Dec 14 ~ We Hear the Gospel More Clearly When We Hear Different People Deliver its Message / 3Rd Sunday of Advent

Due to the Youth Christmas Pageant, there is only the printed version of Pastor Joel's sermon this week.

Isaiah 35:1-10

Psalm 146:5-10

James 5:7-10

Matthew 11:2-11

Sermon by Pastor Joel

Think back to a moment this week, when you saw someone and instantly decided you knew their story. Maybe it was the brusque young woman in line in the grocery story, or the teenager with purple hair behind the cash at the gas station, or the dirty-looking guy at the Dollar Store. Maybe you were the one whose story was being written by some stranger and you didn’t even know it. Those of us who are white, sitting here in the pews, may never really experience this. But there is a reason why Black Canadian mothers warn their kids to be extra careful when shopping or driving; they worry about the story being written before anyone even asks their son or daughter a question.

Our brains can’t help it: we are guilty of unconscious bias, we remember the details we heard more recently, we are influenced by falsehoods presented as facts. Our brains naturally want to categorize. Don’t we learn that as young children? To sort the red blocks from the blue? The circles from the squares? The very way we learn is by dividing items up by difference. Is there any wonder that we also do it with people?

The danger of the stereotype is our gospel lesson this morning, presented to us by the questions that Jesus poses to the crowd about John the Baptist. John is in prison, and he has heard about Jesus; he sends a message to find out if it is true. Jesus sent back word to let him know of the miracles and healing he is performing, that what John predicted is coming true. “And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me,” Jesus concludes in his message to John.

But then Jesus turns his attention to the crowd, asking them specifically about John himself: What did you go out to see in the wilderness?  A reed that sways in the wind? Did you think that John was someone who would abandon his belief, or reject his own values when his life was in danger?  We can imagine the crowd shaking their heads to say “no”, because Jesus asks another question: Then what did you go out to see? Someone in fancy robes who lives in a kingdom?  In fact, Jesus says, the crowd met a prophet. Whether they thought John fit the image of a prophet or not, whether he was what they expected to find, Jesus is saying that John wasn’t only A prophet; he was THE prophet.

So much of Advent and Christmas is about challenging our stereotypes. In this case, the one who paved the path for Jesus was not an educated man, or even a fisherman. He was a wild man from the wilderness. He was the last person you would expect to have a line to God, or to be the opening act for Jesus. What is the lesson there for us? Surely, we, too, need to question all the times we make assumptions about people. When we assess their character by who they are, or what they do, or what they wear. Had we done that in the crowd listening to John, we would have been so busy scoffing at his smelly clothes and eccentric ways we would have missed what he had to say.

What’s more, if John is lifted first above everyone, then he is a role model for us. We don’t have to be like him in his style of shouting, angry oratory – we can choose to be soft-spoken. Those are qualities only on the surface of John: the part to emulate is his character. And most specifically what was mentioned: he was not someone who bent to the will of others in a way that dismantled his own faith.

It seems as if every few months I find one post or another by a church leader, deciding that what John really meant – in his words of last week – was that some people are good enough for God and some people aren’t. But how are we supposed to know who is who – and why does the Advent and Christmas story basically upend every stereotype? Maybe that’s the point: we can’t know, and we shouldn’t try. And really, does the gospel suggest that God is so lacking in nuance? 

The “probably good enough” and the “not good enough,”  “the “accepted” and the “rejected,” are the conclusions we arrive at when we get in the gospel’s way by presuming to be God. For example, I am your pastor; I try to lead you, just as I am so often led by many of you.  That is our role for one another. When someone decides God also sorts people, it encourages us to the do same. Why shouldn’t we get started at what will happen in heaven anyway? What’s more, it often puts us in some kind of competition for God’s divine attention, as if there were a finite number of spots in heaven. In that case, I had better raise issues about my neighbor’s flaws so that I look better. Why would I help my neighbor, if it cost me a spot? For there to be so-called “worthy” people, there must be those who are “unworthy.” And the only way we can decide that is a shortcut kind of way with stereotypes. Otherwise, we would have to truly get to know someone, and we might find out they aren’t who we thought. We have been raised in a society that teaches us that this is how progress happens: by one person stepping over another, and so on. But is that how society really works? Or has it just created a world where we are so busy stepping up and trying not to get stepped on, that we’ve become much less likely to reach out our hands to help one another? 

We should heed the caution in our second lesson: “Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the judge is at the door!” The judge is God. And we cannot presume to know what God sees in someone else.

Think of what our stereotyping does each day, even aside from the great tragedies of history. I think I have told you the story about the summer between university years when I worked as a plumber. If so, indulge me again. After work, dirty and in construction boots – probably doing my best version of John the Baptist’s style – I went to cash a cheque. I was turned down because I didn’t have enough money in my account and was told I’d have to wait five days. I went home, got dressed in my suit, and went back to the bank. (I wasn’t going to make it 5 days without money) And guess what? They did it, no questions asked. It was the exact same cheque. I was the same person. But they saw me with different eyes.

