Trinity United Sermons

Matthew 11:25-30

I’m finding that today’s text addresses at least 3 huge questions that we all live with to some or other extent. I wonder how they resonate with you?

And so to that first question: I wonder what it is about little ones that Jesus said makes them especially open to the ‘things of God’ – that apparently are so difficult for the ‘wise and intelligent’ to embrace? I wonder if it has to do with their innate curiosity, their open receptiveness, and their easy teachability. Children do SO have that ability to soak things up. As a parent, ever argued in front of your children and then caught those little faces worriedly looking up at you? It’s their ability – both beautifully and tragically – to absorb/ to become what they are exposed to… Deeply impressionable, with impressions that can last a lifetime. Is that something of what Jesus had in mind here: our being soft & receptive/malleable with the things of God…?

But there’s more: We know that with an infant mortality rate of up to 40% by puberty [i] – those early biblical communities were not sure whether their children would survive childhood. It’s only once they’d celebrated their Bat or Bar Mitzvahs in their early teens that children gained any individual standing in the community. And so, in addition to being deeply impressionable, marked by an insatiable curiosity and wonder-full receptivity, children also had no special status. All they had in their lives, was given purely by grace, and their communities knew that!

And so, What new thing are we being encouraged to become – like a child – curious, impressionable and humble enough to notice and to embrace during this time? Perhaps, it’s a genuine willingness & ability to see God’s gracious hand at work outside of the formal & familiar?

At a time when most of us are seriously missing our gatherings in the traditional sense, it’s us becoming open enough, curious and humble enough to recognize God in the most surprising places: in the work and words of heroes such as our wonderful Dr Bonnie Henry, or any of those who are putting themselves on the line standing up against the pernicious effects of this virus. Psalm 91 speaks of God putting ‘angels in charge of us to protect us wherever we go’ – is that what this means? There is all those many many people who are constantly noticing and caring, reaching out to the most vulnerable in our societies?

How about God within that which is arising from within all of us – religious or not – all who are saying ENOUGH to systemic racism: DO YOU SEE GOD THERE? Where are you being given this child-like ability to notice holiness? What blinkers are keeping you obliviously indifferent to what God is in fact currently doing…? Oh, may we be given child-eyes to see God’s hand in all of these ‘outside-of-the-church’ places and so come ever more deeply to appreciate how God is still very much with us and is still so very beautiful! For that IS somehow who Jesus actually is and who Jesus reveals God to be …for those with eyes open enough to see…

Which brings us to the second question: What distorted images of God, and of ourselves should we be losing – that an infinitely truer image may emerge? I’ve always loved the name ‘VERONICA!’ because of what it means: VERA-NIKA: TRUE IMAGE! It is associated with the 6th station of the cross, that 1st Century woman who became St Veronica – who after handing Jesus a cloth to wipe his sweat, it’s said that an image of his face miraculously appeared on the fabric![ii]

So… what DOES Jesus reveal of God? And perhaps as NOT of God? What ugly and false, damning images of God and of Jesus and of ourselves made in God’s image do we really need to lose, and what liberating and spacious images of the Holy and of our truest selves are being revealed to us? It’s no coincidence that there are so many studies and articles dealing with our ‘Distorted Images of God’ because we are so good at creating them. I think of JB Philip’s little classic  ‘Your God is too Small’ Why, when all is revealed as being so beautifully vast and spacious, holy, why do we insist on making it all so exclusively tight and small?

And that’s our third question: For what particular work are we currently being positioned & commissioned? The ‘rest for our souls’ is not so much about us getting more sleep, as about coming into an alignment with how and what we have been made to be – the blessing God has always intended us to be! THAT is the real rest that Jesus was referring to! I love Peterson’s paraphrase of this passage: I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

This ‘blessing’ of being yoked is surely about the enthusiastic embracing of our truest selves as we are being set for service. I don’t see it too much enthusiasm in the stoicism of yoked oxen, but have you ever seen the explosion of excited energy as sled dogs are harnessed and set to work? Sure they can survive without their harnesses but it’s as they are put to work that MOOSH! THEY JUST COME ALIVE! It’s what they were bred to be, and what they were bred to do! It’s with Christ’s perfectly fitted yoke that we come to be most alive: …made in God’s image, it’s what we were bred to be and do!

…and yoked together! We do our best work for God as we are with others, acknowledging our altogether communal identity and purpose – all pulling together!

And so, once again, these 3 questions: what are you most hearing through all this?

What new thing are we being encouraged to become curious, humble, teachable enough – like a child – to notice and to embrace during this time…

What small & distorted images of god/of ourselves have we been clutched by for far too long – that an infinitely truer image (VERA-NIKA) of holiness everywhere may emerge?

For what particular work are we, together, being prepared, positioned, commissioned?

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] This paper first appeared as: M. Bar-Ilan, ‘Infant Mortality in the Land of Israel in Late Antiquity’, S. Fishbane and J. N. Lightstone (eds.), Essays in the Social Scientific Study of Judaism and Jewish Society, Montreal: Concordia University, 1990, pp. 3-25. The electronic address of this file is: https://faculty.biu.ac.il/~barilm/infant.html

[ii] The point of vs 27 is that Jesus is the ‘VERA-NIKA’ of God …kind of like what he said to Philip in Jn.14: ‘anyone who has seen me has seen God’

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Psalm 13/ Psalm 22

We celebrate Canada Day on Wednesday next week – and how weird not to be doing so with all our usual mass gatherings and parades. But what a privilege to be here in this land where – despite our mistakes, both current and historical: our atrocious relationships with indigenous communities, we lament our failings, we are wired to want to be better. It’s right there in one of the verses of our national anthem:

Ruler Supreme, who hearest humble prayer,

John Cleese of Monty Python fame, wrote a satirical series for BBC TV in the late 1960s, called ‘How to Irritate People’. His fundamental key is not to allow people to vent! Get them to be annoyed but only to the point where they can stand it, because the minute someone is allowed to erupt all their hurts and frustrations, is when they start to feel better and you will have to start annoying them again from the start. The very serious point to take from this is that the venting of our feelings, our expressing whatever we are otherwise allowing to build up inside of us, is not only good for us, it’s essential for our good health and sanity!

I’m always a little unsure when we answer ‘how are you’ with the usual ‘I can’t complain’ because it’s just not true! WE CAN COMPLAIN! Our good health REQUIRES that we complain! I’m not talking so much about always being miserable about something or another – but about how, when we are going through what’s rough, we must CREATE opportunities to express our pain! …if not to some people that we trust, then at least to ourselves, certainly to God! And that’s exactly what our texts are doing today! We’re speaking about the gift of lamentation. It’s the gift of being able to react, to grieve!

Some [i] argue that as much as 55-60% of all the sentiment expressed in Psalms which we know were the Hebrews’ hymnbook, are doubt, frustration, anger, hurt, and lamentation. And not only in the Psalms, we hear this response to hard life events all through scripture: e.g. the Book of Job, where he was feeling desperately miserable after all he’d been through and had no qualms about expressing it: “Why did I not perish at birth, come forth from the womb and expire?” (Job 3:11). As do the prophets, crying out to God, “Why is my pain continuous, why does my wound seem incurable…?” (Jeremiah 5:18). The whole of the OT book of Lamentation is dedicated to just that – the people of Judah weeping as they expressed their pain at losing their land after being taken into Babylonians exile.

We see it the New Testament where suffering people cry out to Jesus for help. “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” shouted Bartimaeus, the blind roadside beggar, (Mark 10:47).

