God of Light, God of Darkness

A Lenten Homily

John 3:14-21

As a university student, I used to plant trees in Northern Ontario as a summer job.  It was hard work, rising early, planting as much as you could in the daylight and resting during the night. On occasion, on really, really nice days, when the morning planting had been going well, one of my favorite things to do would be, after my lunch break, to stretch out under a large tree and take a well earned nap.  I would lie there in the darkness of a deep sleep, on a bed of moss, or of dry earth with a warm summer breeze blowing over me, until I would wake up to the light of the midday sun shining down on me through the cracks in the canopy of maple or oak or birch leaves that occupied the space between the light of the sun and my eyes.  

I still recall those moments in vivid memory—those moments of waking, of blinking at the invading light, adjusting to being awake again, getting my bearings, taking stock of what the rest of the day held in store as I lay on the forest floor—in those moments, coming into the light was beautiful and sublime.

Of course, at other times in my life—like when my mom would throw open the curtains on a Monday morning at 7 am to rush me out of bed so that I would make it to school on time—coming into the light, being awakened by the brightness of the morning was a less than beautiful event…it was downright maddening for a teenager—in fact, it’s still downright maddening for a grown man, but that’s just between you and me. 

You see, coming into the light can be, at times beautiful and, at other times, maddening—and sometimes, coming into the light, at its most intense, can be both at once.  Think about the birth of a child.  This beautiful act of coming into the light of the world is accompanied by pain, stress, crying, and maybe the occasional freak out by the attending husband (again, this is just between you and me)—you see, it’s madness and beauty all wrapped up together. 

The light that invades and displaces the darkness is the light of God; in fact, here in John’s gospel light is another way of speaking about the life of God himself, who in Jesus assaults the darkness of the world.  The shining of this light is itself both beauty and agony, which is something the season of Lent asks us to remember as we approach Good Friday where we learn that the beauty of God is all tied up in the agony and madness of the cross of Jesus.

Being drawn into this light is both maddening and beautiful.  This light of God, this light that Jesus shines into our world displaces and dispels our darkness—which is beautiful in itself.  But it’s maddening because, as Jesus says, we love the dark—and not just the darkness of a good sleep.

This passage in John comes on the heels of Nicodemus’ coming to Jesus to question him.  He comes to Jesus, in the darkness of night.  "Night" is, in the gospel of John always more than the darkness of night. It’s ignorance; it's sight, but it's an obscured sight; it’s confusion.  It's odd to find Nicodemus here "by night". You see, Nicodemus is one who knows. He's a “leader” in the religious establishment, a smart person, a learned person, a church person, if you will.  Nicodemus is us, those of us “on the inside track”—but he’s still in the dark.

We, as people, love the dark because it’s there that we feel safe, don’t we?; we feel safe because it’s only in the dark that we feel as if our secrets won’t betray us as they would if we found ourselves in the brightness of the light.  In the light we can’t help but be exposed and that’s maddening because we don’t trust each other with our secrets, let alone do we trust God.  We feel as if coming into the light might somehow expose us as in some way less than loveable by God and by each other—and that makes us anxious and fearful.  Anyone who’s kept a secret, anyone who’s harbored a lie deep down within themselves knows this fear—and that’s to say we all know this fear.  Not only fear, but this madness can easily slip into hatred of each other because it’s easier to hate each other than to live truthfully with each other.

But learning to blink at this light, as I like to think Nicodemus did when we find him later in the Gospel of John preparing Jesus' body for burial is what salvation is all about.  Learning to slowly allow the light of God’s love to illumine our lives, darkness and all, learning to see the light of God’s love through the cracks in our lives is another way of speaking about conversion.  Not many people experience the blinding light of God’s love like Paul did on the road to Damascus—though its been known to happen.  No, for most of us, recognizing God’s light in our lives is a slow process; it’s a slow opening of the eyes, like after a deep and heavy sleep; the darkness doesn’t just vanish but as we learn to see in God’s light, as our eyes adjust to what life looks like, or ought to look like on God’s terms, we’ll notice that the darkness of our lives cannot help but be slowly exposed—and that that’s ok.  We ought to be a community that trusts God and each other with our darkness, with our secrets.  We are called as the church to learn to be a community that knows trust and love as living alternatives to fear and hatred. 

Coming to the Lord’s table—being a eucharistic community—means that we commit ourselves, weekly, to a way of life where, whether we like it or not, we are implicated in living in the light.  If I were honest with you, some weeks I’d rather hide in the darkness than to be implicated in this exposure…but again, this is just between you and me.  Regardless of our proclivity for the absence of this light, the beauty of all of this is that God does love us and that God does transform us, in spite of ourselves, from lovers of the darkness to lovers of the light, from lovers of clandestine fear to lovers of the truth, the truth about ourselves, about God and about each other, no matter how maddening we might find that to be.

Let us pray. 

Relentless God, you pursue us with your light; you invade our darkness with the maddening light of your Son Jesus.  We’d rather live in the darkness and, if we were honest with ourselves, we’d rather you leave us alone.  But you don’t.  You pursue us, and you catch us; you catch us up in your love.  And when we get past our compulsive desire to be alone—to be in the dark—we find ourselves in this community, implicated in your way of life as your eucharistic people.  Prepare us again this morning to walk in your light and may we live that light into the darkness of our world. Thanks be to God.  Amen.

A Funeral Homily

A Funeral Homily

preached at Moore Chapel

Opatovsky Funeral Home

Sundridge, ON

March 26, 2009

Our Stubborn God

I met Bob at our first wardens meeting when my family and I first came to the parish a year and a half ago.  Bob, at the time, was a warden at St. George the Martyr Anglican Church in Magnetawan as well as its treasurer.  I was just remarking to Shirley a few days ago about how much one person can do—about how important one person can be in the whole scheme of things and what a gap they can leave when they’ve gone.  Well, in our church, with the loss of Bob, he’s left a huge gap.  Bob was determined and tireless in his work for the church and for his community—people like Bob are hard to come by.  Bob was, to say the least, one of a kind.  He was an Anglican’s Anglican.  He took his faith seriously and he treated the life of the church as if it were an extension of his very own.  He was also inseparable from Shirley—they were a team, a pair in ministry as they were in life.  

