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

November 16th ~ By Your Endurance You Will Gain Your Soul

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Malachi 4:1-2a

Psalm 98

2 Thessalonians 3:6-13

Luke 21:5-19

Sermon by Pastor Joel

This week, I learned the story of Jesse L. Brown and Tom Hudner. Jesse was the first African-American aviator to complete the United States Navy's basic flight-training program, and he flew in the Korean War. Tom was the wealthy Irish-American guy who became his wingman. While flying over North Korea, Jesse’s plane took a bullet and crashed on a mountaintop. Instead of abandoning him, Tom crash-landed his plane nearby to save Jesse. Unfortunately, by the time they could be rescued, Jesse had died from his injuries.

I learned this story because, by chance, I happened to stumble across a movie on Remembrance Day. The movie had already started, so I missed the back story. But Tom Hudner’s act seemed so selfless, I had to google to make sure this wasn’t Hollywood fiction. And sure enough, the story was true. Jesse had overcome racism to achieve something no one else had done before him. And Tom did crash his plan, and risked the chance never to get home again, to try to save him.

Now, I know Remembrance Day has passed, freeing up all the stores to haul out the Christmas decorations – so why tell this story now? When I read the second lesson, I knew why I wanted to put it in the sermon. These verses from 2 Thessalonians are about a group of people who stop working and stop trying. They believe Jesus is about to return, so they decide to sit down and wait. And yet, they are chastised for doing so, and we are reminded: “Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.”

The second lesson isn’t about laziness; it’s about complacency. And complacency, I’d argue, its much worse than laziness. People, I have found, often don’t act out of laziness, but rather because they have been told for so long that they can’t do something, that they stop trying. Perhaps anxiety paralyzes them, and they are just too afraid they will fail.

But complacency – well that’s people’s being lazy who have the skills and ability and privilege to work for what is right. When we recognize an old problem but assume it can’t be fixed with a new solution, that’s complacency. When we see someone more vulnerable and don’t work to change ourselves or our community or our country to help them, that’s complacency. And it also seems to me that if we honour Canadian soldiers – and men like Jesse and Tom – for only one Sunday service or one hour at a war memorial, well, that’s also complacency.

Tom and Jesse were the opposite of complacent. At that time, segregation still existed in much of the country, but the Civil Rights Movement was growing quickly, empowering some to fight for their rights, turning others into violent thugs and murderers to stop those rights from coming to pass. Indeed, Tom and Jesse lived in a time like that described in our gospel – a time when people were rising up against people, and neighbors against neighbors. When the foundations of a society based on discrimination and oppression were being shaken and rattled, like an earthquake created by people working and fighting for change. And just as in the gospel, people working on the side of change were thrown into prison, persecuted, and beaten. They were betrayed by relatives and friends who stood on the other side; and some of them, as the gospel also warns, were tragically murdered.

In this world, Tom wasn’t even supposed to be Jesse’s friend, let alone risk his life for him. And yet neither sat around waiting for the world to correct itself, for others to fight for change, for the gospel to magically gets things done. They didn’t know how the war would end, or what direction their communities would take, but they went to work. The consequences of their labour were significant; enough to win them both medals and to be portrayed as heroes in a movie decades later. At the end of that movie you learned that the Brown and Hudner families remained lifelong friends. And if that is all their work had accomplished – an unusual friendship in defiance of racism – that would have been enough. Because our work doesn’t need to produce medals and movies; it just has to be an example of what is right in a world once terribly wrong.

Jesus doesn’t mince words; there’s nothing gentle about the image he is painting. He’s saying that the work is hard and the risk is large. But have no fear he says, no hair on your head will be harmed. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

“By your endurance you will gain your souls.” What a great line that is. What an important message from Jesus. Because, “the hair on your head” phrase, is really a metaphor; Jesus was not promising that the disciples would be saved every time they got into trouble, every time they faced an angry mob. No, the real promise is the next line: “by your endurance you will gain your souls.” What restores the centre of our very being? We already know. Doing what’s right by our families and the next generation. Leaving the world a little better than we found it. Being remembered by those who follow after us.

Now, let’s not forget. We don’t have to work. Our relationship with the gospel – and God – is not transactional, as Martin Luther recently reminded us. But Jesse and Tom didn’t have to enlist; they volunteered to wear the uniform. Tom didn’t have to try to save Jesse – in fact, he broke the rules to do so. And no one made the Browns and Hudners remain friends, they chose that path together.

So, let us not be complacent, in the lazy ways of the relatively privileged. Let us be active. Let us get to work. Incidentally, if you’d like to watch it, the movie about Jesse Brown and Tom Judner is called Devotion. Which is fitting, because isn’t devotion the opposite of complacency? What is devotion but the work of persevering, of loving what is imperfect, of standing firm and trying to help, or not getting distracted and wandering away from the place we need to be. Let this be us: persevering, loving, and steady -- disciples of devotion.  Amen