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Mark 3 and Unforgiveable Sin

The following sermon was preached by Andrew Kuhl at Wine Before Breakfast on March 14, 2023

Unforgiveable Sin…

I want you to imagine for a moment, a list of things that you think God will not forgive. Maybe the list that you had in mind before hearing today’s reading.

There are many things that we might think are unforgiveable. Violence, Neglect, Destruction of the planet, or maybe leaving the milk bag empty in the milk jug and leaving it in the fridge. Or forgetting to put your dishes back in the dishwasher. You know the Big things that grieve us deeply.

I don’t know what you imagined, but I want you to hold onto that list for a bit and we will re-examine it, in the perspective from our reading today.

Today in our Gospel Reading, Jesus makes it abundantly clear,

“I speak from my heart, humankind will be released from all their wrongdoing and evil speaking, but whoever speaks evil of the Holy Spirit will not be released. This wrongdoing will follow them into the world to come and to the end of all days.” Mark 3:28-29 (First Nations Version)

“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3:28-29 NRSV

That is the extensive list of unforgiveable sins.

Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

How many of you had that on your list?

And maybe it isn’t one that comes across our minds very often, because we approach it with the sense of as long as I don’t bad mouth the Spirit, or if I keep a reasonable amount of skepticism about the revival in Asbury, and hedge my bets about the Super Bowl advertisements and who is sponsoring them, and as long as I don’t curse her in my mind. Then, I am not really blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

Or it perhaps feels a bit absurd. An accusation of a thought crime, one that can provoke a significant amount of anxiety if we don’t understand it properly, because Who doesn’t have doubts and who wouldn’t speak against the Spirit before they know God.

But I think it is more than that.

This saying is important enough to be here in our Gospel passage, and it appears in both Luke and Matthew. And in other early church writings (like the Didake and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas). Which suggests it is likely something that Jesus actually said. (If you get the Historical Jesus society to vote with their coloured beads on the veracity and it would probably be fairly high chances of an original Jesus saying).

So unfortunately this morning we need to think about what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit because it is listed as the thing that is unforgiveable.

And to be honest, I can unpack the words: Blasphemy is to profane or speak sacrilegiously, to treat as not set apart or to treat the Holy Spirit as a force of evil.

And the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The one who Sanctifies us, She who empowers us with gifts to live out our faith, to draw us into relationship with the Creator and the Son.

And in the context of the passage it should make some sense, Satan doesn’t stand against Satan, and nor does the Trinity work in contrary ways to themselves.

But that only gets us so far. And then I am left with the mystery of the text. Because it isn’t super clear what it means for us: as followers of Jesus, as people pursuing the reign of God.

So when I get stuck in scripture, I turn to two places: 1) To related pieces of scripture (To see what connects and if it clarifies) and 2) to the documents of tradition, to hear alongside of what they are hearing in Scripture.

So my mind, Went to looking at the 10 Commandments, and I noticed something in the Exodus account that I hadn’t noticed before. Maybe you know the 10 commandments: No other Gods, No Idols, Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Keep the Sabbath, Honour your parents, Don’t Murder, Don’t commit Adultery, Don’t Steal, Don’t bear false testimony, Don’t Covet.

Maybe your list had one or two of these as unforgiveable?

But in our simplification, we miss some of the detail that is there in the Exodus passage where God gives this Covenant to the people they rescued from Egypt, and Loves and is longing to bind themself to this people through this agreement.

And It’s the third one on that list that jumped off the page when I was reading through it. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. The passage reads like this:

“You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses [their] name.” (Exodus 20:7)

God will not acquit them, God will not find them guiltless. The person who makes a wrong use, or takes the name of God in vain, will be found unforgiven.

That is one Parallel that we will hold onto for a moment…

But let’s seek some wisdom from another voice.

A North African, Theologian, Bishop, and pastor, has an exceptionally helpful sermon on a parallel passage to this gospel in Matthew. (Augustine writes out his sermon, and I will admit that I took some inspiration from him in case you thought this was a bit of mental gymnastics, he says that “[God’s] will indeed was to exercise us by the difficulty of the question.” (paragraph 10 Sermon XXI). )

Where Augustine lands on the idea of unforgiveable sin is that the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that is being talked about is an impenitent heart. A heart that is turned away from its need for repentance, turned away from the need for grace. That is the state that is outside of forgiveness because it does not truly accept it.

So these three snippets:

  • A heart that doesn’t see the need for repentance.
  • Taking God’s Name in Vain.
  • And Blaspheming the Holy Spirit.

These three things together bring the question and us into a better focus of what is unforgiveable.

Let’s come back to those lists of unforgiveable things for a moment because we all possibly had the cruellest forms of violence and misuse of power as unforgiveable: And yet our Gospel seems to say that even those are forgiveable. (Of course this is the scandalous nature of Grace!) But those things might actually have elements of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. (Though we should not be quick to judge those things as outside of the realm of repentance!).

But what is not forgivable is blaspheming the Holy Spirit and it is better for us to read it closer to home to read that for ourselves first:

Perhaps it is like the Philip Yancy story that Brenda sent around. It is when we persist in doing that which is wrong, “trusting in God’s grace” but never working to change our lives because God will just forgive us.

And eventually we stop looking for grace?

It is the story of how we move to an unrepentant heart.

To live claiming that Covenant, that God has bound themself to us, in the giving of the law, in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and God has acted to save us and will act again, And yet we continue living in a way that dishonours that law or that covenant. Continue to dishonour that relationship.

That’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. Living as God’s people without honouring the covenant given to us. Living as though that relationship is not important.

Because it is a life that cheapens the grace that we are offered. And actually, as long as we persist in treating that grace as not significant we just continue in that path.

And maybe that is what it means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

To live in such a way that we treat that grace,

Salvation too lightly,

Sanctification too ordinary, too profane.

That if we are honest about what it is saying, it is actually blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

And here is the good news. If it is abiding in that way of life, that attitude of our heart, that act of living blasphemy, that we continue to refuse the grace offered to us, and the opportunity to be sanctified by the work of the Holy Spirit. Then we are living unforgiven. We are living without that reality of God’s grace being real and present in our lives.

And in turning, in returning, we find that God is still patient, and gracious, and merciful because God longs for us to be in relationship with them—for our own good, and for the good of the world around us. That grace that we receive in forgiveness, actually frees us to be transformed by the Holy Spirit to live in a way that seeks the reign of God, marked by justice, and goodness, and life in its fullness.

And it is good news, because God’s Grace is capable of transforming even our hardness of heart, if we are willing to return to our God and be open to being changed.

Amen.

Source: Augustine of Hippo: Sermon XXI https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160321.htm

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Sin: A sermon (or why many Protestants need a better theology of sin)

The following sermon was preached by Michael Buttrey at Wine Before Breakfast on March 28, 2023, as part of our series on sin. He looks at James 1:12-15 and 1 John 5:14-17

Three years ago, I started to think there’s something weird with how Protestants talk about sin. I was at a pub west of here, and we were discussing what we do with theologians like John Howard Yoder, who abused his power to assault and harass dozens of women. The conversation was a struggle, in part because a professor insisted that “we’re all sinners.”

I’ve been thinking about that comment ever since. It’s true: all human beings are sinners. But in the context of that pub conversation, it was unhelpful. To see why, imagine a friend was telling you their child was sick and you replied that everyone dies eventually. True, yes, but in context you’re saying they shouldn’t care so much about their child. It’s cruelty disguised as insight.

Since then I’ve been looking for sources that understand sin differently. I don’t have a comprehensive theology of sin or anything like it; just a couple of ideas I’d like to share with you.

First, consider First John. I wasn’t very familiar with this letter, and I don’t think people preach on it as much as Paul’s letters. Reading it, you can understand why: it’s kind of a mess, and there’s some harsh and apocalyptic imagery in it.

There’s also a lot about sin, or broken ways as our translation puts it. In chapter 1 the author affirms that everyone has broken ways, saying that we call our Creator a liar if we claim not to have sinned. But in chapter 2 he says that he is writing so that we will not walk a path of broken ways – in other words, that we “may not sin.” Interesting, that.

Later in chapter 5 sin comes up again. In the passage read for us, the author says “you might see a sacred family member walking in a broken way that does not end in death. You should pray and that person will be given life.” Ok, great. Pray for other people when they’ve gone astray, got it. But then: “There is a broken way that ends with death. If that is so, prayer will not help.” What? Prayer doesn’t always help? And finally: “All who do wrong walk in broken ways, but not all broken ways end in death.”

If you’re a Protestant, your alarm bells may be going off. If not, here’s another translation of the last verse: “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not deadly.” Ding ding ding! Non-Protestant doctrine detected. This text seems to be suggesting that some sins are deadly, and some aren’t. Eugh!