Bob was also very stubborn.  It seems as if it was built into him.  Shirley and I spoke about this one day on our way up to see Bob in North Bay as he was fighting his cancer.  From our very first meetings, when I first came to the parish, he would stick to his guns, clarify his points, and he would push them through, and he had no problem telling me the way it was—he was indeed a force to be reckoned with!  Now some people take stubbornness as a less than desirable quality—but, in the case of Bob, I appreciated Bob’s tenacity—his doggedness; in fact, I think it was a blessing to the church.  In other words, Bob was a gift for the church and a gift to his community.  I say this because Bob embodied a way of life that reminded me a lot about what we, as Christians, confess about God.  I’m not sure Bob knew this or not, and I never did get the chance to tell him—but he knows now—that he reminded me consistently that our God is a stubborn and tenacious God.  

The God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of the church is a God who doesn’t let us go despite our faithlessness; God is a God of persistence, a God who will not let his point go; a God who relentlessly pursues us in this life with the light of his love and who catches us up in that love in our deaths.  This God is a force to be reckoned with!  Bob knows this God and this God knows Bob; and now that he has died into the life of this God, Bob knows this God to be even more stubborn than he was!  And thank God for that!  

God’s whole point in Jesus Christ is resurrection—the turning of death into life; the miracle of light exploding the darkness of our lives and our deaths.  And so, while the death of someone we love, like we loved Bob, is certainly a time for mourning—for mourning a real loss—it is much more deeply a time to celebrate hope; to celebrate the hope that God doesn’t leave us alone, that God is so insistent on his point, so stubborn for us, so unrelenting in getting his way that he won’t leave us alone.  He hasn’t left Bob alone and he doesn’t leave you alone Shirley, or your children.  He doesn’t leave any of us alone and we thank our stubborn God for that. 

Amen & Amen. 

Our new little boy!

Our new little boy arrived about a week and a half ago and is doing very well. I've taken a parental leave from the parish and will be home for the next two months.

You can read about our home birth on my wife's blog here.

This is a picture I managed to snap of his older brother, giving him a kiss! He's very excited to be a big brother.

Mix self-indulgence, a little bit of ignorance and what do you get?

A Piece of Crap!

Lars, the Real Girl and Foucault

Renée and I watched Lars and the Real Girl the other night starring Ryan Gosling. I can't believe that this movie was passed over for best picture for the Academy Awards. It did get nominated for best screenplay (well deserved) but lost to Juno (another great film). Gosling also got a SAG nomination for best actor but, unfortunately, was overlooked by Mr. Oscar.

If you're a fan of the HBO series Six Feet Under, you'll really enjoy this one. The screenplay was written by Nancy Oliver who wrote some of the best Six Feet Under episodes. Not only is this movie fall-off-your-chair funny (which I did when Lars introduces his family to Bianca), but it's also a sociopolitical commentary on how society deals with emotional and mental health. I won't get into the plot too much, but the story is about a delusional breakdown of the main character, Lars (played by Gosling) who has been unable to deal effectively with past family tragedy (the loss of his mother, occasioned by his own birth, and the loss of his father when he was a young boy). Clinically, he would be labeled with something like social anxiety disorder (a 'sad' acronym at best). Lars has repressed his emotions to such a degree that even the touch of another person causes him pain (the kind of pain when your feet get really cold then you come into a warm house and they burn...it feels just like that, Lars tells us). He ends up ordering a 'real doll' from a website and begins a delusional relationship with her and the rest of the story deals with how his family and his community (his church, workplace, friends, his therapist, and a real girl) support him and help him through his delusion.

I've also been reading Foucault's History of Madness and early on, Foucault talks at length about leprosy and how medieval Europe shunned and relegated all lepers to the outside of the city gates (a scapegoating role the mentally ill--the mad--would come to fulfill after leprosy disappeared from Europe). Foucault then takes us through a medieval liturgy of exclusion:

'Dearly beloved', says a ritual from a church in Vienne in the south of France, 'it has pleased God to afflict you with this disease, and the Lord is gracious for bringing punishment upon you for the evil that you have done in this world.' The leper was then dragged out of the church by the priest and his acolytes...but was assured that he was God's witness: 'however removed from the church and the company of the saints, you are never separated from the grace of God.'...Abandonment is his salvation, and exclusion offers an unusual form of communion (History of Madness, 6).

This liturgy of exclusion would carry over into the eighteenth century as society became less and less hospitable to madness, controlling it by labeling it, corralling it, and 'solving' it with institutions and the systematic treatment of 'unreason'.

What struck me in this movie, is how Lars' family and community (even his church!) came alongside him and didn't expel him or scapegoat him. But the most compelling aspect, in my opinion, is how the therapist works with Lars. We never get the sense that she's treating a problem and Lars is never medicated. Lars learns how to be touched by her and Lars eventually makes the decision himself to finish his delusion. In one scene, Lars' brother wants an answer, he wants a solution to this problem as quick as possible. The therapist tells him, in probably the most subversive scene of the movie, that this delusion isn't a problem, in fact, it can be a gift for Lars and for those around him, which in fact, it turns out to be.

Now, I realize that labeling this delusion 'a gift', especially for those who have lived through or live with mental health issues, is a tenuous description but one that is, at least in this situation, quite apt. In fact, in the Foucaultian sense, this 'gift' has its own dignity--this ship of fools is allowed to float on without being 'powered' over, without being confined and expelled from society. In fact, if the church can come to behave like Lars' community, learning to live with and within the delusions of life, we can also learn how to accept the gift of difference that mental and emotional health issues bring with them into our communities.

Foucault on Power, Help!

To those of you who happen to come across this rarely updated blog (and who are competent in the secondary literature on Michel Foucault!) I am in need of help. I'm working on my dissertation on how Barth handles the language of 'powers and principalities' in the NT (also looking at some minor figures like W. Stringfellow) but I think Foucault will offer a solid dialogue partner for a constructive account of the Christian life lived in conflict with the 'powers'. That said, can people point me to the best of the secondary literature on the subject? Toole's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo first turned me on to Foucault so I'm familiar with that one.

Thanks,

Patrick
p.s. I'm reading Foucault's History of Madness right now and I'm entirely fascinated with it! I'll post some thoughts on it soon (maybe!).

