We are not abandoned in the wilderness

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Fourth Sunday in Lent

March 10, 2024

Numbers 21:4-9

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

It can be difficult for us to reconcile this vengeful God of the Old Testament with the loving, forgiving God who guides us in the Gospel. Our reading this morning from Numbers is just one example. Directed by God, Moses has led the people of Israel out of the brutality of slavery. They have travelled far, under even more brutal conditions.

But the trials are beginning to show. The euphoria of freedom is becoming weighed down by the reality of life in the wilderness. Should we judge the Israelites? They had already endured so much, and to escape one horrific situation to find themselves worn down and exhausted by yet more trials, would have been a lot for anyone.

But, boy, they certainly sound petulant, whining about their lot. There’s not enough food to eat and or water to drink. And what there is, they complain to Moses, is awful. They can hardly stomach it.

How many whiners did Jesus listen to? How did he respond? By turning their own words upon them or teaching them a lesson about being a Good Samaritan, or understanding that one prodigal son returning home does not displace them.

But the Israelites are not whining to Jesus. Instead, our God of the Old Testament, we are told, teaches them a lesson – by tossing poisonous serpents into their midst, to bite them.

Now it certainly does the trick and turns them around: they come back to Moses ashamed and ask for forgiveness. Lousy food is one thing; deadly snakes -, that is quite another.

But this hardly sounds like our God of the Gospel. So let us look at the story again.

The people of Israel were falling victim to a common human failing: forgetting to appreciate what they had. They were like people who, at first, when they win the lottery, are overflowing with joy and quit their jobs and make plans for all the great things they are going to do. And then life creeps in again - in the imperfect, frustrating way that life has of creeping in – and their happiness plummets. If they are lucky, it only falls right back to where it was before they got that winning ticket. There’s been plenty of research looking at how often this happens when people win the lottery. They get much happier for a while, and then their happiness falls back to regular levels. That’s because the lottery is not a ticket to happiness What sustains us for the long run is our approach to life – our faith, our attitudes, and our hopefulness.

Complaining too, is a human condition. This week, I read about how 15th century Germans coined a phrase for it: Greiner, Zanner. Or “whiner, grumbler.” Indeed, we are a discontented lot of Greiner, Zanners these days, it seems. Quick to snap at servers or at drivers who cut us off. Earlier this week, my social media feed gifted me with two middle-aged male travellers on the Vancouver Sky Train beating each other bloody. Read the comments under a typical newspaper story or post – full of vitriol. No matter how often we are told that life overall is better now than how humans had it in the past –with better medicine, better food, safer communities, longer lives – we seem to spend most of our time grumbling about the little things, while the really big problems, like climate change, just get bigger. Or we stop at complaining instead of acting.

But back to the Israelites. Listen, the wilderness could not have been fun. It’s possible, that even those Egyptian slavers were no longer looking so bad. At least then, they had food and water, a roof over their heads. They had known what to expect from one day to the next. But now their lives had become uncertain, and that triumphant feeling was fast dwindling away.

How God ultimately solves the problem of the serpents is the key lesson for us. Because Serpents are always turning up at our feet – not placed by God - but put there by life, by unlucky circumstances, by our own mistakes. In the wilderness, God doesn’t take the serpents away – for they will always be there. Instead, God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent, to heal the people who have been bitten, to give them a place to find hope, with everything going wrong.

In our gospel, we hear Jesus compared to that serpent lifted up by Moses in the Wilderness. Jesus is that solid ground in the wilderness, that place to bring our problems and our trials, and to be heard.

For we are told in the gospel, “God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Jesus.”

God does not put serpents in our paths; God gives us Jesus, the person to whom we may appeal when the serpents are nipping at our heels. The person who will hear us when we are whiny and complaining. The person whose teachings will remind us to have perspective, to have hope.

And what does Jesus remind us to do, when we are stuck in Greiner, Zanner mode? He reminds us to ask ourselves: what can we change about this situation? Who is really suffering? Have we tried to see the situation from a different perspective?

