Sermon Notes for October 26, 2008

by Rev. Cathy Campbell
Oct 26a: Deut 34:1-12; Ps 90: 1-6, 13-17; 1Thess 2:1-8; Mt 22:34-36

What a gift it is to share worship with you, and to share ministry with you in this corner of the kingdom. You are a gift to us. Thank you. Nicely, our scriptures this morning point to the essence of the journey of faith in community.

We start with Moses, the great law-giver and prophet of the people, victor over the armies of Egypt, teacher/leader of the people in the wilderness, dying on top of Mount Pisgah, in conversation with God immersed in the vision of the promised land. Then Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ, who is of the line of David, but more than that, not defined by that genealogy, is tested by a lawyer, an expert in the law, that legacy of Moses’ conversations with God on mountain tops.

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus doesn’t choose to engage the intricate complexities of the written and oral legal structure that had grown up to govern the people’s life and faith. Rather Jesus goes underneath the question and points to the reality that under-girds all of our lives in faith, then and now:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Even Paul, who I imagine almost as fierce and rugged as Donald Jackson’s picture of Moses, [although perhaps more intellectually argumentative than Moses,] even Paul, describes his work in Thesselonica this way:

though we might have made demands as apostles of Christ… we were gentle among you, like a nurse tenderly caring for her own children. So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

So what is this love, this tender caring, that lies at the very centre of the law; that is the fuel, compass, and non-negotiable of our lives in faith, our lives in God, in the heart and wisdom of our universe? What is this love that is the currency of the kingdom, of God’s economy in creation?

This summer, at the start of one of the bible studies in our vacation bible school with the Sudanese girls, our camp leader said the theme for the day was love. One of the little ones [maybe 5 or 6] in the front row, said loudly and clearly: “Oh, Yuk!” And we all laughed, but if your image of ‘love’ or ‘loving’ is what you see on TV or in the movies or read in harlequin romance novels or encounter in all sorts of artifacts of our culture, I too would say: “Oh, Yuk!” That loving is such a distant and distorted relative of the ‘love’ at the heart of our faith that it almost needs a new word. So, if we disregard popular culture’s reduction of ‘love’ to a transitory emotional event like ‘falling in love’ or ‘being in love’, most people begin to catch a glimpse of a sturdier, deeper understanding of ‘love’ through experiences of love as a child, parent, partner, friend; as lover and beloved. Yet even those experiences at their best, are always only partial. The love our faith speaks to and calls us to, the love of God, is a love that comes from a bottomless aquifer. It is love inseparably intermingled with infinite wisdom. It is love that embraces enemies and can absorb evil without return. It is, therefore, not simply a matter of affection, temperament, or emotion. It is rather a deep disposition of the heart: “a commitment that shapes our ways of seeing, understanding, and acting” [quoting Roberta Bondi.] It is a commitment to the wellbeing of others in which we cultivate “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.”(Phil 2:5) “It is a way of seeing and responding to the real, separate, individual needs of each of the people we encounter in our lives every day.” We come to this disposition, this habit, or shaping of our hearts and minds “as a result of God’s grace and our own choices and commitments lived out over a very long period of time.” It is not something we achieve or possess once and for all. It is something that is cultivated. We are constantly growing into it, everyday, as the full fruits of the Spirit continue to unfold and deepen in our lives.

Much has been made of the tripartite nature of this love: love of God, neighbour and self. I think that the analogy of Dorotheus of Gaza, one of the early desert fathers, is an accurate description of the interconnectedness of all loving – the economy of loving if you like. He wrote:

Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. The center point is the same distance from any point on the circumference. … Let us suppose that this circle is the world, that God… is the center, and the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of human beings. … Let us assume for the sake of the analogy that to move toward God, human beings move from the circumference along the various radii of the circle to the center. So at the same time, the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God.

And, the inverse is also true: “as we move away from God we move away from other people, and as we move away from people, we also move away from God.” But you might ask, what of the “as we love ourselves part.” Observers of human relationships have noted that there are those whose inner sense of themselves is so filled with shame and hurt that they cannot enter into loving dynamic because they don’t or can’t love themselves. Yet, even there, maybe especially there, healing – the true liberation of the gospel, happens as the selfless love of God touches that deep wounded place either directely as an experience of grace or indirectly through the love and care of others. As Richard Wagamese, abused and abandoned as a young child, writes in his memoir: "One Native Life"; “Sometimes life turns us upside down and backwards. It’s caring that gets us back on our feet again and pointed in the right direction.” In time the tears of our wounding melt our steep protective walls and allow us to receive care and enter into this economy of love that gives life. The death economy is based on self interest. It is driven by care-lessness, what Gretel Erhlich calls the “driving, drying force of our world;” our failure to care.

