Off to Africa

Well, I'm off to Tanzania for the entire month of July. I hope to keep being able to blog so I don't need to write one big one at the end of my trip. I'll be visiting Meza, a friend who studied at the Moravian Seminary with me. Most of my time will be spent with him and his family in Mbeya, although we will hopefully do a little bit of traveling together.

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. I know I will.

Last Sermon at Riverside

One of the first things that happened to me upon my arrival here in Riverside was a change in the colour of my thumb. Up until this point, the only colours my thumb had been were regular flesh, and black and blue, when I accidently hit it with a hammer. That all changed because when Jeff and Kris went on vacation and to Mississippi, as one of my tasks was to water the plants outside and inside the parsonage. Suddenly my thumb had turned green and as I reflect on my time spent here in Riverside, I have come to realize the position of student pastor means that a green thumb is necessary. Even more so, as followers of Christ, we are all called to be gardeners, people who plant seeds.

You see, for me as a student pastor, one of the best parts of my job is that I get to scatter seed as far as I can. Whether it is in a children’s chat, teaching a Sunday School class, preaching a sermon, building a labyrinth, having a shared meal, writing a newsletter article, discussion during a committee meeting, working with the confirmation class, or even during a short conversation while shaking hands at the end of a worship service, all of these moments are times when I hope I have scattered seeds which will eventually yield some amazing fruit. The disappointing part of being a student pastor is that a year is rarely long enough to really nurture such seeds so that they may bear fruit.

But between my joys and disappointments in my own gardening role is the life giving role in which you all play within God’s garden because the truth of the matter is that your pastors are not the true gardeners. Each and every one of you are the people who should be planting the seeds in the lives of your friends, your neighbors, your loved ones, every person you meet in the store, while you walk your dog, while watch a baseball game. Every moment we have to interact with another person is another chance to plant a seed which God will give water and light to in order that it yield fruit to be harvested for God’s kingdom.

Now remember the first scripture which we read today? Jesus tells us to enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.” I think that when we combine both of these scriptures, we can gain a better understanding of how we can plant our seeds in good soil so that we don’t just go about scattering our seed in thorny places where they will not take a good root.

As we try and walk that narrow path, we realize that the soil on the sides is incredibly fertile. The only problem is that this path is difficult to find. Almost everything in our own culture tells us that we should take the easy route in life. Instead of making a meal at home, we have countless fast food restaurants which offer to take the time and energy out of preparing the meal. Instead of taking mass transportation because it is more of a hassle, we all drive places individually so we can get there as quickly as possible. We spend more time in front of the television than sharing stories with our sisters and brothers in Christ. There are times in which we argue with one another in order to avoid doing the right thing because the right thing is hard to do while arguing is the easy way out.

Doing something hard over something easy is what God calls us to each and every day we decide to follow Jesus. Christ raises the bar! He does not allow us to buy our salvation with money or works. He calls us to follow and then continues on ahead of us, wondering if we will try to catch up.

When I was in college, the degree I cared most about was my political science degree. My first two years were taught mainly by the head of the political science department who was considered to be a fairly easy teacher. He would post the notes of every lecture he gave and would create the tests right from his notes. And while he did not require you to attend class, if you attended every class and had a B or higher average, you didn’t have to take the final. For two years, I thought his classes were the best thing going. I always got a B in each of his classes and never had to take a single final. If I wanted to take the easy road for an example in this story, my point could be how important it is just to show up, but the easy way is not the best way.

During my junior year, we got a new professor in the Political Science department. This professor said that every class you missed, your next paper would lose 5 percent of the grade. If he thought most of the class didn’t do the required reading, he would give the class a pop quiz. Not once did he simply lecture from the notes he took from the stuff we already read…the new professor actually was ahead of us in our discussions and learning. He did not require us to regurgitate information we could find in the library, he wanted to see if we could think for ourselves. At the end of the semester, I had a C minus in this class. It was the lowest grade I ever got in college. I probably should have been disappointed with myself, but the truth of the matter is that I thought it was the best class I ever had. In fact, the next semester I took another one of our new professors classes because of how much I learned. I was challenged in ways I had not been before, and it was a great thing.

Sadly, when I look at my senior year of political science classes, I again had the teacher I had my first two years and I fell back into mediocre work. It is the perfect example of how one of my teachers planted a seed of thorns and one teacher planted a seed which would have deep roots if they were not so close together. I have to constantly struggle with the thorny bush my first professor planted. It is the seed planted in my soil which makes me lazy, which makes me only do what I need to do instead of doing the hard thing which will cause me to be a better person. And thankfully, I still have the seed along side of it which calls out to me to push myself to learn even if it is hard, even if my grade will not be as high.

