November 8 ~ Remembrance Day

Sermon by Bishop Cindy Halmarson

Amos 5:18-24

Psalm 70

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

Matthew 25:1-13

Everybody loves a wedding! When the invitation comes, we RSVP with anticipation. Plan what to wear, choose a gift, book the travel, and get to the church on time! We can’t wait for the special day.

Weddings in the time of Jesus were a little different. You never knew exactly when it would start. Instead, the bride’s attendants would gather and wait. They watched and waited because they never knew when the groom would arrive and the festivities would begin. Sometime during the day or the night a messenger would run the streets to announce the bridegroom’s coming. And then he would appear! If the bridesmaids weren’t ready, they could be left behind and miss the celebration. If you were a bridesmaid, you had to be ready, prepared to follow at a moment’s notice.

“Be prepared” is what the parable says, the parable of the Ten Bridesmaids. Be prepared, be alert, be on your toes!

We can see why such a message comes at this point in the gospel narratives. In Matthew’s gospel we are at Chapter 25. Getting close to the end, close to a crisis point in Jesus’ life, and the life of the disciples. Jesus has given the disciples hints and warnings along the way. He’s been celebrated by crowds, but also in conflict with religious authorities. His teachings are becoming more pointed, more apocalyptic. The signs are there. Crisis is coming.

What will happen to Jesus? And how will his followers react? What preparations can they make to be ready for what is to come? Will the disciples remain loyal when the crowds turn against him?

The time of trial is coming. And the parable of the bridesmaids is a warning and a message. Be prepared.

Be ready, is what the parable says today. You and I never know the hour when we will be asked to stand loyal to Christ. Any day, perhaps every day, is crisis.

Sometimes it’s the smallest thing. How we react when we see an injustice taking place, a kid bullied in the schoolyard, a neighbor going on about how newcomers are so advantaged, an outburst at church on Pride Parade Sunday. Are we prepared to speak or act on behalf of fairness and kindness and acceptance, all values that Jesus teaches?

Sometimes it’s the really big things. Drive by Parliament Hill and you can literally read the signs. Nuclear threat. Human rights. Climate crisis. Dehumanizing the workforce. Economic collapse. How ready is the church to understand and address all the modern-day crises that we face? Are we prepared to follow a gospel imperative that guides our opinions, our attitudes, our voting, our actions? Do we make life choices as loyal followers of the Prince of Peace, the Son of Righteousness, Emmanuel, God-With-Us?

The signs are all around us. And yet, how hard it is to shake ourselves awake and follow the way Jesus lays out before us. You never know the day or the hour unless you’re alert, unless you’re prepared.

Is there anything worse than to miss the moment? The parable says there isn’t. Nothing is more painful than to sense that the time is passed and it’s too late. You didn’t speak. You didn’t act. You can turn away and find all the excuses. You can shrug your shoulders and try to make light of it. But the memory of failure doesn’t fade. No one wants to be remembered as the one who missed the important moment.

The foolish five in the parable missed their moment. By the time they are ready, the door is shut.

The parable says more. It says that the crisis coming isn’t just ours. It’s not just how you and I act. It’s not just about our church or our country. It’s a matter for everything under God’s reign.

The early church believed they were living in the last act of a cosmic drama. Christ had come saying, “The reign of God is at hand”. After Jesus’ death and resurrection, his followers were sure that it was only a matter of time before God would ring down the curtain on this world, destroy evil, and establish the promised reign. The world would not whirl on forever but would come to a grand conclusion in God’s purpose.

Of course, that hasn’t happened, has it? The world goes on now as always, no worse, no better.

We wonder if the idea of a reign of God is just a superstition the Bible once believed which we’ve outgrown. So, we put the God talk in a box, save it for Sunday, keep it for the small things we can manage. Being kind. Making nice. No hurry to save the planet. No rush for peace in our time. Business as usual, we say. And we whistle by the graveyard of a big, final crisis. The end hasn’t come yet...

The early Christians shared those same doubts. Their world didn’t end as expected. Christ did not come conquering, and evil seemed inconsiderately stubborn. But then they remembered this parable and told it to each other. Because the parable reminded them that the earth turns by God’s time. Sun, moon and planets follow their set path. Human history unfolds as it does. And God is with us. We cannot ask the day or the hour, nor can we know. But we can be alert to God’s word every day. We can be open to the hints and signs. We can listen for the messengers who say the time is at hand. And we can be prepared to serve God come what may. That’s what the parable says. Be prepared.

But for what? For what do we make ready?

