Preached at Melville United Church, August 28, 2016
Scripture: Luke 5:36-39
I was born in August of 1960.
The world was changing. The United States elected its first Catholic president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Smoking was linked to heart disease in middle-aged men. Xerox introduced the first commercial document reproduction machine. And despite their astronomical price of $219.95 for a 23-inch black and white television, there were over one hundred million sets in use world wide. The FDA approved “The Pill.”
In other ways, the year 1960 was much like the years and decades before it.
65 out of 100 children lived in a family with their biological, married parents, where mom stayed home and dad worked. Only one child in 350 lived with a single, never-married mother.
80 percent of Americans thought that people who wanted to be single were “sick” or “neurotic” or even “immoral.” Only 28 percent of the adult population was single—divorced, widowed or never-married. Gay men and lesbians were not only sick and neurotic and definitely immoral, but criminals as well, according to the laws of the time.
Almost everyone went to church on Sunday, and stores and entertainment venues were closed.
The FDA may have approved the pill, but it wasn’t legal or available to single women.
The average cost of a new house in 1960 was $12,700. A man in manufacturing in Canada could expect to earn $1.98 per hour. A salaried worker on average earned $116.41 per week. Given a forty-hour work week for that manufacturing worker, the average house cost just over three years’ worth of wages. A worker would earn the equivalent of about ten loaves of bread per hour, and it would take him over one hundred hours to earn the cost of that television set.
Back then, a moderately-priced computer cost about one million dollars and took up several rooms. Those are 1960 dollars, unadjusted for inflation by the way. Only government agencies, universities, and large corporations could afford a computer, and they rented out time on it to smaller entities by the hour, charging thousands of dollars a day.
It’s now 2016, of course, and the world has changed.
The average wage of someone working in manufacturing is now $21.06 per hour, according to Statistics Canada. Interestingly enough, if that worker buys the store brand of bread, he or she is still earning approximately ten loaves of bread per hour. Despite moaning and groaning to the contrary, food and wages seem to have kept pace with one another.
As for technology: that 23” black and white television has become a quite modest Insignia 32” 720 pixel High Definition LED Smart TV, only two hundred and nineteen dollars and ninety-nine cents, on sale this week, only at Best Buy! Instead of over one hundred hours, it now takes the worker a little shy of ten hours to earn wages equivalent to the price of a decent television. And my Moto G cell phone, which I got for free when I signed up with Wind Mobile, has more computing power than that one million dollar gigantosaurus from 1960.
It’s not all good news, though. This week I looked up the average price of a house in Guelph. A modest house is now selling for about four hundred thousand dollars.
In wage terms, that’s about ten times a full-time manufacturing salary. But it’s obvious from the Stats Can data that a lot of workers are not working at full time permanent jobs, even in manufacturing. The average yearly salary is just over 30 thousand dollars, which is about 75% of a full time salary. Which makes a house worth more than thirteen times the yearly salary of a manufacturing worker.
In 2016, only 22 percent of children are living in homes with a mom and a dad where mom stays home and dad works. Another 22 percent live with single moms, and half of those moms have never been married.
Single adults are no longer seen as sick or immoral, and comprise about 44 percent of the adult population. It’s no longer illegal to be homosexual, and transgendered people are slowly making headway with respect to human rights.
Most people don’t go to church on Sunday. Stores and entertainment venues are open not only on Sunday, but sometimes 24/7. Even most banks are now open Saturdays.
Not that anyone uses a teller anymore. A worker is often paid electronically, pays the bills electronically, and pays for purchases electronically. In today’s world, you can be broke and get rich and go broke again, all without ever handling a single piece of cash money!
The world has changed. The reality that my children inhabit is vastly different from the one that I encountered as a young adult, and even more different from the one that many of you encountered when you were their age.
They meet their mates online, even if they’re old high-school friends. They play games online, get their news and weather and sports information online, they shop online and very often work online (and from home).
Most of our young women now attend college or university, and over 50 percent of university graduates are now women. A high school diploma is a necessity if you want to work at Linamar, or even get promoted to a junior management position at McDonald’s.
With student debt skyrocketing, and house prices soaring, fewer young people are able even to dream of owning their own home. Not that it’s always practical anyway—our society is much more mobile that it was, with the average person moving about every five years.
Everything seems to have changed…
Or has it?
Growing up in the 1960s and 70s in the United Church, I remember a little bit about the services. There was an opening call to worship, and some prayers, and three or four hymns, and two or three scripture readings, and a sermon, and the offering, and an anthem, and a prelude and a postlude. Sunday morning, ten-thirty to eleven-thirty, in the same building. Everyone sat in the same pew they sat in the Sunday before. Kids went off to Sunday School.
The hymns have changed, and we’ve changed the words to the prayers, and our theology has evolved. Most churches now don’t have the children go off to Sunday School right at the start of the service, but have them stay for a short while. We’ve added a children’s time.
But we still gather every Sunday morning, often in the same buildings we were meeting in then. We still have prayers, sing hymns, listen to the sermon, put money on the plate. And in most mainline churches, the people in the pews are the ones who were there ten and twenty and thirty and even forty or more years ago. We’re just older.
And we wonder why, with “all these changes,” our children and grandchildren aren’t coming to church. Where are all the young adults? We need them—to fill our pews and help us feel less alone, to bring their kids to our Sunday Schools, to put their money in the offering plate, to learn and perpetuate the values and traditions we hold so dear.
I was introduced a couple of weeks ago to the concept of “zero to one.” It’s a way of talking about innovation. Ordinary innovations are most often of the form “one to n,” which in commercial terms means it’s “new and improved.” We add features, or tweak existing features slightly in order to improve a current product.
Think of your basic kitchen stove. When I was a kid, our stove had four burners on top, and an oven on the bottom with two elements. If we wanted to broil, only the top element came on, and if we wanted to bake, they both came on.
Today's kitchen stoves are substantially the same, with a few tweaks. They’ve got digital clocks and timers so that dinner will start cooking when you want it to start cooking. You no longer have to guess whether or not the oven is up to temperature—the sensor beeps when it’s finished preheating. Some stoves have flat glass cooktops instead of those spiral electric burners most of us are used to.
That’s the “one to n” concept—adding to and improving a current product.
Zero to one happened for cooking with the advent of the microwave oven. The only thing my microwave has in common with my stove is a clock, a timer, and an electric plug. It uses the electricity to heat the food directly, instead of heating up the whole oven beforehand and cooking indirectly. As a result, it’s much faster.
It’s not a replacement for my stove. There are things my stove does well that my microwave doesn’t (like produce a luscious roast of beef or a wonderful peach pie), but there are things that my microwave does much better than my stove. For example, I can cook oatmeal, NOT the quick kind but the large flake, yummy kind in large batches in ten or more minutes on my stove, or I can put 1/3 of a cup of oats and 2/3 of a cup of water in a bowl and microwave it for three minutes, and it never burns.