Actually many Christians through the ages, even notable Protestant Martin Luther, made distinctions between what they called mortal or deadly and venial or non-deadly sins. However, the distinction has fallen out of fashion since 16th century theologian and influencer John Calvin attacked it, calling it “absurd” and “an insult to God.”

Now to be fair to Calvin, I think his purpose in attacking distinctions between sins was to emphasize how God’s mercy is great enough to pardon any sin. Thomas Aquinas makes a similar point about this passage: we can’t reliably tell how deadly people’s sins are, so we shouldn’t deny anyone the help of prayer. I agree!

We can also rightly worry that making distinctions can risk self-righteousness. Remember Jesus’ parable where a Pharisee thanks God that he’s not like that tax collector? Distinguishing between mortal and venial sins can easily turn into the classic game of “my sins are venial, your sins are mortal.”

At the same time, I think there are practical contexts where we need to make judgements. For example, I know of a couple churches that consider the offence of “publicly criticizing church leader” to be worse than “sexual harassment.” Personally, I think that’s completely backwards. But the solution, I’d suggest, isn’t to abolish all distinctions, but to make better ones.

Even in the most progressive community, there will come a time when someone may need to be excluded for everyone’s safety. If so, that decision had better be based on careful distinctions, not just what the leaders personally find annoying.

Another role for distinctions may be in our own spiritual development. For example, in my own life, should I be more concerned about laziness and sloth? Or wishing ill on people I don’t like? Are those exactly, equally bad for the health of my soul? This passage doesn’t answer this question, but it does suggest there are reasons for different levels of concern.

Turning now to our other passage. James is a famously rigorous letter, and the comments on sin are no exception. However, notice the progression here. In the passage read, James discusses temptation, and argues against the idea that the Great Spirit is responsible for tempting us. Rather, James says we tempt ourselves when we are lured and enticed by our desires. Then, when an evil desire takes root in our hearts, it gives birth to broken ways, or sin. Finally, when these broken ways have taken over, they drag us down a path that leads to… death.

Sounds dismal, doesn’t it? But notice how the word “when” is repeated 3 times. This happens in stages. Sin doesn’t arise out of nowhere, take over our hearts, and immediately doom us to death for breaking God’s law. It’s a process, which means it can be interrupted.

If you haven’t already removed the battery from it, I bet your Protestant alarm is going off again. Am I suggesting sin can just be avoided?

Well no – and yes. The problem is that discussions about sin happen on at least two different levels, or contexts. On one level, capital S sin can’t be avoided. Everyone sins. On another level, there’s evidence certain lowercase sins can be avoided. After all, the murder rate varies enormously between individuals: most people commit 0 murders, some commit 1, and a few, many.

The confusion between these levels arises in part because theologians are generally concerned with big picture questions, like why do human beings sin? Why does humanity need redemption? The answer is usually doctrines like the Fall, and maybe also free will, depending on the theologian.

But for me, my most urgent questions are more personal. Why are some people impatient with their spouses, and others are serial sexual predators? Can I avoid certain serious sins? Why am I tempted in this particular way? Is it even possible to become a better person?

The doctrine of the fall doesn’t answer these personal questions. Neither does the idea of free will, except to say “try harder.” Trusting in Jesus is certainly helpful, definitely a good idea, but also kind of mysterious.

Nowadays people are more likely to ask their therapist such personal questions than their priest. And that’s fine, I’m not sure I’d want to tell my priest all my problems, and they definitely don’t have enough time to listen to mine and everyone else’s. But even though the authors of the New Testament weren’t psychologists, they had insights into the human person, and they were interested in these questions. Thus, any good theology of sin should reflect these very scriptural nuances.

So let’s return to the text. One thing I really appreciate about the First Nations Version is how it uses the phrase “broken ways” for sin. In the context of our passages, that phrase suggests to me that sin is like a journey – “walking in broken ways.” But on a journey you can stop, change course, turn around. You don’t have to keep walking brokenly.

James makes the same point with the three stages of sin. Yes, desires can entice us, but they don’t have to take root in our hearts. Or even if they take root, broken ways don’t have to take us over. The progressive process can be interrupted at each point. And not just out of our own willpower – maybe, as 1 John suggests, it’ll be because someone is praying for us.

Now, you may find the idea of making distinctions between sins and examining your desires exhausting. If so, I get it. Life is already full of demands, and I don’t want to add any more burdens to your journey. The good news – and it is good news – is that you don’t need to understand sin in order to be redeemed from it.

But if you want to better understand the broken ways in our world, I think there’s some real resources out there – in psychology, ethics, theology and even the Bible. All we need to explore them is to turn off that Protestant alarm for a bit.

Amen.

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The Messiness of Wisdom and Sin

The following sermon was preached by Brenda Kronemeijer-Heyink at Wine Before Breakfast on February 28.

I find this text from Proverbs both intriguing and confusing. And even though I’ll look with you at some of the text in the sermon, I’m not sure this will clear up all the confusion. Nor do I think it should. I think that the confusion is a fitting part of the book of Proverbs and wisdom in literature in general. We live in a world that is complicated and confusing, and even though we might crave simple answers, we can find comfort in how this text relates well to the messiness of real life.

Proverbs often give practical wisdom, providing examples of how “if you do a certain thing, then this is usually what will happen.” In this particular text, the focus is on how we speak and the gaining of riches. The text says multiple times that hard work and righteousness will lead to riches. For example, verse 4 says that “the hand of the diligent makes rich,” and verse 3 says that “The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry.” And verse 22 says that “The blessing of the Lord makes rich.”

Yet, I doubt any of us here would have difficulty finding counterexamples to these words. The poor are often hard working: stuck with long hours and unreasonable shifts in order simply to make ends meet. And there are many who exploit the poor, through renovictions, price-gouging, and questionable labour practices. The riches they have gained from these practices are surely not because of the Lord’s blessing.

There are ways to explain away the difficulties of the text. If you look at the translation by Cal Seerveld (see end of this), you’ll notice that he’s put certain verses in quotation marks. Verses 4 and 5 are seen to be quotes of what people usually say: how diligence brings wealth. Such words can be a helpful lesson to a child but they can easily become false, too quickly reinforcing the lie of the American dream: that our effort alone gets us anywhere, forgetting that our privilege, whether from race, education, class, able-bodiedness, or something else is at least as much a reason for our success as any of our own effort.

Another quotation in the translation in the back is verse 16, where we are reminded of how “possessions are not a citadel of strength to a person of wealth!” Only righteousness brings life. Ultimately, as verse 22 says, only the Lord’s blessings make the righteous rich, and from our own experience, we know that those riches are not necessarily worldly wealth.

While I believe all that I have said so far in interpreting these texts is true, I also find these explanations a bit too simple. And I think the text itself warns against explanations that are too simple. There is something disconcerting but also challenging in how a text that focuses so much on riches and righteousness also focuses significantly on deceit and lying lips. And in that juxtaposition I am struck by how easy it can be to lie to ourselves: to think we have a right understanding so that we don’t make space for the further instruction that might lead to life, as verse 11 and 17 suggest.

As someone who is personally not that tempted by riches and who has spent time thinking about and coming to terms with my own privilege, there’s not that much enticing to me to believe the lie that my own efforts have brought about my own happy middle-class existence.

However, as someone who deeply wants to be affirmed by others, I can easily be tempted by the lie that hard effort and productivity is the same as goodness and righteousness. This is a variation of what verses 4 and 5 in the text seem to say – that diligence brings rewards. And that effort and hard work are in themselves completely good. Such an idea also corresponds to how society around us often sees procrastination as the worst sin today [cf. David Zahl, Seculosity]

I think that those of us in academia and ministry – jobs where our work hours are unusual and where our efforts are for the greater good – to help others – can be especially tempted by this lie of how my worth is tied up in my work and what I produce. After all, doesn’t the Lord bless the work of the righteous?

Yes, and. As the last part of verse 22 says “all your troubled struggle doesn’t add a bit to it.” Our efforts bring nothing.

I find these words deeply humbling. All this work that I invest so much time and energy into – and then this verse says the Lord blesses the righteousness despite all the work we do.

Such words humble me and help me recognize how easy it can be to deceive ourselves, to convince ourselves that we know how to interpret the texts and thus know what wisdom is. There are certainly better ways of living that lead to flourishing and doing well. But there is no perfect formula to succeed or even avoid sin: it is not a simple “do this and all will be good.” Sin is slippery, like the lips that bring about deceit.

When it comes to sin and wisdom, we can easily fall into thinking that if I only do this, then all will be good. If only I would try harder, or if my situation changed and it was an easier season, or if only those other people would act better, or whatever words you use to convince yourself that all be well. And the worse part about sin is that, just like wisdom, it acts a bit like Heisenbergers uncertainty principle: if we try too hard to define exactly what wisdom looks like, we are likely to have lost sight of what wisdom really is, reducing it to something simple that doesn’t reflect the messy reality of life around us.

