From the Globe and Mail
RCMP in Campbell River on Vancouver Island said a local woman strolling a beach found an Adidas sneaker this morning, containing what appears to be a man's foot.
“It's certainly suspicious,” Sergeant Mike Tresoor said in an interview.
This is a newly appointed Convenor of a Canons Committee and the best laid plans which the mice and he presented to General Synod that afternoon had gone completely tits up.
He should think of it as a sort of hazing ritual. A lay delegate, a clergy delegate and a bishop flip a coin in the men's loo to see who'll do the deed this year. And what shall we do? Shall we get the new Convenor liquored up and put him naked on a train for Cornwall? Maybe lure him into a tattoo studio?
Or why not simply defeat his flagship motion from an unexpected corner?
A fine young fellow. You can't help but like the guy and think back fondly back to the years when you were young and your limbs grew all out of proportion and you had these feelings you didn't understand.
It's been a heck of a week or so. I was down in Glasgow on Thursday, thence to Derbyshire for a conference (more on that later) from Monday until Wednesday and our General Synod has been in session since yesterday morning. Lots of fun and too much travelling. I'm sitting next to the 'naughty corner' of disgruntled clergy who are abstaining and objecting to everything. I'm told that they're not all from Glasgow Diocese but I don't believe it. They've already been referred to as 'the usual suspects' by the chairman of the last session.
Forensic references - sounds like Glasgow to me!
Clearly they will have no portion among the just!
The very contentious 'Congregational Status' Canon has finally been resolved after two years of bitching.
Regularly updated text and audio updates of the proceedings of General Synod can be found HERE.
Did you appreciate this sermon? Did you nick bits of it for your own sermon on Sunday morning? Here's the collection plate. Fr Kenny's congregation in Dumbarton raises the lion's share of the budget of a primary school in Serrakunda, the Gambia.
Matthew 7:21-29
A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost
We all stop working when the bell rings.
Not the sharp little bell indicating that a client is at the counter looking for some attention. Not the bell that announces the end of the day or time for lunch but that constant droning bell designed by some bright person to be able to cut through background noise and cause us to straighten up and pay attention which indicates that the fire alarm has been pulled somewhere in the building.
A mistake? Possibly. A drill? Were we to expect one – was one announced? You look around the office and everybody has stopped work. There are a few weak smiles. Your colleagues shuffle their papers on the desk. It’s possibly nothing. But we are on the seventeenth floor. There’s a long way to go before we can leave the building.
When it is all right to alarm somebody? When your children are playing outside you’ll hear one of them cry out because they’ve fallen. They cry. It’s nothing, you say to yourself, and you just hope they don’t come in sniffling and requiring too much attention because you’re in the midst of a conversation. But there’s a different sort of cry which gets you up out of your chair. It’s the real thing. Somebody’s hurt.
The reading from Matthew’s Gospel this morning is alarming. It is intended to alarm. It’s not just a general call to vigilance. These words were meant to alarm particular people. They were not spoken, remembered and written down in order to alarm those who have never made a profession of Christian faith. They were not intended to provoke someone who’s never given the Gospel a second thought. So they are not a fairly aggressive evangelical thunderbolt aimed at those outside the Church (because, after all, words to the stranger on Jesus’ part are generally words of invitation). No – these words are directed to us – to people who may never have allowed the thought to pass through their heads that they might be on the wrong track.
We are, after all, members. We are card-carrying Christians.
What would it say on your card? Maybe you actually have a card. If I dug around long enough I’d find my card. I filled one out at an evangelical crusade some time back in the seventies. It had a space for your name and a space for you to write down the date and a prayer which you were supposed to say. I think I’m supposed to be able to recite the date – tell you which evening it was that I made a commitment to Jesus Christ but I can’t be that specific. Maybe you don’t have an actual card but if you did, what would it say? That you were born here – that these pews and that Sunday School room were home turf for you – that you were raised in a Christian home, that you attended this or that Church, were part of the Sunday School and the Youth Group. Maybe you were part of the Christian Union at College.
Now none of us are the sort of folks who believe that the book of life is just a collection of parish rolls from all around the world. We know more than that – there’s something which comes from the heart which is counted for more than our names on any piece of paper. We know that or we think we know that and so to supplement our sense of well being and ‘being at home’ in the Church we will recount the times that we have ‘felt’ something like God in the midst of our services or the times we have ‘resolved’ to be better Christians than we are. We can tell the story of our own lives and can underline the parts where we believed we drew near to God and He to us.