Or even Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane, so terrified and overwhelmed before his betrayal and arrest: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me…” (Mark 14:36). As well as from the cross as he was dying, owning the words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me…?”

IT’S PROFOUNDLY BIBLICAL! These MUST be our prayers as we go through rough circumstances, and we MUST be allowed to pray them: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice!” (Psalm 130:1) “O my God, I cry out by day, and you answer not; by night, and there is no relief for me” (Psalm 22:3). “How long, O Lord? Will you utterly forget me?” (Psalm 13:2), “Why, O Lord, do you stand aloof? Why hide in times of distress?” (Psalm 10:1)

And yet, despite how scripture presents lamentation as a vital and therapeutic part of any faithful response to when life is hard, we seem to have lost touch with it. Or worse, we think that by expressing our anger or sadness we are somehow losing our faith! What? Seriously?                              

I’m grateful for an article published by Old Testament Professor and scholar Fr Michael D. Guinan, (GUY-NIN) [ii] in Franciscan Media & I am drawing freely today from that article as we think about ‘lamentation’.

Firstly, lamentation can be an act of faith. Faith is not simply about our intellectual agreement with statements about God. It is about the trusting to God of our entire selves. Of course there are times when it feels God is absent, when we feel alone, confused, and we doubt. But honest doubting is never the opposite of our faith! Unbelief is the opposite of faith! We actually DO believe in God’s goodness and love and that’s why our difficult experiences hurt so much – it’s our faith in something better that provides the context for our doubts. We cry out directly to God because we know that while there is very real hurt in here, we know deep down, somehow, there is a God who cares, deeply. We lament because we DO have faith that God is in fact hearing us – despite our doubting, or of how desolate we may be feeling: it IS an act of faith!

Secondly, it’s directed to God. Injustice, hatred, brokenness, hard circumstances, unfairness, are all part of our lives and part of our world. And when we experience them of course we may instinctively want to retaliate, return hatred with hatred. But just because we may feel a certain way does not give us permission to dump all our negative reactions wherever and on whomever.

And so we lament to God because we believe we’ve been given the right to express our uncensored feelings there, as opposed to compounding the pain of our situations by inappropriately attacking those around us!

Thirdly, lamentation gives us the ability to acknowledge & so begin to process our pain

…it’s what we need to do to begin getting those destructive feelings out of us, get them to where we can begin to respond more constructively to our challenges. With more intentionality…

We know forgiveness is always the goal, but we also know that it’s never helpful to go there too quickly! If we do not recognize and deal constructively with our most difficult feelings and hurts, they will go underground to pop up later in destructive ways. Our grief, anger, lamenting, is a constructive way for us to begin to do that. Notice also how almost all of the lament psalms end with praise, but also that they’re only able to get there once they’ve faced and expressed the writers’ pain and negativity – it’s only then that healing can begin.

That is the Jesus way! This is his Easter model of truth: how it is only by facing the hard stuff/death that we come to embrace the new stuff/life/resurrection.

We may never try leaping too quickly away from our experience of loss. Christian faith proclaims a message of hope, but the reality of death and grief must still always be a very real part of that process.

In the 2003 movie ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson fall in love, get together, break up and then rediscover one another. But it’s after the breakup that we see a devastated Diane Keaton demonstrating all of what we are saying here. She laments! The movie takes us through lots of her just wailing/howling on the beach to the waves, and to herself, and to God! But the point is weeks, months later, when she emerges, she is whole and ready to go back to life! …leaving it up to Jack Nicholson to have to grovel his way back to her! 

The ancient Jewish practice of sackcloth and ashes understood that dynamic, where the grief-stricken would deliberately tear their clothes after their loss, sit in ash and wail, with the community understanding that that was their time to be left there to do that healing work…

Fr Michael ends his article by encouraging us as the church to create opportunities to re-introduce practices and rituals to bring lamentation back into our everyday lives, after a painful divorce perhaps; or after any kind of trauma, or loss…

This time of COVID has been brutal! Not just for those almost 10 million who have been infected, or for the loved ones of the half million who have died so far, but for all of us. The world is changing, and we miss the way things were before, we miss being able to gather, we miss the security of knowing what the future holds for us…

Of course we believe that all throughout this fog of unknowing God still has this – there IS hope for something good to emerge. But we dare not try embracing that future hope without respecting and expressing our sadness at what is lost. What have you lost?

We are always more traumatized than we like to believe – there is always grief work to do. We  carry the effects of our unprocessed sadness and loss, and it’s deadly! I’m grateful to Alma-Jean who is currently offering grief and loss groups where folks are being encouraged to process whatever loss they know – please contact the office if you’d like to know more…

In this model of God inviting us into the cycle of dying-letting go, & resurrection-coming back, we have the key to so much of our living. Honest-to-God expression of frustration & grief followed by the rediscovery of our hope-filled restored selves is an essential part of what following Jesus and the way of Christ is all about!

May I ask again: What are you most aware of having lost in your life? What unresolved grief are you still carrying, perhaps exacerbated by this time of isolation and insecurity?

Go there – unapologetically, and confidently, boldly, as we pray our lamentation to God in Jesus name, Amen.

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] I’m remembering the writing of David Cook, paraphrasing from his unpublished doctoral thesis ‘Courage to Doubt’

[ii] Michael D. Guinan, OFM, who is a professor of Old Testament, Semitic languages and biblical spirituality at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, California. https://www.franciscanmedia.org/biblical-laments-prayer-out-of-pain/

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Romans 6:1-11

Today is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, celebrating the original inhabitants of this land of Canada, whose presence here goes back for many 1000s of years. It’s also when we acknowledge the pain and suffering they have faced as a result of their unjust and racist oppression at the hand of privileged settlers. As the Church, instead of always acting with the inclusive and empowering love of the Gospel, we confess and repent of our own complicity in that – both in the past as well as the present – with our prayer and commitment towards healing, and hope, and reconciliation in the future. Dear God, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

It’s also Fathers’ day, when we honor all the Fathers and Father-figures in our lives. One of the most famous fathers in scripture is Joseph, the husband of Mary, and the father of Jesus’ youth. We don’t know too much about him, but I wonder to what extent it was as a result of Joseph’s influence that Jesus was so easily able to call God the very familiar Abba – his daddy?

And so, Dear God, we pray for your steady, healing, comforting, Abba-like presence in all our lives. We pray especially for those who have suffered because of circumstances and attitudes of others beyond their control.   We hold up Canada’s Indigenous people O God, and we pray for all of us: giving thanks for the best of our father-influences, and asking for healing and forgiveness when they – and we – get that so wrong. We pray, deeply grateful for your healing presence of life and love which abides with us today and always, in Jesus’ Name, Amen

Will Willimon points out how: When we sign on with Jesus Christ and his mission, something is gained, but something is lost as well. To embrace Christ – to live in Christ – is to die to many of our old habits and infatuations. That’s something of what Paul means when he writes of how “You also should consider yourselves dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus.” 

Being a Christ follower is about so much more than simply buying into a particular philosophy or belief system; it’s about our embracing of – or perhaps better, our being embraced by – a whole new way of seeing, being, living. It’s about our acknowledging a whole new reality – a much more real reality than what is always immediately obvious, and then our living into THAT reality. As Mark Malek said, our faith, according to Paul, is not so much about “a philosophical point of view, something for us either to accept or reject …as a reality that now lives in us, with the potential to live through us!