Yet, despite knowing how ineffective it is to simplify what it looks to live wisely and avoid sin, we will always be tempted to do it. Perhaps it’s a desire for control over our lives. Perhaps it’s because we’re so often right, and we forget about how easy it is also to be wrong. Perhaps it’s to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. There are so many reasons that it’s not possible to name them all.

A couple of years ago, I spent a season studying sin. Because you know, I’m a pastor for university folks, and I like talking about hard things. We looked at Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s book, Glittering Vices, on the 7 deadly sins. I deeply appreciated how she talked about the complexity of sin and even how situational it is, just like wisdom. Each of us has different things that tempt us. It can be easy to look down on those who are tempted to things that are not attractive to us, and it is easy to dismiss the sins we have in ourselves. Studying the enneagram is another way of understanding the complexity of sin. You discover your type often by identifying how you’ve tried to address your deepest longings in unhealthy ways.

As I came to understand how complex sin is, it gave me hope.

It became more obvious that I was never going to live the life of wisdom that I could deceive myself into pretending that I was one step away from.

I did not need to compare myself to others because I wasn’t the same as them – and God wasn’t interested in my holiness comparison.

Instead, I could dump my messy failed self in front of God. Because even if sin is deeply complex, God’s response to our sins is not. God’s response is grace and love. A response of love that we see through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. A response of love that we remember each time we do the Eucharist, each time we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit.

These wisdom texts and any conversation on sin ought to invite us to know ourselves well, to look and see sin for the ugliness it is. And God encourages us to live wisely, as a way not to harm ourselves or others.

But ultimately such study isn’t so that we can try to become better but to look to God – and recognize the truth of verse 12 of the text – that love covers a multiple of sins. Or as the translation from Cal Seerveld says, “love dresses all kinds of misdeeds with clothes.”

And as we talked about earlier this semester, it is God who clothes us. The love of God doesn’t simply cover up and hide the shame or guilt that we might have from our sins and how we continue to do things that we wish we didn’t. Instead God’s love heals our wounds and washes us clean. And then God clothes us, the same way God clothed Adam and Eve as they left the garden. Because of God’s love, we are clothed with Christ, and so as Colossians 3:10-11 says, “we have stripped off the old self with its practices, and are now clothed with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of our Creator.” God’s love covers the whole multitude of all of our sins, and we can trust that God’s love will continue to work in and through us now and forever.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Proverbs 10:1-22 – Cal Seerveld’s Translation

1 A wise son or daughter makes a father or mother’s heart merry,
and an insolent, godless child breaks its parent’s heart to pieces.

2 Treasures gotten by underhanded dealings are of no use at all:
doing what is rightly just, however, saves you from death!

3 The Lord God Yahweh never lets a man or a woman who is actually righteous stay hungry,
but God rams the greedy desire of those who like to cut corners right back [down their throats]!

4 “A negligent empty hand brings on poverty:
the grip of the diligent makes one rich.”
5 “A fellow ho gathers in at harvest time knows what he is doing:
a fellow who oversleeps at harvest time is simply disgraceful!”

6 Genuine blessings halo the head of whoever come through with just deeds,
while the mouth of people who don’t act straight casts up a smokescreen over deeds that violate others.
7 The person who has persevered in doing what is just will be remembered as a gift of shalom,
while the good name of those who have been guilty of crookedness shall decompose.

8 A person who is at heart wise simply carries out [his or her] tasks:
it’s the pair of slipper lips that will be smashed to bits.
9 “Who walks in wholesome ways will walk securely unafraid:
who chooses his paths to be twisty will be discovered [tied in knots],”
10 An eye that blinks the double-crossing wink makes bitter trouble;
[I repeat:] it’s the pair of slippery lips that will be smashed to bits!
11 The mouth of folk kept truly just is a bubbling source of life;
while the mouth of people who don’t act straight [I repeat] casts up a smoke-screen over deeds that violate others.

12 Hate rouses bickering, blistering discontent,
while love dresses all kinds of rebellious misdeeds with clothes.

13 You will find wisdom on the lips of an experienced, discerning person,
but “You need a stick for the backside of anybody who at heart lacks sense.”
14 Judicious men and wisdom women are thrifty with hard-won knowledge,
but blockhead babblings are pregnant with disaster:
15 “Possessions are a citadel of strength to a man of wealth.
It’s poverty that ruins the poor –
16 [No!] the handiwork and wages of a tried-and-true man or woman is full of life,
but the income of a crooked fellow only increases his or her sin.
17 When one faithfully follows a nurturing discipline, you are on a pathway of life;
but to pay no attention to corrective judgments will leave you wandering around lost!

18 Lips of deceit conceal hate,
and whoever spreads gossip is a godless, insolent fool;
19 Wherever there is too much talk, the upstart misdeed will not fail to materialize –
whoever is more chary of his or her lip movements has more sense.
20 The tongue of a tried-and-true woman or man is as valuable as the choicest silver,
while the heart of connivers is worth next to nothing.
21 The lips of the tried-and-true woman or man will nourish many [to new life!]
Stupidly closed fools, however, because they lack sense at heart, drop dead!
22 It is only the Lord God Yahweh’s blessing that makes one rich:
all your troubled struggle doesn’t add a bit to it.
Pages 194-5 in Reading and Hearing the Word (1998)

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God as disabled

The following are excerpts from a sermon given at WBB on January 31 by Hannah, a writer, MFA student, and regular participant at GCF.

“In John 20, Jesus has to prove himself wounded. Despite being raised from the dead, he still bears the wounds of crucifixion – the ones Thomas could see and maybe some of the he couldn’t.”

“What does it mean that Jesus was still injured after being resurrected? After ascending into heaven? It means he was human. His body was fallible. He was like me and you. Able-bodiedness is only temporary. If you’re not disabled now, you will either become disabled or die first. Jesus did both.”

“What I take from this passage [John 20], from Jesus as a Disabled God, is that I don’t need to be healed to be forgiven. I do not need to be healed to be liberated. I am not a symbol of salvation. I am someone that needs to be liberated by removing barriers.”

“I would challenge you to consider how disabled people around you are invited into leadership and participation… How are we enabled to lead, speak, and offer our gifts, whatever they may be. One way would be to have information available online that details the physical and verbal specifics of worship, and the specificities of accessibility, so we can ‘stroll’ in just as confident to be there as anyone else, knowing that we are in a community that affirms that we do not need to be cured or fixed to be accepted.”

As quoted by Hannah: “In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation. In so doing, this disabled God is also the revealer of a new humanity. The disabled God is not only the One from heaven but the revelation of true personhood, underscoring the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability.” Nancy L Eisland, The Disabled God (100)

Cross-posted on our Instagram account.

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Give us a King

The following are a few excerpts from a sermon preached by Peter Haresnape at Wine Before Breakfast on January 24.

Growing up in England, Elizabeth was the queen, Maggie was the Prime Minister, Kathryn Janeway was the captain, Margaret was the pastor, and my Mum was in charge. And now, 2023, men seem to be everywhere. We have men prime ministers, men popular entertainers, and even men preachers. And now, a man queen…

A king can symbolise concepts that are hard to grasp. The Crown in right of Canada represents the immaterial presence of authority and power, the power that lies behind the institutions of courtroom, cabinet, and cop. It’s the assertion of sovereignty over vast tracts of land, on the basis that the Crown holds the land on behalf of the Indigenous nations, administering it in their best interests. It’s a complicated legal fiction designed to make it hard for Indigenous nations to have their land rights recognized, and simple enough for the citizens of Canada to believe. A king can be very helpful.

So the people say, ‘give us a king’. And why not? These are the elders of Israel, speaking on behalf of the whole nation. ‘Give us a king’, because Samuel the Judge and Priest and Prophet is old, and his sons are corrupt, and there are no more righteous judges. The days of Deborah and Gideon have gone, the old days when God called leaders to respond to specific problems. They want an end to the uncertainty, a permanent king and army and state, like other nations.

….

In the fullness of time, God sends someone into the line of King David, in the form of a prophet, with the authority of the judge. And this person is plunged into the pain of the world, filled with the Holy Spirit, and tempted with three great temptations – hunger, safety, and power. And he says ‘worship God’. And this person is acclaimed as a healer and a miracle worker, a teacher and storyteller, and he says ‘God’s kingdom is here’. And this person forms an army of outcasts and insiders, and marches on the capital, and says nothing to those who demand his life.

And these rulers crown him, and raise him up, and call him the King, and kill him.