I learned a huge lesson that day, which is probably why I remember it so clearly, and love to keep sharing it. I learned that when I present myself in a different way, people decide my story before I have a chance to share it with them. Sometime the joke’s on them – like when I used to accompany Erin to prenatal appointments with my collar on, to raised eyebrows. Sometimes it makes you angry for the sake of others –as it did when I was judged at the bank. What of the person who can’t go home and put on fancier clothes? Sometimes it is dangerous – as marginalized people in Canada have too often learned.  

We are in a time in North America when we need to begin asking ourselves, and one another, to think about the stereotypes we hold – sometimes without even knowing it. And we need to resist any law that treats people like red or blue blocks to be so easily sorted.

The next time we go looking for a prophet in soft robes, Jesus might suggest we recall John the Baptist. We can hear the truth of the gospel more clearly only when we are more open to hearing different people deliver its message. The message is coming:  Advent is the time for us to think deeply and look broadly to receive it. 

Amen

December 7th ~ Every Time We Respond to Need, We Have Cleared the Path / 2nd Sunday of Advent

Click above to listen to a recording of Sunday's Sermon

Isaiah 11:1-10

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Romans 15:4-13

Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon by Pastor Joel

This week a friend of mine fell and broke her wrist. She went to Emergency with my wife, Erin. And if any of you have been to Emergency recently, you can guess what happened next. It took more than an hour to be seen, and then another hour after that to get an X-ray, and then 17 hours after that to be seen by a doctor about the X-ray. They had gone in at 3 p.m. Erin went home to sleep at 11. And I saw our friend at 6:30a.m., just as she was finally getting her wrist frozen so they could adjust it for a temporary cast. She’d been up all night. All three of us discussed the experience chatting with people, making another visit to the waiting room, the loud and aggressive patients brought in by police in the middle of the night, the weary nurse who had to clean up when someone went to the bathroom in their pants, and then smoothly pilfer away the vodka mickey he’d hidden in his jacket. By the time Erin and our friend came home around noon the second day, she left the hospital without socks. She’d met an elderly man with cold feet and had given them away.

I spend a lot of time in hospitals, and they are places that represent the worst and the best of humanity. Sit in emergency long enough, and you see everything: kindness and cruelty, pain and relief, weariness and perseverance. And often, over all of it, I can feel loneliness. The act of wanting, desiring comfort, and reaching out only to find empty air.

Whenever I am exposed to this side of humanity – the evidence of our rich and yet flawed society failing our own humanness – I am also reminded of John The Baptist, who might have been more easily mistaken for the barefooted, dishevelled man brought in by the police, than the wise and self-sacrificing prophet that he was.

How clever it was, I have always thought, for the gospel and the Holy Spirit to wake John the Baptist up to pave the way for Jesus – and thus, to wake us all up. There is no other character like John the Baptist in the gospel. From every other disciple, I have always felt a sense of tidiness and propriety. But that is not John. He wore camel hair clothes, he probably rarely washed, and he ate locusts. He yelled at everyone. He would have been the last person you’d choose to sit beside in an emergency room. Maybe that’s what saved him for so long: the Pharisees may indeed have been a brood of vipers, but John was the meanest, most God-fearing rattlesnake they’d ever seen.

And yet who else but John could have avoided getting caught up in the fame of it all? No amount of adulation appears to have tempted him to take any credit. If anything, it just made him meaner. You ain’t see nothing yet, he told the people. I am not worthy even to carry the sandals of the guy coming next.

But most importantly, John said this: “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make the path straight.”

And that’s the crux of John. He wasn’t a ditherer or debater. He wasn’t going to strike a committee to solve a problem. Faced with a crooked path, he wasn’t going to consult or conduct a pilot project. If a path needed straightening, he straightened it. If a person needed food, he fed them. If an old man needed socks, he gave him the socks off his own feet. We don’t need that written down in the gospel to know it. This is just who John the Baptist was – the rebel who never met a rule he wouldn’t step over for the right reason. And what a great role model he is for us all.

We spend a lot of time – and I include myself here – thinking of what happens after we act. What happens if I talk to that the lonely neighbor? Will I have intruded? Will I have taken on too much? What happens if I offer my socks? Will I have offended? Will people just want more from me afterwards? And we think so much about doing that the moment passes, and we never do what we were thinking about.

But John sees a need – or a Pharisee in need of a good comeuppance – and he acts. He acts upon the need because his response in that moment is what matters; his response to what happens next is an entirely different issue – a problem or solution for later. John understands who he is and what his role is; and he does not bend on either to suit anyone else.

Now that’s a hard act to follow. So, it’s a good thing the next act was Jesus. But what can we learn from John heading into Advent? How can we make the path straight? We can think very clearly about what is most important to us, the quality that we want to define us. We can then find ways to transform those qualities into actions We can muffle the Pharisees of our day—consumerism and competition and materialism – and hold them at bay. We can heed the message of John the Baptist and use this season – this time when everyone’s hearts are open just a little wider, to create a straighter path - one pebble, one act of charity, one pair of socks at a time. Every time we respond to need, we have cleared the path. The next generous deed clears it a little bit more. Until one day, we are at our final destination, and we can look behind and see a great distance, and know that all this time, we were only making way for the gospel and God; we were clearing our own path to a spirit-led, gospel-infused meaningful life. Let this be a practice of ours in the weeks ahead—to prepare the way of the Lord and make the path straight.