Perhaps we can be reassured by the fact that people are not so different today compared to the days of the Exodus. Maybe that’s more disappointing than reassuring. But let’s face it, we are also quick to forget the good thing that happened yesterday in the midst of the lousy thing that’s happening today. We judge first and open our minds later. We are often our own worst serpents.

We are mid-way through Lent. This would be my challenge to you for this week. Take some time to think about your complaints. Those things that really upset you. The people or action you hear yourself grumbling, even whining, about. And then ask yourself, am I being a whiner, grumbler? Am I creating my own serpent? Is this worth the time and energy I have put into it? Or, would I do better to change perspective and invest my energy elsewhere?

It is hard to stare deeply at the parts of ourselves that are miserly and mean. But Jesus is not here to condemn us for our imperfections. We will not be abandoned in the wilderness. Jesus is here to face the serpents with us, and to help us save ourselves from them.

Amen.

Change has to start somewhere. Be the positive tipping point for the world

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Third Sunday in Lent

March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

Mother Nature has certainly been having her say this week. A thunderstorm in Ottawa in February, followed by a flash freeze. A raging, dangerous fire in Texas, that sent smoke all the way up to us.

Scientists give us the news so often these days that all those studies blur together: the ice is melting, the ocean is rising, the world is burning. We can brace ourselves for another hot summer, with all the risks that brings to a human world. We may give thanks, jokingly, for a mild winter – even as skating rinks close early. We may, come August, soak in a warmer ocean. But these are all harbingers of an environment reaching its tipping point, our point of no return. If that hasn’t happened already.

Can we blame young people for being angry? I don’t think so. They are looking at a much different timeline than their parents. That will affect their choices, their futures, their families. Their anger is justified.

This problem, like so many of our issues, is something that just seemed to creep up on us; like the privatization of water, and our toxic air – we never meant for those to happen. It is the consequence of many small and large decisions, and one disconnected, self-serving behaviour piled on top of the other. Until those actions result in one big push, and we fall off the cliff.

I suspect that this is what happened to our merchants in the temple in Jerusalem. They hadn’t meant for things to get so out of hand. They hadn’t planned to stink up the temple with flocks of animals, to shatter the peace with their shouts of haggling, or at least that was just an unfortunate side- effect of their original goal – to make some cash. After all, they were providing a needed service. During Passover, the population of the city more than tripled. People came from Persia to Rome and all points in between. They needed animals to sacrifice – and, even the poor, who could only afford doves – couldn’t carry their animals all that way from home. They had to pay their temple tax – and they needed to exchange their currency to do it. You can just see it starting, with one enterprising farmer setting up a stall near the temple doors, with a few animals for sale. He mentions it to his banker cousin at a family dinner, and the next thing you know, the first money-mart opens for business. Another farmer. Another banker. And so on, until you need food vendors to feed the shoppers and clothing stores to dress them, and suddenly the tipping point: the temple—a place meant for worship—has been turned into a mall.

In our lives, isn’t this how it works most of the time? We don’t plan out our sins; they just happen. In our first lesson, we hear the Ten Commandments spelled out for us, as they were declared to the Jewish people by Moses when he came down from the mount. Most of us would never intentionally break any of them. When it happens, we are often surprised to look back and consider the small, harmless-seeming decisions or patterns that led to it. We don’t see it coming, however, because we choose what we want to see. We fall into ruts; or we convince ourselves that we aren’t doing anything wrong – that we are just “borrowing” the money, that we are just “protecting” someone with a lie, that we are just “comforting” a flirty coworker. But those actions, if we don’t catch them, can reach a tipping point - a lie becomes a betrayal, an intimate lunch becomes an affair, a borrowing becomes a theft. And suddenly, we are like the merchants stinking up the temple, and we cannot clean up the mess because we wouldn’t know where to start.

