June 7 ~ "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" ~ Matthew 9:11

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Hosea 5:15—6:6

Psalm 50:7-15

Romans 4:13-25

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Sermon by Pastor Joel

God beckons us in the most unusual and exciting ways. Slow to anger and always creative, God challenges us to pay attention to the small things and follow Christ. Whenever God calls us to serve, we are transformed by an experience that strengthens our faith and conviction in the love of Christ. It is in these times that we clearly see what Christ calls us to do: love unconditionally. For what does Jesus tell us in our gospel this very morning: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice.”

Compared to sacrifice, you’d think that mercy would be an easier action for humanity. For what is mercy but acceptance, forgiveness, kindness, understanding – all the things that each of us desires in our own lives. We know a merciful society is the best society and so we create constitutions and charters and treaties designed to be merciful - and then we go about eroding and breaking them. Even knowing better, we are afflicted with what I might consider the worst of human flaws: judgement. How many groups have suffered under that oppressive judgement of society? How many were sacrificed by the unmerciful? 

The list is so long. You will all name your own – groups, individuals, perhaps people you sought out to protect yourselves. In the case of Canada, I will point to two. You may not be surprised to know that some of the most open and accepted racism in this country is directed at our Indigenous brothers and sisters. How quickly we forget that the last residential school closed only in 1996 – a mere three decades ago. Canada sought to erase a culture, caused irreparable harm to generations and yet, even today, when Indigenous Canadians insist on being heard, they are shut down. They sacrificed so much, and yet in so many ways, we have failed to show mercy. 

June is Pride month, another time to recognize our failure to show mercy. Instead, in our own lifetimes, the LGBTQ community has been imprisoned, committed to mental hospitals, castrated, shunned, denied basic rights such as justice and health care, denied the right to stand before this very altar and vow before God to love the person dearest to them. Was that the mercy that Jesus, who welcomed everyone, desired of us? 

In our gospel, Jesus beckoned Matthew to follow him and become a student of life and love. By society's standards, Matthew was not the best example of a faithful servant. His background as a tax collector, zealot, and a man prepared to engage in violence with anyone who disagreed with him made him a risky choice. But Mathew was passionate about life. He was open and willing to see the world – and the people in it – with generosity and openness. 

Hosea was available to God late in life and had a choice of whether to serve God or not. To an unbelieving, undoubtedly judgemental crowd, he preached about grace and love, about becoming faithful instruments of peace, about replacing old ways with better ones.  Hearing that message, our responsibility is to turn around to God and say, "Here I am. Send me!" 

God's promises can be fulfilled only through faith. In Romans 4:13, God's promise to Abraham is fulfilled because of Abraham's faithfulness. Through faithfulness Abraham received and accepted God's grace. God's grace is not earned. Our faith provides a vision for a church without boundaries, an altar and font where people of every class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and any other category we invent for humanity, gather to worship God in love and peace. Through our faith, we receive God's grace to build communities and societies that embrace the best of our traditions and adapt them to a progressive, merciful world. Through our faith, which is dynamic, we receive God’s grace to build a world that does not exclude. 

In today's climate of fear and frustration, it is not easy to be available to the love of God. It is our choice to be available to build a community as a place of refuge for all people. James 2:14 (RSV) teaches us that "faith without works is nothing"; Hebrews 11:1 (RSV) teaches that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen." With faith we can build a new church that meets the needs of all. With faith we can knit and bind together a nation in love and trust, seeking Christ in each person we meet. And treating that person as though they were Christ. 

Like Mathew, we can choose to follow Christ. Like Hosea, we can choose to deliver the message. Like Abraham, we can live into the promise of God in faith. But it is by God's Grace that we are forgiven, strengthened, rejuvenated, and transformed in the love of Christ. Each day we make decisions about our lives.  Some are consciousness- or process-oriented, while others are spontaneous, requiring very little thought. Yet, we always have a choice to follow Christ, live a life of love, and embrace those who are perceived as unlovable. We decide whether to show the mercy that Jesus desires. 