Remember HG Wells’ Country of the Blind which tells of a sighted person’s arrival into a country where no-one has eyes, and his attempts to make them appreciate a reality that is so much greater than the very limited grey and wooden thing they’d created for themselves ina survive in darkness: ‘There’s Sky… Colour… Light…’ Of course they didn’t appreciate having their reality challenged and so tried to ‘fix’ him by make him like them – removing his eyes [i].

WE are so often those people who learn to survive in the darkness we create, with CHRIST as the one who saves by exposing his most real reality – infinitely truer and more beautiful than whatever we could ever create for ourselves in order simply to survive!

That’s the ‘ABUNDANCE’ that Jesus speaks of in Jn.10:10! ‘The thief comes only to steal and destroy (your life), but I have come that you may (discover how you) have life in all its abundance!’ But for some reason we seem to want to stick with the dark opacity that we know!

We are all, always, serving something, following some or other guidance or leading: and that something is either feeding us or killing us! Remember how Bob Dylan sang it back in the late 1970s, how everybody’s gonna have to serve somebody… I can’t imagine a much more tragic circumstance than when we allow the worst of ourselves to lead us in serving something (or someone) that we would NEVER in our best selves want to have that kind of control of our lives – that is like choosing to live a dark and limited reality – so much less than what God intends!

Is what I am currently serving true, & spacious and life-giving or is it an illusion: false, small & limiting? We so easily allow how we see ourselves and others and the world to deteriorate into this something dark and distorted. What do you allow to define you, to drive you? Who or what does your life serve? This is vital, because our serving instincts can’t stand a vacuum. Unless we embrace an alternative, we will serve whatever our small, ego selves demand of us! If we’ve been hurt, or disappointed, well, then, perhaps it’s our bitterness, or defensiveness that we serve best! Or after a failed relationship with a parent, or a partner perhaps, our low self-esteem/broken self-image may leave us wired for serving whatever we believe will be good for boosting just ourselves and our own shredded reputations. Or fear – we’re especially vulnerable to that one! And there’s so much to feed our fears: our fear of strangers, fear of being poor, fear of sickness, of being ignored, of being unpopular, fear of death… Oh my goodness… ‘We’ve been made for so much more than just trying to survive in the dark…

And then there’s our SIN. I’m not sure how you understand ‘SIN’ – you know, that thing that Christ died and rose in order to destroy for all time – it’s such a loaded word, but, how about this for a definition: SIN is all of what we allow to block & distract us from knowing and being and living into all of whom and what we ACTUALLY are, how we’ve ACTUALLY been created to be! …and not just us but ALL creation!

We are made in God’s image: We are hard-wired to know and to reflect God’s love! As channels of God’s Peace: wherever there is hatred and illness and despair, we are most alive when our lives come to reflect God’s character of love, healing, hope. Wherever there is injustice, and cruelness, hate, we are most alive as we reflect God’s justice, compassion, mercy – THAT’S WHAT IT MEANS TO BE THRIVING!

And as for those still choosing their familiar ego-blindness over knowing and living into whom they actually are – who are still choosing to serve lesser masters, remaining blind in that country of dark hatred and bigotry, marching to other, lesser drumbeats – what do we do about them? I know that we must treat others’ life-choices with the deepest respect – whomever or whatever they choose to be serving…[ii] Thoreau speaks of how different people are entitled to march to the beat of different drummers. But to be trapped into serving that which is actually obscuring, demeaning an awareness of their own beautiful selves, souls: serving the darkness that masks and erodes their lives – whether they are aware of it or not…

Surely, Christ and the things of Christ – what Christ is and what Christ has done and is even now still doing in them – is still very valid! Surely they have to know! Surely it’s up to us to tell hem!

Our faith in Christ is about so much more than just what happens inside us. Of course it’s personal, but its light is designed by God to stream out from us! It’s what we sing: Lord the light of your love is shining…’ Wherever we find anything that blocks God’s light …WE ACT! And we act by addressing it in ourselves, and in others, wherever we find it! That’s what Jesus did – and it’s still what Jesus does! Remember those bracelets?

We don’t stand idly by any kind of misguided ‘country-of-the-blind’ behaviour – allowing dark ignorance to dominate either ourselves or our societies – however comfortable or familiar that ignorance may seem! We don’t stand idly by as we allow internal fears to produce the xenophobic racism that puts others down so we can feel better about our own diminished small-selves… No! In Christ we know that we – and everyone – are all so much better than that!

And so yes, it’s true that by following Christ something is gained, but something MUST be lost as well.  It’s true that ‘…we must die to many of our old habits and infatuations. Thank God for the goodness we gain, and thank God for the distortions/illusions that we get to shed!

What attitudes/perspectives are you currently hanging onto and what do you need to allow to die? What small-self obsessions are we allowing to keep us in mere survival mode, as opposed to the thrive-living for which Christ is come and for which we’ve been created? Alive to God is ‘THRIVING’ in God! Is that what our lives look like? Oh may it be so!

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] Spoiler alert: he escaped just in time!

[ii] …as David Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote some 150 years ago, that: If someone does not keep pace with their companions, perhaps it is because they hear a different drummer. Let them step to the music which they hear, however measured or far away.

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Romans 5:1-11

June 21, next Sunday, is National Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and our denomination is marking this Sunday as a day of prayer for Indigenous people everywhere. We are choosing prayerfully to acknowledge our own complicity in the oppression of indigenous people and of all minorities in Canada. That’s what the Black Lives Matter movement is stirring up in us all. Our prayer is that God would use this time to sensitize us to the reality of white privilege and release the healing and hope for all those who have suffered and who still are suffering the most as a result of this insidious evil. Dear God, in your mercy, hear our prayers…

Today’s text brings together so much of what Paul understood to be the whole point of Jesus’ work! Theologians describe this as ‘Soteriology’. It’s about how Jesus SAVES us!

How are we different now as a result of our having been impacted by God in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ?

It seems that there are various understanding this. We typically assume that whatever we believe must also be true for everyone. In fact, what some may believe is good and true about Jesus and his work in us may actually seem offensive to others. I know what I believe has significantly evolved and grown over the years – and I’m deeply grateful for that because I find that I am now more certain of loving this Jesus Christ and of being loved by him, while also increasingly stretched by what he is revealing of himself, and of God, and of creation – but perhaps especially of myself.   And while we may not exactly sure about where he is leading as we grow in our faith, what we MUST know is that WHATEVER He is revealing of himself is constantly always bigger and better & deeper & more beautiful than anything we could ever have known before…

But getting back to today’s text: It seems, historically [i], that people have developed various theories – doctrines – to understand who and what Jesus is and does. Most describe Jesus as the lamb that God needed to have die in order to destroy the power of evil over us – by satisfying some great debt owed either to Satan, or to God. Jesus is understood then to be acting on our behalf in order to change God’s mind about a sinful humanity – getting between us and God’s wrath. But surely that can’t be the whole of it – as Richard Rohr so often stresses – ‘it was never God’s mind that needed changing about humanity, so much as our minds that need changing about God! God loves us, always has, always will, that doesn’t ever change!

The bottom line in understanding today’s text is that God, in Christ, is about something quite wonderful for all creation, bringing us into awareness BOTH of who and what God actually is as well as what we, and all of this is, as well – and what we have  always been intended by God to be.  Jesus demonstrates what ‘righteous’ or ‘being-made-right’ living – ‘us-aligned-with-God’ living – is actually all about. He is what makes it possible for us to know that even the very worst of ourselves is no longer ever able to dominate & define us – and certainly NEVER able to separate us from God’s love!