In the church, we’ve been concentrating for nearly forty years on changing our services to hopefully bring in more young people. We’ve changed the music, we’ve changed the theology, we’ve experimented with different Sunday School curricula. What we haven’t done is changed the basic structure. We’re trying to appeal to millennials with a wineskin that appeals to their grandparents. And they’re mostly not buying it. The new wine, the spirit that is contained in our young people, is pouring out of and away from our old wineskins.
We need to ask ourselves why, in an era where the average working family is in debt up to their eyeballs and may never be able to afford a house, why are we asking those folks to contribute to the upkeep of buildings that are locked up most of the week? Why are we asking them to commit an hour or two of their precious spare time every single Sunday morning when many of them are working two or more jobs, often with irregular and unpredictable schedules?
Don’t get me wrong. We do need the church as it is. We need it because the fastest growing age group in Canada is the over-80 age group, and those who have tasted old wine prefer it to new, and are better fed by it. We need it because some of our young people have tasted the old wine and find they prefer it.
But I believe we need a new expression of church as well, one that can hold the new wine that is the spirit bubbling through our 20- and 30-year olds.
How will it look, this new wineskin?
I don’t know, but I have some ideas. With real estate currently priced at record high levels, and with it trending steeply upwards rather than down (I just read that in the first six months of 2016, the house prices in Guelph are up ten percent over last year), more church congregations will be landless. Many may not even meet physically more than three or four times a year. An active internet presence, with blogs, Facebook, Twitter and whatever comes next will be a big part of their ministry.
And I believe they will teach that personal spiritual practices, personal scripture reading, and personal reflection are more important than weekly bible studies and participation in church-run programs.
This last was brought home to me when I was reading an article about Willow Creek Church yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the mega-church to end all mega-churches, with eight different locations. It’s basically a denomination in its own right. The mega-church model is one that requires intense participation—in addition to the “celebration services” every Sunday, each member belongs to one or more small groups that meets weekly.
The leadership team of Willow Creek conducted a qualitative study, which means they were asking not about how many people were participating, but about whether the activities in which they were participating were helping them grow spiritually.
They found, to their surprise and dismay, that participating in lots of church-run programs did not predict whether someone was progressing spiritually, or whether they were becoming more of a disciple of Christ, or whether they loved God or people more.
Bill Hybels, Willow Creek’s founding pastor, summarized the findings this way:
Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back, it wasn't helping people that much. Other things that we didn't put that much money into and didn't put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.
Hybels confesses:
We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ‘self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.
In other words, spiritual growth doesn't happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships. And, ironically, these basic disciplines do not require multi-million dollar facilities and hundreds of staff to manage.
That’s actually really good news. I know a fair number of young people, and one thing that stands out to me about that generation is their passion for self-development, and having seen how computer technology has been used to transform education and gaming and shopping and banking and just about every other aspect of life, I can see how it might be used to help our young people develop as Christians.
When Jesus talked about new wine and new wineskins two thousand years ago, the Jewish culture was transitioning from temple to synagogue. Jesus preached on hillsides and plains, and asked no-one to sacrifice any animals. He did not follow all of the strict Jewish traditions around what one ate and when and where and with whom. He reached out to outcasts who would be turned away from even the most progressive synagogue. He was pouring new wine, one that was for everyone and not just a chosen people, and it needed a new wineskin. And so the Christian church was born.
A few hundred years later, Constantine wanted to unite an empire of disparate peoples, and he did that by embracing a faith that was for everyone, and not just a chosen few. The church transitioned once again, from being on the fringes of society to being the glue that held society together. The Roman Catholic church was born.
When the printing press was invented, and literacy rates in Europe soared, the church changed yet again to accommodate those who could and did read scripture for themselves. The Protestant Reformation was born.
And now, we find ourselves in the digital age, with a world that is beyond the imagination of the dreamers of the past. The church as we know it will transform yet again, but the faith of our ancestors, transmitted to us through the ages, is as alive and vibrant and new as ever. Amen.
Showing posts with label sermons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sermons. Show all posts
Thursday, September 8, 2016
Monday, May 16, 2016
Things We Found in the Fire
Reading: Acts 2
My son David preached yesterday, and his sermon reminded the congregation that the images surrounding Pentecost of "tongues of flame" aren't always comfortable ones. In ordinary years, the average congregant might perhaps equate those flames with the warmth of a fire on the hearth, or in a wood stove. Perhaps we might think of roasting marshmallows over a campfire or a candle-lit dinner with a loved one.
Warmth, beauty, sustenance--these are the associations we might make with the fire and flames of Pentecost in an ordinary year.
But as David pointed out, this isn't an ordinary year. Fire still rages over vast areas of Northern Alberta, and the entire city of Fort McMurray has been evacuated. "Only" two lives lost (if one can describe anyone's death as "only two lives"), and those in a motor vehicle accident, not in the fire itself. But eighty thousand people are now homeless and unemployed, and many of those will never return home or work in Fort McMurray again. Parts of the city have been destroyed by fire, while much of the rest will likely sustain damage from the smoke and heat.
Tell the people of Fort McMurray or anyone whose home, business, school or place of worship has been consumed by fire that flames are warm, sustaining and nurturing! The truth is that those small, tame fires are merely seeds of something that can grow to be much bigger. Given the right encouragement, a campfire can consume a city.
Believe it or not, those raging, out-of-control fires are necessary. A forest fire is nature's way of clearing out dead growth and underbrush, and preparing a nutrient-rich seed bed for new life. Certain pine cones will only open to release the seeds within when heated to extreme temperatures. Numerous species of animals and birds, including deer and black bears, thrive in the aftermath of a forest fire. The death and destruction of the old brings about life for the new.
And so we come to a bunch of men and women, some hundred and twenty persons in all, hiding, meeting in small groups, comforting one another and grieving for the past, as those in transition are wont to do.
Then roaring through their gathering with the ferocity and violence of a Northern Alberta forest fire comes the Holy Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come.
If we had any knowledge of the true power of that invocation, many of us would never utter it again.
That roaring power immediately destroyed that tiny gathering of Messianic Jews. They began babbling in languages they'd never learned to speak. Onlookers accused them of being drunk--at nine o'clock in the morning! The tongues like fire raged, burning away their protective cocoon. They left the room where they were gathered and began to witness to the people of the city. They stopped speaking their own language, and told the story of the Risen Christ in tongues that their listeners understood.
And within days, one hundred and twenty Messianic Jews became over three thousand Christians. The raging fires of Pentecost had given birth to the Christian Church.
We sit in our pews today, and we have once again dwindled. Two thousand years of traditions and doctrine and being embraced by the political establishment have grown up around the pillars of our faith, sometimes choking them, and certainly smothering new ideas. We have become more afraid of losing our positions of influence with the governing bodies of our countries than we are of losing our evangelistic roots. Many of our churches today are insular, pursuing what they perceive as "their God-given mission," in isolation from other congregations of the faithful and from the world. The majority of congregations today aren't any bigger than that scared little group of first century Messianic Jews, and many of them are much smaller.
