appears three times – twice positively and once negatively - in our short Gospel reading from Luke this Sunday.  Herod desires to kill Jesus.  Jesus desires to gather God’s people in Jerusalem under his wings like a mother hen.  The residents of Jerusalem, however, have no desire to be so gathered.  It’s a bit like watching from a hillside as two cars speed towards each other along perpendicular routes.   “Stop”, you cry, “or something terrible will happen”.  There are shades of Italian opera here – Giacomo desires Lucinda, Lucinda desires Paulo and Paulo is completely uninterested or is distracted or is a fool or is simply not the marrying type.  If your high-school-aged child related a similarly connected string of unrequited love amongst her pals in class you might say to yourself:  My word, this will all end in tears.

The question of the Gospels is this:  How will God win for himself a family in the ministry of Jesus his son?  

·         The stakes, you see, are so high, 

·         the power of Jesus’ enemies is so strong 

·         and the hearts of the people are so cold and resistant.  

And now Jesus proposes to leave the Galilee and proceed forthwith to the city so long a source of death to prophets.  That impact at the crossroads is certain.  The result of this impossible equation of love will indeed, either by accident or design, be tears.

Have your ears have been open for the last few weeks?  We are full-steam-ahead towards the tears of Holy Week and Good Friday.  In the story of the Transfiguration, which we read together on the last Sunday of Epiphany (Luke 9:28-36), Moses and Elijah were perceived, at either side of Jesus, by the sleepy disciples.  What they discussed was specifically what Jesus would accomplish in Jerusalem which was ‘his departure’.  On the first Sunday of Lent readers were sent back to an early moment in the Gospel account (Luke 4:1-13) where Jesus deliberately set aside and rejected the very tools – safety, strength, the gift of kingdoms and acclaim – which would have prevented those tears and guaranteed his domination of the crowds and his welcome by the several hierarchies of his day.  Jesus forswore these means – one after another.  They were not his Father’s gifts.

What we must piece together from the narratives and sayings of the first three Gospels is clearly stated in the Prologue in John at the very outset:  Light [had] come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light.  The remedy from the beginning will be Jesus’ self-giving unto death.  He knows himself to be part of a big story and Herod can therefore have no part in it.  Herod's ghastly desire is an empty threat.  Jesus words to him are rightly a rebuke.  Jesus is aware of the weakness of human beings.  They cannot be led like an army or instructed like a classroom.  His words concerning them are rightly a lament.  They are broken and he must die for them.  He will hold them in his lasting and effective love forever. 

The First Sunday in Lent
Year C
Luke 4:1-13

Sunday School children will tell you that the answer to any question is always “Jesus”.  The answer to the question “What is the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness about” is no exception.  In other words, it’s not about you.  Luke is not coaching you about chocolate, card games, red wine or exercise.  These may be issues - you’ll simply need to find another text.  In this Sunday’s Gospel reading we are observers of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry following his baptism in the river Jordan and as we go through the opening words of the episodes in Mark’s, Matthew’s and Luke’s version of the story we note a subtle difference in language

Mark:  The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness…

Matthew:  Then Jesus was led up by the spirit into the wilderness…

Luke:  Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the spirit for forty days in the wilderness….

Matthew and Luke are the only two writers who detail the explicit events of Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness – what he came to define or discover or to show about himself and it is fitting that they express this as being at the leading of God’s Spirit.

Two questions could be asked.  What happens to Jesus in the wilderness? And what will happen in the story as it continues beyond our reading into the first verse of the next part of Luke’s account - 4:14?  Second things first, alors.  Beyond the end of our reading Jesus will emerge into his public ministry in the Galilee still very much in the power of God’s Spirit in his words and acts.  Whatever happened to him in the desert has not compromised him.  It has defined and sharpened his mission.  Back to the first question: So what happened in the wilderness?

In the wilderness Jesus lived with gaps – with things that he did not have.  He had no bread (hunger).  He had no power or public acclaim (solitude).  He had no safety (at the mercy of beasts and thieves).  The devil offered him solutions to these problems which, on one hand, might seem to better equip him for the public ministry that will follow but for which faith in God could never be credited.  Jesus said no.  The power of the Spirit remained with him.