Upcoming Conference

There's an exciting conference coming up at Tyndale University entitled The Holy Trinity in Holy Scripture and the line-up of presenters is exciting. The conference's keynote speaker will be John Webster. There is still a call for papers for those of you interested. Last year's conference Figured Out: Figuration in Biblical Interpretation has already been published. This year's conference will also be published in book form. I won't be submitting a proposal, but I will hopefully be going.

The Stillborn God

I've recently started to read Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God and have come across a review by Jamie Smith over at the Immanent Frame blog. While I'm only 50 pages into the book, Jamie's review has ruined the book for me. I was enjoying Lilla's engagement with 'political theology' (at the very least he takes it seriously) and was looking forward to his engagement with Barth and Rosenzweig (I cheated and looked in the index). I was excited to see someone, outside the theological academy, engaging Barth and German theology in general.

But a perfect world this ain't: apparently, Lilla lays the blame for Nazism upon the shoulders of Barth's political theology!! Well, since I haven't read this far into the book, I will withhold judgement. Needless to say, if this is the charge, I'm anxious to see just how he gets there!

Well, so that is that...

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes—
Some have got broken—and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week—
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father:
"Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake".
They will come, all right, don't worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practise his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God's Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

~ W.H. Auden, from For the Time Being, A Christmas Oratorio (1941-42)

Sufjan Stevens, Christmas Music, and the Apocalypse of God

A couple of years ago, I received a gift of Christmas music from a friend whose friend knows someone who knows Sufjan Stevens. This Christmas collection was released last year in a box set of 5 EP's.

It was only this year that I've actually read the liner notes for the album about why Sufjan decided to go ahead with this project.

Sufjan's ability to cut through the sentimentality of the season and get to the theological heart of what it is we 'celebrate' at this time of year is rare to find in the church, let alone in a musician. But Sufjan is unrelenting:

"What did the angels renounce in the wake of the shepherd's trepidation? 'Have no fear,' they petitioned with trumpet blasts and a garish display of constellations. But that's like waving a gun in a bank lobby and demanding: 'Everybody stay calm!'"

What Sufjan gets is that Christmas is an apocalyptic event; it's about the terrifying coming of God. Further along he confesses that "Christmas music poses a cosmological conundrum in requiring us to sing so sweetly and sentimentally about something so terrifying and tragic." That's Christmas; that's the demand made of the church: sing about the unsingable!

I'm reminded about Karl Barth's observation about theological speech: "We ought to speak of God.... We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory. This is our perplexity. The rest of our task fades into insignificance by comparison" (The Word of God and the Word of Man, 186).

This is Sufjan's way of recognizing both his obligation and his inability; his own attempt, while waving his gun around, to tell us to stay calm. So, steady yourself, await the coming of God, and STAY CALM!

Deluded About God?

To anyone who reads theology blogs: if you're reading my blog and have never read Ben Myers' Faith and Theology blog, go there now! Every so often, a Yanke pastor whose managed to land in England by the name of Kim Fabricius posts his "10 propositions" on a theological issue. Some of my favorites are archived and linked on the right hand column. The most recent are Kim's props on Dawkins, Hitchens, and these so called 'new' atheists. It's a wonder-ful post, as always. For those of you in my book club at church, read these propositions and you'll see how closely they resemble Rowan Williams' moves in our book.

As our group will be going through Williams' Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief throughout advent I will post some of our thoughts and some issues raised from this provocative book.

That's all.

Advent Birds

A few days ago, as I was preparing for Advent celebrations in our churches, my carefully planned schedule was interrupted with a death in my parish. One of my parishioners lost his father, a man whom I had visited a few times since beginning ministry here. I was already overwhelmed with meetings, services and hospital visitations. I knew he was a special man, a man who lived his life in laughter; a man who lost his wife of fifty-seven years three-and-a-half years ago; a man who was waiting...who, in his terminal illness knew the reality of advent, of waiting for the unexpected.

As I busily prepared for his funeral, and for all the other services, I was overwhelmed with rushing around. The morning of the funeral, I was heading out to drive to the church and I noticed some snow falling from the trees beside our house. There was a group of birds eating from the pine trees. I grabbed the camera and I waited. I was reminded what it was to wait for something beautiful. I managed to get a few good shots, but I had to take the time to wait for the birds. I was a helpful and graceful reminder of what season was encroaching upon my busy existence. It was an advent moment.

For those interested, these birds are Pine Grosbeaks; I found that out at a dinner table with a theologian who, apparently, is also an avid birder. The beautiful rose coloured one is the male, the yellow one, female. Enjoy the pictures!

Waiting for God...

A Sermon preached at the Anglican Parish of Almaguin/Emsdale Dec. 2nd, 2007 Is. 2:1-5; Ps. 122; Rom. 13:11-14; Mt. 24:36-44

God who comes to us so unexpectedly, come to us this morning and so transform our lives. In the name of the One we expect, Amen.

This morning, we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent. Advent marks the beginning of the Christian year and it’s the season that asks us to prepare ourselves for the unthinkable: we are asked to prepare ourselves for the in-breaking, for the coming of God into our world. It is a season which asks us to anticipate, to sit and wait for the impossible, the unexpected.

Waiting can be a really frustrating experience as I experienced all week waiting for our lovely national treasure, Bell Canada, to fix the church’s phone line. You call, you get put on hold, you get automated message after automated message and finally you get a live person only to find out that you’ll have to wait 24 to 48 hrs for the line to be fixed. And, when it is, you realize that there are a host of other problems and you have to call them again, and the season of waiting begins all over again. Even as I was writing this sermon, I was sitting, waiting for Bell. We tend to get impatient, frustrated, and even angry (though, I would never, never get angry with Bell Canada). We want things now, we don’t want to wait; we want instant gratification.

When we lived downtown in Toronto, we had a Shoppers Drugmart directly across the street. One night, the eve of Halloween, we needed some medicine for William because he was running a fever. So, I went across the street. The store stayed open until midnight and I was the last one to walk in as they closed the doors behind me. The scene that greeted me literally made me take a step back. All the employees of the store were taking down the Halloween decorations and products and replacing them, row by row, with Christmas ones. Astounding! “What the rush?”, “Why so quickly?”, I asked myself. There were Halloween pumpkins sitting beside and amongst Christmas wreaths and bows—a sure sign, if there ever were, of our culture’s obsession with immediate indulgence; a symbol of our collective inability to wait! The night of Halloween, we were thrown, headlong, completely unprepared, into the season of Christmas. How maddening!