After the service today, when you’re having lunch with a family member or a friend, I challenge you to share a story in your life in which a seed was planted in good soil and it produced an unexpected yield in your own life. It is when you share these stories, it is like eating the fruit which was once a small seed. It has been planted, grown, nurtured and finally shared. When that’s done, you have more seeds which will hopefully find their way to fresh soil and you can continue following Jesus down the narrow road.

To wrap this up, I just want to thank you all for your warm gifts of hospitality and the love which you have shown me over the last year. I will never forget the time we all walked in God’s garden together. It was a wonderful experience for me and I will always look back on my time here as fruitful. Amen.

Wordle Sermon

This is my latest sermon put into a word cloud. Thanks to Wezlo for finding this. Putting one's own work into this medium really is just plain awesome for those people who struggle to make art.

Romans 6: 1-13

I want everyone to go ahead and find their pulse. Everyone got it? Good, now wipe your forehead and say “phew”. I want to congratulate you. You are a resurrected being! Repeat after me: “I am a resurrected being! I am alive in Christ!” Believe it or not brothers and sisters, this is a very important distinction between us and the rest of the world. When we are baptized, we are making a public statement that we are a resurrected person. Not everyone can make such a seemingly outrageous claim. In fact, it appears that most Christians fail to embrace living a resurrected life and this is a very sad thing.

There are a lot of excuses we can use for failing to embrace living a resurrected life in Christ. We can say that we were baptized at such a young age that we don’t remember what it means to be baptized. We can say that our western culture allows us to be purchasers of faith instead people who truly seek to be disciples. We can blame TV evangelists, the liberal media, the government, or even other denominations or faiths. Because of this, it seems as if it is easier to continue to live in sin and ask for forgiveness than to be a bearer of grace to the rest of the world.

For the most part, I assume that the sins which we all normally pray forgiveness for are what we might know of as the 7 deadly sins which are Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth. If none of those are particularly meaningful to you, an Archbishop in the Catholic Church has recently added 7 more sins to the list. They are Environmental Pollution, Genetic Manipulation, Accumulating Excessive Wealth, Inflicting Poverty, Drug Trafficking and consumption, Morally Debatable Experiments, and Violations of Fundamental Rights of Human Nature[1]. If you somehow still find yourself thinking those are fairly easy to avoid, Gandhi has his own version of 7 deadly sins. They are Wealth without Work, Pleasure without Conscience, Science without Humanity, Knowledge without Character, Politics without Principal, Commerce without Morality, and Worship without Sacrifice[2]. If you’re anything like me, I know that I’ve fallen prey to more than a few of these sins. In fact, there are only two which I’m pretty sure I haven’t done, which are genetic manipulation and morally debatable experiments, and that’s only because I’m not smart enough to figure out how.

Fortunately for us, if we are baptized and have a pulse, we do not need to continue to keep on committing those sins and asking forgiveness. Please don’t think I’m saying that we need not ask for forgiveness any longer, because when we do slip up, we must still ask for God’s grace and forgiveness, but I’m saying that God calls us to a higher standard. The second half of verse 13 calls us to “offer ourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of our body to God as instruments of righteousness.” What this does is take the things which could be small stumbling blocks in our faith journey and transforms them into stepping stones.

Peter is my favourite example of a person who turned a potential stumbling block into a stepping stone. When he denied that he knew Christ three times, the moment the rooster crowed, he could have allowed himself to stay dejected, hating himself for being so selfish. Instead, he allowed the grace of God to overpower his sin, and allowed his initial denial to lift him to new heights in his discipleship.

If you find in your life that you are always envious of your neighbor’s flat screen television, one way of making such envy into a stepping stone is to get rid of the TV you have and find another way to spend your time or perhaps you could simply start by getting rid of cable. If you find yourself with more wealth than you really need, give it away so that it cannot hold power over you. Or if Gandhi’s lists of sins, which border on the spiritual more than the physical, are more difficult for you to keep, find a way to turn one of them into a stepping stone. Gandhi’s last sin, which is Worship without sacrifice is by far the most intriguing sin to me. Sacrifice as worship is an amazing thing which we hopefully think about every day when we make it a point to take up our cross and follow Christ. When we sacrifice, that old part inside of us which was prone to sin will die and make us a better disciple. The trick is to actually allowing it to die. I heard a story of a person who realized that when they were sinning and they were not allowing their sin to be a stepping stone, they would say words which are normally part of a funeral service. Upon realization that their sin was getting the best of them and not allowing Christ to shine through them, they would say “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Rest in peace."[3]

One of my favourite movies is the Shawshank Redemption and I think it does a wonderful job of giving us a visual example of what it means to give a tiny funeral to our sin each and every day. You see, in a funeral, some pastors as they say the words, Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, will sometimes sprinkle some soil on the top of the coffin. In the Shawshank Redemption, the character played by Tim Robbins, has slowly been planning his escape from prison. Every day he scratched a little bit of a hole in the wall in order to escape his cell. Every day when he was out on the yard, he took the dirt and dust created by digging the hole, put it in his pant’s pocket and let the dirt go as he walked the yard. Every day he allowed a little bit of the thing which held him as an innocent prisoner to return to the earth, and after many many years, he was free. Morgan Freeman’s character then quipped that his friend’s favourite part of every day was releasing that dirt and dust every day into the yard.