The truth is that most of us – no, all of us – allow the best of ourselves to become trapped in prisons of some kind: some we build for ourselves, some we allow others to build into us! I’m thinking about the crippling effects of guilt! Victimhood! Broken self-image! …all designed to be keeping us as less than ourselves…

The tragedy is that we then go on to fool ourselves enough that we think we come to feel safe within those prison walls, like ‘Red’ in the movie The Shawshank Redemption – remember his thoughtful words while gazing wistfully up at the granite from inside the prison courtyard?

“These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.” Or like that paralysed man in John 5 who got so used to lying in his paralysis next to the pool at the sheep gate in Jerusalem that Jesus had first to ask whether he ‘wanted’ to get well. 

I’m speaking about all those restrictive attitudes that we permit to keep as down and away from the vast and spacious wonder of all of what we and all of this is created and  intended by God to be. DO WE WANT TO BE WELL? Why would we ever chose to allow our truest selves to remain hidden in this way?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us [ii].

OUR SALVATION is about us being saved from the dark, worst effects of our smallest, false selves and the graspy, self-preserving drivers that we allow in to steal our lives…

Who and what Jesus is, and does, is surely about so much more than something merely transactional – as if the entire point of Jesus’ life was just about what happened just between him and God – with us as passively beneficial spectators. It’s in the medieval teachings of the likes of St Francis of Assisi, and St Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus that we understand the whole Jesus event of his birth, life, teachings, his death and resurrection to be REVELATORY and INVITATIONAL, as opposed to merely TRANSACTIONAL! 

It’s REVELATORY to the extent that it reveals the depth and the effect of God’s love!

… and it’s that poured out love – all about Christ’s dying and rising – which is at the heart of everything that is most true in life. I read somewhere of how ‘The Christ Mystery is thus the template, model, and goal for all of creation. Julian of Norwich, a 14C mystic writing almost 650 years ago, described how she, in a vision, believed that Jesus touched her! She writes of how she saw and heard him speaking to her from the cross, speaking about himself as well as all reality. There was no shame in what he was saying, no guilt, no fear of God or of hell, only a love to inspire delight, freedom, intimacy and hope, cosmic hope…

Jesus was revealing to her and through her to us all how he, as the risen Christ, was transforming every cross, in all of creation, into resurrection glory – and that this is the loving, transformational nature of God – as we know he said elsewhere [iii], that: anyone who has seen him as seen God! THIS IS REVELATORY!

…and it’s also INVITATIONAL – INVITATIONAL to the extent that he invites us to enter IN to participate in his life & death and rising…

As Christ died so are we are invited also to allow the death of our small self-lives, that our true soul-selves may be released: I think of texts such as

Us being in Christ, is our acceptance of his invitation not merely to be spectators but to be participants – invited to be participating with him in what God is still doing through him…

Oh, he touched me, he revealed to me who I actually am and who I have actually always been, and then he, in me, he uses me to reach out into creation to touch others – that they too may know. Looking through the eyes of the risen Christ, so I am given to see my truest self as well as all of creation as God intends it to be seen!

Where does this leave us? …this leaves us with hope! Of course there is wickedness and struggle in our world where people continue to experience the injustice and the hate and discriminating prejudice that we all so easily fall into & even perpetuate. Of course there is still so much anger and hatred and selfishness and greed, and deepest hurting. But, thank God, that’s not all there is and it’s NOT what we allow mostly to define us! There is also hope! Our hope is in the fact that in Christ, God is come bringing all of the loving-kindness that is at the heart of God’s sacred essence and presence – with us invited to absorb and recognize that fact in every fiber of our being…

Also, we choose not to allow that knowledge to anaesthetize us! Our faith is never meant to be – as Karl Marx wrote – an opiate to dull us into passive inactivity! Instead, it’s to be the living, loving fire that mobilizes us towards God’s most radical mission and purpose.

And so, as we go about facing both the best and the worst of our world – facing it as the God serving, Christ receiving, Spirit compelled Christ followers that we are: …pushing back against the reality of Covid-19 …and refusing to continue to be complicit in perpetuating the marginalizing racism that dehumanizes those who are different to us… so may our lives become as this beautiful prayer that Karen will be singing for us in a moment – Christ as:

…our breath …our voice …our hands, feet, our heart …our dream.

May that be our reality, even as we pray in Jesus’ name, Amen

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] In a paper published some 2 years ago theologian Stephen Morrison[i] attempted to describe these, writing about: The Moral Influence Theory – which describes Jesus as being sent primarily to demonstrate his good moral influence…  Other doctrines include The Ransom Theory, Christus Victor, The Satisfaction Theory, Penal Substitution, The Government Theory and The Scapegoat Theory.

[ii] Marianne Williamson

[iii] Jesus was speaking to Philip in John 14

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Matthew 28:16-20

This is our 12th online Sunday worship gathering and our hope is that we ARE just beginning to make some real progress in coping with this pandemic, in BC anyway. But, how shattering the exposure of all this racial division in the US has been for all of us, and especially as we know that racism isn’t confined to south of the 49th parallel, it is right here with us as well. A dear friend confessed with heartbreak to me this week her conviction how what is happening there: ‘is a picture of the darkest recesses of her own heart…’ We HAVE to notice it! We HAVE to go there! We go there so we can deal with it! Former professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote recently of how ‘Racism …is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands.’

And so we light the Christ candle acknowledging how we need to be aware of Christ’s purest and clearest light shining every day into every part of our lives: exposing/ challenging/ comforting/ healing…

Our Pacific Mountain Region President Jay Olson also wrote this past week, of how there are no words are adequate to explain the horror of an African-American man dying with a white police officer’s knee at his neck. We weep for George Floyd and his family. But closer to home, she writes also of how ‘we weep…for an Asian elder kicked to the ground and left on the street. We weep for Indigenous peoples still treated as second class citizens. We weep over the truth that racism remains embedded in Canadian life and is still active in the Church.

Christos Kyrie Eleisan – Christ, Lord have mercy.

As we watch cities disintegrate in flames of the pain of injustice, let us be renewed in our courage to stand against racism and learn to relate to all others as a children of God. It must be so if we really are the body of Christ.

Dear God, as we gather now, online,

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day we recognise when we, as Christ followers, according Matthew, received our marching orders: The Great Commission.

In a 2017 interview Eugene Petersen shared how he wrote The Message bible translation as an initial response to the race riots of Baltimore in the 1960s: “… people were worried about what was happening in the city. I was worried about what was happening in people.”

THIS IS SOMETHING WE ALL NEED TO FACE, AND TO ACT AGAINST. Nike gets that. Have you noticed their latest marketing campaign that instead of saying ‘Just do it’ now stresses for us NOT to do it: “Don’t pretend there’s not a problem… Don’t turn your back on racism. Don’t accept innocent lives being taken from us. Don’t make any more excuses. Don’t think this doesn’t affect you. Don’t sit back and be silent.”

 ‘The Great Commission’ is about Jesus telling us NOT to be silent! He is defining what we, as Christ followers, are primarily to be ALL about! This is our main purpose and function, and it’s not to be about making our what’s good for just ourselves – but to be MAKING DISCIPLES OF ALL NATIONS – if whatever we do is not somehow about that – we’re missing the point!

Notice how we are never told – anywhere in scripture – to make converts!

In fact, passages like John 6:44 tell us just the opposite – how no-one will ever be able to be ‘converted’ unless God decides to do it!

Conversion is God’s business!

‘Proselytizing’ defined as ‘actions attempting to convert someone from one religion, belief or opinion to another’ is always odious and offensive! It’s also disrespectful and an invasion of others’ lives! Often manipulative. WE DON’T DO THAT!