And so, unable to bear the burden of waiting, we enthusiastically enter into this consumer Christmas, which has turned into a time of setting our cultural and societal coping mechanisms into play. We’d rather not take the time to wait; we get busy, we hide behind the season, we’d rather build fantasy castles around ourselves, decked out with plastic angels and candy canes than to . We lull ourselves to sleep, we numb ourselves in our shopping, we cope in our busyness. But advent, this season of delay forces us to wait, to take the time to anticipate, to prepare, to steady ourselves for God’s coming to us.

And notice that our readings this morning don’t circle around God’s incarnation in Christ, but around Christ’s coming again, his Second Coming. St. Paul writes “now is the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.”…and Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew’s gospel, “keep awake, for you don’t know when the Lord is coming”…”you must be ready, for God in Christ is coming at an unexpected hour.” So the church is asked in this season not only to recall God’s adventurous coming in Christ but to prepare for Christ’s return…to anticipate his coming; to expect the impossible, to await the unthinkable—Christ’s advent, his coming to us. But what does that mean? What does that mean for the church, on the ground?

It means wholeheartedly and assuredly that waiting is an exercise of hope; it is the church’s exercise of hope; waiting is Christian hope in action. It's not wishful thinking, but hope in the One who has come and who will come; it is an active belief that God’s justice will prevail and that we are called to embody that justice in anticipation through our actions toward each other and toward our world. This means that waiting is not a passive activity but a wholly active one. Waiting is a restless, impatient act. Our children have a thing or two to teach us about the posture of waiting; “are we there yet?” is a common enough, but profound refrain; or you may remember what it was like as a child, waiting for Christmas morning—eager, impatient, restless, active waiting…this is what the church is called to do.

But this active hope requires that the church not fall asleep in its anticipation of God’s coming. But how easy it is to be lulled in this season!—how can we not when we’re bombarded with the synthetic images that float across our television sets, that greet us in our newspapers and magazines that demand that Christmas be a time of consumption and not a time of expectation; a time of gratification and not a time of preparation?

And when the church buys into this it neglects its prophetic call to stand in our culture as a beacon of hope, a place of peace in a world of violence, a light of justice in a world where it’s a rare gem. But when we wait, when we wait impatiently like a child awaits the wonder and mystery of Christmas morning, we can participate in the change that comes to our worlds; we can play a part in bringing God’s advent light to shine amidst the darkness that threatens our world.

So we prepare for God’s coming in this season of advent. And we actually expect that God will come to us. How foolish of us, how absurd, how impossible, but oh how marvellous and miraculous!

Amen.

"Behold! I Make All Things New", or God 'ends' us in Jesus

A Sermon preached at the Anglican Parish of Almaguin/Emsdale
Nov. 18th, 2007
Is. 65:17-25; Is. 12; Lk. 21:5-19

Lord of our endings and beginnings, we treasure what you bring to end and we fear what you begin. But in trust and faith we thank you for ending us in Jesus and beginning us again in him. Begin with us anew this morning. Amen.

When I say the word “apocalypse”, what do you think of? Many of us think end of the world stuff, destruction, violence; some may think about Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now with its deep darkness and profound sense of hopelessness. Some of us may think about the massively successful book and now movie series Left Behind. Or maybe we remember the apocalyptic fervour surrounding Y2K. These are all popular notions of apocalypse embedded within our culture, but they all miss the biblical understanding of apocalypse.

Apocalypse simply means ‘revelation’, it means new out of old, light out of darkness, it means "coming" and in Scripture it means the coming of God, a coming which cancels what was and makes what is to be. Apocalypse means ending, but at the same time it means beginning. But most of all, for the Christian church apocalypse means Jesus Christ—God’s apocalypse is Jesus. God’s revelation—his coming to us—is Jesus.

Two of our readings this morning are ‘apocalyptic’—they revolve around beginnings and endings. These two readings, Isaiah’s vision of the newness of beginning and Luke’s sombre vision of endings are fitting as we’re coming to the end of this long season of Pentecost (which is next week, for those of you not keeping track) and the liturgical year and we await the coming of Advent and the season of anticipating and waiting for the light of Christmas.

Our reading from Isaiah 65 is about a vision of God’s re-creating, of God’s remaking of all things…”Behold! I will make all things new!”, God says. But this new beginning requires an ending, it means the passing away of old things, an ending of things as we know them…“former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” writes Isaiah…be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating”. The vision is one of the peaceable kingdom, where the lion lays with the lamb…it’s a reordering of the world, an ‘apocalypse’, a revelation of what God’s end game is like. And what a beautiful and striking vision it is.

In our other reading from Luke’s gospel Jesus is talking to some people who were really admiring the ornate beauty of the Temple…”wow, what a beautiful Temple”. I’ve had this experience walking into large cathedrals…”this is such a beautiful church!!” If somebody came in here and said that, we’d be inclined to answer them with, “well thank you, we work really hard to keep it up”. How does Jesus respond? In his surprising and subverting way, he tells them the Temple will be destroyed…not a stone will be left, everything will fall apart—in effect he tells them that their lives which revolve around the Temple in Jerusalem will end…and it did; in fact, for the readers of Luke’s gospel this would be the reality they lived. Jesus’ warnings about the end carries with it the promise of newness; endings mean new beginnings. For that, we need to read a little further in the gospel. Further along Jesus says to his disciples, ““Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Endings are part and parcel of what God did with Israel, of what he is doing with us, with his church and with this world. What we know will come to an end; sometimes suddenly or sometimes slowly, and most of the time endings can be quite uncomfortable or painful. Jobs come to an end, marriages end, friendships end, life itself has its end. This isn’t news to any of us.

But there’s something in us that reacts quite sharply to this. We don’t like endings, endings are by nature unpredictable, uncontrollable. But we want to control our endings…there’s something in us that so badly wants to be in control. In fact, our entire modern age of technology and supposed progress is one long attempt to be in control of our destinies. If we can maintain some sort of control over our situations, we think we can maintain a level of comfort or at least a level of manageability. If we can be in control, we can feel like we’re grabbing life by the horns.