It will take an entire Gospel to explain how God expresses his saving power through this Jesus who refuses a crown and speaks the truth powerfully from a standpoint of weakness and want.  You’d need to add the letters of Saint Paul to find out how a rag tag collection of early Christians will express that same invitation to God’s friendship.  Add to that cloud of witnesses St Francis and St Claire, every missionary to a hostile population, every Christian activist who bore witness to powerful oppressors.  It has ever been so.  

  Transfiguration                                                                                                 Luke 9:28-36 (37-43)

The depiction of the Transfiguration by the Renaissance painter Raphael was the artist's last painting prior to his death in 1520. You'd be forgiven if you passed it in a gallery at the Vatican and
said "What the heck?" Jesus seems to float in the air above his sleepy disciples.   Moses and Elijah have been dredged up from distant history and are hovering at each side of him.  Meanwhile, at the bottom of the mountain, the characters from his next more typical healing miracle (the bracketed bits in our lectionary reading for this Sunday) appear to be waiting for things to get back to normal again once the enigmatic events on the mountainside are over. You'd return to your hotel room from the Vatican museum and you'd look the story up in Luke's Gospel to see if you could get some clarity about the events depicted in the painting.

You might not be that much further ahead.  Peter who was there on site clearly didn't understand what was going on and possibly never did.  Jesus himself told his disciples to keep the experience to themselves - this glimpse into his glory - as something which not only defied explanation but was not even meant to be explained. It just was and it was what it was.

What the heck, indeed!

Line up to the left those for whom a puzzle, a paradox or a mystery is a good thing which shows us
to be small creatures in a world which is big and rich and beautiful. We are in God's hands. He is
not in ours. That we are not in control of all the facts is to us some comfort and makes of our life
and progress a truly worthy adventure.

Line up to the right those who believe that any mystery simply means that we are not yet equipped
with the math or the software to properly run the numbers.

You can guess where I stand on this. It may be why acts of worship where we sing and process
about, tell stories, dress up and ring bells offer to us the glimpses of glory which even a
competently written sermon can merely explain. The explanation cannot hold a candle to the
experience. It's why the famous mystics can never really tell you what they've seen - their
experiences cannot easily be broken down into propositions. They will only invite you to set
yourselves to the task of applying that attention in your own lives to the presence of God within and
around you.

The frustration of not being in control of the facts - even of feeling and looking like a bit of an idiot
when the lid is taken off and we get a glimpse of God's glory in the midst of life - might be a helpful
part of the process. As Peter says, just before he then gets it wrong, "Master, It's good that we're here". That might be enough. We might want to stop applying our inferior arithmetic to the story of our lives and begin to listen to, look out for and even be nourished what we cannot yet fully understand.

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Epiphany 4
Year C
Luke 4:21-30

Maybe this has happened to you. 

You start going on about something at a crowded dinner table.  Everyone looks happy and nods affirmatively. Then, somewhere along the way, you say something that causes everybody’s face to fall. You, who were doing so well five minutes ago, are now about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party. You misjudged the politics of your audience or used saucy language or insulted the lady of the house.  You got it wrong.  You’d like to know why because you’re not sure.  From the silence in the car on the way home you suspect your wife is confecting the necessary words to tell you.

The story from St Luke’s Gospel about Jesus speaking in the synagogue at Nazareth describes just such a sudden collapse in popularity by a speaker. To highlight this our lectionary has divided the story at the very point where things begin to go wrong. Last week’s reading (Luke 4:14-21) had Jesus being handed the scroll by the elders of the synagogue and beginning to read at the appointed place, reciting the promises of God to release the captive and show grace to the blind and the oppressed. Jesus hands the scroll back to the attendant, sits back comfortably and following a meaningful pause declares that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”. There’s a charged silence as the home crowd waits for what the local boy will say next but the mood in the room is still pleasantly calm.