That’s the same way we should feel every day when we turn our sins into something which glorifies our risen savior. When we are able to say, even though I sin, I will use this moment to show how great God is. When we are able to do that, we are truly living a life which tells the world we are resurrected with Christ.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7287071.stm
[2] http://www.deadlysins.com/features/gandhi.htm
[3] Brad Braxton. Dead and Alive. http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/braxton_4502.htm

Seeking God First – Matthew 6:24-34

The Hebrew Scripture has 613 commandments in it. Most of us only know about 10, and even then, we have a difficult time remembering all of them. Thankfully, the Gospels have Jesus reinforcing only two. To love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That’s easy to remember and hopefully leads us to better relationships with God and every other person in our lives. But there are other commandments which Jesus says which we either choose to ignore or have such a difficult time living, that we don’t even bother to try.

The Gospel lesson for today comes at the tail end of the Sermon on the Mount. Most of us have some idea as to its beginning, Blessed are the poor in spirit… blessed are the meek…blessed are the peacemakers… Then there’s that wonderful part about being the salt of the earth and the light of the world. These parts make us feel good about who we are as disciples of Christ. We tend to forget about the latter parts, because they’re much more difficult to understand, and even harder sometimes to live.

The commandment that Jesus offers us today is, in my opinion, one of the hardest things a follower of Christ can attempt to live out. What is this commandment? It comes from verse 25 and continues at verse 31. Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink: or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food and the body more important than clothes?... So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

That’s tough. In fact, most scholars and preachers do a very good job of deflecting the point of what Jesus was saying. They say “Jesus' challenge is (also) not a mandate for stupidity and irresponsible planning. It is about having a clear goal and setting up the path in a way that takes us there and not down the side alleys of spending too much time thinking about ourselves”[1] This type of thinking allows us to still be members in good standing in the church of consumerism and keeps us from living in the Kingdom of God which Jesus calls us to.
Instead, our “middle-class culture always wants it both ways on almost everything; a little of this and a little of that; a world of both-and. That’s not Jesus’ instinct about the kingdom. His view is that it’s either-or. Don’t even try to live it otherwise.”[2]

This passage then, is really about stewardship and in fact, it would be extremely easy to link what Jesus is saying to giving of our money in order that it no longer control us. While this is true in some senses, I believe it misses the point of what Jesus wants us to hear. If we only focus this on clothes, food and money, “we subtly succumb to the illusion that we are the only sufficient stewards, not an invisible God. Life in the kingdom demands that this be reversed.”[3]
In fact, a couple of chapters later, we see the disciples succumbing to the same illusion. Shortly after the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sends out the 12 to drive out demons and perform miracles. Upon their return, we get to read the story of the feeding of the 5000. The disciples want to send the crowds away because they are thinking about stewardship. They could not afford to pay for meals for so many people. Can you imagine Jesus smacking his head when his disciples mentioned that? Why are they still worrying about where their food will come from?
In fact, it seems to me that we in our contemporary church fully live within that model. We worry so much about our own stewardship of the things God has blessed us with, that we tend to forget the stewardship of God, who provides every basic necessity. Seeking God will lead to miracles, worrying about how you will pay for it will lead to disappointment.

I’m sure all the trustee’s right now are shaking their heads and thinking I have no idea what I’m talking about. Even though Jesus says that when we seek first the kingdom of God and all of the other necessitates will be given to us (v 33), “we know that our money problems will not all be solved by an unquestioning confidence in God. Even Paul, whose confidence in God was unbounded, often went hungry and without shelter (2 Cor. 11:27). What Paul learned from his deprivations was that God was greater than his needs (Phil. 4:11, 13).”[4]