I came upon a strange thing a little while ago. At least I thought it was strange. I had rented a DVD and apparently, the new thing with movies, is that some movies allow you to choose the ending to the movie. Does that strike anyone else as strange? You’re able to choose the ending you want. Designer endings…In the world of movie magic we get to control how the story ends. I can see the appeal. Maybe Gone with the Wind's Rhett Butler decides that he gives a damn after all; or maybe at the end of Casablanca Humphrey Bogart doesn’t send Ingrid Bergman on the plane and they walk off into the fog together.

But there’s something wrong with this. In the story of life we can’t choose our endings, we aren’t in control of our destinies—no matter how much our talk-show gurus would like us to “Get-Real” and create and take control of our own destinies, endings surprise us and confuse and, most of the time endings mess up our plans. But that’s the whole point of the gospel—that job’s taken: the end of the story, the final curtain of this drama of life is in God’s hands. Our beginnings are his, our endings, all the endings we experience in life are his also. This is another way of speaking about salvation, about conversion.

The salvation that the church speaks of, the salvation the church proclaims about Jesus is just this: God surprises us in Jesus, He ends us in Jesus Christ, and begins us anew in Jesus. The God of our beginning, the God of our creation is the God of our endings; our endings and our beginnings begin and end with God, not with us. Conversion is the slow and often uncomfortable realization of this.

What sustains the church is not the church’s social activities, its monetary support, or its engagement of culture, important and as vital as these things are. What supports and sustains the church is its faith, its deep trust that God carries the church, that God carries us and will bring us to our ends and will bring us through our ends to something new. God ends all of us, he ends all of our desires for our own way, our own ends, for control over what we want; he ends us in Jesus Christ and begins us anew in Christ. This is what our baptisms represent—we are ended in Christ’s death and we are made new in Christ’s resurrection. In baptism we participate in God’s apocalypse, we participate in God’s coming and making all things new. And our participation in the Eucharist this morning is our reminder that we celebrate God’s apocalypse, God’s revelation of who God is in Jesus Christ and who we are as those people called and gathered by him. In the bread and the wine, we celebrate God’s coming to us in Jesus Christ; these physical things, this bread and this wine, are for us the sign of God’s apocalypse—the beginning and end of the world in a wafer. So we participate here in anticipation of the ending of this church year and the beginning of something new; we participate in anticipation that out of the endings in our life, we will find new and exciting things; we participate in anticipation that we ourselves will be made new.

Amen.

Jüngel on Beauty and the Beautiful

"According to the self-understanding of Christian faith, there is only one single appearance of truth which - despite all parallels to the beautiful pre-appearance of the truth - follows another law. That is the revelation of God. It is distinguished from the epiphanies of the beautiful in that the origin of all light appears in this event, and indeed appears in such a way that it does not radiate in the light of the world as does the beautiful, but rather appears hidden sub contrario [under the opposite]. The event of revelation cannot therefore be subordinated to the category of the beautiful. Sin - that which God made him, who knew no sin, for the sake of sinners, and for their benefit - was too ugly for that.... The revelation of Jesus Christ shatters all beautiful appearance. It must shatter the beautiful appearance, because it is not a pre-appearance of the truth, but is the truth itself. Yet according to the understanding of the New Testament, this truth occurs fundamentally as a crisis. It does this by confronting the world not only with its finiteness and transience, but also with its merited end and well-earned disgrace. Revelation does this, as Paul expresses it, by 'painting' the crucified 'before your eyes' (Gal. 3.1). From this death as such, it is not apparent that the life of the risen one has been released from it, and with that that eternal life is promised in the form of a visio beatifica [beatific vision], thus a totally unfettered vision of God face to face. For according to the New Testament, God's love is a work in this death. This love is not a love which (like amor hominis [human love]) is kindled by the beautiful, but rather a love which beautifies that which is ugly, namely the self-defacing homo peccator [human sinner], by loving it. As the event of the love of God, the death of Jesus Christ is the opposite of what it appears to be. The cross of Jesus Christ does not disclose that in this death there occurs the unity of life and death in favour of life, which deserves to be called love.

For that disclosure to take place, a renewed coming of the one who has previously appeared sub contraria specie [under the opposite species] is necessary. For this, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is necessary, that is, the Easter coming of the Lord in glory and thus in the unmitigated light of his own being.... For now the beautiful appears both in the alien light of the world as well as in the light of its own being; but then this twilight hanging over the beautiful will come to an end. Then nothing more will appear. For then being in glory will replace appearance.... Then truth and beauty will be identical...here and now the beautiful remains only a glimmer of truth, lighting up and fading away again. With Schopenhauer one can say that the beautiful 'does not deliver' humanity 'from life for ever, but only for a few moments'. In a world context characterized by sham existence and lack of freedom, the experience of the beautiful (as the glimmer of truth) that makes the torn world whole can only be an experience which interrupts this world context. The most that an aesthetic relation can promise is being whole (being eternal) for a moment - in order then to return to the interrupted life context, at best changed and changing. But if one wants it to be more, or if it should become more, if one denies the bitter insight that 'even the beautiful must die', then the beautiful will inevitably become and enemy of the truth.

.... only what makes a claim to truth deserves to be called beautiful, and that only where truth establishes itself in a work can one speak of a work of art. But beauty and art are both welcome and dangerous competitors with the Christian kerygma, for in the beautiful appearance they anticipate that which faith has to declare, without any beautiful appearance and indeed in contrast to it: namely, the hour of truth."

~ Eberhard Jüngel, "'Even the Beautiful Must Die' - Beauty in the Light of Truth", in Theological Essays II (T&T Clark, 1995), 79-81.

Learning to Live in Exile

Sermon for the 20th Sunday After Pentecost
Anglican Parishes of Almaguin/Emsdale
Oct. 14th, 2007

God of all hope, you have called us to be your people. Teach us how to do that so that we can witness to your ways in our world and so to participate in your transformation of it. Amen.

During one of my classes in seminary in Toronto, my theology professor was trying to make a valid point and he used a passage of Scripture from the book of Jeremiah in support of it. After making his point, a student in the back of the class raised her hand and after my professor acknowledged her, she said, “you know sir, Jeremiah just doesn’t speak to me.” Without skipping a beat, my quick witted professor responded with, “Well, frankly dear, I don’t blame him.”

