September 18th, 2022

Sermon By Rev Joel Crouse

You cannot serve God and wealth. That last line in our gospel this morning lands with a bit of a thud right now. Most of us probably aren’t feeling particular wealthy – or at least not relative to how we felt when inflation was low, interest rates were rock bottom, and the stock market was soaring. All around us, we are watching life get more expensive just when life is finally – finally! – getting back to sort of normal. If coming to church meant being poor, that would be a hard tithe indeed. But as with most of the wisdom of Jesus, and the lesson of the gospel, that’s an oversimplification of what Jesus is really saying. In fact, if we pay attention to the complexity of this particular gospel message, it might be the one we most need to hear right now. Jesus packs a lot into his talk to the disciples. First, he introduces us to that parable of the manager who is in trouble. He is being called to answer to a rumour that he has been mismanaging his employer’s property. Worried about losing his job, he goes back to the people in debt and offers them a deal. For the one who owes 100 jugs of oil, he cuts the deal to 50. The farmer who owes 100 bales of wheat now only has to pay 80. And the weird thing is that his boss, when he finds out, slaps the manager on the back and congratulates him for being “shrewd.” Of course, the parable is an obvious one, on the surface: if the boss is God, and the manager has made some mistakes, he solves them, not by taking it out on others, but by showing mercy to those in his power. He doesn’t drag them into his mess, but instead eases their burden. You might say the shrewdness is realizing that when he’s out of a job, he will need friends: he’d better bolster their friendships now. So no, it wasn’t pure altruism. But what altruism is pure? A person realized that when all was said and done, he would need community, and he gathered that community, but using the power he had to make life easier for those in it. That he gained something from it – friendship – doesn’t diminish the act - so long as the manager didn’t make the mistake of pride and hold it over his friends. Most of the time, doing a kindness for someone else usually pays off in kind one way or another. But why was the manager’s boss congratulatory? He was now getting less. I suppose the lesson there is that God is happy with something from us, happier than with nothing at all; and doesn’t want our debts to weigh us down and consume us. But this gospel is really about the manager, so let’s stick with him. And let’s remember that Jesus is talking to the disciples in this case: people who have already decided to follow the gospel and walk with him. It is a very specific audience, and his message to them isn’t about introducing the gospel, but about focusing on the finer points. And this point mainly is, cheat with earthly wealth, and you cheat the gospel. Jesus was trying to make the disciples understand that there is not one set of gospel rules over here and another set of earthly rules over there. There is only one set of rules. If we are shrewd with our personal possessions and money; we must also be equally shrewd with God’s treasure on earth. The gospel calls us not only on Sunday, but on every other day of the week as well. If we are disciples, we are disciples with every decision we make. “Whoever is faithful in very little is faithful in much,” Jesus tells the disciples. The gospel isn’t a faucet we turn off and on. Let’s go back to the manager. He could have reacted all kinds of ways to the threat of losing his job; he could have lied about it. He could have pointed the finger at someone else. He could have grabbed what he could and made a run for it. All those choices might have left him a little richer, at least for a while, but they would also have left him alone. Instead, he showed mercy, and built a community. Jesus goes on to present the problem with that famous line, about serving two masters. A person comes to hate the one and love the other; or to be devoted to one and neglect the other. So we must choose: God and wealth are not in opposition, on their own. It is our slavish devotion to wealth that leads us away from God. This is a time for caution: when we are stressed and anxious, worried about our own futures, we tend to turn inward, to protect what we have at all costs. But Jesus, of course, would advise the opposite: look outward to the need around, and to the people you love; don’t get trapped within yourself. Be shrewd, for yourself, yes, but also for others. Because, of course, hidden in that gospel is the real secret to wealth. When we are shrewd and wise with those around us, we gain important currency for ourselves. We become people of integrity. When we practice the gospel – not only by not cheating at all costs, but also by risking what we have for others, by giving others a break, we grow in wealth, through community and self-worth. When we can live easily with our own actions and look back on our lives as having given more than taken, we are rich indeed. It is true: you cannot serve God and wealth. But to serve God is to be wealthy. Amen.

