June 8 ~ Love is Our Common Vocabulary

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Day of Pentecost

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104:24-34, 35b

Romans 8:14-17

John 14:8-17, 25-27

(The context of this sermon was 100% written in Canada by a human)

That is a marvelous story we heard this morning. And a true example set by the plurality of languages being read from the same text. And good on all of us who found pleasure in it, even if we did not understand the language being spoken. Perhaps you felt a little confused or worked hard to keep up with the snippets you heard. You have just performed the most essential action of Pentecost: you accepted what you did not know, with humility.

If anything, our Pentecost reading came off too perfectly - thanks to the talents of our readers. For that is not how people of different cultures and languages come together. They misunderstand one another. They have to be mutually patient to build a friendship on deeper subjects than the weather. They have to be quick to forgive misunderstandings, and humble in the face of their own limitations.

For what else do tolerance and openness require but times when we are awkward and stumbling, in moments of misunderstanding and confusion, and with an optimism that we will build a relationship - indeed a nation - together?

Yet a willing humility to be confused and to feel awkward seems like a trait much in absence these days. I imagine my Norwegian grandfather coming to this shore - and how his English was at best filled with errors. What effort it must have taken even to order food, or be understood at a shop, let alone try to get through some government through. And yet, I assume that for him to have thrived in Lunenburg - and what’s more to have wooed my very feisty grandmother - he must have had people who were patient with him, who coached him, who gave him the benefit of the doubt when he stumbled.

Instead, today what do we hear? Fake news about the strangers in our midst. Anti-immigration rhetoric, even though we live in a country built on the strength and perseverance of immigrants. Complaints about diverse languages in the street, even though we may make little effort to cross the sidewalk and exchange greetings with a newcomer. We can have, of course, a real discussion about immigration and whether it is right to bring people to Canada who cannot find a home - but we can also accept in principle that diversity is what makes our communities alive and thriving. We can have serious and complicated questions about holding fast to the democratic principles of our country while allowing freedom of speech and religion. Too often we forget that kind and reasonable people can disagree reasonably and with kindness - on approaches, for instance, if not goals.

So how far are we from that first Pentecost? From a united vision of a loving God? Very far indeed, it would seem.

None of this is simple or easily solved. Not the wars between faiths that are ongoing; not the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, not the antisemitism experienced by Jewish citizens in democratic countries, not the distortion of God’s progressive and loving message.

The story of Pentecost seems to come off so easily: God, with a snap of the fingers, causes everyone to speak the same words in different languages. How much easier it would have been for us just to speak in one language. But Pentecost is a reflection of the reality of the world, that human beings are diverse and unique, depending on where they live and the language they speak. The world is complicated, and both the disciples and us are reminded of this today.

So, what can we do, as progressive people of faith, horrified by religiously-motivated violence, seeking peace, trying to compromise? We could, of course, just abandon our faith – reject religion entirely as the source of unrest in the world, a tool of discrimination in a species already prone to discrimination. We could, alternatively, hide our faith, ashamed to be tainted by association.

But this, as history has shown, would be tragic. For in a space with no middle ground, the extremes take over. If in North America, those who argue for tolerance and social justice go quiet, then judgment and tyranny will take over - indeed, we already see that clearly happening. If in Israel, those Jewish and Muslim citizens who seek peace stay silent or flee, violence will grow. If people stand by while teenagers and students are rounded up in the street, who will they come for next?

It is our responsibility, here in Canada, to continue to voice the principles of the gospel, of which Jesus has left us in charge.

Pentecost is a dream, an ideal goal – a time 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. The risk of our hearing the Pentecost story is that it suggests that if we just stand around, God will take care of it for us. But in fact, the gospel is not about God’s taking care of things for us – it is about God giving us the tools to take care of ourselves and the world around us.

Pentecost is a challenge to us: to seek to understand, to find a way across barriers such as nationality and language, to hold to the universal tenets of the gospel while the world is noisy and uncertain and confusing.

What, then, are we to do? What example has been set by Jesus, in our own faith? We are 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 the anger, 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.

We can do that as Lutheran Christians. Christ has taught us how. Indeed we have all been freed by Christ and empowered by Christ, in small ways - in the conversations, for instance, that we have with one another. Listen to your own words – are we assuming we are right too often? Or are we putting ourselves in the place of the other person and really trying to understand that perspective? Are we educating ourselves to understand the complexities of the problem? To truly practice this fine art of listening, of perspective-taking, of knowledge-seeking, is the only way to solve the problems that divide us.

Go out into the world and speak the language of the gospel, as Jesus would have us hear it. Above all else, love one another as you would be loved.