The point is that Jeremiah still speaks to us whether we listen or not, whether we are open to what he has to say to us or whether we think he’s irrelevant—a by-product of another time with nothing of relevance to us.

Last week we considered what it might mean to exist as a people who live thankful lives, even in full view of the complexities and struggles of life. We learned that Israel, even amongst the ruins of Jerusalem, learned how to give thanks to God. This morning, we consider, thanks to this letter from Jeremiah to his fellow Hebrews, what it might mean for Israel and for us to live in exile.

Our first reading is the beginning of a letter which Jeremiah wrote to his fellow Jews who had recently been trucked off to Babylon after Jerusalem fell. There were some prophets who were counseling the people that they would be leaving Babylon shortly and that their stay there would soon end. But, if we were to read further into the letter, Jeremiah calls these prophets liars. Jeremiah’s words to Israel?: Israel better hunker down and spread some roots because this stay in Babylon was looking more permanent than transitory. In fact, Israel remained in Babylon captivity for generations but ultimately they did survive their exilic existence and were restored as a people though many continued to live as Diaspora Jews, as ‘scattered’ Jews within Babylon. This is one of the most astonishing historical phenomena we have in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jewish people survived the Babylonian exile. If this doesn’t impress you at face value, the Northern kingdom went into captivity as well at the hands of the Assyrians and, well, that’s where we get the name the ‘lost-tribes’ of Israel from…they just disappeared from history.

The story of Israel’s exilic life is ultimately a story of hope in the darkest of days, a story of surviving as a people, when all the odds are stacked high against you. Jeremiah’s counsel is for Israel to continue to exist as Israel, to keep on doing it’s Israel thing—to multiply and not to decrease, and as Israel to seek the welfare of the city, to pray for Babylon, and in its welfare to find its own welfare for Yahweh works—surprise, surprise—even through Babylon. Jeremiah doesn’t counsel revolt against Babylon but an active living in it—and through this, through living as Israel fully immersed in Babylon and its culture, Israel would witnesses to the fidelity of God in a society that is hostile to its existence. Jeremiah doesn’t counsel Israel to passively acquiesce in Babylon, but to be who she is in Babylon—to be active witnesses to God even in Babylon. The vision of Israel’s life in exile is a missionary vision. In Psalm 137 the Psalmist asks : “How can we sing the Lord’s songs in a foreign land?” And yet that is what Israel learned to do, and do well.

We often hear about the death of the church at the hands of secular culture, a culture that has little or merely decorative use for the church. And our culture, if we’re honest with ourselves, is, if not outright hostile to the church’s existence, at the very best, merely puts up with it. But this is nothing new and it shouldn’t come as a surprise, the church was born into such hostility in the Roman empire. So it’s not a new situation, the church has always existed as a witness to the ways and world of God in Christ within a world that would rather not hear about it. And this culture, this situation, this post-Christian world we live in is looking more permanent than transitory. We better learn how to hunker down and learn how to live as the church in our times.

So, just like Israel, the church lives in exile—as the church we live as a peculiar and strange people—as people whose lives are shaped and governed by the gospel and by the virtues and habits of being of Christian discipleship and we exist as this people in a world that is shaped by all sorts of other isms—by materialism, by capitalism, or by secularism to name but a few. Many have sounded the death knell on the church. But just like the rumors of Ina’s Trollove’s death were so greatly exaggerated, so too is our culture’s pronouncement of death upon the church.

Our word this morning from this ancient prophet is a word of hope—what does Jeremiah speak to us this morning?—keep on living as the church in the culture we find ourselves in, keep on being the church: multiply and do not decrease, keep on existing as a people whose lives find their rhythm, not in the time and pace of society and culture, but as the church, as a people whose lives are shaped by God’s time, by God’s time for us in Jesus Christ. Our lives are shaped and given contour and definition by what we do here in our liturgy this morning and by the subtle gestures of our common life because it is in the enactment of this common life, that the transformation of the world has begun.

It is in the subtle gestures of our common life—gestures of kindness, peace, and concord—and in the rhythm of the liturgy, in the formation of Christian discipleship; it is in all of this, in the living of life as Christ’s body to the world, that the church lives its life in exile. The church lives, not in revolt against our culture, but as fully alive within it! This is the call of mission for the church: it is not a call to passive acquiescence, to roll over in Babylon, but a call to an active witness in a culture that so badly needs to hear about the One who has redeemed our world.

Amen.

Living Amongst the Ruins of the City: On Learning to Give Thanks

A Thanksgiving Day Sermon
The Anglican Parish of Almaguin-Emsdale
Oct. 7, 2007
Lam. 1:1-6; Lam. 3:19-26; 2 Tim. 1:1-14; Lk. 17:5-10

Lord of Creation, you who spoke light out of darkness, speak life into us this morning so that we may live lives of thanksgiving so that the world may know You. Amen.

We like Thanksgiving, don’t we? It’s a time of celebration and joyfulness for all that we have in abundance. Giving thanks is almost as natural as breathing, or at least it should be. Someone opens a door for you, you respond automatically with ‘thank you’. But we had to be taught to be thankful. When someone gave you a gift as a child, your parents hopefully taught you to offer them a heartfelt ‘thank you’. Well, our Scripture readings today, specifically the readings from the book of Lamentations, teach us that being thankful is not an easy or trivial thing to do, they challenge us to re-think what it means to be thankful in a world like ours—and in fact, I want to suggest that living a life of thanksgiving requires a lot of effort, and like all things worth working for, is itself an art form, a learned skill, it's something we all keep on learning—and this morning, the Hebrew poets of lament are our teachers.

In our reading from the book of Lamentations, we have what seems to be the exact opposite of giving thanks—we are here witnesses to the ancient Hebrew practice of poetic lament, that literary performance which gave public testimony to the deep grief of the Hebrew people over the destruction of the city of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. Israel, as a people, had experienced something they never expected, they lived through the ruin and devastation of Jerusalem and more pointedly, they experienced the annihilation of the Temple—the very thing that gave their lives, as Jews, meaning.