September 11th, 2022

Sermon By Rev Joel Crouse

We sure do love our opinions. Knowing what we know, and holding to it, is comfortable

– and it is easy. When life was dangerous – and the things we needed to know were

based on day-to-day survival – it was probably pretty helpful, too. But today the world is

complicated and nuanced and noisy. Yet still, our brains are better at processing

information when we agree with it. Once we have an opinion, we are likely to notice all

the ways the opinion is supported – and ignore or miss the counter arguments. Social

media – envisioned as a place of bountiful opinions – has only made it worse. You can

spend all day in that infamous echo chamber, having your opinions bolstered and never

challenged. The algorithm will make it so. This is indeed the tragedy of the commons –

when our minds cannot be changed, we cannot find common ground, we cannot see

when we have got things wrong, and we cannot hold sway when we are right.

And yet we know holding so fiercely to an opinion is wrong, even when we so

desperately want to keep it. We sometimes feel, in the fight for it, that we have lost

focus on the opinion itself – that we have become about winning and not about believing

something. Indeed, we see all sorts of times in society when people have argued

fiercely against something – how many of us had relatives who swore they would never

wear a seatbelt and are now grandparents who would never think of putting their

grandchild in the car without one? They came around. Research over time shows we

often do – about smoking bans, about not using plastic bags at the grocery store, even

when it came to sensible choices we made the during the pandemic. Our minds can be

changed, just sometimes it happens while we are still kicking and screaming.

So isn’t our first lesson a lesson for us? In that reading, God is angry. To Moses, God

announces plans to consume the people, who, having been delivered from their

enslavers in Egypt, appear to have lost their way. But Moses pleads their case: give

them another chance, he says. And what does God do? God’s mind changes. God

takes a pause, listens to Moses, and decides that, yes, maybe those people have been

through a lot, and they do indeed deserve a break. And what does that say to us – who

are fallible in so many ways– that God’s mind can be changed? Should our minds also

not be so open?

In fact, we have many historical examples of great change happening in the world

because people changed their minds. Martin Luther, for one, walked away from one

way of understanding our relationship with God to create another. Many of the disciples

of Jesus were people whose mind were changed when they heard the gospel. In

August, Mikhail Gorbachev died, a figure who would have loomed large among those of

us who remember the cold war. Gorbachev was a member of the Communist Party in

the Soviet Union, and a successful one. But the reason we know who he is, why he is

admired in history – is because he changed his mind. His radical reform of the system

he had once supported led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and an end to communism and

the Soviet Union as we know it.

The Queen, who we honoured this week for her constancy and stability through 70

years on the throne, was, by nature of the job, less knowable to us. But for all those

resolute steps, the Queen who took the throne at 25 was a different thinker from the one

who formally appointed her last Prime Minister two days before she died. If reason

doesn’t change our minds, often life will take care of that for us.

And yet, wouldn’t it be better if it weren’t so hard? If we didn’t first dig in our heels, and

hold our position, and not just listen, or pay attention to the world around us? How does

any change happen? People share their opinions, and you begin to see sense in them.

Or you look around and see the way that what you believe is unsustainable for the

earth, or harmful to others, or selfish, or built on anger and not reflection.

This is what our gospel this morning is ultimately about: Jesus cares about the one

missing sheep because we have the room, the power to change our minds. We can

repent. We can choose to see the world differently. Surely this was true of the tax

collectors, who, having spent their lives taking, came to hear Jesus teach them how to

give. Surely this is true of so many sins of pride and judgement; letting go of them is an

act of changing one’s mind. What is the other side of hate but a mind changed to love?

Changing our minds, as God shows us in our first lesson, is not weakness, but strength.

The journey of being changed lies behind mercy and forgiveness, the two most life-

giving acts we have in our power. To do so, we must listen, and we must pay attention

to the world. We must know that when we plant our heels in the sand and refuse to

budge, we are, in truth, fighting for what matters.

Amen.