What he says next as this Sunday’s gospel reading picks up the story (4:21-30) relates closely to the themes in the King’s Wedding Banquet (Luke 14:16-24) where invitations are sent out and the traditional invitees refuse to respond and so the King extends that invitation to a larger and previously uninvited crowd. We are reminded that we enjoy our membership in the family of God not because we are a deserving heaven-born crowd but because God shows an interest in his creatures which is sufficiently wide to include even us.  As the line from the hymn puts it:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy

Or the line from that other hymn:

A spendthrift lover is the Lord

Were there widows in Israel in the time of Elijah? Of course, but God’s grace was extended to a Gentile woman in Sidon. Were there lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha? Yes, but God chose to bless a Syrian soldier. Believe, as you should, that God releases the captive and blesses his creatures but know that he will extend that grace to whomever he will. If you think you're special, you're not. If you won’t get up on your hind legs and receive such grace thankfully you may end up outside the circle.

We can say with probability that when you and I ran afoul of the group we were speaking to it was because we got it wrong. What Luke tells us in his narrative is that the violent response Jesus received from his hearers that day in his own home town was because he had gotten it absolutely and thoroughly right. Too right, in fact, not to have a fight break out.

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The Third Sunday after Epiphany

Year C                                                                                                     1^st Corinthians 12:12-31

Unity or diversity?  The one or the many?

Challenges to a family, a company or a church should, in the best of all possible worlds, be met with a great show of unity amongst the members.  The phone calls are made which need to be made, the decisions taken and the resources marshalled to see the group through its rough patch.  A show of unity.  Divisions and differences are minimized.  We come to recognize what we have in common.  

Unity can occasionally be a crippling thing as well.  There is something comforting about hearing our own words and opinions echoed back to us.  We might feel ourselves to be fairly cosmopolitan people - able to navigate foreign cities and speak a few words in another language but when we choose our friends they may well be those who are like-minded people.  We might have bent to our family’s will and followed in our family’s footsteps when we chose a profession.  We might have heard from a parent or another family member that the Smiths or the Joneses aren’t that sort of person.  We don’t do that.

That part of the world which is big and expansive escaped us because we conformed to the supposed unity of our family, our nation or our clan.  We took on the family narrative.  We lost out on horizons.

St Paul describes the society – and he would say that the Church is the greatest society of all because it is the one that God himself has built – as being made up of many nations, languages and even religious backgrounds which have been brought together and baptized into one Spirit.  From the many, one people.  Jews, Greeks and Barbarians, Male and Female, Rich and poor are gathered into a unity which must defy the prejudice and clan loyalties with which each viewed the other previously.

We are one body.  But does that mean that we are the same?  No and this is where Paul continues.  What troops out of that Ark of baptism are all the different creatures and varieties which make the world of the Church an interesting place to be.  Our gift to the world is that some of us move one way and some in other directions.  We use the gifts which God has given us and we discover gifts we did not know we had.

This is an interesting time for the Church and for churches like ours.  Gathered as we are from a variety of places we find that we have much in common.  We are able to work together.   In fact, we find ourselves today in a place where the future of our small congregation requires that we pull together as never before.  What is required, though, of each of us is not the same offering of a common gift.  It begins with the “Same Spirit” - it moves to the quite unique contribution that only you can make.  God has something for you to do.  God is lifting up ministries in his Church.  Which one is yours?

The Second Sunday after Epiphany
Year C
John 2:1-11                   

Those of you who read up on the Auvergne before moving here will know that this was one of the great wine regions of France before some bright spark had the clever idea of bringing vines over from the New World to plant on French terroirs and took little notice of the tiny aphids (Phylloxera vitifoliae) clinging to both root and branch of the American vines he shipped in on the boat.  The rest is sorry history.  The restoration of the wine industry with new grafted vines came late to our region.  Our local wines are only now beginning to climb back on to the register.  Good wine is produced after decades or centuries of interaction between grape type and soil consistency.  Good wine isn't produced in an instant.  Unless you were a guest at the wedding at Cana, that is....  On that occasion copious amounts of the very best quality wine issued from stone containers which had to that point contained only water.  I remember one of my past parishioners expressing frustration with me that the story required any explanation at all.  Didn't I believe in Jesus?  Don't I believe in miracles? If Jesus is on site, then miracles happen and bad situations are reversed - these thirteen words are all that is required.  Here endeth the sermon.