This is God’s solution to the violence of the world. The true King who holds absolute power of life and death, who could summon angel armies and darkness and blight, but who chooses to forgive. This is God’s solution. This is God’s Kingship. And this Kingship undoes every abuse of power and every claim to innocence. This Kingship exposes every tyrant’s pretension and every strongman’s terror. . . .

To read all of Peter’s sermon, see his website.

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God as clothing – Sermon on Colossians 3

The following sermon was preached by Deb Whalen at Wine Before Breakfast on January 17.

It all began in the garden. A loving and shrewd God squinting at Adam and Eve.

“Who told you you were naked?”

It’s ironic that Adam and Eve’s first lie was an attempt at covering up their wrongdoing, and they chose to make it about their need to cover up their bodies. And we’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since. Because of Adam and Eve, every one of us, each and every day stands in front of our closet, asking:

“What am I going wear?”

By this point in our lives, as evidenced by all the fully clothed people in the room today, we’ve all learned to dress ourselves, no longer relying on someone else to choose our outfits on for us. Even those of us for whom getting dressed is merely a basic necessity, we’ve figured out at least what doesn’t work. What colours we hate and won’t wear. What fabrics we simply cannot bear because they are a punishment to our skin. And we know generally what size we like to wear, even if it is too big, like some of our most forthright friends and family will insist on telling us. Perhaps some of us have adopted a bit of a uniform, with a number of items in our closet that are in multiples. 3 plain black or white t-shirts, a few button up shirts, maybe one white and another a darker colour. A sweater or a cardigan. A pair or two of jeans. 1 pair of “nice” pants, or a skirt that goes with anything, and a bare minimum amount of shoes. Perhaps you have assembled a wardrobe of pieces that are interchangeable with one another so that when you get up in the morning, the decision making comes down to whatever is cleanest. And then at the end of the week, one load of laundry resets the whole situation and you can begin again on Monday.

But for others, getting dressed is FUN. There’s a creativity involved that allows us to match colours and patterns and fabrics. Even in the winter, a fashion-excited (and weather-savvy) person can check the temperature and think “Minus 15. Right. That means either the black or green cardigan. Am I feeling sleek and mysterious today, or do I need a pop of colour? You know what? It’s going to be grey all day, so green it is. Which means the white button up, and… I can wear my teal plaid pants with the brown boots. Great. I love these boots!” For some, calculating an outfit can be as exciting as redesigning a room in one’s house, or choosing a subject and colour palate for a new painting, and we can spend as much time as we are afforded on exploring all the possibilities. Not to mention the bonus of the endorphin rush that comes with shopping for more and more possibilities.

Each of us in the room will fall at various places along this spectrum of how we feel about dressing ourselves every day. And we might even harbour some judgements about people who approach it differently to us. And I hope you don’t expect me to tell you who is right. I don’t believe in a Biblical dress code, so far as what is appropriate to wear. Because I don’t think it matters. Frankly I am far more interested in WHY we dress the way we do. Because whether the wardrobe you have is styled after Johnny Cash or Moira Rose, it is a sad fact that many people wear their clothes as a means of covering up more than just their bare, cold skin.

Some of us are covering up bodies we hate -or at least bodies we think could be better. Men, women, and non-binary people alike, for so many different reasons, often desire different bodies than the ones we have, and while things like exercise, diet and plastic surgeries can (for better or worse) help us change those bodies, in the interim, clothing allows us to deal with the ways we feel our bodies are falling short.

Brenda mentioned in this week’s email that I spent a long time working in retail -and it’s true. For over 10 years I worked as a bra-fitter, working with people of all shapes and sizes, and I saw, in a very intimate way, how impacted we are by the expectations of how we think we should look. But I actually want to tell a personal story, from long before my bra-fitting years. All the way back to my adolescence.

I went to high school in the 90s, and I was a grunge-era, artsy kid. I was a girl who didn’t feel beautiful. I was bigger than the pretty girls. I didn’t fit into any of the trendy clothes at the mall. So I wore baggy jeans and tshirts. That was my uniform. Even at summer camp, because I didn’t want anyone to see my arms or legs. I LOVED being in the water, but I dreaded those few seconds it took me to remove my outer layers and get my bathing-suited self into the obscurity of the water. I was so ashamed of my body.

When I was 17, I got a solo in one of our school variety shows and the number required me to wear a look that was more formal than I was used to. The director told me to bring in 2 or 3 dress options and she and my dance teacher would decide which was best. I had nothing at home, I was sure, that would be appropriate, so my mom took me shopping and we found a few long dresses that would cover up my legs, and were very in style, and even though they made me feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and awkward, I took them to school and shuffled out onto the stage in one dress after the other, while the program director and the dance teacher hemmed and hawed over them, from the safety of the seats in the back.

I can’t remember what I ended up wearing in that show, but I remember as clear as if it were yesterday, what happened next. My dance teacher, Ms. Frid, a gorgeous and toned woman with full, luscious dark hair rolling down her back, waved me to the back of the auditorium so she could speak to me privately. It was just the two of us, and she was careful and kind, but very direct: “I can see that these outfits you’ve been showing us are very different to what you wear from day to day, and that it’s making you a little uncomfortable, so I just wanted to encourage you a bit. You wear a lot of oversized, baggier clothes, and if that’s for the sake of comfort or intentional style, then more power to you. But if you are trying to hide a body that you think is ugly, please hear me when I tell you it is not. What I just saw up there on that stage is a body that is strong and feminine and beautiful and if you want to, you are allowed to show it off.”

Well. It was one of the most vulnerable and important moments in all my life. The idea of being beautiful was so bone alien to me. So I muttered, “Ok thank you.” And then ran to the bathroom where I locked myself into a stall and bawled my eyes out. Part of me was scared, part of me was confused, and most miraculously, part of me wondered if Ms. Frid could be right. Maybe I wasn’t hideous. Thank God I was already in counselling, and had someone to talk to about it. And I am thankful, every day, for that turning point where the voice of the Holy Spirit, through a perceptive dance teacher, was able to break through the walls I’d built up around myself. I was hiding more than just a body behind all those baggy clothes. I was also hiding a lot of anxiety and self-loathing. But still, all of a sudden, that voice reached into the heart of me and asked:

“Who told you you were ugly?”

I had fallen victem to all the voices that surround us every day, telling us we aren’t acceptable the way we are. We need to be smarter. Faster. Prettier. Stronger. Have more followers. Be married. Have children. Play the game. Wow the judges -no matter who you need to step over or throw under the bus. It’s been a long time since I was a teen-ager, and I’m sorry to say that none of these lying, incessant voices have gone away. But I have learned to distinguish God’s voice from the din, because God doesn’t talk like them. God doesn’t need me to do, say, achieve, wear or look like anything in order to be a beloved child in the Kingdom. But the transformation that can happen when we accept that we already belong… it is life-changing. And, in fact, it comes with a functional and gorgeous new wardrobe.

“The Great Spirit has chosen you to be his holy and deeply loved children, so put on the new regalia he has provided for you. Put on the deep feeling for the pain of others, kindness, humbleness of heart, gentleness of spirit, and be patient with one another. Learn to forgive. Be thankful.”

God doesn’t just hold out unconditional, affectionate loving kindness; God wraps us in it. We wear it like a warm coat. And as we come across those who are shivering, naked, and hiding in the bushes, we need to do our best to coax them to come out so we. In turn, can wrap that loving kindness around them. When we’re not worrying over ourselves and whether or not we measure up, we are free to move through the world with an ease that will make any outfit sing, and more importantly it frees us up to care for one another. To beckon and welcome more people to the Kingdom and to put on all this stunning regalia.

This is how the Kingdom gets built. With the very fabric of compassion and empathy. With humility and gentleness of spirit and gratitude. These are things that mark Christ-followers and set us apart from a world that wants us to compete with one another, to cover up our faults, to hide our true selves. God doesn’t want us to hide. He wants us to be transformed. We’re already made in God’s image, what we’re shedding is the façade that we create when we give into the pressures of earthly Kingdoms. We’re becoming more and more like God as we are renewed. More like the selves we were always meant to be. Creation is not something of the past. It is still happening, because God is still at work in us.

Even so, I’m afraid to say, clothing is still not optional. One of my favourite writers, journalist Caitlin Moran, wrote an article about women and clothing once and pointed out something that I don’t think you have to be a woman to relate to. She says that when we stand in front of our closets thinking “I have nothing to wear!” what we are actually saying is “I have nothing that looks like who I am supposed to be today!” While we do need to figure out what will be appropriate for the lives we lead from day to day -here on campus, in offices, in churches, travelling around town- I hope that urgency to demonstrate ourselves can be curbed, as Christ-followers, by knowing that the main thing we wear is our strengthening Christ-like character, that regalia God has given to us. It may seem like just a white t-shirt and jeans. Or a vintage dress. Or a jacket and tie. But how you move in those things, the confidence and kindness you show in those outfits, the forgiveness or encouragement you can give to people who don’t expect it, these are what will make people look at you twice and wonder what makes you different. It’s the royal attire we wear from the inside out, giving us our holy beauty. That is what will stop people in their tracks.