And so we huddle in our little congregations on Sunday mornings, speaking our own languages, preaching to the converted, and fearing the future.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come.
Burn away our fear and shame. Make us drunk with the possibility of new life. Blow away our cloak of respectability, and teach us to speak the languages of the masses outside our door.
Teach us to prophesy. Fill us with dreams. Boot us out of our sanctuaries and into the world. Impel us to act.
Prepare us as a seed bed to nurture new life.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come!
My son David preached yesterday, and his sermon reminded the congregation that the images surrounding Pentecost of "tongues of flame" aren't always comfortable ones. In ordinary years, the average congregant might perhaps equate those flames with the warmth of a fire on the hearth, or in a wood stove. Perhaps we might think of roasting marshmallows over a campfire or a candle-lit dinner with a loved one.
Warmth, beauty, sustenance--these are the associations we might make with the fire and flames of Pentecost in an ordinary year.
But as David pointed out, this isn't an ordinary year. Fire still rages over vast areas of Northern Alberta, and the entire city of Fort McMurray has been evacuated. "Only" two lives lost (if one can describe anyone's death as "only two lives"), and those in a motor vehicle accident, not in the fire itself. But eighty thousand people are now homeless and unemployed, and many of those will never return home or work in Fort McMurray again. Parts of the city have been destroyed by fire, while much of the rest will likely sustain damage from the smoke and heat.
Tell the people of Fort McMurray or anyone whose home, business, school or place of worship has been consumed by fire that flames are warm, sustaining and nurturing! The truth is that those small, tame fires are merely seeds of something that can grow to be much bigger. Given the right encouragement, a campfire can consume a city.
Believe it or not, those raging, out-of-control fires are necessary. A forest fire is nature's way of clearing out dead growth and underbrush, and preparing a nutrient-rich seed bed for new life. Certain pine cones will only open to release the seeds within when heated to extreme temperatures. Numerous species of animals and birds, including deer and black bears, thrive in the aftermath of a forest fire. The death and destruction of the old brings about life for the new.
And so we come to a bunch of men and women, some hundred and twenty persons in all, hiding, meeting in small groups, comforting one another and grieving for the past, as those in transition are wont to do.
Then roaring through their gathering with the ferocity and violence of a Northern Alberta forest fire comes the Holy Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come.
If we had any knowledge of the true power of that invocation, many of us would never utter it again.
That roaring power immediately destroyed that tiny gathering of Messianic Jews. They began babbling in languages they'd never learned to speak. Onlookers accused them of being drunk--at nine o'clock in the morning! The tongues like fire raged, burning away their protective cocoon. They left the room where they were gathered and began to witness to the people of the city. They stopped speaking their own language, and told the story of the Risen Christ in tongues that their listeners understood.
And within days, one hundred and twenty Messianic Jews became over three thousand Christians. The raging fires of Pentecost had given birth to the Christian Church.
We sit in our pews today, and we have once again dwindled. Two thousand years of traditions and doctrine and being embraced by the political establishment have grown up around the pillars of our faith, sometimes choking them, and certainly smothering new ideas. We have become more afraid of losing our positions of influence with the governing bodies of our countries than we are of losing our evangelistic roots. Many of our churches today are insular, pursuing what they perceive as "their God-given mission," in isolation from other congregations of the faithful and from the world. The majority of congregations today aren't any bigger than that scared little group of first century Messianic Jews, and many of them are much smaller.
And so we huddle in our little congregations on Sunday mornings, speaking our own languages, preaching to the converted, and fearing the future.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come.
Burn away our fear and shame. Make us drunk with the possibility of new life. Blow away our cloak of respectability, and teach us to speak the languages of the masses outside our door.
Teach us to prophesy. Fill us with dreams. Boot us out of our sanctuaries and into the world. Impel us to act.
Prepare us as a seed bed to nurture new life.
Come, Holy Spirit. Come!
Saturday, May 21, 2011
It's The End of the World As We Know It...
...and I feel fine!
No earthquakes. No floods. No dead bodies everywhere. And unfortunately, none of the crazies have been taken up to heaven to be with their god and leave the rest of us alone. *sigh*
And the CDC had even come out with a blog post about what to do in case of the Zombie Apocolypse. I was so looking forward to putting the plan into action.
NOT!
I'd like to say that I don't understand why so-called holy men (it's almost never a woman) predict the end of the world, but unfortunately, I do.
It's buried on the ebiblefellowship site, which has already taken down the "end of the world" prediction page. Not that I expected any less, seeing as how it didn't happen.
But they still haven't taken down this page. It's their donation page, and it was live right up to and beyond the apocolypse. Just in case they change the wording, I'll quote what was on there up until at least the time of this blog post:
That's right. Despite the fact that the end of the world was coming when they wrote this, one part of their conglomerate (which they claim isn't affiliated to the other part. Like Hell...) was and is still accepting donations. Apparently, Family Radio intended to continue even past the end of the world.
Which tells me that the perpetrators of this scam didn't believe a word they wrote. It was only a scam to get money out of ignorant god-fearing folks. Unfortunately, it worked rather well on some people. A man took out his life savings to put up billboards all over NYC, I'm told, and I read about a couple who stopped paying their mortgage and saving college funds for their three teen-aged children because they thought it wouldn't matter past today.
As far as the perpetrator is concerned, he should be charged and convicted of fraud, since it's patently clear that he lied in order to obtain money, and innocent if ignorant folks are going to suffer big time because of his duplicity. I wasn't counting too much on the world ending today, so I didn't get myself in deep water financially or anything, but I'm sure that some folks will be in torment for far longer than the five months the tribulation was supposed to last because of this idiot.
And for the victims, I have only this to say: Wise up! It's fine to be a conservative or evangelical Christian, but fundamentalist Christians who believe this sort of nonsense are the laughingstock of atheists everywhere. Get an education in science and world history and textual criticism. Start questioning authority, especially the authority of anyone who claims to know the mind of God on any matter. And be doubly suspicious if they not only have a direct line to God, but claim that God wants you to give them all your money.
I'm a Christian, and I'm passionate about my religion. I love and serve God (or at least I try to...). I genuinely believe that if a society is to function optimally, there needs to be a religious cohort present. Certainly I don't know of any society from the beginning of recorded history until now that has successfuly functioned without one.
So it makes me truly sad and angry to see folks who might have been helped and comforted by having a religious faith become passionate unbelievers because of stupid nonsense spouted by greedy and/or ignorant preachers.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6, NIV)
ETA: I wrote this post, and had to come back to edit it, because someone on the Absolute Write forums linked to this article.
I will quote the writer:
One nutcase, with about ten followers, and people who don't know any better take them as representative of all religions.
If you are an atheist, please have the intelligence to realize that the overwhelming majority of religious folks are not like this, nor does most religion encourage "fear based on imaginary terrors." If you're so inclined, I give you a challenge: find a mainstream denominational church with a liberal bent and attend services for a few Sundays in a row. I'm not hoping you'll convert to Christianity if you do this, but I do hope it will educate in the matter of the wide diversity of Christian beliefs. You can also read some of my former posts on this blog, many of which are sermons I actually preached to good reception.