How safe is that story – safe in the sense of it being an accurate telling of men and women growing gradually closer to their Redeemer over the course of years?
After all – any story can be told in the best possible light. And we do have some investment in telling our own story like that. We belong. We reassure ourselves in moments of doubt that we belong.
The tale Jesus relates is that of two houses - one which is built upon rock and another which is built upon sand. It’s not a complicated image. We might be familiar with it as it was retold in the story of the Three Little Pigs.
I live in a frame house in Penicuik which was built on fairly inadequate foundations back in the late sixties. It’s a great little house – purpose-built as a rectory with the office and a large entrance allowing people to come and visit without dominating the whole place and which leaves the family adequate protected space to carry on their lives. But I’ve seen cracks in the wall which indicate to me that there is movement going on. I know that eventually these cracks will widen. This is not a rectory which will survive a hundred years. The choices made back in the late sixties about expenditures and construction costs will eventually come back and haunt us.
What can be done? Nothing much really – the place is nicely tarted up. Every time the place is painted the cracks have been plastered. That’ll do it for a few years. But they open again and show themselves. There is a problem.
Most church basements in Montreal see at least one twelve step group in the course of the week. Narcotics anonymous, Alcoholics anonymous – gamblers maybe. They shuffle in – from all walks of life – and they tell of the years in which they patched up the cracks in their walls until eventually the walls gave in. They will recount – sometimes quite dryly and dispassionately – the lengths to which they would try and convince themselves and others that they really had no problem at all – that every man has the right to a drink or two at the end of the day – that a few pounds spent on the horses really didn’t amount to anything – that other people consumed much more cocaine than they ever did and managed to hold down a job and stay out of the hospital. These lies eventually cost them jobs – it cost them their marriage – it pushed them into activity which may have ultimately cost them their liberty.
They may even count themselves the luckiest of people the wall came tumbling down because it was footed on a tissue of falsehood and that when it came tumbling down they found themselves owners of the only thing they had left and the greatest gift of all – time. Time to rebuild. Time to take stock and form an accurate assessment of their situation.. Time to make amends. Time to come to know their ‘Higher Power’.
When will we be honest? One thing that stands out in the Gospel is that Jesus does not abide fakery – will not remain silent as those who find themselves privileged proceed to tie heavy burdens upon those around them. He does not defer to the religious leaders of his day. He finds strength in people who others have given up on and he finds deceit and untruthfulness in people who ought to know better. “You are a teacher of Israel” he says to Nicodemus, “and you do not know these things” “Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees” he calls out “blind guides”.
We could get agitated about this. The reading begins this morning with a word of doom
Depart from me you evil doers - I never knew you!
spoken to a group of people who claim to have done great things in Jesus’ name but who have not been formed by his words nor have they done what these words require – they have only ‘spoken them’. With these words men and women have felt special, honoured, included. With these words men and women have differentiated themselves from the others – from the great unwashed – they have forged identity – Christian identity – with words such as these. But the inside has not matched the outside. The truth has been kept secret – the lonely existence of men and women who should have been alarmed but weren’t has finally been revealed for what it is. A sham – a show. As with so many things – a good dose of bad news early enough can be the best thing that has happened to us and the one who faces us up to the mirror only feels like our enemy.
We have heard this story. It was written for us. It was designed to place within us a germ of self doubt – a pebble in our shoe. Faith is tried and proved in adversity. How do we do in adverse conditions? Love is tried and proved in those circumstances where love is required by somebody not overly loveable and may prove more difficult a commodity to find than we ever thought. How do we measure up in our gift of love to those around us?
And you have heard this Gospel story read, preached and proclaimed on the morning of June the first, 2008. It was remembered and written down for us – not merely to reflect on the fact that we are probably doomed but with adequate time on our hands this morning to reflect on whether the inside looks like the outside and whether the story we would tell about ourselves resembles in any way the true story of who we are.
Did you appreciate this sermon? Did you nick bits of it for your own sermon on Sunday morning? Here's the collection plate. Fr Kenny's congregation in Dumbarton raises the lion's share of the budget of a primary school in Serrakunda, the Gambia.
Matthew 6:24-34
A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
We’ve all known folks with a light touch on life – given to making major changes in the midst of life, not overly careful with their money, spontaneous and maybe a big glib. They can be grouped into two categories – those we felt were foolish and irresponsible and those we have admired and who completely amaze us.