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, we cannot simply learn about what Jesus is talking about. We must live the experience. When you are thinking about having your neighbors over to your home for dinner, but have put it off because you haven’t got food which is going to show off your talents in the kitchen; Jesus says, thank God for the peanut butter and jelly you’ve got in your pantry and have them over anyway. The fellowship is much more important than the food. It is putting God’s righteousness as your first priority and your own worries and desires second.
Putting your own desires second is not exactly the easiest thing in the world to do. Sometimes it produces amazing miracles, and other times, miracles which are less than exciting. Two weeks ago, I was Sunday night and the Flyers were playing the Penguins in the conference finals. I had preached a sermon earlier that day, which for some reason tired me out more than normal, and all I wanted to do was sit and watch the game in peace. I picked a seat which didn’t have anyone around me, and the only thing on the bar was a bill for someone’s tab. It appeared that I wasn’t going to be bothered there, so I sat down, ordered some food, and began watching the game. About five minutes into the game, I found out why there was a bill in front of the seat next to me. The drunkest guy in the bar was outside having a cigarette and had decided to stumble back inside and where does he sit? Right next to me.

I do everything in my power to give off a vibe that said I don’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t take my eyes off the screen, I kept my arms crossed and I tried my best not to laugh when my drunken neighbor started getting into a funny conversation with 3 people on the other side of the bar.

But it’s not like this guy didn’t try to get me to talk. He asked me my name, shook my hand, but I was a stone wall and he moved on. For the next five minutes, this guy was verbally beaten up by the three men and somehow, the drunk guy started talking about the Tet Offensive and Vietnam and how these guys had no idea about anything and ended up getting quite upset. The bartender came over and yelled at the guy, but it really didn’t help. And all I can think to myself is, didn’t God know that I wanted a nice quiet night of watching the Flyers?

Then out of no where, this drunk guy mentions Hosea 4:6. Which is “My people are destroyed from a lack of knowledge.” Right after he quotes Hosea, which is a fairly obscure book in the Bible, he turns around and asks me what I do for a living. Still not wanting to talk to the man, I tell him I’m a preacher, hoping that would scare him off. Unfortunately, that was an invitation for him to have a conversation with me. He ended up doing most of the talking. In his drunken speech, he told me a lot of information about himself, and what I needed to do in order to become a good preacher. Some of the stuff was good information, other was complete nonsense. Then, about 45 minutes later, he starts talking about King David. How he sent the husband of the woman he lusted after off to his death and how God still said that David was a man after his own heart. My drunken conversation partner realized how profound God was and just left the bar. He was in such sheer amazement of the character of God…

Well, I watched the last few minutes of the second period and decided to leave for home. I had too much excitement for one night. After I closed the door to the bar, I turned around to see the drunken man sitting on a bench. I had to walk by him as I headed for home. As I walked by him, I noticed that he had urinated all over himself. He was wearing a grey t-shirt and it was quite noticeable. At this point, I took pity on him and tried to say goodnight. I then realized he was talking to God. Well, he stopped that conversation and began talking to me again. He kept poking me and eventually he grabbed my hand. He said that he wanted to pray. He took my hand and put it on his chest, about 3 inches away from the stain on his t-shirt. He was holding on to my hand pretty tight and began praying. I was holding on tightly too, but only because I didn’t want his hand to slip down a few more inches. Shortly after that, he finished his prayer, I said goodbye, went home, and used a lot of anti-bacterial soap to wash my hands.

It was not the relaxing night I had hoped for, but I went to bed, wondering how I was going to tell my friends what had happened to me. I told some people over the next few days, and at that point, it was nothing more than a gross story about the drunken guy at the bar. Well, I went back to the bar a few nights later to again watch the Flyers. I sat down in the same seat, although this time there was no bar tab next to me. Sometime after the first period, the man arrived, slightly more sober than he was the last time we met.

He asked me if I understood that it wasn’t him talking to me that night. That he was just a messenger. We spent another hour talking about how he spent time in prison, how he had prostate cancer, how he didn’t expect to live much longer, but that he felt God was keeping him alive because God still needed him. He told me that he sure as heck hoped that I wasn’t the last thing God needed him for and that he didn’t ever want to see me again in this bar. I have yet to go back to the bar, but that’s only because the Flyers lost the series.

Perhaps my story doesn’t illustrate my point as much as I had hoped, but to me, I realized that when I want God to give me the night off and some time to relax, I am not seeking God’s kingdom first. Luckily, God’s kingdom found me that night in the form of a person who really wasn’t hoping to be the messenger. The moral of the story is that we really do need to always be seeking God’s kingdom, even when we don’t feel like it.

[1] First Thoughts on Year A Gospel Passages from the Lectionary. Pentecost 2. William Loader. http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtPentecost2.htm
[2] Matthew 6:24-34. By Mark Labberton. http://www.goodpreacher.com/shareit/readreviews.php?cat=12
[3] Ibid.
[4] Douglas R. A. Hare. “Matthew: Interpretation: A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching.” John Knox Press. Louisville. 1993. Pg 75, 76.