I have no real qualms with atheism, but fundamentalist atheism scares me as much as fundamentalist Christianity or Islam or Judaism does. And so I say the same to you as I say to the religious folks: get educated!
No earthquakes. No floods. No dead bodies everywhere. And unfortunately, none of the crazies have been taken up to heaven to be with their god and leave the rest of us alone. *sigh*
And the CDC had even come out with a blog post about what to do in case of the Zombie Apocolypse. I was so looking forward to putting the plan into action.
NOT!
I'd like to say that I don't understand why so-called holy men (it's almost never a woman) predict the end of the world, but unfortunately, I do.
It's buried on the ebiblefellowship site, which has already taken down the "end of the world" prediction page. Not that I expected any less, seeing as how it didn't happen.
But they still haven't taken down this page. It's their donation page, and it was live right up to and beyond the apocolypse. Just in case they change the wording, I'll quote what was on there up until at least the time of this blog post:
Donations to EBible Fellowship are no Longer Accepted
EBible Fellowship is NO LONGER ACCEPTING DONATIONS due to the shortness of time until May 21, 2011. If you still wish to make a donation, please make it to Family Radio (see below).
For all those who have given over the years, we thank you for your faithfulness in assisting to get the Gospel out into all the world.
Donate to Family Radio
Although EBible Fellowship has no affiliation with Family Radio, we do believe them to be a Biblically based ministry used by God for the furtherance of the Gospel. Contributions can be sent to them at:
In addition, you may donate to Family Radio through their secure donation form.
That's right. Despite the fact that the end of the world was coming when they wrote this, one part of their conglomerate (which they claim isn't affiliated to the other part. Like Hell...) was and is still accepting donations. Apparently, Family Radio intended to continue even past the end of the world.
Which tells me that the perpetrators of this scam didn't believe a word they wrote. It was only a scam to get money out of ignorant god-fearing folks. Unfortunately, it worked rather well on some people. A man took out his life savings to put up billboards all over NYC, I'm told, and I read about a couple who stopped paying their mortgage and saving college funds for their three teen-aged children because they thought it wouldn't matter past today.
As far as the perpetrator is concerned, he should be charged and convicted of fraud, since it's patently clear that he lied in order to obtain money, and innocent if ignorant folks are going to suffer big time because of his duplicity. I wasn't counting too much on the world ending today, so I didn't get myself in deep water financially or anything, but I'm sure that some folks will be in torment for far longer than the five months the tribulation was supposed to last because of this idiot.
And for the victims, I have only this to say: Wise up! It's fine to be a conservative or evangelical Christian, but fundamentalist Christians who believe this sort of nonsense are the laughingstock of atheists everywhere. Get an education in science and world history and textual criticism. Start questioning authority, especially the authority of anyone who claims to know the mind of God on any matter. And be doubly suspicious if they not only have a direct line to God, but claim that God wants you to give them all your money.
I'm a Christian, and I'm passionate about my religion. I love and serve God (or at least I try to...). I genuinely believe that if a society is to function optimally, there needs to be a religious cohort present. Certainly I don't know of any society from the beginning of recorded history until now that has successfuly functioned without one.
So it makes me truly sad and angry to see folks who might have been helped and comforted by having a religious faith become passionate unbelievers because of stupid nonsense spouted by greedy and/or ignorant preachers.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." (Matthew 18:6, NIV)
ETA: I wrote this post, and had to come back to edit it, because someone on the Absolute Write forums linked to this article.
I will quote the writer:
This is what religion encourages: fear based on imaginary terrors.
One nutcase, with about ten followers, and people who don't know any better take them as representative of all religions.
If you are an atheist, please have the intelligence to realize that the overwhelming majority of religious folks are not like this, nor does most religion encourage "fear based on imaginary terrors." If you're so inclined, I give you a challenge: find a mainstream denominational church with a liberal bent and attend services for a few Sundays in a row. I'm not hoping you'll convert to Christianity if you do this, but I do hope it will educate in the matter of the wide diversity of Christian beliefs. You can also read some of my former posts on this blog, many of which are sermons I actually preached to good reception.
I have no real qualms with atheism, but fundamentalist atheism scares me as much as fundamentalist Christianity or Islam or Judaism does. And so I say the same to you as I say to the religious folks: get educated!
Monday, January 19, 2009
People of the "Yes!"
Scripture Readings: 1 Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51
Carl Allen was a “No” man. Ask him out for a drink at the local pub, and he’d almost certainly say, “No.” Ask him to a party, or to stay late at work, or to help out with a project that’s too big for one person alone, and the answer would always be the same.
“No. No, no, no, no, NO!”
And what did Carl do instead of saying, “Yes?” Why, he sat at home watching bad television and DVDs randomly selected from the video store.
His wife left him, and his friends almost gave up on him when he missed the engagement party of one of them. Late one night, he dreamed of himself lying on the sofa dead, while his friends drank his last beer and stared down at him, trying to determine if he really was dead. They had trouble doing this, because in Carl’s case, there wasn’t really all that much difference between dead and alive.
This is how the movie Yes Man starts. It’s an exaggerated version of the start of the book it’s based on, also called Yes Man. The book is the true story of a year in comedian Danny Wallace’s life, a year that begins with Danny realizing that saying, “No” has gotten him nowhere fast.
The book and the movie aren’t about particularly unusual people. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of people in the world whose life consists of waking up in the morning, eating breakfast, commuting to a job they don’t particularly enjoy but don’t hate enough to leave, doing the job, commuting home, having supper, watching television, and going to bed. Carl Allen was one of those people, and despite his seemingly glamorous career as a comedian and television producer, so was Danny Wallace.
People of the “No” have been around for a long, long time. How many women before Hannah refused to leave their sons at the temple? Refused to give them to the Lord? Our biblical records don’t tell us. They’re forgotten.
To how many people did Jesus say, “Follow me?” Only a dozen? Somehow, knowing human nature, I don’t think so. Probably more than a dozen, possibly many, many more. But the Son of Man had no home. Following him meant leaving the familiar, the supportive. It was a lot easier for them to listen politely, nod their heads, and just say, “No thanks. Not today.”
No. No, no, no, no, NO!
Saying no is safe, it’s easy, and rarely costs anything. Or so we believe. If we say no, we won’t get scammed, taken in, misled. If we say no, we’ll have the time to do the things we really want to do, even if we don’t know what they are. If we say no, we’re condemned to live life as it has always been, and die never knowing what would have happened had we said, “Yes.”
But if we do say, “Yes…” What happens then?
In real life, Danny Wallace was on a bus. He may not have felt down at that fateful moment, but he certainly must have looked it, because a man on the bus spoke to him and said, “You need to say ‘Yes’ more.” Danny thought about that, and decided to say “yes” to everything for the next year.