For joy! That’s what the parable holds before us, joy! Peace! Love under the reign of God! Everybody loves a wedding! Festive and glad! We don’t live our lives cringing before the threat of hellfire or cowering before the rap of a judge’s gavel. No, we make ready for a joyful celebration of love and life we would never want to miss! The Lord is coming, says the parable. Be alert, be faithful, prepare for the day. Something worth waiting for, isn’t it. And something worth living for.

May God make it so. Amen.

November 1 ~ What we will be has not yet been revealed

Sermon by Pastor Joel

Revelation 7:9-17

Psalm 34:1-10, 22

1 John 3:1-3

Matthew 5:1-12

C.S. Lewis lived alone for most of his life, writing. But in his 50s, he fell in love. Her name was Joy Davidman, an American writer who had recently become a Christian, and started writing to Lewis about his work. He was enthralled by her witty, intelligent letters, and she eventually travelled to England to meet him. In 1956, when Lewis was 57 years old, they married in a civil ceremony. But a year later, Joy was diagnosed with cancer, and they said their vows again, in a Christian wedding. Joy lived three more years – the happiest ones of his life, Lewis would later write. And then having found love late, he had to learn to mourn it.

Every year, at one time or another, I return to the book that came out of that experience. A Grief Observed is one of the most thoughtful reflections on love and loss that I have read. It has served me at times when I needed it, and I have shared it with others when I thought its word might also bring them comfort.

Lewis describes a journey through grief that reconciles not only how we understand mourning today, but also the overarching theme of our readings this morning. People used to talk about grieving as something you did and then finished. But of course, anyone who had grieved a deep loss knows that is not how it works. And when researchers studied those who carried on after a loved one’s death, they learned to think about grief as something you carry forever, even if the weight of it changes. Just as Lewis recounted, people continued to talk to the ones they had lost, and to hear their words at meaningful moments. What they feared most was not that their sadness would never go away, but that they would lose their memory of that person, so they found ways to hold on to it. Grief didn’t end; it just became something new, part of a new relationship with a person who had died.

This is what Lewis describes in his book. He feels the loss of Joy like an amputation. He fears that he is losing his memory of her face. He disavows friends who do not mention her -- a betrayal, as he sees it, of her existence. “What does it mean,” he wondered, “to continue loving someone who is not there?”

At one point, he writes: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape."

That new landscape cannot be known until we arrive. Yet we know we are walking a path toward it. That new landscape, who we are becoming, is also what John speaks about in our second lesson: "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed." We are one person today, and on a path to becoming a different person tomorrow. Notice the tension in that sentence. We are God's children, in the present tense. Right now. Not after we get our lives together. Not after we become more faithful. Not after we learn to pray better.

We are God’s children now, and yet there is more to come. "What we will be has not yet been revealed." We are already accepted and loved, but not yet complete.

The same message is woven throughout the Beatitudes. The people who Jesus says are blessed are not static; they are on a journey – through mourning and hunger, to the other side of mercy and peace. They are people still longing and seeking and growing. People still travelling through life. People who are yet to be revealed.

Just as the people whom we remember today are still being revealed to us. None of the loved ones on our minds today were perfect. They don’t need to be perfect to be loved. None of us who are loved are perfect.

Some days, we might remember most clearly how imperfect they were. On other days, their kindness and love is clearest in our minds. And over time, the memories and wisdom that matter most to us may also change.

In the years since my mother died, in the decades since I lost my brother, the nature of my bond to them has constantly shifted. Some days, I see my mom as the woman who refused to let me buy the second-hand suit I coveted, and then only laughed from the choir loft, when I walked past her in church wearing it – and I remember to laugh off small problems. Some days, my mom is the Nana who watched the same kid’s movie for hours on the couch with Noah while I was at the hospital with Erin waiting for Samson to arrive in the world, and I feel her caregiving watching out for me. At other times, I hear when she judged me too harshly, or perhaps failed to give me what I needed in the moment – a reminder that we all make mistakes, especially with those dearest to us. And sometimes, I can feel the softness of her hand on my cheek, the day before she died, telling me that I was a good boy, and I feel loved.

As the years pass, however, I do not live with these memories in the same way; I am still becoming myself, and how I receive those images also changes. If I viewed them as a grieving son at first, and could not see clearly, I now sit with them ten years later and without the sharpness of loss. I can see the lessons lying in them more intentionally. My mother is gone, and yet she is still in the act of becoming for me. And more than a half century later, what I carry of my brother is also part of that becoming.

If we are wise, we listen to these Saints in our lives, however they speak to us. They are, for worse and for better, a part of who we are today, and who we will be tomorrow. There is something comforting and also powerful in that fact. The comforting part is that those we love keep teaching us as we move on. The powerful part, is that we, who are still living, still becoming, can seize the chance to learn from them, and be happier for it.