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“The Holy in the Common” Sermon on God as bread

The following sermon was preached at WBB on 15 November 2022 by Robert Revington, the ministry’s emerging leader.

Let me begin with a question. How many of you, at some point in your lives, have had a sandwich from the chain Subway restaurants? I have many times and liked the taste. However, Subway has a bit of a reputation for the fact that their ingredients aren’t always what they claim to be. For example, one lawsuit argued that Subway’s tuna sandwiches had little actual tuna, but were a mixture from a variety of animals.1 Perhaps even more damning, two years ago, a court in Ireland ruled that the bread used in Subway’s sandwiches did not legally deserve to be called … bread.2 After analyzing their ingredients, the court found that Subway’s bread had a surprising amount of sugar relative to the amount of flour, and so, it would be more accurately labeled confectionery than real bread.3 Subway released a statement saying that they believed their bread really was bread.4 I think we can agree that in Gospels, when Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life,” (John 6:35) he didn’t have Subway bread in mind. No. But it is a recurring theme in that Gospel that Jesus uses metaphors to represent himself which point to some of the basic and most foundational things in existence. I titled this sermon “The Holy in the Common.” It’s taken from a line by the British theologian John A. T. Robinson. Robinson wrote that many people today “are more likely to respond to the sacred in the secular, the holy in the common … than in the distinctively religious.”5 Robinson laments that too often, “localizing the holy in the sanctuary in fact for many makes it more difficult to recognize.”6 Robinson also says that the phrase “the holy in the common” is “basically the meaning of the holy communion.”7 There’s something symbolic about that: the coming of God is represented in one of the most common of all things—a piece of bread. It was like that in Jesus’s time. So much so, that in the New Testament, the Greek word ἄρτος means “bread,” but can be used interchangeably just to mean “food” in general; when the Lord’s Prayer tells us, “give us today our daily bread,” it means keep us fed—not just to keep us well stocked in grain products specifically. Jesus chose one of the most common of foods to represent his body. He came into our common history—into the real world. Not just the world that we hear about in church, but in the world where people wait in line when they go shopping at the store, or get put on hold when we make a phone call, or get stuck in traffic. The world where kids have school and someone has to do the vacuuming and do dishes. That world. As the Gospel of John tells us, “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The holy can be found among the common because the Incarnate Lord came in common flesh for common people. When Jesus calls himself “the Bread of Life,” he is identifying himself with the essential food we need to sustain ourselves. Because we need him to live. Sometimes, the most common things are the things we need the most.

Similarly, when the preacher G. H. Lang visited the Middle East in 1928, the meaning of another of Jesus’s metaphors in the Gospel of John was brought home to him in a striking manner.8 It was a hot June day; the temperature was 102 degrees Fahrenheit.9 The sort of day that gets you all sweaty, leaves your tongue dry, and makes you long for a sip of cool water to quench your thirst. Lang visited an ancient well “and drank of its cold and clear water.”10 It was refreshing on such a hot day. But it wasn’t just any well. It was the site of the story in John 4, where Jesus meets the woman of Samaria. Here, Jesus speaks of how he offers living water (John 4:10). Jesus says of the well, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14). Drinking of the water in that same well on such a hot day made Lang understand that story in a new way. And he reflected that as wonderful as it was to get those sips of water on a 102 degree day, it was nothing compared to what Christ offered: living water from which one would never thirst again.11 We see again that Jesus is identifying himself with something pure and almost elemental: the water we need to live. There’s something hard to beat about having something in its pure, elemental form. I have liked drinking orange juice for many years and always thought Tropicana orange juice was particularly good. But until recently, I didn’t know what I was missing. When I was studying in the U. S. earlier this year, after going to an American grocery store chain called Trader Joe’s, for the first time in my life I tried freshly-squeezed organic orange juice. It was like I’d never had orange juice before! It was so pure and tasty and natural. If Jesus had made a metaphor about orange juice in the Gospel of John, he would have said: “I am the freshly-squeezed organic orange juice.” And he would not have said, “I am orange cocktail made from concentrate.” Because it’s not the same thing—especially once you’ve had the real thing. A little like Subway bread compared to the warm, fresh baguettes I had some mornings when I went to France.

I’d like you all to take a look at a picture. This is a painting from around 1850 by an Englishman named John Everett Millais. It’s called Christ in the House of His Parents; it shows the young Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and other members of the Holy Family—including a young John the Baptist carrying water.12 And it’s dense in biblical imagery in the background—like the Good Shepherd and Jacob’s Ladder. Surprising as this might sound, when this painting first came out, it caused a scandal. It was considered irreverent, even though this wasn’t the author’s intent. There were a lot of different reasons people reacted this way, but here’s one: in Victorian England, people were scandalized by how, in the painting, Joseph’s carpentry workshop wasn’t spotlessly clean—and this was the Holy Family! You can see scraps of wood all over the floor. Shocking, isn’t it? Now, you’d expect that this is what you’d find in a real carpenter shop where people did real work. But sometimes, the world of the Bible is treated as unreal—and not the world of common things.

In fact, an American Presbyterian theologian named Robert McAfee Brown once went to a church conference in the Philippines. He went to a worship service that used a Filipino dialect called Tagalog. Although Brown didn’t know the language, he discovered “that the Tagalog word for ‘holy’ was banal.” At first, he was put off by that, because in English, if something is “banal” that means it is uninteresting, unimportant, or ordinary. But when Brown reflected on it further, he realized that for these Filipino churches, “the ‘holy’ was not located in some far-off place, but in the very midst of the banal, the ordinary, the apparently unexciting—the places we North American folk would not be likely to notice.” Brown writes: “Even the coming of the Messiah into the world was an example of banality: Jesus was a nobody from the boondocks.” He concludes: “I count this interpretive key one of the major theological discoveries of my life.”13

Similarly, if you read the Book of Colossians, you’ll discover an interesting thing. The early chapters of the book talk in great, cosmic terms and speak of how the whole universe is under Christ’s dominion. In Colossians 1:15-17, Paul writes of Jesus that

he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

But we need to remember that when Paul says, “all things,” he means “all things.” Even the little things of everyday life. In the later part of the book, Paul gives rules for how people are to live at home or treat the people around them—for example, how husbands and wives are to treat each other, how children ought to obey their parents, but parents ought to treat their children well. Today we might think that Paul stresses the authority of the husband too much for modern tastes or not like how he has to tell slaves to follow their masters. Still, there’s an underlying point here. As the Bible scholar Luke Timothy Johnson writes, in that letter, Paul went from talking about these great cosmic ideas to something more grounded: the household.14 As Johnson says, “this illustrates Paul’s point made throughout: instead of seeking the ‘extra’ or ‘higher’ things, Christians should look to their own community and their present experience of God, for there they will find the manifestation of everything they so fervently desire.”15 In other words, when Paul said that “all things” come together in Christ, he meant the cosmos and the rulers of nations—but also the things of everyday life.

G. K. Chesterton writes that when Jesus chose the leader of his movement, he picked “a shuffler, a snob, a coward—in a word, a man.”16 It was Simon Peter. Chesterton adds:

All the empires and kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian church, was founded upon a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.17

In essence, Jesus chose to make the rock of his church not a great man, but a common man. Likewise, the minister Peter Marshall reminds us that “Jesus liked people—all kinds of folks—red blooded folks … for he himself was red-blooded.”18

And another important thing also comes in common forms: love. Throughout history, there are so many stories and poems about love. We might think of descriptions of young, beautiful people in a meadow on a sunny day. Yet, I would submit to you this: sometimes, love is most pure when it’s least glamorous. What, then, is love? Love is what makes a parent get up in the middle of the night to bring a bowl to a child who has thrown up and then clean up after them. Love is pushing someone in a wheelchair around a hospital floor, and giving them something to lean on for support to help them walk. And love is visiting someone in a nursing home when they may not always know who you are and won’t remember that you came.

Where does this leave us? Jesus came in a common form and we commemorate him in the breaking of bread. He came in the humdrum existence of everyday life. Sometimes the most holy things are found in the most common places, because the most common things are the things we need the most. As with bread, and as with love, let us remember each day, that, the holy is in the common. What could be clearer evidence of it than this: the Good News that the Son of God came down in human form to save us common people? Amen.