Jesus, as we know from the Gospel, reaches his own kind of tipping-point where this temple business is concerned. He flies into a rage. He whips the animals out of the temple. He dumps out money and flips over tables and yells at the top of his voice. This is the human side of Jesus – the Jesus who is so angry he doesn’t waste time with conciliation or prayerful reflection. He wants to make sure everyone is paying attention.

Now, there is some debate among New Testament scholars about the reason why Jesus was so ticked off. Was it because the shopkeepers were cheating people, turning the temple into “a den of thieves” as he is quoted saying in the other gospels? Or was it simply because the temple had been turned into “a marketplace” as this morning’s gospel tells it? I personally side with the first interpretation: what else besides corruption could get Jesus so angry? But either way, many religious scholars believe the storming of the temple was that tipping-point moment in Jesus’s ministry – when he could no longer turn back from his fate on the cross, when he committed to the path that God had set for him. After all, his behaviour was a direct attack on the powers that be, and it hit them in their pocketbooks, where people are most likely to feel the pinch. According to three of the four gospels, the purging of the temple was one of the last acts of Jesus’s ministry, before his arrest. He had become too much of a threat to ignore.

But for us, Jesus tips things in the other direction – away from sin and toward salvation. And Jesus sets an example for us; Jesus reminds us of the good that can come from living with intention and conviction -- that acts of kindness and courage, piled one of top of the other – can actually change the world for the better. We often forget this. Recently, my social media feed presented the story of a note a hairdresser received. An elderly lady had come into the salon, suffering from dementia. She was confused, asking the same questions again and again. But the hairdresser, the note said, had treated her like anyone else, with the care of any other client, and given her a lovely haircut. She died not long afterwards. But her husband, who penned the note, described how she had admired herself in the mirror for days. It was the happiest he had seen her in a long while. A small act of kindness that had a big impact. Just like our environmental decisions which collectively become so much larger. Our small negative actions have consequences, too. They gather power without our even knowing it - the driver we yell at for cutting us off, losing patience with a colleague, that colleague’s going home grumpy to his family, and so on. But this is also how our collective social behaviour works: it begins with one person, spreads to two, and so on, until it is felt by people we never know about.

This proves how powerful we can be in small groups. Like the examples we have right here in our communities of faith throughout this season of Lent -- with carbon fasts, food bank support, education, and activism around God’s good creation. Change has to start somewhere. Certainly it is our mission as a church community to start the chain of kindness and social responsibility.

But this is the question: Do we, through our welcoming and openness and interest in others, spread the message we want? Jesus’s anger in the temple was outlier behaviour. His ministry was built by going from town to town, speaking to fishermen by the lake and women by the wells – taking care not just to meet them, but to be someone who could inspire them to change.

For Jesus to be that tipping point in our lives and in the world depends on two things: first we must be deliberate about the kind of change we want to bring about, finding the personal integrity in ourselves by virtue of our faith to make the change. And second, we need to be the kind of people whose examples will catch on with others.

There may indeed be space for anger in the temple. Righteous anger burns like fire in the belly. But the example that Jesus sets is in the power of individual actions and choice. In the end, it was not the overturned table that defined the ministry of Jesus. It was the table he deliberately set and shared, around which everyone was welcome.

Amen.

Drown out the voice of temptation with something positive

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Second Sunday in Lent

February 25th, 2024

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Has there ever been a society so full of temptations and so well-designed to help us slip into them? Judging from the current debt load in Canada, we can see how consumerism has tempted us. Walk down any street, and there’s the temptation to buy something – and easy credit to buy it now and figure out how to pay later. We are easily tempted to work longer, to worry more about the wrong things. It feels as if at every step, temptations are thrown in our paths. Some temptations we recognize; some we fall prey to without even realizing it.

For the last two weeks, our gospel lessons have been all about temptation, cast in literal form as Satan, the devil on our shoulder. Last week, we had a brief reference to the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, to which Satan paid a visit. Today, we have Jesus himself invoking Satan, when Peter objects to his describing the journey to the Cross as inevitable.