In the movie, Carl is dragged to a seminar on saying yes by an enthusiastic friend. Guru Terrance Bundley bullies him into making a covenant to say “yes” to everything.
Though the specifics differ, what follows in both book and movie is a funny, moving journey—the journey of a man travelling the road from death to life.
Right about now, I’m almost certain that some of you are thinking, “That’s crazy! You can’t say yes to everything! What about scammers? What about over-commitment? What about money? It doesn’t grow on trees, you know!”
If you’re asking those questions, let me ask you a couple of questions in return.
What place does “faith” have in your journey?
And how important are your concerns, really?
Let me tell you about another journey that has involved saying “yes” a lot. It’s a true story, and I know this because it’s mine.
I said “yes” on the first Tuesday of a long-ago September, when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with him to see what Army Cadets was all about. Something a bit odd, something none of my female friends would have done.
But I said “yes,” and I followed through, and that night I met a young man named Bill Cooke. And now that I think of it, that’s in keeping with what happens to both Danny (in real life) and Carl (in the movie.) We all ended up meeting that special someone— someone we wouldn’t ever have met had we stuck to our routines and our closed circle of friends.
The Saturday following that fateful Tuesday, I learned how to shoot a rifle, and crawl through the bush unseen, and camp in a tent. I went from being a child of the suburbs to being at home in the wilderness almost overnight, and it’s changed how I see and interact with the world.
A few years later I said another “yes,” this time to Bill. A few “yeses” later, and we had three kids. The eldest of those, at age five, wanted violin lessons. We were broke, and I wasn’t sure that five years of age was old enough to learn to play an instrument, and…
I said “yes,” of course. I never imagined that eighteen years later, one of my children would be on her way to being a professional musician. I certainly never dreamed that I would myself be playing in an orchestra and accompanying the famous operatic tenor Ben Heppner, which will happen on February 13th of this year. (Me? Excited? Nah… )
I said “yes,” when at the lowest point in my life, God called me to ministry. Again, no money, no job, no hope. But I had nothing to lose, so I did it. And ended up coming back to life.
I’ll freely admit that many, if not most, presbytery meetings can be boring. When I was in ministry, I’ll shamefully admit to finding reasons to say no. But one day, I didn’t put it off, and I said, “Yes.”
I went home with a flyer about a youth mission trip some members of a Waterloo church were planning. We couldn’t afford to send one child—once again, we were broke, under-employed, and now dealing with an autistic child.
We ended up sending two of our kids, and Allison and David will probably be delighted to tell you all about it some time. They came back changed for life, but it wasn’t just them who benefited. I found out, through saying yes, just how much support is out there for people who say yes. Five different church families supported us. Random strangers donated to our cause. We found resources and talents within ourselves that we didn’t know we had. We made friends, and we had a ball.
Because I said yes to a boring meeting, and yes to what followed.
It’s not just theory, and it’s not just me and Carl Allen and Danny Wallace. Saying yes to most things, even when it’s hard to do so and requires sacrifices we don’t think we can make has rewards that are beyond our imagining.
Let’s go back to those early followers of Jesus. They said, “Yes,” and they learned a new way of living.
Feed the hungry, heal the sick, clothe the naked. Don’t be afraid of death, for God is with us in life, in death, and in life beyond death.
We take those lessons for granted some days, but I’m convinced that those simple acts of saying, “Yes” to the world around them were the difference between life and death for the early church.
The people around those early Christians often abandoned those in need. With no antibiotics, no surgery, no knowledge even of what caused disease and how to prevent it, saying, “No” to helping someone who was dying was an act of common sense, not of callousness. The same might be said of giving to the poor and hungry in a world where famine and drought and want were regular visitors, even to the rich. We sometimes forget that in our little world where we too often waste as much food as we eat that it wasn’t always that way, and that giving away one’s excess food might very well cost one one’s life in lean times.
But early Christians became convinced that there was something more to living than mere life, and lost some of that fear of dying that is instinctive to us all. Not being afraid of dying meant a Christian was more likely to help a sick neighbour. The help the sick neighbour received meant the neighbour was more likely to survive. A neighbour who survived a plague due to Christian nursing was very likely to become a Christian himself. And so it went. The early Christian Church had a phenomenal growth rate, and it wasn’t due to preaching the word. It was because Christians live the word, and the word was, and is, “YES!”
Mary said yes, and Jesus was born.
James and John and Simon Peter said yes, and a church was born.
Philip and Nathaniel said yes. Paul said yes. Dorcas said yes. Timothy said yes.
And on, and on, and on, and on, right on down to you. Now the question comes. God is knocking at your door, calling you to do big, scary, fun things—things that you’ve never done before. God is that unknown person on the bus, that slick television guru, that pesky friend who drags you to a new place, that stuttering person standing up at the presbytery meeting.
You’ll listen to their calls to action, and you’ll think about it for a bit. And you’ll find excuses to say no. You don’t have the money. You don’t have the time. You don’t have the energy. You don’t have the skills or the resources. Saying, “Yes” would be a big hassle, and upset your routine.
But God is persistent. God will still knock at your door, calling your name, asking you to come out and play, to come out and live. God will keep knocking, keep asking, for the rest of your life.
How will you answer?
(Preached at Alma United Church, January 18, 2009)
Carl Allen was a “No” man. Ask him out for a drink at the local pub, and he’d almost certainly say, “No.” Ask him to a party, or to stay late at work, or to help out with a project that’s too big for one person alone, and the answer would always be the same.
“No. No, no, no, no, NO!”
And what did Carl do instead of saying, “Yes?” Why, he sat at home watching bad television and DVDs randomly selected from the video store.
His wife left him, and his friends almost gave up on him when he missed the engagement party of one of them. Late one night, he dreamed of himself lying on the sofa dead, while his friends drank his last beer and stared down at him, trying to determine if he really was dead. They had trouble doing this, because in Carl’s case, there wasn’t really all that much difference between dead and alive.
This is how the movie Yes Man starts. It’s an exaggerated version of the start of the book it’s based on, also called Yes Man. The book is the true story of a year in comedian Danny Wallace’s life, a year that begins with Danny realizing that saying, “No” has gotten him nowhere fast.
The book and the movie aren’t about particularly unusual people. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of people in the world whose life consists of waking up in the morning, eating breakfast, commuting to a job they don’t particularly enjoy but don’t hate enough to leave, doing the job, commuting home, having supper, watching television, and going to bed. Carl Allen was one of those people, and despite his seemingly glamorous career as a comedian and television producer, so was Danny Wallace.
People of the “No” have been around for a long, long time. How many women before Hannah refused to leave their sons at the temple? Refused to give them to the Lord? Our biblical records don’t tell us. They’re forgotten.
To how many people did Jesus say, “Follow me?” Only a dozen? Somehow, knowing human nature, I don’t think so. Probably more than a dozen, possibly many, many more. But the Son of Man had no home. Following him meant leaving the familiar, the supportive. It was a lot easier for them to listen politely, nod their heads, and just say, “No thanks. Not today.”
