Fort Garry MB Church - Winnipeg, Canada

As we conclude our series Of All Nations, Pastor Carl leaves a tangible and practical challenge on the table:  as Christians, we must participate in reconciliation before approaching the Table of Our Lord for Communion.

Listen as Larry Wilson, chaplain at Stony Mountain Penitentiary provides, first, startling statistics around treatment of Indigenous people through the 1900s to modern day before moving to share his own personal story of healing and God's intervention in his life.

Pastor Howard Jolly shares a cutting message to Fort Garry MB Church, outlining seven biblical characteristics of reconciliation.

What is the "Spirit of Sonship" we have been given in Christ and what does it mean and what are its implications for how we live among (and our responsibilities to) the Nations.

Having reached the end of our Lenten journey of 2022, Pastor Call invites us to consider how we as a church and as Christians are to participate in the work of Easter.

He is risen!  Listen to Pastor Carl's sermon from our Easter service of 2022, wherein we wrap up our series, Seeking God's Ways.

In John's telling, Mary Magdalene is the one who discovers that the tomb is open.  After the two male disciples see the empty tomb and leave, she is the one who meets Jesus.  Her sorrowful certainty that Jesus' dead body has been taken away is transformed when Jesus speakers her name and opens her to the unimaginable truth of his resurrection.  Mary gets to announce this good news to the disciples, inviting them to let go of their certainty that they knew the ending, and to be opens to God's unexpected triumph over death.  We are invited to surrender to our certainties that falsely place limitations on God and to join the psalmist in praise: What God is doing is marvelous in our eyes!  Recall Isaiah's words from the third week of Lent: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than you ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." (Isaiah 55:9)

Jesus acknowledges that he is king, a king who comes in peace with a compassionate, humble power.  Some people were looking to him to be a king who would have power over everyone and everything, power to make the circumstances of Roman occupation go away.  God's way of power is to empower with love.  We can look at the donkey in the Palm Sunday story as an insignificant character empowered by the role Jesus gave it.  A donkey is not a powerful creature, yet it was chosen to humbly serve and go the way of Jesus.  The power of God's love is transformative; being on the way with Christ is the source of this power.  We can consider the power we have in the pulpit and take care to avoid using it as power over others, allowing the power of Christ's Spirit to flow through us in love.

Isaiah reminds us that God is about to do a new thing.  God's way is amazing abundance in a wilderness place of scarcity.  We can find this surprising abundance again in Paul's words to the Philippians: everything else is like trash next to knowing Christ, the source of abundance.  Oneness in Christ transforms us to be generous and compassionate, to humbly receive grace and share it with all.  Mary's anointing of Jesus embodies this abundant way.  She gave everything she had without expecting anything in return.  She was criticized for using expensive oil in this way by those who viewed it from a scarcity mindset.  Her critics weren't thinking, "This is Jesus! Nothing else matters!"  It can be scary to give everything we have to Jesus, "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead."

The human point of view named in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 causes us to think that we are "in" ad others are "out."  In Jesus' parable, the elder son is stuck seeing from this perspective and thinking that his father should love only him, not his brother who left home.  The elder son struggles to realize how blessed he is.  The younger son experiences reconciliation, which can radically open our hearts to be welcomed and to understand God's welcome.  The prodigal son is a new creation because he came home to receive his father's love.  We may wonder about the Israelites and their rituals of circumcision (Joshua 5:2-8) and Passover (Exodus 12:12-13) that defined and celebrated who was chosen and who wasn't chosen.  We can ponder their shift from receiving the grace of manna to eating the produce others had grown.

Like the gardener in the Luke 13 parable, Jesus doesn't. give up on us.  Jesus continues to nurture us like a fig tree/. The tree does not earn his loving. care: it is not bearing fruit.  Christ's living water and cultivation are freely given. to us.  We couldn't afford. to buy. this true nourishment if it. had a price tag!  It is difficult. for us to accept. this grace, or even imagine. it.  Truly, God's ways are as far above our ways as the heavens above. the. earth (Isaiah 55:9).  We can be skeptical about gifts that appear to be free but come with an actual cost.  God's way contrasts with our culture, which urges us to be self-sufficient and earn our way, basing our identity on the way we make money.  Repentance - turning around - includes coming to Christ to freely receive what we can never earn.