But while conversion is God’s business …the making of DISCIPLES is up to us!

And so what is that? ‘DISCIPLE’ is the translation of a word meaning simply ‘LEARNER’ [i].

What we are to be about is making ‘learners’ of those who are currently not learners! Of course, we are ourselves to be impacted by what Christ would have us know of God, and of what God has made of us and of all creation, but it’s NEVER to stop there! His point is that we are then to go address all of what stops others from learning those things for themselves…

And notice how it’s for ‘ALL NATIONS’! This is not just about those who are like us, or whom we like, but all people! …people of every race, of every religion, every sexuality, every income level, EVERYONE! We are to use all our creativity to serve and to witness, and to challenge whatever has been unhelpfully formative – or deformative – in their worlds, ina pique their curiosity for finding these better, holier, godlier, more life-giving things for themselves…

Every time we see the effects of injustice, hatred, greed, the emergence of this awful tribal racism that we all so easily embrace, our discipleship DEMANDS that we point that out, challenge it…

GO MAKE DISCIPLES OF ALL NATIONS means NEVER …allowing evil – defined as anything that opposes God’s rule of loving justice and compassion and mercy – to exist unexposed and unopposed! We work that others may come to see it in all its obvious ugliness, that they too may be moved to go to work against it. It was John Stuart Mill, who in 1867 said that: “Bad people need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good people should look on and do nothing.” WE DON’T DO NOTHING!

We know that it is never in God’s plan for anyone EVER to have to face the effects of others’ bigotry and prejudice. We know that God’s plan for humanity is for us to live with the deepest respect in creation alongside one another.

And we know that our role in this plan is not just wishful thinking on God’s part!

It is what God has actually, practically achieved and empowered for all of us in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ. This IS the work of Jesus Christ in us and it’s Christ’s work for others through us! …TO MAKE DISCIPLES…

BUT HOW DO WE DO IT? Some believe it was Mother Theresa, others St Francis of Assisi, who first said that we do so by using words ONLY IF WE HAVE TO! Steve Sjorgen [ii] speaks strategically of ‘Conspiracies of Kindness’ campaigns for Christ followers, where we are most effective in our making of disciples by living lives that model what discipleship means. I think of lives marked by kindness, (as both Ellen DeGeneres and our Dr Bonnie Henry would agree…)

Perhaps that’s the most effective way for us to obey Christs Great Commission! It’s not so much by what we say or think as by what we do – what we actually model…

Pedagogic professionals understand that! Stanford University’s Albert Bandura [iii] writes about ‘Observational Learning’ as (quoting) a kind of vicarious learning by which direct instruction does not necessarily occur… For example, an athlete’s violent outbursts on the football field can serve as a (negative) model which a high school player might imitate, although the high school player is not being directly instructed on how to have a violent outburst. Just about any type of behavior can be modeled. Modeling has been shown to be especially effective in the development of social skills (i.e., saying “please” and “thank you,” helping others, etc.)…

Our call is not just to BE a disciple, but to be about MAKING disciples! That is Jesus’ whole point in our reading today. We ‘make disciples by knowing our place on that Christ-journey of sacred discovery and then by committing ourselves to helping others make that discovery for themselves. We do that by living lives that models what we have in fact discovered of ourselves, of others, of all creation in Christ, and by challenging all of what stops others in their process of that discovery! And as we do so – our prayer – is that we may make God smile.

We have our instructions: May God’s smiling on us be the result of our good and faithful response to all of what Christ instructed those 1000s of years ago, and what he still so clearly instructs today – that our lives come to model all of the loving justice, compassion and healing hope that Our Trinity God intends, the Redeeming Christ has secured, and the Empowering Holy Spirit has sealed for us all. Truly, may it be so, we pray in Jesus’ Name, Amen

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] Disciple (μαθητής): ‘Learner’

[ii] Community of Kindness (2003) Regal Books, California, USA

[iii]https://www.britannica.com/science/observational-learning

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Dear God, on this day of Pentecost,

Our reading (Acts 2:1-21) begins with us being told – specifically – they were all together [i], and in one place. We know from Matthew 18:19 that there is something very special about people meeting and agreeing, being of one mind, as opposed to the Medusa mythology that warns of how having too many thoughts all flying in different directions immobilizes us – turns us to stone – individually as well as a community. All together in one place implies their being of one mind! 

(When) ‘suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting’ – evocative of Adam’s [ii] inspiration.

And then ‘Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them’.  Resting on each – individually. We can imagine so many bottles being individually funnel-filled as opposed to having buckets of water sloshed over them. Those people were being individually ‘funnel-filled’ with God’s Spirit, as marked by those individual tongues of flame over each one of them…

And the effect of that filling was how the many different languages which were being spoken were now suddenly all understood. People began actually to understand one another. Some see this as the reversal of the Tower of Babel curse of Genesis 11 [iii].  13 But not everyone, because ‘some others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” Kind of like our easy contempt for whatever we don’t understand – or perhaps feel threatened by.

And then came Peter’s sermon recalling that awesome prophecy of Joel, how God said: 17 ‘In the last days … I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and our children shall prophesy, young men see visions, and our old men dream dreams. …in those days …21 when everyone who calls on the name of the Lord SHALL BE SAVED.’

‘The effect of the Pentecost-poured out Holy Spirit in our lives is our ability better to embrace what was achieved for us by God in and through Jesus Christ – THAT’S WHAT WE UNDERSTAND BY ‘BEING SAVED’

THERE IS SO MUCH IN OUR LIVING THAT WE ALLOW TO STEAL OUR LIVES!

…to steal our IDENTITIES! And our  PERSPECTIVES! And our whole sense of PURPOSE!

What do you allow to decide your IDENTITY?

OF COURSE our sense of self is affected by any or all of those factors, but to allow them EVER to go to the very heart of who we believe we ACTUALLY are?

How we see ourselves matters ENORMOUSLY because it defines OUR PERSPECTIVE! I remember telling the Chuck Swindoll story of the old guy who awoke from his afternoon nap to find that naughty children had smeared really smelly limburger cheese on his moustache – and how the whole world now just reeked – until he found that the smell wasn’t from out there at all but from under his own nose? Our ‘sense of self’ filters & affects everything about how we see the world. Some of the most unhappy are simply stuck, seeing themselves as ‘victims’ with all the world against them. And tragically for many, who can blame them? Especially when exposed to the racism, or homophobia they may be experiencing, or the loneliness perhaps, perhaps it’s the effects of their chronic mental or physical disease, their substance abuse…

We’ve heard this before – hear it again: Our primary identity is that we are MADE in God’s image! THAT IS TRUTH: GOD-GIVEN, CHRIST-SECURED, SPIRIT GUARANTEED!

What we own as our most essential IDENTITY influences our PERSPECTIVE. And then it’s our PERSPECTIVE that has everything to do with what we understand as our PURPOSE.

And that’s true quite regardless of however other influences may have impacted our awareness of that! Our SALVATION in Christ is all about our reclaiming our Christ-secured identity: It’s about the embracing of our Truest Selves/ Our Best Selves/ Our Soul Selves! Pentecost’s outpouring of the Holy Spirit is God’s empowering guarantee of all that! [iv] 

And so, drawing this together: IT’S AS OUR GOD-GIVEN IDENTITY comes to inform our GOD-GIVEN PERSPECTIVE allowing us to see beyond all the distraction to the holiness of what is most essential and sacred within everyone & everything, so we begin to catch our God-given PURPOSE! The ‘visions’ and ‘dream’ referred to in today’s reading have to do with our glimpsing of that! It’s precisely because most people don’t know, that God created the Church, making it our whole purpose/mission as Christ followers, to know it for ourselves, and then to do whatever we can to tell them! THAT IS OUR MISSION! 