1 Tim Carman, “The Subway Tuna Lawsuit Is Back, Alleging That Samples Contain Chicken, Pork, and Cattle DNA,” The Washington Post, 10 November 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/11/10/amended-subway-tuna-lawsuit/.

2 Sam Jones and Helen Sullivan, “Subway Bread Is Not Bread, Irish Court Rules,” The Guardian, 1 October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/01/irish-court-rules-subway-bread-is-not-bread.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 John A. T. Robinson, “Where May I Find Him?,” in Where Three Ways Meet: Last Essays and Sermons (London: SCM Press, 1987), 165-66.

6 Ibid., 165.

7 Ibid., 165-66.

8 G. H. Lang, An Ordered Life: An Autobiography (Shoals, IN: Kingsley Press, 2011 [1959]), 200.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 For the discussion which follows, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 2(London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970), 62; 67-8.

13 See Robert McAfee Brown, Reflections over the Long Haul: A Memoir (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 263.

14 Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 355.

15 Ibid.

16 G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (London: The Bodley Head, 1905), 60.

17 Ibid., 60-61.

18 Catherine Marshall, A Man Called Peter: The Story of Peter Marshall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 301.

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Sermon on Psalm 32 – God as dovecote

The following sermon was preached at WBB by Alicia Smith, a post-doc at PIMS, on 1 November, 2022.

This morning I want to bring you treasure from two places: from God’s Word and from the heritage of the medieval Church. The image of God that I was asked to speak on is of a hiding place, as we heard in Psalm 32: and to help us think about this, I want to offer you a word-picture used in medieval literature, which is Christ’s body as a dovecote. A dovecote is just a house for domesticated doves: usually a tall house or tower studded all over with small entrances for doves to shelter in. It’s not the most obvious of metaphors for Jesus’s body!

But images like this can do us good simply by making us stop and think, by stepping outside our usual selection of imagery and words for God. My hope is that it will help us think in a fresh way about God’s wounds, our wounds, and the protection that the one can offer the other.

My academic background is in medieval English literature. I first encountered this image in a Middle English ‘Meditation on the Passion’. This is sometimes said to have been written by a man called Richard Rolle, a hermit and spiritual maverick who died in the Black Plague. But it isn’t certain that he was in fact the author.

The author of this Meditation takes us slowly through the narrative of the Passion, demonstrating how medieval readers were supposed to pay careful attention to every detail of the scene and turn it into prayer. The text lingers for a long time on the image of Jesus’s dying body, often using vivid and even gruesome terms. It addresses Jesus directly throughout, making it an intimate encounter that the reader can enter for themselves. Let me read some to you:

Sweet Jesu … Your body at that time was like the sky, because just as heaven is full of stars, so your body was full of wounds.

And again, sweet Jesu, your body is like a net, because just as a net is full of holes, so your body is full of wounds. …

Once more, sweet Jesu: your body is like a dove-house, because just as a dovecote is full of openings, so your body is full of wounds, and just as a dove being chased by a hawk is safe enough if she can only get to an opening in her dovecote, so, sweet Jesu, your wounds are the best refuge for us in every temptation.

The author goes on to compare Jesus’s wounded body to a honeycomb, dripping sweetness from every cell, a book written in red ink, and a meadow filled with flowers and health-giving herbs.

So in Middle English, Christ’s body is like a dufhouse, a dove-house, a dovecote. ‘Your body is like a dovecote, for as full as a dovecote is of holes, so full is your body of wounds.’ We’re supposed to use our visual imaginations first of all, grasping the sheer quantity of Jesus’s wounds, how they are all over his body.

But we aren’t supposed just to look. We’re not even supposed to stop where Thomas did, putting his hand to the wounds of Christ. Here is where it gets weird: we are supposed to go close, to go in, to be enclosed in this broken-open body and find safety there. ‘Your wounds are the best refuge for us.’

The desire to enter into Jesus’s wounds isn’t unique to this text in medieval literature. Late medieval spirituality in particular was intensely concerned with the physical body of Christ, most of all at the point of his death. When you look at visual art of the Crucifixion as it developed through the Middle Ages, over time you start to see Jesus transform from an almost stoic, still figure on the Cross, to one visibly wracked by pain, his limbs twisted, his blood running freely.

This intense, tactile focus led to a particular devotion among many medieval people to the wounds Jesus received, particularly the wound in his side. It’s not uncommon to find illustrations of that wound in medieval manuscripts which are smudged from being touched by reader after reader. People wanted contact with Jesus’s wounded body. They wanted to be close to him, close enough to be protected by him, in the very moment when he gave up any protection for himself.

This brings me to our Bible passage, Psalm 32. You don’t find a dovecote here, but you do find a description of God as a ‘hiding place’, someone who surrounds us with love and protects us from trouble. This verse has been important to me for a long time – I actually wrote it on the ceiling above my bunkbed as a teenager – I don’t think my parents were necessarily on board with me defacing the paint! But I didn’t know until I was preparing this sermon that the word for hiding place in the verse, the Hebrew noun seter, is in fact the same word used in the closest Biblical source we have for the dovecote image.

This is in the second chapter of the Song of Songs, where the Lover says to the Beloved:

My dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the hiding places on the mountainside,
show me your face,
let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.

It might not be immediately obvious to us what the link is between this wild dove in the mountains, which is an endearment for the Beloved bride being wooed in the Song, and the manmade dovecote of the Meditation, which is an image of the wounded Christ. But it would have been simpler for medieval people. They were used to highly allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs as representing the love between Christ and the human soul. So the twelfth-century Cistercian monk Aelred of Rievaulx makes the connection, when he says this about Christ: ‘wounds have been made in his limbs, holes in the walls of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide’.

The image of the hiding place is used differently in the two Scriptural passages I’ve mentioned. In the Song, the Lover is calling to the Beloved to come out from the hiding places in the rock, whereas in Psalm 32, the speaker rejoices in how protected they are by God as their hiding place. But let’s think for a moment about this psalm, and what it says God is protecting us from.

In verses 3 and 4, the speaker of the psalm is suffering. They are weak and wasting away, unable to sleep, groaning in pain. And the reason for this is that they have kept silent about something they need to speak aloud: an acknowledgement of sin. Physical wounds are the symbol of a moral or emotional woundedness, a brokenness that can only be remedied by hiding themselves in God.

Often when we pray for protection or deliverance, it’s from external circumstances: illness, physical threats, conflict with others or in our world. The psalm is aware of the need for protection from these ‘mighty waters’.

But while we certainly face danger ourside ourselves, if we’re honest, we know there are dangers within as well. I’m probably not the only one who relates to Paul’s words in Romans: ‘I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.’ Many of us face turmoil in our emotions or thoughts that it feels hard to escape. We can end up trapped in patterns of behaviour that hurt ourselves and others, and then we’re further trapped by shame that stops us speaking about them.

The psalmist knows this, and the author of the Meditation on the Passion knew it too. That’s why, I think, the dovecote of Christ’s bleeding body is said to be a refuge for us ‘in our temptations’, which pursue us like hawks.

Now, the intense, even obsessive focus on Jesus’s broken, hurting body can feel uncomfortable to us. It’s a lot! And this is a pretty mild example of that trend in medieval culture, to be honest. I’m often thrown off by how unfamiliar this way of thinking feels to me. But I want to say to you, and to myself, that it is really, really important that Jesus Christ is our hiding place precisely because he is a wounded body to whom we can bring our wounds.

In some ways, if you think about it, the medieval image doesn’t make a lot of sense. A wound is by definition an open space that shouldn’t be open. It’s a place where what is inside is laid bare and pain is the result. The inside becomes the outside. So it doesn’t seem like the most promising place to hide.

But that is the point, I think, and it makes an important connection with Psalm 32. The speaker of the psalm becomes sure of the protection and surrounding love of God at the moment when they lay their troubles bare.

It can be painful to be honest with God, let alone other people. But it opens up a path to blessing, and to a safety much greater than the secrecy of shame. We don’t need to cover up our own wounds because Jesus was already wounded. We are safe enough to speak honestly. Maybe there is a way you can live in that radical safety this week.

One way of doing that is to sing, because this is the kind of safety that brings joy. The Lover of the Song says: ‘Let me hear your voice’. The psalmist says, ‘Rejoice, be glad, and sing.’

I’ll close with another voice, the poet Siegfried Sassoon. This is a poem called ‘Everyone Sang’.

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away … O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

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Sermon on Matthew 20:1-16 and God as trickster?

The following sermon was preached on 8 November 2022 at Wine Before Breakfast by Brenda Kronemeijer-Heyink.

As I’ve been telling Bible stories to my daughter, Lydia, I’ve remembered how fun it is to tell good stories: stories where there is suspense and surprise. Unfortunately, the way many Bible stories are told to children they clean up some of this suspense and some of the sneakiness of the characters – and I think we are all the worse for that.