No. No, no, no, no, NO!
Saying no is safe, it’s easy, and rarely costs anything. Or so we believe. If we say no, we won’t get scammed, taken in, misled. If we say no, we’ll have the time to do the things we really want to do, even if we don’t know what they are. If we say no, we’re condemned to live life as it has always been, and die never knowing what would have happened had we said, “Yes.”
But if we do say, “Yes…” What happens then?
In real life, Danny Wallace was on a bus. He may not have felt down at that fateful moment, but he certainly must have looked it, because a man on the bus spoke to him and said, “You need to say ‘Yes’ more.” Danny thought about that, and decided to say “yes” to everything for the next year.
In the movie, Carl is dragged to a seminar on saying yes by an enthusiastic friend. Guru Terrance Bundley bullies him into making a covenant to say “yes” to everything.
Though the specifics differ, what follows in both book and movie is a funny, moving journey—the journey of a man travelling the road from death to life.
Right about now, I’m almost certain that some of you are thinking, “That’s crazy! You can’t say yes to everything! What about scammers? What about over-commitment? What about money? It doesn’t grow on trees, you know!”
If you’re asking those questions, let me ask you a couple of questions in return.
What place does “faith” have in your journey?
And how important are your concerns, really?
Let me tell you about another journey that has involved saying “yes” a lot. It’s a true story, and I know this because it’s mine.
I said “yes” on the first Tuesday of a long-ago September, when a friend asked me if I wanted to go with him to see what Army Cadets was all about. Something a bit odd, something none of my female friends would have done.
But I said “yes,” and I followed through, and that night I met a young man named Bill Cooke. And now that I think of it, that’s in keeping with what happens to both Danny (in real life) and Carl (in the movie.) We all ended up meeting that special someone— someone we wouldn’t ever have met had we stuck to our routines and our closed circle of friends.
The Saturday following that fateful Tuesday, I learned how to shoot a rifle, and crawl through the bush unseen, and camp in a tent. I went from being a child of the suburbs to being at home in the wilderness almost overnight, and it’s changed how I see and interact with the world.
A few years later I said another “yes,” this time to Bill. A few “yeses” later, and we had three kids. The eldest of those, at age five, wanted violin lessons. We were broke, and I wasn’t sure that five years of age was old enough to learn to play an instrument, and…
I said “yes,” of course. I never imagined that eighteen years later, one of my children would be on her way to being a professional musician. I certainly never dreamed that I would myself be playing in an orchestra and accompanying the famous operatic tenor Ben Heppner, which will happen on February 13th of this year. (Me? Excited? Nah… )
I said “yes,” when at the lowest point in my life, God called me to ministry. Again, no money, no job, no hope. But I had nothing to lose, so I did it. And ended up coming back to life.
I’ll freely admit that many, if not most, presbytery meetings can be boring. When I was in ministry, I’ll shamefully admit to finding reasons to say no. But one day, I didn’t put it off, and I said, “Yes.”
I went home with a flyer about a youth mission trip some members of a Waterloo church were planning. We couldn’t afford to send one child—once again, we were broke, under-employed, and now dealing with an autistic child.
We ended up sending two of our kids, and Allison and David will probably be delighted to tell you all about it some time. They came back changed for life, but it wasn’t just them who benefited. I found out, through saying yes, just how much support is out there for people who say yes. Five different church families supported us. Random strangers donated to our cause. We found resources and talents within ourselves that we didn’t know we had. We made friends, and we had a ball.
Because I said yes to a boring meeting, and yes to what followed.
It’s not just theory, and it’s not just me and Carl Allen and Danny Wallace. Saying yes to most things, even when it’s hard to do so and requires sacrifices we don’t think we can make has rewards that are beyond our imagining.
Let’s go back to those early followers of Jesus. They said, “Yes,” and they learned a new way of living.
Feed the hungry, heal the sick, clothe the naked. Don’t be afraid of death, for God is with us in life, in death, and in life beyond death.
We take those lessons for granted some days, but I’m convinced that those simple acts of saying, “Yes” to the world around them were the difference between life and death for the early church.
The people around those early Christians often abandoned those in need. With no antibiotics, no surgery, no knowledge even of what caused disease and how to prevent it, saying, “No” to helping someone who was dying was an act of common sense, not of callousness. The same might be said of giving to the poor and hungry in a world where famine and drought and want were regular visitors, even to the rich. We sometimes forget that in our little world where we too often waste as much food as we eat that it wasn’t always that way, and that giving away one’s excess food might very well cost one one’s life in lean times.
But early Christians became convinced that there was something more to living than mere life, and lost some of that fear of dying that is instinctive to us all. Not being afraid of dying meant a Christian was more likely to help a sick neighbour. The help the sick neighbour received meant the neighbour was more likely to survive. A neighbour who survived a plague due to Christian nursing was very likely to become a Christian himself. And so it went. The early Christian Church had a phenomenal growth rate, and it wasn’t due to preaching the word. It was because Christians live the word, and the word was, and is, “YES!”
Mary said yes, and Jesus was born.
James and John and Simon Peter said yes, and a church was born.
Philip and Nathaniel said yes. Paul said yes. Dorcas said yes. Timothy said yes.
And on, and on, and on, and on, right on down to you. Now the question comes. God is knocking at your door, calling you to do big, scary, fun things—things that you’ve never done before. God is that unknown person on the bus, that slick television guru, that pesky friend who drags you to a new place, that stuttering person standing up at the presbytery meeting.
You’ll listen to their calls to action, and you’ll think about it for a bit. And you’ll find excuses to say no. You don’t have the money. You don’t have the time. You don’t have the energy. You don’t have the skills or the resources. Saying, “Yes” would be a big hassle, and upset your routine.
But God is persistent. God will still knock at your door, calling your name, asking you to come out and play, to come out and live. God will keep knocking, keep asking, for the rest of your life.
How will you answer?
(Preached at Alma United Church, January 18, 2009)
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Just Past Splat
It’s coming up on that time again, and I was wondering—How many of you are planning to make New Year’s resolutions this year?
How many of you are NOT planning to make New Year’s resolutions, because you’ve never made New Year’s resolutions?
And how many of you are planning to not make New Year’s resolutions, because in the past you’ve found yourself making the same resolutions over and over and over and over again, and failing every year to follow through?
If you’re in that last group, you’re not alone, I’m afraid. And the story I’m about to tell is just for you, though I’m sure the rest of you will enjoy it too.
Picture, if you will, a road. It runs through forests and fields and cities, up hill and down. Sometimes, the road is smooth and wide and paved, and other times, it’s narrow and full of potholes. We’ll call this road “life,” because that’s it’s name.
Picture a traveller, walking along this road. Her back is bent under a heavy pack. She walks slowly, for she is weary and has been on the road a long time. She uses a walking stick to help her on her way.