Calm down dear (I wanted to say but didn't).  John's Gospel puts it like this:

Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

A sign points beyond itself to something else.  Even if it begins with a particular problem in time and space it then points out of the room and away from the cups on the table and beyond whatever problems the party's hosts may have.  Jesus performs a handful of miracles.  When he does they are never merely miracles.  They teach us something about God - wrapped up, as they are, with the larger story of the restoration of Creation in the story of the Word's "dwelling with us".  The story informs much more than any present crisis which the instantly needful might want to aim Jesus at.  The party will go on - with or without wine on the table.  Jesus promises his disciples no shortcuts.  He often tells them that they will engage painfully with the world around them but that they will be equipped by him, through faith in him – the one who drives the nourishment up the vine and swells the full fruiting berry.  It is all about that ineffable thing which we lift our glass of good wine to - which is life itself – full and rich and interconnected.  You might say that there is no shortcut to quality - to quality life anyway as the sort of good wine which a true connoisseur would describe with all those daft wine metaphors: "apples in the nose” or “notes of saddle leather, jujubes, and turpentine with a hint of combed cotton” meaning that the tastes and smells evoke and connect to other worlds and experiences.  Signs point to something else. Simple truths open many doors.  

It’s not merely red wine on the table.  It’s not just a miracle.  

First Sunday after Epiphany
Year C                                                                               Acts 8:14-17
                                                                                                                           Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Hopeful people populate both our readings from the New Testament this Sunday. The lesson from Acts tells us that a fellowship of believers had sprung up in Samaria. This was good news concerning the progress of the Gospel which reached the Apostles in Jerusalem who then sent Peter and John down to ensure that the new believers were properly ushered into the work of God through the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In the Gospel reading a group of eager enquirers are pointed by John the Baptist away from himself and in the direction of God's coming Messiah who makes his appearance on the banks of the Jordan River at the end of the passage.

Hopefulness? Are you gripped by it sometimes? Do you remember at least what it felt like? Was it a feeling? A disposition? A state of mind? That glimmering sense of something good around the corner? Easier for some folks perhaps than for others.

You might even vaguely resent the human actors who are ushered into your dream world telling you "This way, not that way!" or "Hope for this and not for that". Who are they to rain on your parade or to nudge you this way or that? It's what teachers, preachers and prophets are sometimes known to take themselves for - the managers and gestionnaires of other people's hopes and fears. Fair cop, I suppose. We should presume to supervise less. But...

The Christmas season which has just ended and the season of Epiphany which now begins is all about the hopes of the world being met in Jesus Christ who is God's gift not only to his ancient people but his gift given freely to the whole world. God responds to the needs of his creation by acting in time and space in the real world we inhabit. It bears saying that Christian hope is not a matter of maintaining a sunny disposition or being the type of person who can see the silver lining around any cloud. Being that sort of person is a matter of having inherited the right genes or being raised in the right sort of environment. Some of you will never be naturally chirpy. And that's okay. Christ came to save the grumpy and the gloomy too.

In line with our personalities or even in spite of our personalities God has given us sufficient reason to hope and someone to hope in. This is the dawn, the time of new things. Men and women across the ages have found their lives and have come to their senses in the light of the Good News of what God has done for the world and continues to do through the Holy Spirit. Wholeness and purpose - reconciliation between God and humankind - deep peace and confidence: These are not unreasonable hopes.

The prophet on the river bank directs those hopes of yours towards the one whom God has sent. Disciples travel from Head Office to pray with you for the spiritual strength to accomplish the task. You're part of a hopeful community. And yes, we would rather help than interfere. But even if we get it wrong you are not alone.

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The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Year C                                                                                                                        Luke 1:39-45

Are you in Clermont over Christmas? Or are you somewhere else with your friends and family?

And what are you expecting?