So I’ve been naming some of that sneakiness in the Bible, and in my own family we see playing sneaky tricks on each other as a good thing. It is a way for me to practice being child-like, to being naive enough that I can be tricked. It’s a way for us to laugh with each other and to be surprised by each other.

It’s with this understanding of being tricked and tricking others that I want to explore the idea of God as trickster. This image of God who invites us into being foolish and learning to see the Bible, ourselves, and the world in new ways.

I also want to acknowledge that this image of God as trickster is still an image that I’m wrestling with. Few people like being tricked and neither tricking or being tricked are positive images for it messes with our understanding of what is fair. So I want to acknowledge that is not a comfortable image of God, nor is it necessarily an image of God that is or should be all-encompassing. Yet I also believe that it’s an image that is worth exploring.

The image of God as trickster is not one that we associate with Christianity; it’s an image that fits more with other religions, with myths and folktales. Yet, this quote from Byrd Gibbens suggests ways that we might learn from the role of tricksters: “Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred. People could not pray until they had laughed, because laughter opens and frees from rigid preconception. Humans had to have tricksters within the most sacred ceremonies for fear that they forget the sacred comes through upset, reversal, surprise.”1

What if a willingness to be tricked is part of what it means to be a Christian? As 1 Corinthians 1:21 says, “Creator knew that the world through its wisdom would not come to know him. So his heart was glad to rescue and set free the ones who trust in the ‘foolishness’ of the good story we tell.”

To explore this idea of trickster a bit more, the following are several Old Testament examples about tricksters and then move on to the parable that we read.

I’ll start with the story of David and Goliath. David shows up in the army camps, bringing in food for his older brothers. He asks why everyone is standing around while Goliath is making fun of them and their God. When he hears about Goliath’s challenge to fight a champion, he offers to go himself. Instead of intervening when David makes the offer, those in charge agree and offer to lend him armor, which doesn’t fit, kind of like a child playing dress-up.

When David approaches Goliath, Goliath makes fun of him – and probably doesn’t take David seriously. Because of that, David shoots him with a slingshot. Which probably violates all proper rules of combat. As a child I never questioned the unfairness of what David did – after all, God was on David’s side. As an adult, I appreciate how David won also because of how he tricked Goliath. And I wonder what it might look like to live in such a way that we allow God to use our trickery to do good for God – what it might look like to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves, as Jesus commands us [in Matthew 10:16]

Then there is Joseph, who is introduced to us by his obnoxious habit of telling his family about how his dreams show how they’ll bow down to him. After Joseph is dragged off to Egypt and his dreams actually come true, he meets his brothers again. And while the story eventually ends with a tearful reunion, again and again Joseph plays tricks on his brothers. He returns their money, accuses them of theft and cheating him, takes one of his brothers prisoner, and even conspires to take his youngest brother for himself. As Joseph’s brothers experience his tricks, they are convicted of their sins, arguing that what is happening is God punishing them for selling their brother. The conviction goes even so far that Judah changes from being the person who was willing to harm his daughter-in-law, Tamar, to being someone who was willing to lay down his own life for that of his youngest brother – so that no harm might come to him or their father.

As I hear that story, I wonder how trickery might play a role in my being convicted of my own sins, of the church and society might be convicted of how we need to change.

One last story, the story of Abraham and Sarah. God tells Abraham that he would have a son. Abraham laughs. Abraham and Sarah try to make that promise true by involving Hagar and things get very messy. Then three visitors come and Sarah overhears them telling Abraham that in a year he would have a son. Sarah laughs. What kind of person is foolish enough to believe that someone her age would have a baby?

But babies don’t come from nowhere – and Abraham and Sarah were foolish enough to try to make a baby. And indeed within a year, Isaac is born. Isaac whose name means laughter, a constant memory of their being foolish. And how God was gracious enough to meet them in spite of and because of their foolishness.

In these Old Testament stories we see how God uses trickery and foolishness to convict and to work in and through us humans. Trickery and foolishness also have a place in the New Testament. The parables and Jesus’ very life rearranges our expectations of who God, how God works, and what it means to follow Jesus. How often did Jesus not say – you have heard it said, but I tell you… And then he would tell a saying or parable.

In the parable we read today, many people see it as showing how salvation is about grace and that we can’t actually earn it with all our hard work, no matter how early or late we come to know God. The parable is also seen as a reminder that how God treats people doesn’t necessarily fit with our ideas of justice.

Yet, parables are meant to convict, like tricksters do. While God might need to convict us of our envy of how God treats others differently than me, perhaps the parable has an even harder lesson. After all, if the parable is really about how abundant God’s grace is for the first and the last, then why are people not actually being paid abundantly in the parable? All of the workers in the vineyard get paid only a day’s wages.

Amy-Jill Levine notes that the workers focus on how things are not fair but the landowner instead shows them what is right. She argues that “the point [of the parable] is not that those who have ‘get more,’ but that those who have not ‘get enough.” Furthermore, “If the householder can afford it, he should continue to put others on the payroll, pay them a living wage (even if they cannot put in a full day’s work), and so allow them to feed their families while keeping their dignity intact. The point is practical, it is edgy, and it is a greater challenge to the church then and today than the entirely unsurprising idea that God’s concern is that we enter, not when.”2

I think her words are both hard and convicting, especially right now when we in Ontario are surrounded by a conversation around how much education workers are getting paid. And while I don’t know enough about the situation to be able to speak to which degree each party is both right and wrong, I am struck by the truths of this parable. God cares that people have enough to live on. And this parable argues that those in power should do what they can to make sure that happens.3

I hope and pray that people, including ourselves, will use what influence we have to try to ensure that people do receive a living wage – that people can feed their families and themselves, have safe housing, and do so with their dignity intact.

As a final example of God as trickster, I’ll acknowledge that as much as I think it’s important to pick texts that are relevant to today, I’m a little unsettled by how relevant today’s text is. Alongside of all these OT examples of tricksters, I wanted to share a parable. The reading from today seemed fitting because of how it convicts us that our understanding of fairness might be wrong. I wasn’t expecting the conversation of fariness and a living wage to be one that the whole province was having and arguing about. And hopefully Christians have been praying and thinking about.

Even after all these examples, I’m not sure how well this image of trickster will connect with you – and that’s okay. But I do hope that you find joy and hope in God not always working as we expect. That you can find comfort in how God convict those who need convicting. That it will give you hope that people can change, including ourselves, and that the world can change so that more people will have a living wage and more people will have safe and affordable housing.

I pray, too, that you might open yourself to being naive and open to being tricked, so that you can make space for God to work and space to be surprised. And last of all, I pray that you might experience laughter and that this might help you to better know and love God, yourself, and others.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

1 Byrd Gibbens, quoted epigraph in Napalm and Silly Putty by George Carlin, 2001. Taken from wikipedia article on tricksters.

2Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, 218.

3After all, Jesus “tends to focus less directly on ‘good news to the poor’ than on ‘responsibility of the rich.” Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, 218. Cf. Deuteronomy 15:11

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God of Action – sermon on Mark 11:11-25

A version of this sermon was first preached on October 18 at Wine Before Breakfast by Matthijs Kronemeijer, a Dutch theologian. It has been expanded and revised after feedback.

Mark 11:11–25

Dear friends,

“God is action”. This is our image for the day, as we consider images of God this season.

God is action. These words create a tension, a question.
If God is action, what action is this, and who acts? If God acts, where are we? If we act, where is God?
If there is no action going on, does that mean that God is somehow absent, not paying attention? What should we make of this inaction?

A lack of action can be hard to endure. It makes people impatient. I know that all too well myself. I have been unemployed since my family and I moved to Canada two years ago. Being unemployed does not equal being inactive, but even so, it can certainly lead to a sense of impatience. Especially when the urgencies seem to pile up around one, as I have experienced, both in the United States and in Canada.

A large part of what I have done over the past year and a half is study the gospel of Mark. Mark is the gospel of action, of God’s action. Mark presents Jesus’ ministry as a sequence of fast action, especially towards the beginning and end. The middle section has room for something different: it has more reflections, and it tells the story of Jesus’ disciples being led up the mountain where they hear God’s own voice. “This is my Son; Listen to him”.

The general plan of action in Mark develops a bit like the hymn we are going to sing in a moment, “The love of Jesus calls us” (Common Praise 434). After the initial joy and wonder at God’s mercy there follows a period of reorientation and transformation to be true followers of Jesus. And after that comes a time to challenge the status quo, the powers that be, by means of direct action. This is where the confrontation with ongoing abuse and exploitation can get pretty overwhelming – as it does for Peter and the other disciples in our chapter 11.