But nevertheless, in the middle of the poet’s darkest reflections—and even T.S. Eliot, at his most somber, doesn’t approach the sense of melancholy and sorrow expressed here by this Hebrew poet—even in the middle of all of this, the poet is able to articulate: ‘But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness’. Even in the midst of the tumultuousness of its life, Israel is grateful to her God for his goodness and his provision; even amongst the ruins of the city, Israel learns to give thanks, to acknowledge its hope in God’s mercy, his faithfulness and his steadfast love. The poet, in our canticle, comes to a resolution only as they reflect on God’s provision and his care for his people; the poet is able to wrestle life out of death because of God’s steadfast love.

Following the literary movement of this poet, from the depths of lament to hopefulness of God’s provision, I’m reminded of one of the most moving scenes in modern cinema, from Roberto Benigni’s 1998 movie Life is Beautiful—a movie which takes place during the rise of fascism in Italy during WWII. I’m reminded of the scene where the father and his young son are in the concentration camp, in the most horrible circumstances one can imagine. The father wants to protect his son from the reality of what they are facing and so tells him that the whole thing is just a big game and that the manual labour that he performs every day is just really a competition. In this way the father, a man who can find humor in the most bleak of situations, shields his son from the horrors of the camp which, in the end, saves the son. Here is a man, who in the heart of darkness, is so thankful and grateful for the life of his son, that he struggles to find the beauty of life in order to protect him. He is able to wrestle life out of death so that his son might have hope and not despair.

This is the reality of our lives as Christians, this is what the gospel of thanksgiving is all about! Thanksgiving, giving thanks to God in the middle of the hard things of our existence is an art learned in the living of it; true, deep biblical thanksgiving is a chastened gratitude for what God has given us, for what he had taken us through and for what he will take us through. The celebration of Thanksgiving is more than a one day affair, much more than a long-weekend spent with the family, but something, as Christians, that we live out with our lives, one day at a time.

It’s easy to thank God before meals and for our families (well, most of the time), or for prosperity and health or for the beauty of creation—but after this it gets a little difficult. It’s not an easy thing to live lives of thanksgiving when we have obstacles to be overcome, lessons to be learned, when we need to endure hardship, or to live with those people in our lives who are more thorns than they are roses. Sometimes it’s much easier to become disillusioned with our lives and so become bitter. But this morning, it is not a glib or superficial ‘thank you’ that we offer to God, but we offer our very lives in gratitude to God, as damaged, as broken and as bruised as our lives may be—we live them in thanksgiving to a God who struggled to find life in the heart of darkness, who wrestled life out of death in the life of his resurrected Son so that we might have hope and not despair. True thanksgiving is gratitude born in the full view of all the realities of life, in view of joy & sorrow, of love & brokenness, of pleasure & pain, of gratitude & lament, of life & of death.

So, as we prepare to come to this altar this morning, as we come to perform the church’s most central act of thanksgiving in celebrating the Eucharist—and eucharist itself literally means ‘gratitude’ or ‘thanksgiving’—let’s offer our thanks for God’s wonderful provision and for his beautiful creation we see all around us—for the marvelous colours of this fall season and for a bountiful harvest, but most of all, let us offer our thanks to God for wrestling life out of death.

Amen.

Abelard on Family Life

I came across this in Peter Abelard the other day:

"What man, intent on his religious or philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the noisy confusion of family life? Who can endure the continual untidiness of children?" (History of My Misfortunes, ch. 7)

Any of you academics working on your degrees with children present can surely relate to Abelard's concern, hee hee! Well, he never was married (duh!?) and did eventually get castrated by some really angry guys for sleeping with his collegue's daughter. Boy, if only theology faculties could live up to this sort of drama today!

The Upside-Down World of Jesus

A Sermon Preached at Church of the Epiphany, Sudbury ON, July 15, 2007

When my wife Renée and I were expecting the birth of our son William about three years ago now, we were given a popular book that many mothers swear by: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I’m sure that some of you recognize it. The cover has a picture of a young mother-to-be, rocking peacefully in a serene scene full of bliss and joy. It sounds nice doesn’t it. It didn’t take long after William was born—a couple of sleepless nights to be exact—for me to begin to think that there was something a little slick and slightly dishonest about the title. It’s not that I’m not grateful for books which try to prepare parents-to-be for what they are about to experience. It’s just that having a baby and becoming a parent is such an unexpected, interrupting and world-altering experience that by definition, expecting what’s going to happen is a stretch, to say the least.

We may go into life and the situations we encounter along the way with all sorts of expectations and, if we make the mistake of taking ourselves too seriously, we can be bound to those expectations—and we can get bitter if things don’t work out the way we want. When your world is turned upside-down by something like the birth of a child, you quickly realize that what you thought you recognized as the lay of the land, is actually a completely different landscape. It’s unsettling and it takes time for our eyes to adjust to our new surroundings.

Something similar is going on in today’s gospel with the lawyer we meet. We’re all somewhat familiar with this parable. The parable of the Good Samaritan has indeed seeped into our common vocabulary and popular culture. It’s just another example of the Golden Rule right? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” This is usually what we think of when we read the parable—at least that’s the way it was always taught to me. It’s a moral lesson about being good to people, about helping others, about loving thy neighbour as thyself. It’s about being ‘good’ just like the Samaritan, right?

Well, that’s certainly part of it, but if we leave it at this we really miss the subversive nature of Jesus’ parable and indeed of the gospel as a whole. There’s something much more radical going on here—the parable, if we actually read it, or rather allow it to read us, is quite a challenging and unsettling one—it’s a world altering story. And here’s a tip: if we read one of Jesus’ parables and we feel comfortable and settled, chances are that we’ve misread it.

A lawyer, one soaked in the Hebrew law and Jewish religious customs, approaches Jesus, not with a question but with a challenge, with a test, with a public legal dispute. In the Greek we have a strong verb here—and with the tone we get the sense that the lawyer is trying to entrap Jesus—this certainly wouldn’t be the first time. There’s a sense of hostility here—this is no courteous conversation over a cup of tea. The lawyer means business, as they often do.

The lawyer came thinking he knew what to expect from Jesus—he knew what Jesus would say—he had it all figured out, this legal stuff. After all, he had studied the law for quite a long time. “Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The lawyer is asking the question, not in order to hear something—he didn’t come ready to listen to Jesus, rather he wanted to say something—he wanted to test Jesus’ fidelity to the law. This legal question may indeed be a veiled assault on Jesus’ ministry with the unclean, with those whom Jesus treated as his neighbours. The lawyer came expecting Jesus to play ball.