These are two very different kinds of temptation: the first is self-serving; the second is an act of love. But both are really about the inward questions we all ask ourselves.

Up until this point, the people making life tricky for Jesus were earthly ones – religious leaders, questioning disciples. He did pretty well with them. The criticisms of the religious leaders he turned back upon themselves. The questions from the disciples became teaching moments for his ministry.

But those were external forces. In the wilderness, he was battling with himself. We can imagine it as a literal confrontation with Satan, who, if you recall, promises him wealth, and, when that fails, demands Jesus prove his own greatness. But ultimately, those really sound like internal questions: Do I deserve more? Am I doing the right thing? Can I handle this responsibility? Those are very human questions, questions posed by someone wrestling with inner temptations.

It is the same with Peter. Jesus responds so sternly - calling one of his closest disciples by the name Satan - that it suggests we should look for the subtext. Jesus, facing a difficult choice, could not handle any doubters, lest his own doubts creep in. Peter was trying to show his support for Jesus, but he did it in a way that only gave voice to the temptations Jesus was dealing with the ones beckoning to him to give up. Who hasn’t had a loved one, truly well-meaning, do the same?

This is the potential power of our own 40-day journey through Lent. We, too, are called to wrestle with those questions – to identify our own temptations, to determine a plan to resist them, and to define who we are with a better response to them. And we are tasked with seeing the times when, however good our intentions, we have been like Peter, unsupportively supporting, giving them an excuse when they didn’t want to take the easy way out.

Now, I would not presume to know what your temptations are. I do know my own. And that’s probably the easy step in the Lenten journey. Because I bet pretty much all of us can name, with just a little thought, the parts of ourselves that are so easily tempted to leap off the gospel’s path. Maybe you’re a critic when you should be a cheerleader. Maybe you make promises and don’t keep them – even when you know you should. Maybe you give up on people too easily. Maybe you give up on yourself too easily. This part is important: we have to be able to name it to fix it. We all have to do our own time in the wilderness. So, take some time, take a hard look, and don’t flinch.

In the end, though, for many of us, I imagine the most painful temptation is going to be the voice we have been hearing all our lives, the one that says you aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t smart enough, you aren’t good enough. Ultimately that’s the voice Satan falls back on with Jesus, raising doubt about his character, his true value. Satan basically asks Jesus, are you really worth all this fuss? And Peter, in his own moment of panic, was like that same internal voice, questioning the value of the choice facing Jesus. Often that internal voice - our own creation - is not very kind to us. So, what do we do with it? What is next for the rest of the time in our Lenten wilderness, after our temptations have been laid out to taunt us, our weaknesses outlined in front of us? Well, it wouldn’t be long before we all felt pretty lousy; there’s nothing more depressing – and more dysfunctional - than stewing in our own imperfections and failings, whether true or not.

So, our next step, then, is to enter into the conversation: we have to be like Jesus in the wilderness. He didn’t ignore the questions posed by Satan. He answered them. And each time he did, he learned a truth about himself. But the framing of his answers is important. When Satan, if you recall, offered a partnership, Jesus defined himself by the relationship to God that he already had. When Satan challenged him to prove his power, he said, God already knows what I can do; I have nothing to prove. When Satan promised him riches, he said, actually, I need more than money to live well.

One of the best forms of counseling that we learn about in seminary is the one that moves past ruminating about all the stuff that goes wrong and focuses on changing the conversation, finding an answer when that voice shouts at us about being unworthy. Just this week, I read about a researcher suggesting that the best way to change a bad habit was to focus on overlapping it with a good habit. If you want to stop eating chocolate cake, create the good habit of eating more vegetables.

In our house, when we focused on what we would do for the next 40 days, it became clear that the best goals were the “I will try to,” or “I will do more of.” Those were the goals that added something to our lives, rather than focusing on dodging temptation.

Jesus shows us how to deal with temptation. We do not need to waste time focusing on what we are already getting wrong. We are invited to create a better plan, to drown out that voice with something positive. And be that voice for others. Amen.