Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions: Book Review

Growing up, I heard that Eskimo’s have over 100 different words for “snow”. That when your life is surrounded by snow, your language will reflect the subtle differences in the cold precipitation. It was somewhat comforting to think that at least one group of people could adequately describe something so central to their life.

Now that I am older, I know that this story I heard as a child is a myth. No group of people have 100 words for snow. But if there was one concept in life which is deserving of such an honour, it is love.

In his book, Sacred Union, Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan writes about how through the history of humanity, love has come to take on many forms. One of the least accepted forms in society is the male-female, non-sexual, relationship. This book highlights this under-developed, often misunderstood form of love in a world which desperately needs its strength.

As most “emergent” literature is today, this book takes aim at conservative Christianity, whose views of relationships and sexuality is behind the times. And while Brennan does a good job of keeping this to a minimum, while highlighting the numerous denominations who do a better job at male-female, non-sexual relationships, it is a good book to read if you are unsure as to what should be the role of people of the opposite gender in your life.

My only disappointment with this book is that it seemed to minimize the difficulties as well as the dangers of this type of friendship. In a modern world which focuses on the shallow view of human sexuality, we need direction on how to form these positive, Christ affirming relationships in such a way that sexual intercourse is not the desired outcome. (I hope this might be addressed and developed in a second book!)

Pick this book up... its worth it to help begin to change the world to have a more positive view of love, relationships and sexuality!

http://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Unions-Passions-Engaging-Friendship/dp/0982580703/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280731568&sr=8-1

Feb 7, 2010

Does anyone want to take a guess of the age of the average life expectancy is in Canada? 80.4 years is the answer. And sometimes I think we take for granted that we have such a long time to live, especially when it comes to Christianity. When we hear stories like the one we hear today, I think we’ve been told to imagine either some older teens or those who are in their young 20’s for those that Jesus called to be his disciples. While that seems “young” by our standards today, this was not the case in Jesus’ time.

The day that I moved into my first apartment in Seminary, I was introduced to a man named Meza, who was living in the building. He was from Tanzania and I was asked help show him around town, and help answer any questions he had about living in America. I was glad to help, as I was a former exchange student and knew what it was like moving into a new culture. This first introduction to Meza was something that was going to turn into a strong brotherhood. We would sit in each other’s apartments for hours while we were avoiding assignments, and allowed us to talk about all sorts of topics.

The name of the building we both lived in was called the Widow’s house, and was originally built in the mid 1700’s at the height of the Moravian choir system, where people lived according to their status in the community. The young men lived in the single brethren’s house, the singe women in the single sister’s house. The married couples lived together, and the widowed lived together in the Widow’s house. Widows had lived in that house for over 250 years. And the Moravian seminary had bought the building, but there was still 4 widow’s living there.

I remember that we celebrated the birthday of one of the widow’s one day, and after the celebration, I went back to Meza’s room to chat. Meza was amazed that this particular woman was celebrating her 90th birthday. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen often in Tanzania.

Naturally I asked my friend what the average life expectancy was in his country. He guessed that the average person in his home country lived to the ripe old age of 45. While this gave me a bit of a shock, what truly gave me shivers is that my friend was already in his mid 30’s. It struck me as very odd that Meza at 35 had already lived a great portion of his life.

Thankfully as I was doing research for this sermon, I looked up this info and found out that the average life expectancy in Tanzania was in fact 55, which gave me a huge sigh or relief, but it also showed that at the time of his birth, the age was 45. In nearly 4 decades now, with modern medicines and technology finally making its way to the middle of Africa, the life of the average person has extended 10 years.

I tried to look up this same statistic concerning Jesus’ time, and I found a wide variety of answers. While no one can be sure what the average life expectancy was in Jesus’ time, I think we can safely guess that it was in the mid 30’s. And when we combine that with the thought that most scholars believe Jesus to have began his ministry around the age of 30,

Even though we might be tempted to view Jesus and these first disciples as being on the younger side of things, we need to realize that they were, at the age of 17, already done with half of their lives.

I tell you all of this because it is my hope that you would be able to identify with the calling of these first disciples. Here they are, at the end of a long day of work with nothing to show for it. They’ve thrown out their nets a hundred times. And found little success. So they came into shore, and began to clean their nets. All those attempts must have meant they caught a lot of seaweed. So in comes Jesus, noticing a bunch of folks along the shore, he decides to use one of the fisherman’s boats to preach from. So these fishermen get to listen to the word of God as they finish their day. No one knows if Jesus finished preaching or if the fishermen wanted their boat back, but at this point, Peter and Jesus begin to interact. He challenges Peter and his comrades to go back out into the water.

At first, Peter complains. I love this part, because it fits in with my personality so well. I am inherently lazy. I don’t want to do more work at the end of an unproductive day. I’d rather just go do something else. Relax with friends, go watch a movie…something other than what I’ve been doing all day.

So Peter and his buddies go back out. Going back out means a couple things... First, it means having faith in what Jesus says. We all know about this. Having Faith in Jesus is nothing new. What’s infinitely more important is that after we have faith in Jesus, after a long day of fruitless labor, that we go out and follow what Jesus wants for us, we’re suddenly knee deep in fish, which means we’re knee deep in work. They have so much work to do that they have to call others over to help them.

Once they got back, their work wasn’t finished. Most of the markets for the day would probably be closed, and they would have had to finish salting their catch late into the night. There was a lot of extra’s that came from following Jesus command.

Now we have Peter and crew coming in from a catch so large that his boat was sinking as it came in. When it says that Peter fell to his knee’s, we might be able to imagine that Peter landed on his catch. And as he did so, he said “Go away from me!”

But Get away from me is a poor translation of the Greek. A better translation of Peter is “Get out of my neighborhood!” Peter realized that Jesus was going to have them doing a lot more than they were used to doing. And his initial reaction was to make Jesus leave so it wouldn’t be his problem.

Jesus then answers… “Don’t be afraid”. With that answer, Jesus realizes that Peter is scared of the possibilities Jesus offers. There is a common thought that people are afraid of change. This is far from true. The world changes all the time. We are not afraid of change, we are afraid of loss! The loss that they were afraid of is the loss of what they knew. One of the reasons I am always afraid of change is because it will mean that I can no longer be as lazy as I’d like to be. Following Jesus means a loss of who we are and what we are used to. Even though Jesus is telling us not to be afraid, surely we will be afraid with the changes that will happen when Jesus calls us to catch people.

This church has been fishing for a long while, and rarely have we caught enough fish to feed ourselves. We are at the stage where we are listening to Jesus on the shore, cleaning our nets. And I truly believe that sometime in the near future, Jesus is going to call us to go out can cast our nets again and we are going to be surprised with what we come up with. Jesus is going to give us a lot of work to do when we catch for him. Until then, we must work on our nets. The things essential to who we are. We need to find ways to strengthen our prayer life. We must be hospitable and generous enough to let Christ use our boats, and we must listen at the foot of Christ, listening to the word of God.

Join me in prayer:

Loving God, you have come to us in your Son Jesus Christ, you have given us your Holy Scripture as that which we are to listen to as we go about our daily tasks. We know that in the future, you will ask us to cast out our nets among the people. We pray that when the time comes, you will find us willing to follow you. Until that time comes, we sit at your feet and will listen with open ears to that which you would have us hear. Amen