I’m speaking particularly about our telling those whose circumstances or life experiences have eroded & contaminated their vision of themselves to SUCH extent that they’ve come to believe the lie that they are so much less than what they actually are!

The things that distort their vision are just about exactly what we need to go to work against: easing the effects of their poverty, healing, releasing the crippling effects their guilt from the past, comforting their loneliness, embracing their need for acceptance, addressing their longing to fit in and to be loved. 

Our Pentecost prayer is that our witness becomes all very real and possible as once again we allow ourselves to receive the empowering presence of God’s Holy Spirit love…We know the prayer of St Francis so well, but hear it again today as Jillian sings at the close of this service – own it as if for the very first time:

Lord, make me a means of your peace.

God, grant me to seek and to share:

Lord, make me a means of your peace.

Dear God, in this world where there is so much that messes with our awareness of who You have made us – and all creation – to be, we pray that You, by Your Spirit, would save us: open our eyes, clear our minds, rebirth our lives, that we may know the beauty of You in all that You touch…

Thank you for Jesus Christ and for whom & what we are as we embrace & are embraced by His Shalom/Peace…

Thank you for your Holy Spirit, poured out to empower our knowing and our living into what you intend…

May we be useful to you, O God, as vessels, channels, as the means, conduits of your love, of your wholeness, of your peace…

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] Like the Emmaus Rd two/ also Mt 18:20…

[ii] ‘Adam’ (meaning ‘reddish’ ‘like skin’) recalling humanity ‘coming alive’ with God’s ‘Ruach’ / wind/ breath.

[iii] Reversing the effects of the language cacophony which resulted from the arrogance of humanity trying to be     equal with God.

[iv] Ephesians 1:13,14

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Luke 24:44-53 

Jesus, we saw last week is, by the Holy Spirit, always with us! But simple COMPANIONSHIP is not enough! As the ‘Ascended One’ we are reminded that Jesus with us now represents all the holiness of God which is now with us!

Luke writes in physical terms of Christ’s ascension to make the point that this Jesus whom they had come to know as their Rabbi, their leader, this One whom we first met as an infant born into poverty, who walked and taught and lived and blessed and healed and challenged, and who was then betrayed and killed, but who rose from the dead, and appeared to over 550 people, THIS ONE – is now also THE ASCENDED CHRIST – & IS ONE WITH GOD!

Paul and other New Testament writers pick up on that ‘ascended’ status, describing how Jesus having left the disciples looking up into the heavens[i], and ascended into the heights[ii], is now associated with ‘the things that are above’[iii] and is ‘above all the heavens that he might fill everything’[iv], ‘the Christ taken up in glory’[v], and is seated ‘at the right hand of the Father’[vi] above every ruler and authority and power and angelic power…now and in the future’[vii]

We haven’t got the whole story of Jesus until we get this! And that this is the One who, by the Spirit, is now also with us! While most may be happy to think of Jesus as a Teacher or Role Model/Good Man, first his Resurrection & now his Ascension affirms that he is SO very much more than just that! Christ is God with us – EMMANUEL, as well as with all of creation – revealing our truest nature as being essentially good and of God and in God!

Just as God – in the incarnate Christ – has come INTO all the world, SO HERE – in the Ascended Christ – we see God drawing all of creation UP into the very holiness of God!

This is a truth that we probably don’t need to know while things are good and going well for us. Instead, as Will Willimon writes, it’s a truth that we need when things are not so good: It’s for…those days when the sky turns dark, and storm clouds gather, or the earth shifts under us, and we have that feeling that we are slipping out of control – and can do nothing about it.

That’s when we need to know that the ONE who is utterly with us, who knows every detail of our circumstances, is also the ONE CREATOR AND SUSTAINER of all creation – and the One WHO stays in control!

After[viii] a senseless act of gun violence, the powerful city mayor showed up on the scene. The people, in their grief and anguish, took out their anger on her. The last thing they wanted was for City Hall to use their tragedy as a political opportunity. And so they shouted harsh judgments as she emerged from the car. Then the police handed her a bullhorn and she spoke:

“I am here today, not as your mayor, but as somebody who, to some degree, can personally understand what you’re going through.” Many thought it sounded cheap…

But the mayor continued, “My little brother was gunned down when he was only 14. That was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. It changed everything.

In fact, the reason I ran for office and wanted to be in public service was my pitiful attempt to bring some good out of the terrible wrong that was done to him.” The crowd grew quiet as they realized that, just maybe, this powerful person did indeed understand them. She had been there, and truly knew what they were going through.

We should, take that as a kind of parable about the significance of the Ascension of Jesus.

This One who reigns, the One who sits upon the throne of God, knows and understands.

He has been here – and he is here, with us, bringing all of the holy and comforting and empowering grace of the Living God! AND THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!

Christ’s post-crucifixion Resurrection & Ascension isn’t just a promise for what may happen to us one day after we die, it’s about our being given a whole new appreciation of life NOW, while we live! …it’s perhaps ESPECIALLY about now! It’s about Christ’s opening of our hearts/minds to how God would have us be – enabling us to embrace all of this with new eyes, fresh appreciations, awesome wonder! ‘THIS ‘Christ-with-us’ IS WHO WE ARE – it’s WHERE WE ARE! AND THROUGH CHRIST we are beginning to ‘get’ how IT’S ALL SACRED!

The book of Revelation describes our fresh appreciation of A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH, without all the odiously exclusive and tribal separations that we so easily create:…a world without categories of ‘in and out’, ‘good and bad’, ‘religious and not religious’.

That’s what St Francis’ was writing about almost 800 years ago in his beautiful canticle ‘Brother Sun and Sister Moon’ – where he was given to see how we are all connected – in Christ descended it’s God with us and in Christ ascended it’s us with God…

The real miracle are those times when we are actually given to glimpse it…

Have you ever seen the wonder, In the glimmer of first sight

I see the world in light, I see the world in wonder

But the reality is that for so much of our lives, for so much of us, we are not able to see this – not yet! And we probably won’t be able to, until God decides it’s time – is that perhaps initially at least part of what we call ‘The Second Coming?’ I’m speaking about our awareness of the Risen and Ascended Christ who is now with us and with all of creation…

While we DO await the fullest possible realization of all this, our job – as Christ-Followers – is to embrace it as we are able, and to live into that as we are given to do so – that’s what the Church’s MISSION and purpose is all about!

Today’s passage ends with such beauty:

50 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them.

On this Ascension Sunday may we own that same blessing of Christ! And receiving that blessing, let’s anticipate the rising of joy from deep within us as those disciples experienced,

…and then may all our everyday living – at home, at work, just wherever we are – become as an appreciation of our being in a temple and bringing blessing to Our God!