For in the end, every human speaks the same language – that desire to be loved, 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 be heard. Amen

June 1 ~Why Does Our Humanity Thrive on Screen, But Falter in Real Life.

Click above to watch a recording of Sunday's Sermon

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

John 17:20-26

(The context of this sermon was 100% written in Canada by a human)

Perhaps some of you have already gone to see Mission Impossible this weekend and revelled in Tom Cruise’s famous stunts. Reading the first lesson, it certainly feels like an action- movie plot, and we can imagine a Hollywood movie exec pitching it.

How would it go? The movie opens with a young woman enslaved by the villains of our story. She is dirty and dressed in rags, but, naturally, under all the grime, very beautiful. (“We’re thinking, Ana de Armas, the executive might say.”) Her slavers are using her skill at fortune-telling to line their own pockets: buying stocks before they rise, and winning lottery tickets. Think” White Lotus” wealthy, the people swanning around in fancy clothes in their oversized mansions, ordering people around, conspiring over future plans that take advantage of people – really unlikeable. Our poor protagonist is strong and fierce, but exhausted by their demands.

Enter our dusty, weary heroes: Paul and Silas. (“Perhaps,” the executive might say, “we can get Ryan Gosling and Timothy Chalamet if they are free.”) Paul is the leader, testy, but in a charming ‘Harrison Ford’ kind of way. Like spies in another land, they are trying to get the regular people to rise up against their tyrants and make the world better.

They have a “meet-cute” with the slave girl – “We’ll sort that out later”, the executive says – and she tells their fortunes (cue special effects) that identify who they are. But Paul doesn’t like that, so he uses his own secret healing skill to stop her fortunes. Our bad guys find out – and after a chase, they capture Paul and Silas and throw them in jail. The slave girl, now useless to them is put – inexplicably – in the cell next to them.

But the jailer – maybe a grizzly, bent-over Anthony Hopkins – takes pity on them, and feeds them. He doesn’t have the keys – only the bad guys do – but Paul, ‘MacGyvers’ the door open mysteriously (or was it a higher power?) – and also frees the slave girl.

The final scene: The jailer, meanwhile, has seen the light, and quietly begins teaching his family and friends the lessons he learned from Paul and Silas to create a more equal and just community. We last see our heroes, walking the dusty road, on to their next mission.

Not a bad movie, don’t you think? But then, so much of our sacred text contains the kind of characters and certainly the values that we see in our favourite movies. The misunderstood protagonist who finds her power. The crusty heroic team who saves her. The villains who get their comeuppance. And what do our heroes – the ones we remember by name and cherish in our culture – fight for? Not money and not power. They fight for love and family, for hope and peace.

There are a lot of narratives being told in the world right now. The real ones we read about in the newspaper are often the very opposite of the gospel. We see immigrants in the U.S. being snatched off the street and deported without a legal defence. We see children starving in Gaza and children stolen out of Ukraine. We see dictators solidify power, and democratic voices silenced. Why does what we know is right – what inspires us in stories and movies – seem so lacking in the real world? Why does our humanity thrive on screen, and yet falter in real life? Who are we in the gospel: the ones enslaved by villains, or the heroes rising against them?

All that to say, that while our story in the first lesson may seem dramatic, the gospel message that Paul and Silas were spreading has never been more relevant. That movie executive also took some liberties with the story: the slave girl, unlike Lydia, is featured in a much longer story, yet is never named. Paul is annoyed with her, we are told and calls out her demon. The bad guys, as far as we know, never do get justice. But God is present in both stories: in the resilience of the young girl; in the determination of Paul and Silas; in the willingness of the jailer to open his eyes.

These stories can seem like a good distance from our own lives, out of touch with the world we live in. And yet, the values and teachings they present are universal. What more do we need now – in these times – than resilience, kindness, mercy and openness?

Unlike the jailer who witnessed the power of God, we must look for it more deliberately in our own lives. God is here, among us. Indeed, our movies with their themes of generosity and self-sacrifice speak to the universal importance of the gospel. Even when humanity has lost its way, human beings know who they want their heroes to be, what those heroes should stand for, and how those heroes should act. As our psalm writer says: “Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the honest of heart.”

One last thing: That jailer, we are told, came to believe, and that belief was solid. This is another lesson for us, as we manage misinformation and mixed messages: to be careful what we think is true, and to safeguard our beliefs, which can be hard to change. When you feel confused by fake news and false facts, you need not look far: when everything else is stripped away, the gospel clears our heads and reminds us what to believe. Amen

May 25 ~Peace is Where the Gospel Speaks Softly and Unexpectedly, But Just of Powerfully.