Our traveller reaches a crossroads. She knows that one of the paths ahead leads to a place called “A Better Life,” and the other path leads to a place called “The Same Old Same Old.”
Beside the crossroads, there is a hut, and in front of the hut an old woodcutter sits, rocking away in his rocking chair on the front porch. She asks him, “Which path leads to A Better Life?”
Without hesitation, he points down the narrower and rockier of the two paths. The traveller thanks him and heads off down the road. A short while later, the woodcutter in his chair hears a “splat,” and soon after that, our traveller comes back to him, soaked to her knees in mud.
“I thought you said this path was the right one,” she said. “Now please tell me, which path leads to a better life?”
The woodcutter is adamant. He points her down the same path again, and reassured by his firm belief, she sets off again. A short while later, the woodcutter hears an even bigger “splat!” Soon after that, the traveller returns, and this time, she’s angry—covered to her waist in ooey, gooey mud.
“Tell me the truth, Old Man!” she shouts at him. “Which way is the road to A Better Life?”
“That way,” the woodcutter says, and something in his eyes, something in his calm insistence, something makes her believe him, and off she goes.
Of course, not very long after, the woodcutter in his rocking chair hears a very loud splat. This time, when the woman returns, she’s covered in mud from head to toe, and she’s about to use that walking stick of hers for less than peaceful purposes.
“Tell me, you varmint, you! Tell me which is the road to A Better Life!” (Actually, those weren't her exact words, but I'm not allowed to say those kind of things in church.)
The woodcutter looks her in the eyes, points down the path, and says, “It’s that way, just past ‘splat.’”
Another little story, this one more literal and more personal. I’m one of those folks who makes the same New Year’s resolutions every year, and goes “splat,” usually by the end of January. If you want to know what my usual resolutions are, I always resolve to finish my novel, to lose weight, and to get my finances in order. And without fail, I go splat.
Except this year, whilst swimming around in the mud, I got a vision of what it’s going to be like when I reach that destination called “A Better Life.” Because this year, I set a huge goal, one I’ve set for myself before. But this year I reached it!
Every year for the past five, I’ve participated in a particularly mad escapade called NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoers, as we call ourselves, is to complete fifty thousand new words of a novel.
Before this year, I tried four times, and failed four times. It was particularly discouraging those years my kids did it with me, because they invariably beat my word count, such as it was.
But this year, I did a few things differently. I put aside the novel I’ve been working on for twenty years, and started a new one. I hooked up with friends on the internet and in real life coffee shops who egged me on. And I wrote just over fifty thousand words last month. And I finally figured out that if I can manage to get past “splat” the path continues, and it’s a fun place to travel.
It happens to us all. We set goals that we want very much to achieve, but life gets in the way. We don’t know how to do what it is we want to do. We run out of money, time, or energy. We get sick. Others who want us to stay as we are keep pulling us back into our own ways.
And we give up. Stop what we consider to be vain striving, and head down the broad, easy path to The Same Old Same Old. If God had wanted us to go down that hard path, we say to ourselves, why then, the mud and the rocks wouldn’t be there!
But would it?
We read today a prophet’s words of hope to a nation in exile. They’ve gone “splat” in the most humiliating way imaginable, with the common people treated as slaves in their own homeland, and the leaders exiled to a foreign place. They feel forsaken and alone. By the rivers of Babylon, they sit down and weep.
Simeon and Anna… I’m sure that at times during their long wait to see the saviour, they sat down and wept, too. “I’m an old, old man,” Simeon must have said. “I’m weary of living, God. I want to come home to you. When will that happen?” Anna, too. “I’ve been a widow for years and years and years, God. I’m lonely. Why am I still here, and not with you?”
Splat. Sometimes, even continuing to exist can be difficult.
But God came to them and comforted them. God called Israel home, to become a great nation, and to testify to the world about the beauty of the Lord. They were no more called, “Forsaken.” They no longer lived in exile, but at home in that place called A Better Life.
And God came to Simeon and Anna as a tiny baby, and their hopes and dreams were fulfilled. “My eyes have seen your salvation,” Simeon says. “A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for the Glory of your people Israel.”
He and Anna made it through “splat,” and came to a better place.
It’s appropriate that our New Year falls during the Christmas season. For this is the time when many of us hear God calling most clearly, calling us to A Better Life. And so we make our New Year’s resolutions in that spirit.
It’s because the nation Israel kept going past “splat” that they came to be a light to the nations. It’s because Simeon and Anna kept going past “splat” that the Christ child was welcomed fittingly into the world. It’s because the disciples kept going past the biggest splat of all that we are here this morning, worshipping Jesus as the Christ.
So God calls us this New Year’s and always to keep going. To set our sights on A Better Life, and make our goals, and to keep moving towards them, even if we sometimes end up in the mud.
Back to NaNo for just a moment: On the NaNoWriMo forums on the internet, after November is over and we’ve all succeeded or failed at our goal to write fifty thousand words, we were challenged to set goals for the coming year. And we were challenged to have goals in three categories: Big, Scary, and Fun.
Do something big: Something that is difficult and maybe a bit tedious to achieve. Hear God’s call to save yourself and the world, if you will.
Do something scary: Something you really want to do, but which makes you quake in your boots every time you think of actually doing it. Hear God’s assurance that God will be with you.
Do something fun: Something you want to do just because you’ll enjoy doing it. Hear God’s promise that life will be abundant and full of blessing.
It seems to me that these are wise criteria for goal setting. If you manage to set one goal in each category, I can all but guarantee you that you won’t end up heading down the road to The Same Old Same Old, but rather down the road to A Better Life.
And I’ll give you one last piece of wisdom I picked up, through experience, this past November: Tell someone about your goals, and if possible, gather companions about you who are going the same way.
So right now, I’m going to put the “tell someone” part into practice, and tell you that for the coming year, my “big” goal will be to lose one pound per week on average, or fifty-two pounds.
My “scary” goal for the coming year is to not only finish another novel, but to prepare it for submission to agents and publishers, and, once prepared, to submit it. (The submitting, and possible rejection, is the scary part, in case you were wondering…)
And my “fun” goal for the coming year is to go to New York next November to see Cate Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire.
I hope that this coming week, you’ll think about big, scary and fun goals. I hope you’ll listen for God calling you to take your place at the banquet, both as server and feaster. I hope that you’ll find the energy to listen to that calling.
And this time next year, I hope we’ll be able to compare notes and say, “What do you know? I did it!”
Amen.
Preached at Alma United Church, December 28, 2008
Scriptures: Luke 2:22-40; Isaiah 61:10-62:3
How many of you are NOT planning to make New Year’s resolutions, because you’ve never made New Year’s resolutions?
And how many of you are planning to not make New Year’s resolutions, because in the past you’ve found yourself making the same resolutions over and over and over and over again, and failing every year to follow through?
If you’re in that last group, you’re not alone, I’m afraid. And the story I’m about to tell is just for you, though I’m sure the rest of you will enjoy it too.