But instead of answering his question, Jesus throws it back to lawyer—“Well, you, lawyer, you know the law better than anyone—how do you read the law?” This is really a trick question on the part of Jesus and you can sense Jesus’ sarcasm here—of course any good Jew knew the law: 1) Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and 2) Love your neighbours as yourself. “Rabbi, that’s an easy answer!” “Well”, says Jesus, “you know the law, A+, bang on—do that, and you’ll find all the life you need.”

The lawyer’s feathers are ruffled, he wants to justify himself, to defend his case, he wants Jesus to meet his expectations. So he can’t just let it go at that. Loving God, well, that’s the easy part of the law…we all know who God is. But, on the neighbour thing, we’re a little less clear. “So, just who is my neighbour, exactly Rabbi”? His question is that of a point of legality and did in fact concern a central issue in Jewish law. Ancient Jews defined the neighbour in terms of insiders and outsiders and generally a neighbour for a Jew was considered to be a fellow Israelite. But this lawyer wanted an exact definition just in case the legal question of loving one ever came up. He wants to know who the law demands that he love. He wants boundaries, because boundaries make life easier to live. He wants a reality defined in terms of those inside and those outside. If we know who are neighbours are, we can offer them our love. We can meet the demands of the law if we know what the law demands.

But Jesus doesn’t answer his question...he doesn’t play ball here either. Instead, Jesus did what he did best: he told him a story. A traveler who was on his way to Jericho, is attacked, robbed, beaten and left for dead in a ditch. By chance, a priest and then a Levite pass by without offering any help. The priest and the Levite would have been two people extremely stringent on the law (in fact, many priests were also lawyers—a point certainly not lost on the lawyer questioning Jesus). They pass by, presumably, to avoid contamination and defilement by a dead, or a soon to be dead body—the only dead body a priest could defile himself with by touching was a member of his own immediate family for the purposes of burial.

But now a Samaritan came walking by, he had pity on the stranger, bandaged his wounds and brought him to an inn where he could get well and made sure that he did. We need to understand the radical nature of this dramatic turn of events. What Jesus’ audience would have understood is that the Jews saw the Samaritans as the lowest of the low. A neighbour was one on the inside and anyone outside of that circle was excluded from this category. Samaritans were definitely on the outside—no group was more unacceptable to the Jews of this time—they ranked lower on the scale than did Gentile slaves. For example, if a Samaritan volunteered to pay the temple tax, it was to be returned to them.

So, Jesus asks him point blank, who here was a neighbour to the man? Notice Luke’s intent: he reminds us again that Jesus is speaking to ‘the one who was an expert in the law, and so the expert answers “The one who showed mercy.” Luke wants us to appreciate the great shock of the lawyer’s confession. “Go and do likewise” Jesus tells him.

Jesus was very intentional in his choice of characters here. He chooses the most despised outsider who was unfit for friendship with a Jew as the hero of this parable to deliberately shock, provoke and scandalize his audience. What Jesus’ story does is to effectively turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and inside-out. The lawyer came expecting one thing, but he got another thing entirely—he is confronted, challenged and striped bare with this parable. Everything the lawyer takes for granted, everything he expects is put into question and revolutionized. And notice that Jesus never answers his question, “who is my neighbour” but with the parable, with the story he tells, he forces the lawyer to re-think his presuppositions behind his question. Jesus doesn’t answer his question because in Jesus’ world, the question is unanswerable and ought not even be asked in the first place.

In Jesus’ world, love doesn’t begin by defining its objects but rather discovers them. Jesus turns the question around and inside-out: he never gives the lawyer the boundaries, the restrictions he wants because “neighbourhood” is defined for Jesus not in terms of the object of love. Rather the identity of neighbour is caught up with the subject, the one who shows mercy. The identity of the neighbour shifts from the one who receives mercy (from who is eligible for our love and mercy) to the subject who shows mercy. The question is not, “who is my neighbour?”, but “who am I as a neighbour to those I encounter along life’s way?”—and by this shift Jesus effectively erases any boundaries—if a Jew could admit that the hated Samaritan was the neighbour in this case, then there are no boundaries, no working definition to make life easier. Jesus places the enemy in the position of the elect and becomes the example for the community. This is a mind-blowing, reality altering way of looking at the world and it’s a hard reality for the lawyer to swallow. And notice that we aren’t left knowing how the lawyer reacted to all of this. Jesus’ intent was to clearly change this man’s perspective on reality, but we’re never told how the story ends for the lawyer. Did he go and do likewise, or did he remain stuck in his way of doing things?

We come to church sometimes like the lawyer came to Jesus, don’t we? We may not be hostile (or, indeed sometimes we may). But we do come with our expectations of what church should be, how things should be done, and sometimes with a very strict definition of who is in and who is out. And, more often than not, we come thinking we know what Jesus is all about—we don’t expect to be confronted by Jesus. But, just like the lawyer who thought that he knew what’s what, Jesus doesn’t leave us, with our boundaries and definitions, and expectations unchallenged or unprovoked.

Jesus told this parable to turn the lawyer’s world upside-down and today this parable is for us an invitation to the quite unexpected world of Jesus where Samaritans, the despised outsiders of society and not the religious leaders of the day are the heroes of the story. Where enemies, those we consider to be on the outside are really on the inside. A world where we are shocked to find out that the first are really last and the last are in fact, first.

It is an invitation to a way of life, to a community that doesn’t seek to set boundaries of who is in and who is out—who we love and show mercy to, and who we leave in the ditch for dead. It’s an invitation to live as a follower of Jesus not with our expectations controlling our lives (for we all sometimes get caught up with the expectations we place on each other and on God or especially with the expectations we feel are made of us) but an invitation to have our lives overwhelmed, turned upside-down and inside-out by the miracle of God’s grace.

And just as we don’t know how the lawyer reacted to this provocation, to this quite unexpected turn of events, I don’t know how you’ve reacted to the reality altering world and ways of Jesus in your own life. The invitation to encounter this Jesus who transforms and revolutionizes our lives is open to everyone—and if we let him, he will turn our worlds upside-down.
Amen.