September 4th, 2022

Sermon By Rev Joel Crouse

This summer, in Nova Scotia, Erin and I found the simple life on the ocean. Or perhaps,

I should say, it found us. It took a while – human nature tends to look for complexity

even in simplicity. But eventually, we got there – those moments when all the noise and

buzz of life goes quiet, and you find yourself in the world that God must have imagined

for us in Genesis. 

We have an old jalopy sailboat, one passed down from my parents. It is nothing fancy.

We might be able to sell it for a few hundred dollars. The sails are old, the rigging is

loose, the cabin is musty, the lights don’t work, and the 5-horsepower engine on the

back starts when it wants to (and when we remember to bring gas). Usually, our sails

start with lots of chatter – and a little bickering – about the best way to get off the

mooring, what destination we will take, where the best wind lies. But at a certain point,

calm settles on the boat. We listen to the hum of the swing keel. We watch for a chance

encounter with a porpoise. We feel the sun and the wind, and all the stress drifts away.

What matters in life – this peaceful moment, this gift from God – becomes our focus, a

time to think deeply about our place in the world. To find clarity.

And ultimately, this is the point of our gospel this morning. This is the message that

Jesus is trying to impart to the large crowds travelling with him, filled with people who

seek to be his disciples. His words sound harsh; whoever doesn’t hate father and

mother – and the rest of your family – can’t be a good disciple. Whoever doesn’t carry

the cross can’t be a disciple. Whoever doesn’t give up their possessions cannot be a

disciple. The cost of discipleship is certainly high.

But what is Jesus really saying? Certainly the gospel is not asking us to abandon our

families. It is not asking us to give up what we own. It is not asking us to be perpetually

suffering. 

Sometimes, Jesus swings the pendulum far to one side to make a particular point. In

this case, I think it is this: to be a true disciple, you must silence the noise and buzz of

life, and see what truly matters.

And who is often noisier in our lives than our families – who may write a narrative for our

lives even before we have had a chance to write it for ourselves. Even when done out of

love, this can be toxic. Who are the people most able to get under our skin? Even the

most generous families can confuse our own beliefs and stifle our own independence.

The least generous families conscript us into their way of thinking and become a source

of conflict.

Yet to be disciples of the gospel, we must know ourselves. We must be independent

thinkers. We must go against the common narratives. We must be clear about what we

believe.

And what of our possessions, or our desire for them? Surely, they are equally

distracting. We are taught early to want for more, never to be happy with good enough.

But the desire for bigger and better is also a dangerous distraction. It has done great

harm to our natural world. It has corrupted our souls. It is toxic to the gospel. And so

Jesus says you cannot crave bigger and better – at all costs – and be a true disciple. 

So the cost of discipleship is simple. Indeed, it is a simple life requiring strong willpower

and endurance. We must resist the voices of those we love most when they distract us.

We must shed our desire for possessions. We must silence the human world around us

to hear the voice of God. 

It may seem like a paradox: the gospel is a complex creation, requiring wisdom and

nuance, hard to hold and easy to lose. But to find it at all, Jesus says to us, we must

first distill life down to its most simple ingredients: love, kindness, generosity. From that

starting point, we can begin a path of true discipleship.

No sail is ever the same. It is different every time because the ocean is always

changing. Sometimes it is as flat as a shiny plate. Sometimes it is rolling with white

caps. Sometimes the wind blows from the east, and sometimes from the west. And it is

the same with the world, the one that the disciples of the gospel must navigate. It is

always changing, unsteady under our feet. Yet in that complexity, we may find

simplicity. From there, our steps may be more certain, more sure, and more true.

Did we hear the voice of God on the water this summer? I certainly returned to land

after every sail feeling more clear-headed, more at peace. 

In one of our most quiet sails, watching the horizon, we saw a whale crest the water,

splashing back down into the deep. That is not something you see every day. It is

something wonderful we would have missed had we been fussing about human wants

and needs.  

There is indeed a cost to true discipleship, a challenge pressed upon us. But there are

also many gifts. Silence the world of unnecessary noise, and we hear the voice of God.

Clear our view of what blocks us from the gospel, and we may glimpse the beauty of

creation in its truest form. Amen.