An image: Two women dressed in vaguely middle-eastern fashion clasp each other in an embrace of joyful friendship. Some artists have portrayed one woman as being older than the other or one woman more advanced in pregnancy than the second (who might not yet even seem obviously to be with child). In the picture one woman might be regarding the other with greater honour. Even if the painting were not labeled, anyone familiar with Christian art and iconography will immediately think of the Visitation - the visit of Mary to her cousin Elisabeth (the mother of John the Baptist) and Elisabeth's salutations to Mary: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb" and "Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord".

You brought that box of Christmas decorations upstairs from the basement. You adorned your house "as it was" with something new, something seasonal, something pretty which you will take down and store again in the cave. The house goes back to its usual state. Isn't the Universe an elastic place?. It can be stretched into a new shape. It is capable of novelty. But at the same time it has an amazing ability to return to where it was and to leave no shed of evidence of ever having been different. This is not a modern reflection: men and women have been disappointed before with changes they were promised by others or with the changes which they themselves had promised to turn into a reality in their own lives.

Every Sunday we say, in our Nicene Creed, that God is Incarnate - that in one unique moment in history he took upon himself human flesh through his earthly mother and joins us where we are so that life could be changed in such a way that it does not slip back. From the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews to the testimony men and women you know yourselves, there is abundant witness to the power of God to change willing lives beyond their bounds with power and with permanence. Listen! Engage with the promise of God. Go to Bethlehem this Christmas with your prayers and your thoughts. Elisabeth cries out to Our Lady that she is blessed because she has believed what God has promised. The message to human beings is nothing like the adornment of what already is. It is substantial hope for what has not yet begun to be.

Your lives need never be the same

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The Third Sunday of Advent
Year C
Luke 3:7-18

The idea of fire as an agent of cleansing and renewal appears twice in this passage from Luke’s Gospel.  Useless trees, which bear no fruit, are cast into the fire.  The empty hulls of grain – the chaff – is burned at the end of the harvest leaving the good grains to be bagged and taken into the larder.  We are familiar with one term from this passage – The Baptism by Fire – which we have incorporated into ordinary language to describe any event which seems destructive and hostile but which ends up fitting and preparing us through the ordeal it produces.

When you drive through northern British Columbia and the Yukon Territory along the Alaska Highway (which in my day was nearly all gravel for the 920 miles between Dawson Creek and Whitehorse) you pass through areas which have been recently burned over.  The burnt ground is dotted about with blackened stumps.  It speaks of death and destruction.  If you give it some thought, however, you might be struck by how this section of the forest is now a sunny spot for the first time and standing on what was once the forest floor you can now see the sky.  As you drive along for a few miles more you encounter areas which were burned over a year ago.  Fireweed grows in tremendous abundance, filling in the spaces that have been left.  As you drive further you pass areas which were burned over five years ago.  Small poplars are growing, their leaves shimmering like paper coins in the breeze.  Further on the conifers are new and still small in areas which were burned over a decade ago.  Every hillside around you with its bands of old conifers, fireweed, poplars and new conifers and bear witness to the regular and periodic cleansing of the land through fire.

You – the men and women, the boys and girls of Christ Church Clermont-Ferrand – are being invited by God to repent, to return and to be renewed.  The Advent scriptures come with both promises and warnings because the new life cannot simply be added to what we have already acquired and collected around ourselves over the years.  The natural man will suppose that the promises of new life are extra bits – options if you like - that might go nicely with what we already have.   As you approach the river you should expect to hear loudly that this is not so.  The prophets will all tell you that burdens must be dropped to the road side, taken off our shoulders, stripped and even burned away. 

Where most of our baptisms of fire are involuntary misadventures that come our way by chance or ill luck.  They fall on us.  Your invitation here is something of a quite different order:  you are being invited to enter into the Good News quite voluntarily, to undertake the necessary process of leaving behind what has held back the new growth you desire. 

John the Baptist is telling you quite roughly that you need to decide.  If you want to see the sky again you will need to let some  branches be burned away.