There is also a part of the action plan in Mark that is missing in the hymn, but I’ll come to that. Before I get deeper into Mark, I want to consider an obvious point about God as action, so obvious that I neglected to mention it when I preached this sermon live. “God has no other hands than our hands”. Thus runs a famous saying attributed to St Theresa of Avila, a 16th century nun, who was both a contemplative and a woman of incredible action.1 God has no body but ours, and thus we should act for God, use our hands and hearts and minds. If this is so, if our works can be the works of God, this is one way for God to be action. But you will agree that this understanding of God’s action is not too prominent in our passage. I would not want to read this text as an exhortation to smash the furniture of this lovely church or a call to do good works of love and mercy. We have many other Bible texts about good works, and the fate of the furniture in this church should be left to its congregation. Although I fancy it would make a great banqueting hall, if a suitable cover for some of the windows could be found.

In one word, our passage is about a home-coming – Jesus coming into his true home. We have skipped the story of the homecoming parade, 11:1–10, which has Jesus on the colt entering the city. (I am not sure if you do that at the University of Toronto, but we did at Michigan State). The verse we started with is a spectacular example of (seeming) inaction. After Mark has raised all these expectations, Jesus does nothing more than go to the temple and look around. It is almost like he takes a glance at his watch and decides it is time to walk back to Bethany. After all the royal hosannas it feels like a letdown. Where is the action?

Action kicks in the next day. Jesus and his disciples are back on their feet, walking from Bethany to Jerusalem. And the action is negative – Jesus curses the fig tree. I find the image of the cursed fig tree profoundly sad and in fairness, disturbing. We would want our God to stop random destruction, least of all to carry it out himself. To me, this image evokes the ongoing news of the ongoing destruction of our natural environment that clamours for action. It also captures the apparent futility of so many of our efforts, including mine, to produce meaningful change. We might well wonder: Was this destruction really necessary, given that it was not even the time for figs? And does this destruction also foreshadow our own, unable as we are to produce good fruit at a critical time?

Jesus’ true homecoming, the next day, leads to his most dramatic public action, the “cleansing” of the temple. Jesus puts an end to the work of sellers of cattle and of doves for sacrifice, and to the work of moneychangers. We hear of him overturning the tables they use, the seats where they sit, and prohibiting the carrying of any gear, “vessels” or merchandise. (There is something in these words). Now why did Jesus do that, and what is happening here?

One explanation for Jesus’s actions can be found in the verses Jesus quotes to support his actions in the temple. “My house shall be called a house of prayer before all peoples”. As a Jewish friend and bible scholar suggested to me, this verse is the key to Jesus’ actions. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the selling of animals, the changing of money, or the carrying of merchandise – except that in Jesus’ view they got in the way of the core function of the temple. That is: to be a house of prayer, for all people.

Jesus truly comes into his own here. The actions that Mark squeezes into four verbs show how Jesus acts as messiah, king, and prophet. He exorcises evil, establishes his authority, and teaches. The need for an exorcism fits with his claim that the temple is a “den of robbers” – the second verse Jesus quoted. A den that is being purged, at least temporarily. Temporarily, since after all, the temple is going to be destroyed.

As I read Mark, he comes very close to the belief that the synagogue and the temple were to be replaced by the Christian church. This means that the words Jesus speaks in the temple can also be applied to the Christian church. Understood in this way, Jesus’ words suggest that to live up to its calling, the Christian church should be exactly this: “a house of prayer for all people”. And to be sure, it needs to be uncorrupted by commercial interests. For us who live in North America, where Christianity long sustained a culture of exploitative colonialism, domination and slavery, leading to all forms of internal corruption and also sexual abuse, that criticism hits home. By their subservience to these abuses, our churches and other Christian establishments have become “dens of robbers” too, in spite of the good intentions and true devotion that were and are still present in them. (Chapter 12 of Mark captures these tensions very well). Some Christians continue to align themselves with the political heirs of racism and colonialism, and in any case, the negative patterns created during earlier times – defensiveness, a closed mentality, self-protection – are still ongoing. To some degree, perhaps a significant degree, our churches are still corrupted and in need of cleansing.

With that in mind, let us look at Jesus’s surprising response to Peter’s remark on the withered fig tree. I will admit to finding this the hardest part of the text and of God’s call to action. Not because it is unclear or unappealing. What stands out, first of all, is the compassion Jesus displays to his disciples. No more dramatic action centered on Jesus, but an exhortation to pray with confidence. To pray, specifically, the Lord’s Prayer, which Mark’s readers would have known by heart. Because it seems to me that this prayer is what the text is hinting at in vs. 25, where Jesus refers to God as the heavenly father of his disciples. As for Peter, who alerted Jesus to the withered fig tree, he might have been torn between different feelings: Awe at the power of Jesus’s curse, or regret for the loss of the fig tree. But the fig tree was always Jesus’s own anyways, as God’s son and the heir to God’s vineyard. (This story opens Mark 12). The delightful little book of the prophet Jonah shows that God can grow and give trees as he wishes, and take them away. As Christians, we have no entitlement – to the land, to the fruits of the land, to goods, even to life – only to God’s promise, never to give up on us, the people of God. God did not give up on the sinful people of Nineveh, much to Jonah’s chagrin. So Jonah sulked while God acted, even through him, perhaps in spite of him.

Jesus talks about prayer, which is exactly where the temple and its community had fallen short. Where I fall short. Prayer, for Christians, is God’s action per se – through the Holy Spirit that is moving in our hearts. It is a STILL kind of action, what contemplatives call the ‘opus divinum’, divine work. It is very hard to accomplish and to get oneself to do. Thankfully, some people are better at it than others. A great friend taught me that in prayer to God as our heavenly father, we can permit ourselves to be immature and demanding – like little children. Perhaps that image suits the kind of father – a father who is also very much like a mother – that we could allow our God to be. After all, we are told here (as elsewhere in the New Testament) to ask for the whole world. So that is another part of the action we are invited to engage in.

That said, I still much prefer more dramatic action. “You will say to this mountain”, Jesus says, “be taken up and cast into the sea”. No more dramatic action than that can be imagined, to move a massive heap of rock. But is that necessarily what the text is telling us?

Consider that “this mountain” is the temple mount, which as we just heard is corrupted by forces of evil and has become unsuitable for prayer. Next, consider that the sea can be a symbol for the waters of purification, perhaps even of baptism. Does that change our reading?

To me, it makes it sound much less supernatural, and more realistic – and more impossible at the same time. The stains on the temple mount are going to be washed away, even the blood that after an intermezzo of centuries is again shed on it. The stains on our churches are going to be washed away, even if our buildings risk being sold or destroyed, and many probably will be. That is the impossible possibility we are being confronted with.

Many young and young-at-heart people are ready to overturn tables and chairs, to unseat the powers that be, and to try to prevent commerce and exploitation from running our societies into the ground. Some form of radical action, of revolution in short. I agree that it is needed. But I suggest that we, as Christians, are not ready yet. Our action is not God’s action simply because what we do seems right and necessary to us. In matters of charity and good works that may usually be the case, but in matters of faithful engagement in politics – where the bigger challenge lies – not so much. I suggest that contemplation and deeper thinking are still needed more than action, which is also in large part why I choose to focus on it, for the present time. And perhaps we all need to have some of our convictions and sacred beliefs overturned before a way forward opens up.

The church should be a house of prayer for all nations. This speaks to me, as a Dutchman who is caught between countries, church communities, languages and cultures. It speaks to me about the need for action in the form of contemplation – watching, observing, reading scripture and meditating. But this form of action cannot be undertaken alone. If the church is going to be what she is meant to be, Christians must pray in communion with others. The needs of the present world are too overwhelming for individuals or broken communities to carry.

More practically, it suggests to me that before we pray for God to intervene and ideally solve our problems as if by magic, we followers of Jesus should work to carve out a truly Catholic space where the concerns and needs of all nations can be weighed and explored in comparative safety. Where the lives lost through war in Tigray and Ethiopia weigh as much as those in Ukraine and Russia – and here. In connection with this exploration there is a need for proper discernment and analysis. This is where the work of universities, think tanks, opinion leaders and civil society groups comes in. There is failure in politics, but also integrity, and the need to shoulder burdens that may seem to heavy to carry.

Let us dream of a temple square where people from nations and cultures large and small, poor and affluent, humble or prestigious, can meet in sufficient equality and freedom to understand each other’s needs and perspectives. For to all of us God has said, in the words of Isaiah (chapter 55), “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways”. The realities of our countries and of our part of the world are certain to look very different in the eyes of others, as theirs do to us. Only in dialogue and prayer can we lift them up to God and move mountains. Let that be God’s action plan.

1 For another version see https://www.ncronline.org/spirituality/soul-seeing/soul-seeing/christ-has-no-body-earth-yours