Dear God, thank you that you, in the risen and ascended Christ,

Thank you for the comfort and healing hope that your presence brings

Thank you for the holy and sacred identity that you seal in to each of us and all of your creation…

We continue to thank you for the people and circumstances that you use to express and to reveal your presence, especially as you work through carers and workers through this pandemic…

Be very real to those who are suffering the most, we pray…

We pray your healing comfort, encouragement and hope for all whom you so love in this world, a world that you continue to create and to permeate…

In the name of the risen and Ascended Jesus Christ

Amen

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] Acts 1:10,11

[ii] Eph.4:8

[iii] Col.3:1-12

[iv] Eph.4:10

[v] 1 Tim.3:16

[vi] Eph. 1, Col.3, Heb.1

[vii] Eph.1:21

[viii] Paraphrased and adapted from a Willimon illustration

[ix] Words adapted from ‘Wonder’ CCLI Song # 7084120 Joel Houston | Matt Crocker, © 2017 Hillsong Music , Publishing (Admin. by Capitol CMG Publishing) For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com CCLI License # 11136664

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John 14:15-21

 With so much in our lives shaken by the effects of the Global COVID pandemic, with so much that is uncertain and unknown, it’s good to allow ourselves to be embraced by something, someONE so familiar! Our God, in Christ, is always the same in the eternal love which enfolds us in all our circumstances. And so, as we light the Christ candle marking our awareness of Christ with us, so we pray together:

Dear God, thank you that we don’t have to imagine you.

We carry SO MANY distorted images of God! My asking Google about that registered some 12.7 million hits – I didn’t bother actually following any of them, but, isn’t that crazy? What that does seem to highlight is that there are so many distortions…

Who or what is God for you? How accurate, or distorted is your current image of God? Where do you believe God is in all of this COVID-19 pandemic? Is God causing this? Can God stop it? Just what exactly is God’s role in this and in every circumstance of our world?  What DO you understand God actually does best – perhaps in you, perhaps through you? And how ARE you impacted by your understanding of who and what God is, what God is doing, or not doing, even now…?

One of the main purposes of scripture is somehow to help address questions like these – not necessarily to give us final answers as to engage us, take us deeper into our relationship with God, and others, and even ourselves. It’s like we have been given this exquisitely cut, multi-facetted diamond that, as we hold up to sunlight, just dazzles with the most brilliant colour.

Scripture is that diamond and our insights into God and creation are the kaleidoscope refractions meant to stagger & astound us with sacred insight…

What we are focussing on today is just one clear and undistorted image of what scripture describes God the Holy Spirit as doing: ADVOCACY… Also translated ‘Comforter, or Helper – the one ‘called alongside’ Jesus promised his followers in vs 16 that he would ask ‘The Father’ to send them ‘ANOTHER ADVOCATE’. ANOTHER’ implying the coming of a One who would be just like he had been!

We get the aspect of who or what God is, and does, that Jesus is highlighting in the word that he uses – PARACLETE/ ‘PARA’ ‘KLETOS’ meaning PARA: ‘Alongside’ (parallel lines etc.) KLETOS: kaleo – (‘To call’)

Jesus is promising the coming of One who is like Himself – called both (1) to BE alongside us, as well as (2) who calls out FROM alongside us, on our behalf! It’s both!

Firstly then, this holiness of called down to be with us! Alongside! We say it in our Creed, how we believe that : ‘We are not alone’ …that God is with us – always! Jesus is promising nothing less than the eternal and empowering presence of the God of all Creation – now eternally with us!

Richard Rohr quotes Julian of Norwich (1343 – 1416) writing some 600 years ago: The place which Jesus takes (alongside us) in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. And as Jesus taught: On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. (John 14:20)

This is about God called to be right here with us, meaning that there is now nowhere that we can go to be apart from that presence. There is no circumstance, no struggle, NOTHING, we are told. (Ps 139) That may sound scary because there may be things that we prefer the Holy presence of God not always to see or to know about us… But this is the promise of a One not only AT our side as ON our side: always for us – straining to heal and to love and to restore all of what we allow to unravel and become frayed, broken…

We were never intended to be the insecure, self-consumed egotists that we seem so easily to become! That’s NOT who we are – not essentially! God’s Holy Spirit with us is all about God restoring us back into all the fullness of menschlichkeit/humanity that we are & were always intended to be!

That’s what God the Father wills, it’s what Jesus works, and it’s what the Holy Spirit confirms! This infinitely loving, comforting, encouraging, empowering presence …with us, and for us! Always on our side! …and for others through us!

Is that an image you have of God? Because if whatever ‘other’ image you have is less than that, please know that what you have is probably an unhelpful distortion! Know too that it’s scriptures like this that are given to heal those distortions!

And so God as the Holy Spirit who is called to be with us! At work within us! …and who is also constantly calling out FROM alongside us! Our Advocate! This is an image of God pleading/interceding for us. Romans 8 describes this pleading as the interpretation of our deepest groaning…

All of this, then, to reveal a God who chooses not to be over us, like some draconian overlord, though I suspect at times we would prefer to have God be over us because then we would never have to take responsibility for ourselves, we could then just claim to be lackeys with no responsibility. Instead, Jesus insists in Jhn.15: ‘…no longer do I call you servants, I call you friends!’

Nor is this about a God who chooses to be below us, as if God is some kind of personal genie at our beck and call. I think that too is how we sometimes like to think, that we get to call the shots, and will continue to have faith so long as this ‘god’ we’ve created in our own image does our will!

This is about God as the One Spirit called to be ALONGSIDE! …like the creation stories where we are told that Eve was created as a partner from Adam’s side…

And so I ask again: What distortions of God must you release and replace as you allow yourself to be bathed in God’s ‘kaleidoscoping’ light refracting through today’s text?

What unhelpful images of God have you been allowing yourself to be confused or even cheated by?

Dear God, thank you in Christ, by your Spirit, for our reality of your Presence with us, within us…

We pray your healing comfort, encouragement and hope for all whom you so love in this world that you continue to create…

And so we pray the prayer that you, Jesus, taught, saying:

…our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

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John 14: 1-14

Today’s reading has to do with how Jesus describes himself – and it’s waaaaay beyond what our brains can most easily grasp – but we’ll try. Jesus uses one of the ‘I AM’ statements in John’s gospel to describe his character and purpose. We looked last week at his sheep metaphor, where he described himself as both the Gate for the sheep and the Good Shepherd… (10:9,11). His other ‘I am’ statements include, …the Bread of Life (6:35), after the feeding of the 5000 with a miraculous supply of bread, …the Light of the World (8:12), after absolving the woman caught in adultery, …the Resurrection & the Life (11:25, 26), after the raising of Lazarus, …the True Vine, with us as the branches (15:5), as he described himself as everything we need to live. Each time using this God-formula to describe himself – equating himself with the great ‘I AM’ of Exodus 3:14.

For today, we are looking at how he says: ‘I AM the WAY, TRUTH and the LIFE, and that no-one can possibly get to God other than by means of Him.

I suspect that it’s the misinterpretation of this passage that has been the cause of more division and hatred of ‘others who are not like us’ than virtually any other text. It has all too often been understood not only as Jesus teaching of Himself as the only true way to God but also that all other ways are wrong! And while I actually do believe some of that, it’s definitely not in the sense that it is all too often applied. I DO NOT believe that Jesus is presenting himself as the best of among a whole number of religious options!

This is not a competition, it’s a revelation! Jesus is certainly not being competitive, nor divisive, exclusionary, and any interpretation of this text that does that misses the point. In fact, what Jesus is saying of himself here is more radically INclusive than anything we could ever come up with on our own! Richard Rohr writes[i] that Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. He goes on: The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere. In fact, that is my only true definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude or reject anyone.’

What Jesus IS saying that wherever we find his truly life-giving way of living/ being/ seeing, we find him! Christ, and the way of Christ, is what constitutes truest life for all creation! And that is quite regardless of cultural or social or even religious background!

How are we seeing the way of Christ as revealing God’s character in the world today?