St. Francis of Assisi wrote a prayer about being an instrument for God. St. Francis asked us to consciously consider being God's instrument of peace, to understand rather than seek to be understood, and to love rather than be loved. God does not ask us to be perfect, just available in spirit and truth, and to proclaim the message of love. In a world that is so often judgmental and harsh, let us be the people who speak with love and challenge those who use words of hate, Let us choose, as Jesus asks, to be kind and accepting, not only in private, but by proudly and publicly walking with those burdened by the world’s judgement. Let us, above all else, be people of mercy. As Jesus understood, a single act of mercy can be the beginning of great change. And it is within our power – each one of us – to grant it.  

Amen

May 31 ~ Holy Trinity

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Genesis 1:1—2:4a

Psalm 8

2 Corinthians 13:11-13

Matthew 28:16-20

Sermon by Pastor Joel

When was the last time you truly felt God? Was it during prayer, alone with your thoughts, hoping for clarity with a problem? Was it when, in a moment of choice between right and wrong, you heard the words of Jesus in your mind, reminding you to be kind and forgiving? Was it the perfect sunset, the shade of a tree, the wind rustling in the leaves? Perhaps, if we are lucky, it has been in all those places.

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. Our National Bishop Larry Kochendorfer wrote a sermon for our 40th anniversary as a national church and those churches who might not have a minister today, and in that sermon, he joked about the many pastors who wished for a guest preacher so they could get out of trying to explain Trinity Sunday. 

The church has spent a lot of words and time arguing about the meaning of the Trinity. Is it three separate identifies of God, that you could sit in seats beside one another? Is it meant as a metaphor for one, diverse creator? Is it a way for us to understand the vastness of God?

St Augustine once said: “The Trinity is a mystery. Whoever tries to understand it fully will lose [their] mind.”

Martin Luther, who put great stock in the Trinity as a concept of God, nonetheless rejected simplistic versions—that God could be explained as three slices of one pie, or three separate beings. To try to pin down the Trinity, Luther said, was folly. 

"Why, then, do we poor wretched people rack our brains over the nature of God?” Martin Luther asked. “To take upon ourselves to understand it is a very dangerous thing, through which we may stumble and break our neck.”

Much later, theologians tried to ignore the Trinity altogether, focusing on ethics. Some viewed it a symbol of God’s all-encompassing love. Others objected to the limiting gendered language that locked out other, more diverse understandings of God.

Some suggest that the Trinity reflects God’s actions, and you can find support for that position in our gospel this morning. Jesus leaves the disciples with three callings: to baptize the next followers of the gospel in the name of God, Jesus, and the Spirit. To teach the lessons that Jesus first taught them. And to trust that Jesus is always with them, even when he is not physically present. With these instructions, has Jesus not, in essence, thus defined the trinity? The God who deems us worthy, Jesus who teaches us the way, the Spirit who weaves the presence of the divine throughout the world.

To be honest, I have always found these debates about the meaning of the Trinity too dogmatic, a bit like arguing about what God looks like. Can there truly be only one way to understand this concept of God? Is God contained in one definition? Or does God, as Luther suggests, defy our understanding?

What’s more, we live in modern times, where much of the world is not explained, and much of it remains a mystery. We have the education and awareness to live with complexity. For as much as we know already, we are still discovering new animals, new ideas, and new solutions in the world each day. The world will continue to reveal itself to us, all our lives – surely we know this now. Why shouldn’t our understanding of God do the same?

For myself, I find the Trinity a comforting idea. I am okay that it is fuzzy around that edges, for in that mystery lies more of the divine yet to be revealed to me. The Trinity as a guiding concept reminds me to look for God, in large and small ways, in the gift of baptism, in the words and life of Jesus, and when I am not looking for God at all, but sense the presence of something beyond myself and the world I know.

In the end, what we decide about the definition of the Trinity matters not one iota if we do not do anything with it – if we don’t go out into the world, and show generosity and wisdom, follow the gospel, or bring the presence of divine beauty to the lives of others. 

Bishop Kochendorfer reached the same conclusion with a closing prayer in his sermon, calling us to breathe peace into fearful lives, welcome the stranger, forgive sins, and serve on bended knee, to all in need of care. 

In other words, to be like our God who loves, Jesus who teaches, and the Spirit who brings comfort.