Let me briefly mention two challenges to what some have called this “Golden Rule Christianity.”
One challenge is heard in the derogatory tone of those who critique our caring or acts of compassion as dependency creating charity. It is true that our caring is not always for our brothers and sisters in Christ, but is sometimes for “those poor unfortunates.” It comes not from a place of radical equality and kinship but serves only to reinforce the differences in power and privilege amongst us. Indeed, just as our caring must come out of a hunger for justice, so our struggle for justice must always come coupled with caring.

The other challenge comes from the proponents of the marketplace logic of competitive individualism. In contrast, our faith asserts [in Volf’s words] that “true humanity is realized only when people live with one another in such a way that they do not live against one another or simply next to one another but for one another.” Some in the face of this challenge of life lived ‘for’ one another, turn away with integrity from faith. They appreciate the demand of a love ethos and choose the logic of the marketplace with their eyes open. Others compartmentalize their lives and use the logic of faith for their private lives with friends, family and church; and use the logic of the marketplace in their public work lives - in the political, economic, educational spheres of life. Others accept the challenge of life lived ‘for’ one another and seek with prayer, the guidance of the Spirit and all the gifts God has given, to live the logic of the gospel in all of their lives.

Is this Golden Rule Christianity deeply challenging, some would even say, revolutionary? Absolutely. How is it possible in real time and place, in real lives? It’s possible, I think, only as we draw into the centre, as we root ourselves deeply in the love of God: in prayer, in scripture, at the table, in concrete relationships with all those God introduces us to. The challenges are significant and never-ending and so we pray with our psalmist today:

Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, Lord…

Satisfy us, fill us each morning so your love might flow through us to all we meet, might structure all our decisions, inform all our choices, and prosper the work of our hands. God’s love, seen most fully in Christ, is indeed the currency of the kingdom economy - the path of abundant life for all – even God’s beleaguered and beloved creation. “On these commandments [love of God and love of neighbour as ourselves] hang all the law and the prophets.”

Sermon Notes for October 19, 2008

by Rev. Cathy Campbell
Oct19a: Ex 33: 12-23; Ps 99; 1Thess 1:1-10; Mt 22: 15-22

There is an old saying that there’s nothing sure but in this life but death and the tax man. And that was true then and now. [in fact if you want a brief overview of the history of taxation at the back – the latest issue of the New Internationalist magazine is all about tax justice and injustice]. So is it any surprise that those who were seeking to trap Jesus pose a taxation question:
is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

Now this is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t question.

If Jesus says ‘no – its unlawful,’ its sedition and the Herodians are right there to hear it;
but if he says ‘yes’ he endorses the legitimacy of the brutal oppression of the people by Rome, by the empire.

So he inverts the question. He goes deeper into the issue and transforms a politically charged question loaded with malice into a profound spiritual question. Interestingly, Jesus has no coin on him. He must ask the questioner for a coin. The coin is stamped with a head and title, just like our money is today. Whose coin is it? To whom does the money belong? The questioner, Caesar, God? Now I imagine Jesus looking at his challengers as I am looking at you today and asking: whose image do we bear? To whom do we belong? What does belong to the emperor or empire? And what indeed belongs to God? To whom do we and all our possessions belong?

Jesus leaves his questioners, then and now, with an open-ended riddle:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Echoing behind this riddle is the opening verse of Psalm 24:

The earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.

Or from the first chapter of the bible:

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish… the birds… cattle and wild animals and over every creeping thing… So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

So, who do we belong to and whose are our belongings? What name, whose name do we bear?

Now the Hebrew people were struggling with these issues as well as they journeyed for 40 years in the school of the wilderness. Their leader, Moses, had gone up the mountain to commune with God. And in his absence, the people got restless, perhaps disoriented or fearful. With their gold ornaments, which was all the wealth that they had carried with them from Egypt, they created an idol – a golden calf – an indigenous sign of fertility. Moses comes back. In anger or perhaps disappointment or frustration, he smashes the tablets God had created to teach the people God’s way. He crushes the idol they had made, and makes a powder of it and forces the people to drink it. Then God says to Moses:

“Go, leave this place, you and the people …Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people…"

And God demands that the people surrender all their remaining ornaments. Then in the passage we read today, Moses pleads with God not to abandon them, but to go with them. And God relents and says:

I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.