Christ as the epitome of all purely selfless love. This way of Christ is what gives expression to all of what God is and so what we, made in God’s image, are as well!

And we do know it when we see it, wherever it may be, or from whomever it may come.

I was recently reminded of Gandhi, from the Hindu tradition, who was just stepping onto an already slowly moving train, when he lost one of his sandals, down between the tracks. Instinctively, he kicked his other sandal onto the tracks as well. He later explained: ‘what good would just one sandal be to the person who later found it?

Surely, that sentiment describes something of what Christ looks like. But who can do that: live a life of purely selfless love that always puts others first? With all our suffocating insecurities and personal needs, vulnerabilities… All our lack of faith. All our instinctive greed & selfishness? Our insatiable egos? Seriously?

And yet Jesus insists we can! He goes on in verse 12[ii] to say that ‘those who believe in him WILL do the works that he does and will, in fact, do even greater works…’ He is re-assuring us that even though we all SOOOO struggle to live up to much of what he is about, we remain useful for God to show the world both what God’s character actually is as well as how profoundly precious they are!

And what’s more, as the Church, we are still, in fact, God’s first plan to do so! It’s the whole and entire reason why we, as the church, exist!

Jesus speaks with enormous confidence about that – having said that there is room for us all in God’s house. Of course, that is a promise of something that awaits us all after death but, perhaps most importantly, it’s a promises to us here, now, while we are still alive!

There is room for us to become and to be doing all of what God intends us to be and to do.

May that be our reality as Christian, Christ followers! Far beyond just some remote theories which we may struggle to believe, may our faith come increasingly to align our living with what Christ has revealed to us to be and do…

Dear God, forgive our constant doubting of who you are/ why you’ve come/ what you are doing. We confess that we doubt because we can’t always see your hand at work – not in us, or in the world. And that when we DO see your hand at work, we confess that we don’t always recognize it as such, nor do we understand it. Perhaps it’s our fear that you will want us to get involved that stops us, O God.[iii]

And yet, we believe O God, that as we are in Christ, you DO have such plans for us. May we live into those plans. We pray today, on this Mothering Sunday, for all those mothers and mother-figures in our lives and in this world: …people who come instinctively to love as they live lives of Christ-like nurture and care not just for themselves but for us, and others. Thank you for them all, dear God. We pray that we may be useful to you as we join in their witness, as we learn to care more for others…

The Lord’s Prayer

Amen

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] Richard Rohr ‘The Universal Christ; Convergent Book, 2019:33

[ii] John 14:12 Paraphrased

[iii] Italic prayer paraphrased from writings of William Willimon

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John 10:1-10 

Today’s reading has to do with the voices that we choose to listen to, and to follow.

The sheep follow the shepherd because they know that voice and they associate it with safety, comfort, food, nurture. The voice of their shepherd is winsome: attractive, engaging/ trustworthy. That voice has earned their trust and so they’ve become wired for hearing & responding to it, knowing it’s what they need above all other – despite how distracting other voices may be! Unless there are rules for listening we risk missing truth as it becomes lost within the cacophony of what’s going on around us! We have to filter out what we should be ignoring in order to receive what we know we need mostly to hear!

There is this stream of attention-seeking noise in our lives: From our TV sets: it’s the constant news broadcasts to which we allow ourselves to be exposed. From all our social media feeds: it’s those interminable Facetime and email postings. Perhaps most loudly, it’s what comes at us from within: it’s our experiences from the past, things our parents may have said, or may not have said to us, or from our teachers, partners in past relationships, things we may have done or had done to us, or left undone. The voices are insidious and inexorable as they clamor for our attention – sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle – always affecting/infecting us with their insinuations of fear/ panic/ insecurity.

Senior Salvation Army worker Flora Larsson confesses how she struggles with just that. After all her years of faithfully following & serving she still struggles to distinguish what she calls the voice of God from the voice of the Evil One because they sound so similar!

It was probably not that different back then for those Jesus was addressing, those Pharisees. That’s probably why Jesus told this story! I wonder what formed some of their main distractions – what were some of the voices that they were allowing to distract them/mess with their thinking? Jesus insists that ‘all those other voices are thieves and robbers with agendas to steal and destroy our lives’

What are you doing to filter out all the unhelpful voices in your life, in order to hear what God is REALLY wants you to know? WHAT ARE YOU MOST HEARING?

I have always loved that logo of the Jack Russell staring into the gramophone – as he focuses so intently on ‘His Master’s Voice.’ But it seems that like Flora Larsson, most of us, struggle to do so. I think of old Eli awakened by a young Samuel[i] who, 3 times, heard his name in the night, but was missing who it was or what it meant. What do you suspect God, in Christ as your Good Shepherd, is calling out to you/ calling out from you? For Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah & all the prophets… For Mary, for each of the disciples, and then Paul, so many others, it was all very real, and if they had been deaf to actually hearing that voice, they would have missed it!

What could Our God, in Christ, possibly be wanting of you? Of me? There are clues.

We know that ‘LOVE’ is always the key ingredient needed in our response to his voice – as, according to Paul in 1 Cor. 13, without it all the rest of what we may ever try to be and to do is quite meaningless, just the creaking of a rusty gate![ii]

And then, Jesus spells it out for us where in verses 7 & 9 he says: I am[iii] the gate for the sheep.

What is life intended to look like for us as we follow through that Christ-gate? What are the characteristics of life on the other side of that? Just what exactly was being offered by Christ to those Pharisees, to those disciples? What was being called out from them? …and what is being offered and being called out from us?

Here’s another clue: Whatever he is describing is always winsome, invitational, never manipulative or by force! It’s a poured-out-love that is purely for others! Jesus goes on in the very next verses to speak about the Good Shepherd being prepared to lay down his life for the sheep that he leads. Christ describes that as Life in all its abundance! …and it looks like God’s character! It’s a life filled with love that is selflessly inclusive especially of the most vulnerable & of minorities…

Our call to ‘abundant life’ is our call to respond to Christ’s voice – to live lives that express God’s character in whatever context we may be: On Aug 28, 1968 ‘abundant life’ looked like what Martin Luther King was describing in his iconic ‘I have a dream’ speech, where he dreamt of a world where civil and economic rights would at last be winning & be celebrated by all, as would the end of every kind of racism. In our 2020 world gripped by Covid-19 pandemic, I believe it looks like so many who are selflessly putting the safety of others before the grabbing of whatever they want for their own comforts! It always looks like our caring for the most unlovable, most in need of God’s care…

What is the greatest need facing us at the moment? I ask because I think that’s probably just about exactly where Christ would have God’s abundant life break through – as we scoop up all the loving and selfless justice and mercy and compassion of Christ, and then get on with going to work! Evelyn Underhill shares an image of the sheepdog and the shepherd that has always challenged me even as it blesses me.

We offer ourselves, one way or another, to try to work for God. We want, as it were, to be among the sheep dogs employed by the Lord Shepherd. Have you ever watched a good sheep dog at work? It is not an emotional animal. It goes on with its job quite steadily; takes no notice of bad weather, rough ground or of his own comfort. It seldom or never stops to be stroked. Yet its faithfulness and intimate communion with its master are of the loveliest things in the world. Now and then it looks at the shepherd. And when the time comes for rest, they are generally to be found together. Let this be the model of your love.

Dearest God, thank you for your calling into our lives,

Rev. Robin Jacobson reserves all rights © 2020.

[i] 1 Samuel 3

[ii] 1 Corinthians 13:1-7 (Message paraphrase)

[iii] Notice the use of the God-formula ‘Ego Aimi’

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