Amen

November 30th ~ Are You Awake? / 1st Sunday of Advent

Click above to listen to a recording of Sunday's Sermon

Isaiah 2:1-5

Psalm 122

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

Sermon by Pastor Joel

Are you awake out there? If you were listening to this gospel just now, it seems as if we had all better be awake. And I guess I could go that route – and talk about how this is Advent, the time to prepare for the coming of Jesus and that we all should be ready. And maybe we will talk about how we choose to spend our attention next week when we are knee deep in Christmas lists, and decorations, and the obligations of the season.

But last night, as a church community, we fed people who find themselves unhoused as the winter approaches. We woke up as a community, saw the need and for one evening filled it. And unlike what the gospel seems to be saying, we didn’t ask questions or pass judgment, we turned no one away. We opened the door and let everyone in need inside – just as the gospel instructs us.

But that gospel for today is a doozy. Because it seems to be saying that God is going to shut the door on roughly half of us. It seems to be saying we shouldn’t wake up and serve those in need or be kind because we are called to do so, but because we are afraid of what might happen if we don’t.

If we read it literally, we are being told to smarten up, to do as God wants, lest the day come when Jesus arrives, and we get left behind. On that day, Matthew writes, there will be two in the field: one will be taken, the other left. Two women will be grinding meal: one wins God’s lottery, the other loses out. Best be ready: none of us wants to be the one left behind. In other words, we’d better not rest, we’d better not fail, we’d better never be weak, because Jesus is coming to town someday, and he is going to pick and choose the best of the bunch and cut loose everyone else.

That’s fair, right? Sounds like a good deal? I mean we ALL know that some of us are just better. Some of us are more faithful. Some of us just belong more. We deserve a bigger prize. We deserve a better seat at God’s table. We deserve to be rewarded more than those OTHER people.

Does that really sit right with you? I hope not. Instead, do you, like me, have a visceral reaction to this interpretation – a deep sense of unfairness? It is a cruel notion. One day, some of us might be looking away or messing up, and God’s judgment on us will be sealed forever. Imagine if someone were sitting here in church for the first time, hearing this gospel, and heard the minister preach as if the animals in the story of Noah’s Ark were truly to be humans some random day – divided up by worthiness, friend set apart from friend, parent from child. What kind of God would they think we believed in? Not a generous one. Not an accepting one. Not a forgiving one. And certainly not a very Lutheran or grace-centred one.

And yet this notion in the gospel is seductive. This passage in Matthew, or a version of it, has been interpreted this way throughout different times in history, and by different groups. We see it shaping our public discourse – who belongs, who doesn’t? Who’s deserving, who isn’t?

This may be humanity’s greatest weakness. We so easily succumb to categorizing people or jockeying for our place. We strive not to be a community but to set ourselves above one another.

I would not belong to any church that read this gospel literally. I reject it. This is a message contradicted over and over again by Jesus – who tells us to forgive just as God does, who seeks out the lost sheep, who welcomes the wayward child.

So why do we read it at all? Why say these words in public in 2025? Maybe we should not. But on the other hand, sometimes how we learn from the gospel is through our reaction to it. When we stop and say, whoa, I don’t agree with that, that can’t be reconciled with my faith, we are learning something about ourselves. Pondering this message this week forced me to think about the times when I have divided people up, when I have pushed too hard to be the one who gets in, when I have wanted to be right at the expense of everything else. Those times have brought clarity to my understanding of Jesus, and my notion of what is divine: how Jesus would want us to interpret this message.

If we take another look, we might see that we are both of those workers in the field, we are both women at work in the kitchen, we are both the homeowner and the thief in the night. We are constantly rooting for the better angels of our natures even when the devil inside us wins. And when the gospel reminds us to be awake for this future day when we might see Jesus, the true lesson is to be awake to what makes us good, and what makes us flawed, and to know that Jesus sees the best part of us, and sets aside the worst. In this way, we might be lucky enough to see Jesus at work in the world, as clearly as if Jesus walked in human form among us.

Advent is one of the times in our church year when we are given a practice of meditation and reflection. It is always wrong to interpret the gospel against the life of another, to decide what the gospel is saying about them, about whether they are living the right way.

The gospel is about each one of us figuring out for ourselves our lives and our relationship with God. It is about understanding what that means for how we engage with other people – not what those people should be doing for us. The gospel is something that comes from God and works inside out. In the moments when we manage to get this right, that is when humanity can be great, when we naturally come into community in a grace-centered way.

In those times, we don’t need to be only looking for that day when we meet Jesus face-to-face. That day will come to all of us as surely as the next snow fall. Jesus is also here today, right now. Through us, when we are true to that best part of who we are and whose we are--when we do that which is pleasing to God, Jesus has already arrived.

Amen