So, let me ask you again, when was the last time you have felt God? If you can’t remember, I hope that when you leave here today, you keep an eye open for those moments, that sense of a higher calling, that feeling of the divine in your life. That is the Trinity, and to try figure it all out, as Luther said, will leave us wracking our brains. And yet that is the gift: we do not need to know the answer to everything. We only need to be open to what we cannot understand, and watch for the moments when the divine touches our lives and inspires our actions. 

Amen

May 24 ~ Day of Pentecost / Confirmation Sunday

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Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

1 Corinthians 12:3b-13

John 20:19-23

Sermon by Pastor Joel

Pentecost is a story about the good and bad that faith can do in the world. It represents the challenge for us to know the difference. For this reason, it is an important idea on this, our confirmation Sunday.

For the last two years, today’s confirmands have explored this idea of faith and what it means to see the world through the eyes of the gospel. They have handed out supplies to people living on our streets, and, I hope, learned of the good they can do with their individual and collective actions. During one class, a person, dressed in shabby clothes slept in the pews, and all our youth walked by, not noticing or inquiring about them. I tell this story, without judgement – for judging is not part of our gospel mandate, and we all walk on by, at one time or another, when someone is calling for our attention. This was intended as a lesson in what we can fail to see in the world around us – and, I hope, it was another reminder of the power we have in each of us to see the world for what it is and to act within it.

On Pentecost, as our first lesson says, people of many different languages could, for a moment, understand one another – and they were amazed. What clarity that brought - to know the thoughts and intentions of a stranger from a different background.

Pentecost is a dream, an ideal goal – aspiring to a day when people of faith will be able to speak the same language. In the time in which our first lesson happened, the idea was that everyone would become a follower of Jesus – and indeed, the story of Jesus did spread, so that Christians began to appear in many places in the world. But as time went on, those Christians lost the ability to speak peacefully even with one another, let alone with other faiths. And throughout history, we see the destruction and death that is caused when we compete to be right about our interpretation of God, rather than to learn from one another to expand that understanding.

But the Pentecost story has a flaw in the telling. For it suggests that if we just stand around, God will take care of it for us. The gospel has never been about God’s taking care of us – it is about God’s giving us the tools to take care of ourselves and the world around us.

And what is the first way that God gives us those tools? God tells us we are worthy, and capable, and valuable. Each one of us. I speak directly to the confirmands, but this is a promise we all forget. The human world has a way of telling each of us, over and over again, that we are not worthy. The world will call us names and make assumptions about us. The world will say, “You aren’t capable, you don’t have value.”

Do not believe it. You do not need everyone to like you – in truth, following the gospel means getting under someone’s skin, eventually. People have all kinds of their own reasons for being critical of others that have nothing to do with you. Do not believe them.

Believe God. Believe the people who love you. Believe your friends who support you. Believe in yourself. I hope that each morning, when you look in the mirror, you see someone valuable, someone resilient, someone with the power to change the world for the better. I hope that for all us, young and old.

Ultimately, Pentecost is not simply about understanding spoken words. It is about hearing one another, listening to one another. This is the example that Jesus set: to listen, and to be wise, and not to be quick to fall prey to rumour and spin. To resist our own tendencies to wear judgment like a cloak of righteousness, for, I guarantee, we will quickly find that it is itchy, and heavy, and suffocating. We are to try to hear, underneath a person’s less-than-perfect or even destructive actions, a desire to be understood, to be treated as an equal. There is only one side worth taking – the side that seeks out a loving compromise, that keeps presenting love where hate appears to be winning.

Make sure you do this for yourselves as well – insist on being treated like an equal by those who say they love you. In your relationships, establish a standard of compromise and respect. Know your own worth, as God knows your worth.

Our calling is this: Go out into the world and speak the language of the gospel, as Jesus would have us hear it. Love and value one another as you want to be loved and valued. And love and value yourself so that all this can be possible.

In the end, every human speaks the same language – the desire to be connected and cared for, to be welcomed, to be free. That is our common vocabulary. That is the true sought-after goal of Pentecost – that in speaking the language of the gospel, we may all soar. We may all spread hope. We may all be heard.

Amen