Moses is God’s and so are the people. In all this, God is shaping a people – the people of God [as we say each Sunday: the gifts of God for the people of God.] The Hebrew people, like Jesus, now travel bereft of their ornaments, their personal wealth. For, as this episode makes clear, we shape our idols from our wealth. Rather than be shaped by our creator, we create and worship what we make, and God is displaced. Our possessions, possess us and soon we find ourselves displaced without a place of belonging, trying to fill that God shaped absence in our lives will all sorts of junk food – things that cannot satisfy our deep longings.

So the question is critical: who do we [with all our possessions] belong to - God and God’s creation, idols of our own making, or of the empire’s making? In this time of global economic turmoil, when the entrails of the empire are beginning to be laid bare, we see how deeply interconnected we all are. It is not just the air we share. The coins that we trade with, stamped with all sorts of different images, are all one as well. And we see the devastating effects of greed – of people taking more than their share and bending, breaking and erasing rules to enable that to happen with complete indifference to others’ well being. The ties that bind us to each other and to God’s beleaguered, beloved creation are stretched to breaking. And who will bear the cost of this folly? How can we open to healing of these broken and messed up relations? The language of justice and peace seem shattered.

Last week, little [4 year old] Kayden asked his Aunt Tracey: where is God? Where is God in all this? Perhaps if we could see God, we would get it, find the way and follow. It’s just like Moses who asked of God: “show me your ways, so that I may know you,” and then 4 verses on: “show me your glory, I pray.” For indeed it is hard, hard to find the way in the wilderness, in the entrails of the empire. So, God said to Moses:

I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name… I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; [for no one can see my face and live]
If indeed creation is the body of God, then everyday we with Moses are privileged to see the back-side of God. And there were Jesus’ interrogators face to face with the living God in their midst and.

they were amazed; [yet] they left him and went away.

So here are we with coins of the empire in our pockets and purses, but gathered around our Lord’s table. The currency of this table is the fruit of our life and labour, symbolized in bread and wine, filled with God’s overflowing love and mercy, offered for free, forever, for everyone. The giving, sharing and consuming of this currency builds up community. At this table we are offered healing and restoration of relationships between us, and with the Holy, the one who made us and all that is. We are offered belonging, a statement of our place on the earth. And we are offered the food, the nourishment that genuinely satisfies our deepest hungers. We are what we eat and drink. If we say yes and take the food and drink of this table, we become part of God’s economy – something beyond our owning and controlling; an economy with a very different currency. At this altar we, like the Hebrew people surrender our ornaments to journey forward with our God. This is the ground of our hope. This is the basis for community that is not abusive or oppressive.

“Where is God?” “Show me your glory, I pray.” Borrowing Isaiah’s invitation to the table:
Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.

In contrast to the empire, the food of God’s economy is life indeed – abundant life for all, yes even God’s beleaguered, beloved creation. So

Give to the empire the things that are the empire’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

Sermon Notes for June 8, 2008

Rev. Cathy Campbell

Gen 12:1-9; Ps 33:1-12; Rom 4:13-25; Mt 9:9-13, 18-26

Have you ever been in a situation where you didn’t know the rules or expectations? You know there are some and you know you don’t know what you’re supposed do or say – the sort of situation where you feel really self conscious, uncomfortable, anxious, and like you really don’t belong? I still remember from 35 years ago, the first time a whole fish was placed in front of me in a fancy restaurant where I was eating with people I didn’t really know. I had no idea what to do – head, tail, bones… and of course I started all wrong and things sort of went from bad to a total mess. Some people, walking into a church service, can kind of feel like that – like a fish out of water, like they don’t really belong. Clearly there seems to be a right way, an expected way to do things, but you don’t know it. Have any of you been in that kind of situation…

Now, you and I know that that is not what church is all about - but it sure is many people’s experience:

• that there’s a right way to do things and a not OK way;
• that following the rules, the pattern, is a sign of belonging; and
• that just like political correct language, there’s a religiously correct way of saying things.

And over time people can come to believe, even unconsciously, that those folks who get it right are holier, better, or somehow closer to God – more righteous. Listen to Jesus say ‘no’ to that way of thinking, of being, and of being with each other.