Picture, if you will, a road. It runs through forests and fields and cities, up hill and down. Sometimes, the road is smooth and wide and paved, and other times, it’s narrow and full of potholes. We’ll call this road “life,” because that’s it’s name.
Picture a traveller, walking along this road. Her back is bent under a heavy pack. She walks slowly, for she is weary and has been on the road a long time. She uses a walking stick to help her on her way.
Our traveller reaches a crossroads. She knows that one of the paths ahead leads to a place called “A Better Life,” and the other path leads to a place called “The Same Old Same Old.”
Beside the crossroads, there is a hut, and in front of the hut an old woodcutter sits, rocking away in his rocking chair on the front porch. She asks him, “Which path leads to A Better Life?”
Without hesitation, he points down the narrower and rockier of the two paths. The traveller thanks him and heads off down the road. A short while later, the woodcutter in his chair hears a “splat,” and soon after that, our traveller comes back to him, soaked to her knees in mud.
“I thought you said this path was the right one,” she said. “Now please tell me, which path leads to a better life?”
The woodcutter is adamant. He points her down the same path again, and reassured by his firm belief, she sets off again. A short while later, the woodcutter hears an even bigger “splat!” Soon after that, the traveller returns, and this time, she’s angry—covered to her waist in ooey, gooey mud.
“Tell me the truth, Old Man!” she shouts at him. “Which way is the road to A Better Life?”
“That way,” the woodcutter says, and something in his eyes, something in his calm insistence, something makes her believe him, and off she goes.
Of course, not very long after, the woodcutter in his rocking chair hears a very loud splat. This time, when the woman returns, she’s covered in mud from head to toe, and she’s about to use that walking stick of hers for less than peaceful purposes.
“Tell me, you varmint, you! Tell me which is the road to A Better Life!” (Actually, those weren't her exact words, but I'm not allowed to say those kind of things in church.)
The woodcutter looks her in the eyes, points down the path, and says, “It’s that way, just past ‘splat.’”
Another little story, this one more literal and more personal. I’m one of those folks who makes the same New Year’s resolutions every year, and goes “splat,” usually by the end of January. If you want to know what my usual resolutions are, I always resolve to finish my novel, to lose weight, and to get my finances in order. And without fail, I go splat.
Except this year, whilst swimming around in the mud, I got a vision of what it’s going to be like when I reach that destination called “A Better Life.” Because this year, I set a huge goal, one I’ve set for myself before. But this year I reached it!
Every year for the past five, I’ve participated in a particularly mad escapade called NaNoWriMo. The goal of NaNoers, as we call ourselves, is to complete fifty thousand new words of a novel.
Before this year, I tried four times, and failed four times. It was particularly discouraging those years my kids did it with me, because they invariably beat my word count, such as it was.
But this year, I did a few things differently. I put aside the novel I’ve been working on for twenty years, and started a new one. I hooked up with friends on the internet and in real life coffee shops who egged me on. And I wrote just over fifty thousand words last month. And I finally figured out that if I can manage to get past “splat” the path continues, and it’s a fun place to travel.
It happens to us all. We set goals that we want very much to achieve, but life gets in the way. We don’t know how to do what it is we want to do. We run out of money, time, or energy. We get sick. Others who want us to stay as we are keep pulling us back into our own ways.
And we give up. Stop what we consider to be vain striving, and head down the broad, easy path to The Same Old Same Old. If God had wanted us to go down that hard path, we say to ourselves, why then, the mud and the rocks wouldn’t be there!
But would it?
We read today a prophet’s words of hope to a nation in exile. They’ve gone “splat” in the most humiliating way imaginable, with the common people treated as slaves in their own homeland, and the leaders exiled to a foreign place. They feel forsaken and alone. By the rivers of Babylon, they sit down and weep.
Simeon and Anna… I’m sure that at times during their long wait to see the saviour, they sat down and wept, too. “I’m an old, old man,” Simeon must have said. “I’m weary of living, God. I want to come home to you. When will that happen?” Anna, too. “I’ve been a widow for years and years and years, God. I’m lonely. Why am I still here, and not with you?”
Splat. Sometimes, even continuing to exist can be difficult.
But God came to them and comforted them. God called Israel home, to become a great nation, and to testify to the world about the beauty of the Lord. They were no more called, “Forsaken.” They no longer lived in exile, but at home in that place called A Better Life.
And God came to Simeon and Anna as a tiny baby, and their hopes and dreams were fulfilled. “My eyes have seen your salvation,” Simeon says. “A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for the Glory of your people Israel.”
He and Anna made it through “splat,” and came to a better place.
It’s appropriate that our New Year falls during the Christmas season. For this is the time when many of us hear God calling most clearly, calling us to A Better Life. And so we make our New Year’s resolutions in that spirit.
It’s because the nation Israel kept going past “splat” that they came to be a light to the nations. It’s because Simeon and Anna kept going past “splat” that the Christ child was welcomed fittingly into the world. It’s because the disciples kept going past the biggest splat of all that we are here this morning, worshipping Jesus as the Christ.
So God calls us this New Year’s and always to keep going. To set our sights on A Better Life, and make our goals, and to keep moving towards them, even if we sometimes end up in the mud.
Back to NaNo for just a moment: On the NaNoWriMo forums on the internet, after November is over and we’ve all succeeded or failed at our goal to write fifty thousand words, we were challenged to set goals for the coming year. And we were challenged to have goals in three categories: Big, Scary, and Fun.
Do something big: Something that is difficult and maybe a bit tedious to achieve. Hear God’s call to save yourself and the world, if you will.
Do something scary: Something you really want to do, but which makes you quake in your boots every time you think of actually doing it. Hear God’s assurance that God will be with you.
Do something fun: Something you want to do just because you’ll enjoy doing it. Hear God’s promise that life will be abundant and full of blessing.
It seems to me that these are wise criteria for goal setting. If you manage to set one goal in each category, I can all but guarantee you that you won’t end up heading down the road to The Same Old Same Old, but rather down the road to A Better Life.
And I’ll give you one last piece of wisdom I picked up, through experience, this past November: Tell someone about your goals, and if possible, gather companions about you who are going the same way.
So right now, I’m going to put the “tell someone” part into practice, and tell you that for the coming year, my “big” goal will be to lose one pound per week on average, or fifty-two pounds.
My “scary” goal for the coming year is to not only finish another novel, but to prepare it for submission to agents and publishers, and, once prepared, to submit it. (The submitting, and possible rejection, is the scary part, in case you were wondering…)
And my “fun” goal for the coming year is to go to New York next November to see Cate Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire.
I hope that this coming week, you’ll think about big, scary and fun goals. I hope you’ll listen for God calling you to take your place at the banquet, both as server and feaster. I hope that you’ll find the energy to listen to that calling.
And this time next year, I hope we’ll be able to compare notes and say, “What do you know? I did it!”
Amen.
Preached at Alma United Church, December 28, 2008
Scriptures: Luke 2:22-40; Isaiah 61:10-62:3
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