So, on this All Saints’ Sunday – but not only on this Sunday – I hope we hear the whisper of the Saints around us and listen to what they seek to tell us. For in the end, what C.S. Lewis learned in grief, what John tells us, what Jesus preached to the crowd that day, is that we may feel lonely, especially when we have lost someone. But we are never alone. Amen.

October 25 ~ The Reformation begins with people transformed.

Sermon by Pastor Joel

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Psalm 46

Romans 3:19-28

John 8:31-36

It’s Reformation Sunday, and the scene that most seems to capture our imagination is that no-turning-back scene, when Martin Luther marched up to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and hammered the Ninety-Five Theses into the wood. In fact, historians can’t say for sure that even happened. Nobody actually reported seeing Luther hammer the theses up there, and people put notices up at the church all the time. Even more importantly, Luther, to meet him in 1517, was still an obedient monk, committed to the pope’s authority, hoping church leaders would address the issues he’d identified around indulgences and the lay person’s relationship to God. He was not yet a rebel. That came later.

For the beginning of Luther’s Reformation, we need to go back much earlier, to 1505, to the year of a thunderstorm that terrified young Martin so much, he vowed to become a monk if he survived. The storm passed and Luther soon afterwards became a devout resident at the Augustinian monastery. At dawn, each day, the bell would call him to prayer, rousing him from his cell. He would pray, and confess. Fast. And pray and confess again. But he still felt no peace. His superior, Johann von Staupitz, reportedly became exasperated because Luther kept returning to confession with what seemed like microscopic sins. Not because Luther doubted the church. But because he believed in it so completely.

A second scene to imagine: Luther sitting at his desk in Wittenberg in 1517, drafting the Ninety-Five Theses. He does not intend it to be a declaration of independence, but more a proposal for change from an academic. The Pope will listen. The Bishops will hear him out. His older self will wince at his naïveté; but younger Luther is still trying to change a corrupt system from within. He is trying to save the Church.

Two years later, Luther sits each night with the same Bible verse: Romans 1:17.

"For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, 'The one who is righteous will live by faith.'" He kept tripping over the word righteousness. “I hated that word,” he recalls later. Finally, Luther says, he saw the word in a new way – righteousness was not God’s demand; it was God’s gift. "I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered Paradise itself through open gates,” Luther says. This is not only a theological breakthrough. This is a human being transformed. An obedient monk becoming a liberated Christian.

Another scene, a year later, in Heidelberg. Luther has arrived to defend his ideas. The rumours have spread: the trouble-making monk for Wittenberg is coming. The young scholars are expecting a fight about indulgences. Instead, they hear about “the theology of the cross.” They hear Luther suggest that humans are constantly mistaking glory for truth and strength for God’s way. Luther is reminding his listeners to question assumption, to challenge the framework they’ve been given, to explore faith in a new way. This is reformation – rethinking what has always been, pondering a better way.

And finally, we skip ahead, to 1545; Luther is an old man. His writings, at the end, have turned hateful and cruel; stripped of the grace he had once so devoutly challenged. His racist message in his last works will be used 400 years later, to underpin the most horrific, planned, and deliberate atrocity the modern world has known. “But even then,” he says, “look back through the story; I did not know everything. I learned as I went. My views developed. I changed as I needed to. In other words, ‘God kept reforming me.’”

The Reformation was not born the moment Luther nailed something to a door. The Reformation was born when Luther let God reform him.

And the Reformation is not over. Not for the church. Not for us. There is no one place that we reach and then stop. Change and reformation have been the very definition of our lives and faith. Just as some part of the Bible may resonate more with us at one point in time than others, the words of Luther speak to us in different ways. We must listen to all of them – the words that bring us joy and hope, the words that reassure us about our own understanding of faith, and, yes, the part that brings us shame. By listening, we find the truth that Luther sought. By listening, we make a path toward change. True discipleship is lifelong transformation rather than a single conversion experience.

It is a popular myth that Luther's first concern was indulgences. Really, he was focused on repentance. People were arriving in Wittenberg carrying indulgence certificates they had purchased and believing that repentance had become unnecessary. Luther feared that an external religious transaction was replacing inner transformation.

In Thesis 1, he writes, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' he willed the entire life of believers to be one of ongoing repentance." The entire life of believers, repenting and changing. And reforming. This is Luther’s ongoing argument: we are also being transformed by the gospel. We are always being reformed, especially by acknowledging where we have gone wrong.

Reformation – this act, this choice, this fight to be better - was never sheets of paper hammered on a church door. It was always the people of the church. It was always us. Amen.