Click above to watch a recording of Sunday's Sermon

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:9-15

Psalm 67

Revelation 21:10, 22—22:5

John 14:23-29

(The context of this sermon was 100% written in Canada by a human)

When I come across a first lesson like the one we have before us today, it stands out to me as unique. Through the New and Old Testaments, we often meet people who are over-simplified sketches -- characters that appear in a few verses and then vanish from our faith stories. All we can do is imagine their story, to fill in the blanks. We can choose how we see them, which is how theologians manage to have such lively debates. Usually, we interpret them through the lens of our own culture, and our own life experiences.

In particular, then, we are missing, with a few exceptions, about half the population in scripture. Women typically come to the surface only when a man is not present to tell the story himself. Female characters are the second-choice witnesses. The result is tragic, for while there are strong, brave women in the gospel, there are not enough. And we get little record of the conversations between women. Women in the Bible say little unless they are talking to men, or about them.

The Bible fails the Bechdel test – a term used to describe the amount of time women talk to one another in movies, where a man is not the main subject. In fact, in 15 years of “Best Picture” movies, the male characters get to speak far more than the female characters – many times more. And it’s also true in the vast majority of the Disney Cartoons our kids grow up watching – even in Mulan, a movie where the main character is female, male characters get 70 per cent of the dialogue.

This is a failing of movies, and it is a weakness in our faith stories. We cannot go back and change scripture. We can only spend time ourselves pondering that female presence when it appears, looking more intentionally for the lessons the characters have to teach.

And surely this is important, even essential to a fulsome understanding of faith – and to the words that Jesus speaks in our gospel. Jesus talks about the people who love him who will keep the Word. He cautions us to be mindful of those who speak what sounds like the Word of God but is not. And he describes the Holy Spirit who exists in the world to teach us and remind us of the gospel – and certainly to speak to us through others. “Peace be with you,” Jesus says. And yet he has also said all along that there cannot be peace when there is division, oppression, and discrimination.

And so it is interesting that tied to our gospel about peace and teaching and listening for God, we have Lydia, this interesting woman, in our first lesson. At this stage in Paul’s travels, after the death of Jesus, he finds himself in Macedonia, in the city of Philippi, a Roman colony. There, his first encounter is with a group of women, and Paul, we are told, seemingly without hesitation, sits down to talk to them.

Among them is one called Lydia, and we are given a surprising amount of information about her. She is a businesswoman who deals in purple cloth. Since purple is the colour of nobility, we can assume that she was well off, accustomed to bargaining with wealthy households, and hobnobbing with their residents. Since she carries the name of her place of birth, the Province of Lydia (what is now Western Turkey), some theologians have speculated that she was a freed slave – that’s unknown for sure, but if true, only makes her rise to entrepreneurship more impressive.

Another interesting detail about Lydia: she invites the disciples to come and stay with her, and there is no mention of a husband. She was the head of her household, which was not the norm in her day. Indeed, the lesson refers to “when she and her household were baptised.” Lydia’s household must be large, since she was able to host these followers of Jesus. What’s more, she was inviting Paul and Silas, who had just been released from prison and were foreigners on top of it. Lydia was not concerned with what others thought.

The gospel narrative refers to Lydia as a “worshipper of God,” which is meant to show that she was a Gentile who chose to practice Judaism. So Lydia is also framed as an independent thinker, one able to put tradition aside and choose what she wanted to believe. She was not born into her faith -- she picked it as an adult. We are told that God “opened her heart,” so she was someone willing to listen to different views, and take wisdom from those, as she found it. And since Paul and the disciples stayed with her for many weeks, no doubt having many discussions about faith, theologians believe she went on to be the leader of the Christian faith in Philippi.

Lydia, then, becomes an example of – at least in her time – unlikely leadership. That she is a woman makes her story stand out to us. But among the leaders we might see in the gospel, her strength stands on its own, head-to-head with any examples we have. She demonstrates the traits of independent thought by coming to her belief with consideration and choice. She presents the kind of leadership that does not worry what others think when it comes to acting in generous and giving ways to those who are different. (And in this case, notably, it is Paul who is the vulnerable person.) Through this leadership, she has earned respect in her household and presumably, in the community.

What is the surest way to hear God, and to find our own peace? To be cautious always about the leaders we follow. To mirror the example to those who would follow us, with kind and just leadership. And to listen for the wisdom of the gospel in unexpected places, where it may speak more softly and unexpectedly, but just as powerfully. Amen