Giving Thanks in Crazy Times

A Sermon for an American Thanksgiving in France

2015 - Year B

 Matthew 6:25-33

Don't worry, says Jesus; not about food or drink, not about being

appropriately clothed.  Don't even worry about the length of your life.

You think you are alone with these concerns but you're not.

God knows you need all these things.

Yonder are the Gentiles.  Look at them strive.  Don't be like them.

Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things (the very

things you worry about) will be added to you.

Bible readings for Thanksgiving (October in Canada and November in America) are chosen according to the same three-year-cycle as the usual Sunday lections.  This year - Year B - dwells heavily on the subject of anxiety and the Gospel reading for the day is taken from the Sermon on the Mount. 

Jesus tells us not to worry. 

Let’s clear the table first, shall we?  There are two things we need to negate (one of them completely) and something else we need to explain so that we can see clearly what Jesus then proclaims to his listeners at the end of the passage as the best and most worthy way to deal with anxiety. 

After all, this is the Sermon on the Mount.   We might imagine it to be a sort of manifesto for Christians everywhere and at all times.   Because it deals with the subjects of worry and uncertainty it may have a particular leverage on us right now.  Terrorist attacks have taken place in various places around the world.  Here in France and in Western Europe families and friends are grieving the events and losses of the last week or so. A much larger community is worried about what might take place in the future.  As an expatriate community living in Clermont-Ferrand we have some particular refinements on that worry.  When the news reached our home countries, there were enquiries from friends and family members.  Are you safe right now?  Are you secure in the future?    How far is Clermont from Paris?  Are there troops on the street?  Do you live in ethnically mixed neighborhoods?  What sort of precautions are you all taking?  So, what should be our attitude in crazy and unsettling times?  If we're being told by Jesus not to worry we want to know how.  What are we being told not to do?  What should we do instead? 

First of all some negations:  The subject at hand is not worry itself.  Jesus is not chiding those of us who worry about nonsense.  That would be easy angle to take.   That would mean that this section of the Sermon on the Mount is directed to the ten percent of the population who jump at shadows or who always imagine the worst or who have lived with a sense of dread and impending doom most of their lives and watch helplessly as this anxiety passes from one thing to the next.  For such people this anxiety is more about them than it is about the world.  Faith can have a hand in fixing that too.  So can therapy.  So, too, will friendship.  These might help us to change the way we think. That’s another sermon, though.   Maybe a pastoral conversation.  That's not what this scripture is about.  Jesus is telling his followers on the mountain side that they should not even worry about things which are real and substantial threats to them – the absence of food, drink, and clothing – up to and including the very spans of their lives.  Real things – don’t worry about them, says Jesus.

There’s something else we need to negate and clear from the table:  Is Jesus simply praising a peasant’s or poor artisan’s life by suggesting that it won’t get any better by worrying?  Jesus was speaking to poor country people about a life of subsistence which, while it was hard, was at least working for them.  How could they complain too much?  They were alive after all, weren’t they, as they sat on the mountainside and listened to him?  They were descended from people who had successfully navigated poor and difficult lives and who had scraped by.   Their parents were no more secure than they were.  But they were alive, getting by year-by-year “working for the man,” living in their villages, playing with their surviving children. Is this a sermon meant to dignify a chronic life of worry and struggle as being ‘not so bad after all – most of you will survive - look at the birds, look at the flowers’?  Why would it take Jesus to say such a thing?  They’d heard that from their oppressors and employers. No, I don’t believe that Jesus was simply praising the low and humble life by recourse to nature and family history.  Both Jesus and the crowds understood the novelty of what he was proclaiming which was the presence of the Kingdom around them - Good News for the poor - not merely the dignity of the daily grind.  It’s what drew them to the hillside in the first place.

Before we leave the idea of an inherited ability to “scrape by”, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Isn’t there a well-known path through uncertainty that others walked before us?  You may be related to people who have lived - gotten by – even thrived - in highly insecure circumstances.  Some of you have work colleagues or even school mates here in Clermont who have come from countries where physical security is a daily concern and where the tasks of raising a family and maintaining a household takes place in an atmosphere of turmoil and chaos.  You might want to ask them how it’s done - and done successfully, for that matter.  But even this is still not the point of the passage.

