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

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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

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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

November 23rd ~ Competing and judging lead us astray. Grace, hope, and Kindness lead us to the Reign of Christ

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Jeremiah 23:1-6

Psalm 46

Colossians 1:11-20

Luke 23:33-43

Sermon by Pastor Joel

From the first day we go to school and pretty much every day after, we get told by society that we need to be better than everyone else. What are grades but a way of grouping us into As, Bs, and Cs? At one of the schools my kids went to, students used to get together and write their grades on the boards at lunch to see who was best – and by extension the worst. It goes on from there: we compete to be on teams, we compete to win our partners, we compete for promotions, we compete for the biggest house, the shiniest car, and so on.

No wonder that the action that comes with all this competing is Judgement. After all, how can we know if we are better, if we don’t judge? As society has gone from being more cooperative over human history and less individualistic, we have gotten much better at judging and less skilful at empathizing – empathy being another word for making space for others to be heard and seen. Because again, if another person is seen, does that not make us invisible?

This tends to go two ways: we think everyone is better than we are, or we think we are better than everyone else. Psychologists call this “illusory superiority,” and it has been found over and over again. Ask drivers if they are better than other drivers, and something like 80 percent will say yes. Ask people if they are smarter than most people, and almost everyone will say yes. Ask even therapists if they are better than their peers, and the same things happens. Of course, to paraphrase a famous line: if everyone is above average, then nobody is average. Or is above average then average? All this is to say, how we rank ourselves – whether too high or too low – is, for a lot of reasons, simply not true. It makes you wonder why we even waste time with it, instead of just living our life to the best of our ability.

On this Reign of Christ Sunday, with Advent approaching, we get a gospel much closer to Easter, although quite clearly to Good Friday. It feels off. Why remind of us of this moment so near to Jesus’s death on a day when he is celebrated for his leadership? Why make us think of those two criminals hanging on the cross with Jesus – who we’d rather skip past even on Good Friday? This is why: this exchange on the cross is a moment worthy of a leader to admire. And the thieves are a reminder for us, delivered roughly at the halfway mark back to Good Friday: better to hold your judgement than spew it around.

Let’s take a look at those criminals for a minute. We don’t know anything about them. The first criminal apparently derides Jesus – aren’t you the Messiah? Can’t you save us? The second criminal shushes him: we are getting what we deserve; Jesus is innocent. Which one would you be? Which one do you not want to be? I think we all know.

But why do we assume anything about these two men with Jesus? We know nothing about them. We don’t even know, except for one opinion expressed by an unreliable narrator, if they are truly guilty. We don’t know the context of why they are here and others are not. We don’t know the story of their lives that led them to this place. We do, however, know that the justice system is corrupt, that the leaders of Jerusalem are weak or power-hungry and that innocent people end up on the cross – we are looking right at one. We should be careful about judging: those are very human people, angry and scared and pleading, hanging on the cross with the Son of God. So set that aside: feel sadness for the plight of these two men, who were not saved long before this, and who can bear no more judgment.

What does Jesus do? He says only one all important sentence: “Truly I tell you, you will be with me in paradise.” According to our gospel, he doesn’t say anything to the angry and frightened man begging to be saved. Or if he does, we do not hear it. Jesus has been offered that test before – in a desert – and refused.

But how has Jesus responded in the past to cries to be saved by flawed, imperfect people, even when those cries are delivered poorly? How often did Jesus coach the disciples through their own bad behaviour? It’s true that the man who asks to be remembered by Jesus is more eloquent, more deferential, and don’t we all wish to be him in that situation? He gets the answer: Truly, I tell you, today, you will be with me in paradise.”

The gospel always reads as if Jesus was speaking only to one man on the cross. But I wonder? The disciple Thomas also tested Jesus and was not abandoned. Peter denied Jesus entirely, and was still blessed with his presence. In his moment of pain and suffering, Jesus takes time to speak and offer hope to the others hanging with him – he sets his own pain aside to focus on another. This is the noble act of a loving leader. That is the behaviour to emulate.

For me it all comes back to this: nobody’s perfect. We do selfish things, careless thing, even intentionally negative things all the time, and justify them to ourselves. We make demands of people to fix our own mistakes; indeed, don’t we often make the same demand of God? At other times, awareness seeps in, and we are wise enough to see our flaws, to seek forgiveness, to make amends, and take those to God as well. We are both that flawed human on the cross demanding to be saved, and the flawed human on the cross asking politely. If Jesus was the kind of leader who responded only when people were nice to him or flattering – well that, as we can see very clearly in the world today, is a very different kind of leadership. Certainly not the kind of leadership Jesus spent his life teaching – where leaders act for the sake of others, and not for their own egos.

This is where competing and judging lead us astray. Even standing at the cross, we’re deciding who fits in and who doesn’t, who gets in and who’s left out, who’s better, who’s worse – certainly worse than us. And we are missing the whole point: in his more terrible moment, Jesus still thinks of someone else. It’s only a few verses later in the Good Friday story that he will do it again, begging for our forgiveness. Instead of judgement, he offers grace and hope and kindness. Imagine if we did the same.

Amen