Jesus and his disciples are sitting at dinner with a whole collection of tax collectors and sinners. Now the righteous ones, the ones who cared a lot about doing things in the right way, couldn’t understand why Jesus would eat with folks who clearly were known sinners and collaborators with the Romans and probably extortionists. In our day it might be like Jesus having supper with a whole group of panhandlers, squeegie kids, and maybe even pimps, loan sharks and prostitutes. When the righteous ones saw this, this asked "why." Just as we might ask: why are living Christian communities so rarely filled with society’s ‘successful ones’? Why is Jesus still found at the margins, rather than the centers of power, wealth, success and status? Maybe on this Sunday we could ask if Jesus might not likely be found wandering about the Gay Pride parade rather than in a suit and tie [or pearls] at an altar rail? Now this is not to say that the altar rail or the way we do things does not have meaning and power. But it is to say, that they are not the true heart of it. The heart of it lies in Jesus’ teaching, as important today as it was then:

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

[Sacrifice being the temple practice of the day] The desire of God’s heart is mercy. It’s compassion and loving kindness. That is the heart of Hosea’s teaching [the prophet Jesus was quoting that day] and it’s at the heart of Jesus’ path, and our path. However, it is clearly not at the heart of our culture’s way of life, or path for success, happiness or security.

Now, mercy, compassion, loving kindness is not just Jesus’ teaching. It is his way of life. Our gospel reading is not just about the inclusiveness of his table fellowship. It’s not just about the moment when I say: this is God’s table and all are welcome at this table. It’s not just about welcome, it is also about full inclusion in the blessings and life of the table. It’s about walking the talk, not just learning it, or getting it right in a prayer or sermon. So our gospel text says:
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in -
a respected one, a suit and tie one, comes in. But he is not full of his position and learning coming to challenge Jesus. No, he is full of distress. His daughter has died. He is frantic with a father’s grief, a parent’s love. And so he kneels before Jesus. And just as Matthew followed Jesus, so we’re told "Jesus got up and followed him."

But then again, the flow of events is interrupted by mercy. We’re told:

Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years
came up [to Jesus].

Now in the social customs of that day, this woman would be not just sick, but a cast out one. She was ritually impure, unable to touch or be touched by anyone because anyone or anything she touched would be impure. So this invisible, cast out one takes her heart in her hands and dares to reach out, from behind so no one would notice and get mad or push her away. She dares to reach out and touch the fringe, just the very edge, of Jesus’ cloak. Now Jesus is never surreptitious. He lives in the full light and loving gaze of the Holy. So he turns and "sees her" – imagine what those words mean: being seen by Jesus – known, no secrets hidden, all desires known, seen with the eye of God. And does Jesus speak judgement, or resentment for being interrupted, or lay out requirements for her to jump through? No, he says:

"Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well."

Take heart, be encouraged, let your heart be full. You are my daughter; you are part of my family, under my protection, carrying my name, of my house. You have a place of belonging for all time. You are my daughter. Your faith - the same faith that set Abram and Sarai on their journey, the same faith that Paul sets at the heart of the gospel, that faith has made you well.
And just in case we haven’t got mercy’s power fully into our bones, our text keeps going. It moves us through the crowd of mourners at the synagogue leader’s house who don’t just doubt Jesus’ power, but actively laugh at him – like many in our day do, and like those crowds gathered around the cross. But the power of compassion embodied in Jesus, moves on undeterred. Inside the leader’s home, Jesus reaches out to touch the little girl’s hand. And in that touch, she is restored to the fullness of life that flows without ceasing from the heart and wisdom of our universe – from that day to this - God’s steadfast love and everlasting mercy broken and poured out for God’s beloved creation – all of it – no one, no part of it excluded [except those who exclude themselves.]

Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’

In a million different ways and in the unique way that God calls you: go and learn mercy – it is God’s deepest desire for us all.

In closing, in case there are those who think mercy is too sentimental or individualistic to put at the core of our life of faith, let me point towards the follow-up sermon that flows from this one – the one on justice. Listen to New Testament scholar, Dominic Crossan’s words from his latest book: "God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now." His proposal is:

That justice and love are a dialectic – like two sides of a coin that can be distinguished but not separated. We think of ourselves as composed of body and soul, or flesh and spirit. When they are separated, we have a physical corpse. Similarly with distributive justice and communal love. Justice is the body of love, love the soul of justice. Justice is the flesh of love, love is the spirit of justice. When they are separated, we have a moral corpse. Justice without love is brutality. Love without justice is banality.

So it is really important that we, each and together, take heart and: Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ Then, from that place, with our hearts full, we can we join up with our psalmist today and authentically with all of ourselves:

Sing to our creator a new song with all the music in our souls for all the earth is full of the steadfast love – the mercy of the LORD.