Don't worry, says Jesus.

The word he uses for worry has, at its root, the idea of "dividing up" (“don’t divide” or “don’t be divided up”).  In English we say "don’t go to pieces" – similar, but still not completely on the nose.  The “dividing up” behind this Greek word for worry seems to be more like taking ten one-dollar-notes and trying to apply a dollar to each bill which has come through your letterbox, or trying to deal with all threats to safety, comfort or security simultaneously and thereby turning in frantic circles, desperate and with insufficient resources. The presumption is, of course, that we are completely alone with a single tank of gas that will not get us all the way to Swift Current or a limited pot of money which will not satisfy all our creditors.  Not that, Jesus says.  Don’t do that.  Unify your effort.  Focus your energy.  Do something else first.  He even tells us what that is:  First, says Jesus, seek the Kingdom of God and its righteousness.  After that, all these things will fall into place 

Is seeking the Kingdom of God, then, just a matter of running from what we know to be the case –  what is true?  Is it a matter of going in a different and unrelated direction?   You might object that what Jesus is saying in his Sermon on the Mount is simple denial.  Well, what is exactly is true here?  The truth that hits us in the face – which needs to be reacted to (which Jesus tells us not to do) and doesn’t need to be sought out (what Jesus does tell us to do) is written in four inch headlines in the newspaper in deep red block capitals on our television screens, with drumming music in the background, as we watch the 24 hour news.  Our way of life is at stake.  People of ill will lurk in the shadows.  Further plots are suspected.  The four-inch headlines in the newspaper and the deep red graphics on the network news would tell you that last Friday evening in Paris was a Night of Evil, a Night of Chaos and a Night of Danger. We find that we easily come to inhabit a world divided into black and white, yes and no, friend and enemy, good and evil, right and left in which we have no choice but to flee, react, hide, and strike out - or just helplessly flap our hands.  That might be our character or it may be what we do when we’re not feeling in control of circumstances. You and I should suspect, though, that the truth which you don’t need to seek, the truth which simply hits you in the face, is rarely the truth. And yes, the one positive command that Jesus issues in this passage is to seek - to seek the Kingdom and its peculiar logic.

We are mature enough to tolerate a measure of ambiguity - that state of life where paradoxes abound and more than one thing is true.  The battle is not between a thing which is false and a thing which is true but between two things which are found to be true when you dig a little bit – when you seek truth out.

It’s true that evil, chaos and danger were in evidence in Paris on the Friday night in question, in Beirut the day before and in Mali a few days later at the hands of small and organized groups of terrorists.  But that very same French capital city, for example, contained a much larger community of people intent on doing some of the following things:  comforting and shielding people with a physical embrace who needed to be hidden, reassured and protected, opening their doors to people who had found themselves stranded in the 10^th and 11^th Arrondissements, working for days to ensure the appropriate medical care for the wounded who were swamping Paris hospitals and conducting all the appropriate investigations to ensure the safety of their city.  What we don’t see screaming at us in the headlines is any mention of a Night of Courage, a Night of Friendship or a Night of Helping Strangers. Little mention is made of the people who agonized within themselves in the following days and who vowed that their responses would not make them smaller people, less open to others and less capable of love.  That the truth of what occurred on a particular evening in Paris was expressed in one way and not in another was a choice that somebody made.  Somebody who is not us - who have sat on the hillside and heard Jesus tell us that in the Kingdom things are divided up differently.  

 We have rather a lot of choice in the matter.  On such a night, while the panic and the anger, the prejudice and all the frantic feelings have been flagged and then negotiated, there always remains something to do - something that makes us better and not worse, more open and not hidden away. Life in the Kingdom of God is living within a truth which men and women have chosen to seek out.    It is quite possibly not the first thing in their mind and certainly not the immediate reaction.  What is discovered is a bigger world - a place where worries and hungers are mediated by purpose.  Tell your children that.  Tell your neighbours.  There's always something to do.  And be thankful that such a world is there for the seeking.