In the first group are all the mad children we ever knew. The ones who went off to Europe with their boyfriends at a scandalously young age – the ones who used the entire inheritance their grandparents had left them to invest in something which was not a sure thing – most of the class clowns we went to school with who would open their mouths and say the most outrageous things and who didn’t seem to care who was listening or what their permanent records would look like at the end of their education.
Someone – we might have thought – should sit that person down and give them a few home truths – let them know the importance of building up credits for themselves – both personal and financial. A bad credit reference – well that can follow you for years – as can a bad reputation. Living for today will not see you through until tomorrow. There’s that little fable about the grasshopper and the ants - it might do them a world of good.
“Is not life more than food” says Jesus.
"Yes", we might reply, "but when you are hungry everything looks like food".
We will always be able to find counter-examples – sufficient in number to defy anybody who would take this passage from Matthew’s Gospel and these words of Jesus as promoting carelessness in personal life or denial about the reality of poverty or hunger.
We said at the outset that there were two groups of people with a light touch on life. The first group leave us thinking how thankful we are not to have ruined our lives through indiscipline, laziness, carelessness and irresponsibility. The other folks, however, are the graceful ones. They leave us wondering whether we’ve missed the point somewhere along the line. When we think of them we look in the mirror and feel suddenly very old and frightened.
They did something very well. They were bold – they took risks in order to do it and they seemed to do it without effort – gracefully. An opportunity arose and there was simply no question. It was the right time and they found themselves in the right place and they seized it. Surely they must have had occasion to wonder whether there was a safer option. Surely they sweated for a moment or two. They must have stopped at the top of the cliff before diving into the water and marvelled at the distance they would need to dive before they hit the water. They must have stopped to think that they were risking rather a lot and stepping out beyond the known into uncharted territory.
The first group would have done well to worry a little more. We are not unhappy in having been that little bit more careful and having established our trajectory and the credits we needed. But we – at least some of us anyway – have a deep rooted suspicion that there is no point at which we could stop being so careful. There’s no sign post on the road that says ‘you’ve been careful long enough”. “Stop now”. Now is the time to kick over the traces and gain for yourself a sense of adventure. “Take a few risks here before the next bend”. It’s not as if we’re alone. Everybody wants to play safe these days. I don’t need to tell you how full the newpapers are of good advice on safety and security. There are plenty of doomsayers: our lawyer or insurance agent would advise against anything untoward.. There is no governance board which will ever advise a chief executive to stop compressing and economising. That’s the problem. Playing safe becomes such a habit. It goes on for ever – and ever – unless a decision is made to stop.
When Jesus travelled through the communities of Galilee in the early part of the Gospel account he entered these communities as complete and pure opportunity. Opportunity. His words were words of invitation – words which attracted some and repelled others. One is taken and another is left. One rises from the boat and follows. Another gets back on his donkey and rides away because the risks are too great.
Opportunities. We’ve had ‘em. We think of the paths we have not taken – the forgiveness we have not granted because the risk of being hurt and compromised all over again was too great. The love we did not discover because the risks to our independence seemed too severe. The truth we did not speak because it might have alarmed the stockholders and driven down the share prices.
Reasons to worry don’t go away. Not when we’ve made a habit of hedging our bets. . If you’re looking for reasons to be prudent, or, as T.S. Eliot put it to ‘measure out your lives in coffee spoons’ those reasons can always be found.
It’s a wonderful word – worry. Our fears are given to us as part of our animal equipment – part of the natural man. They keep us at a distance from large predators, they equip us to differentiate between friend and foe. They spur us on to fill our larders before the first snow falls. We worry for a reason – there is much worth worrying about. Apart from its habitual use to describe the sort of anxious fretting we engage in at the prospect of some dimly perceived future it also describes what my Labrador retriever Clio does to one of her stuffed dog toys. She sits in the corner and chews it – she worries it until it is nothing but a pile of threads and polyester fluff.
We can worry ourselves like that. We can worry ourselves sick. We worry about real things and we worry about rubbish. We worry ourselves small, we worry ourselves into corners, we worry ourselves out of community – we sorry ourselves away from opportunities – away from love – away from value.
Membership in the Kingdom of God, which draws near every time Jesus draws near, requires the response of free men and women..
Did you appreciate this sermon? Did you nick bits of it for your own sermon on Sunday morning? Here's the collection plate. Fr Kenny's congregation in Dumbarton raises the lion's share of the budget of a primary school in Serrakunda, the Gambia.
