The Church of St. Aidan in the Beach

Ascension Sunday – May 20, 2012

Building Planes in the Air  

I was at the Toronto diocesan clergy conference last week, and instead of a guest speaker the bishops gave the main presentations over the three days we were there. Their theme was “Shaping Our Common Future.”

I think it’s fair to say that many of the clergy present were weary and worried. A large number are heading into retirement and are simply tired. At the other end of the spectrum are the more recently ordained clergy who are worried that there may not be jobs for them in the future, at a time of church closures, amalgamations and shrinking, often largely elderly congregations.

It could have been a depressing gathering. But the bishops were unfailingly hopeful and encouraging. Even though they’ve all had to close some churches in recent years, and that’s a task a bishop never likes to do, they see in the midst of this turmoil signs of growth, signs of life, signs of God at work transforming the church – as God always does.

The bishops were very honest: they don’t know exactly what lies ahead for this diocese, and they don’t have a grand master plan with details of what to do to fix the declining churches. But they are convinced that we’re in the middle of a transformative period where the Holy Spirit is breathing new life into dry bones.

They showed a video ad from a digital technology company that quite brilliantly illustrates where we are and what we’re doing as church in these times. (And it also connects with Ascension Day, in a funny way.) The ad shows a team of engineers building a plane while it’s flying. They’re strapped onto the wing struts as they weld sheet metal into place; they’re fixing cabin seats into position while the wind at 60,000 feet whips by; they’re hanging under the plane in harnesses as they inflate the wheels. Then when they’re done they push off and parachute down, as the plane flies on. The ad ends by saying, “We build your business even while you’re up and running.”  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3hge6Bx-4w )

I appreciate that image. We’re building the church even while we’re up and running. And if you want to take the Ascension literally, Jesus is up there with us. It’s as though we’re in mid-flight – more than 100 years into it, in the case of St Aidan’s – and we’re working on improvements, changes, revitalization as we go.

Many of you have now seen the concept ideas that the Mission and Facilities group has presented, and there will be opportunities for those of you who haven’t seen them yet to do so. We need to talk a lot, mull the ideas over, refine them, improve them, and come to a consensus about what we want to do. But at the end of the day, no matter what we do, it will be a risk – a leap into the unknown. Every change is a risk. We’ll need to be creative and bold and imaginative, as well as patient and open-minded and willing to learn and adapt as we go along. There won’t be any guarantees that x will lead to y. It will be scary.

But there are things that we can be clear about, and we must be clear about. Who we are and why we exist, to start with. And that must always be rooted and grounded in the gospel.

The readings for the Ascension that we heard today remind us that:

* We are the Body of Christ in this place, and Christ is our head. We’re not doing this                             alone.

* We are a community that trusts in the mystery of death and resurrection.

* We trust in the power of forgiveness and love and grace.

* We are witnesses to God’s subversive power that is totally unlike the power of this                               world’s authorities and big-wigs.

* We have been given the Holy Spirit and a mission.

As we discuss our buildings and what we should do with them so that St Aidan’s can thrive for another 100 years, we must also discuss our mission. What can we get up to here in the Beach, already in mid-flight? More importantly, what is God already doing here, and how can we join in and co-operate with God’s mission here in the Beach?

I want you to think about two questions:

1. What do you see God presently doing in St Aidan’s?

2. What is God doing in your own life?

God is never idle. We need to learn to become clearer about what God is doing and what God is calling us to get involved in, always remembering that the church is Christ’s, and the mission is God’s.

The Ascension story says that the historical Jesus left his disciples after instructing and blessing them, in order that the timeless, eternal Christ might be with them and with us, in all times and places. We can move with confidence and trust into an unknown future.

And this is St Paul’s prayer for us:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

 May it be so.   Amen.

Easter 4 – April 29, 2012

The Baptism of Riley McLay

Following Jesus’ Way of Love in Action

This morning Suzanne and Richard McLay have brought their wide-eyed wonderful son Riley for baptism. They’re choosing for him a spiritual path – the path that Jesus leads us along as our guide – or shepherd, as the gospel says.

My words today are in the form of a letter to Riley.

Dear Riley,

Welcome to the amazing community of Jesus’ family! You’ve been here at St Aidan’s for a while now, since you were quite tiny, and we’re loving watching you grow and change. Riley, you already know what love is. Maybe it’s the one thing you know by heart, before any brain knowledge. You’ve experienced the warm, nourishing love of your mother as she’s fed you and cradled you. You’ve experienced the strong, gentle love of your father as he’s taken care of you and introduced you to the world. I pray that you’ll always have their love as the bedrock of your life, no matter what the future holds.

Riley, this love that surrounded you even before you were born comes from God. Love is God’s first, last and greatest gift to us. Each one of us is created in love and for love. Love is our calling.

As you grow up you’ll see all kinds of paths ahead of you, that lead in all kinds of directions. One major highway is called Success. You’ll see lots of people pouring along in that direction, following signs pointing to wealth, power, security, popularity, happiness. You’ll notice that these people tend to travel very fast, overtaking each other, always wanting to stay ahead, trying to look good and be the best. Riley, beware of that road. There are lots of accidents along it, and it doesn’t lead to Love.

Another highway runs parallel to it, and it’s called Stuff. You’ll see right away why it’s called that: people on it carry so much with them; things they possess, or wish they could – big houses, great cars, lots of money, fabulous vacations. The trouble is, they run over things along the way. They stop noticing the flowers at the side of the road, or the pedestrians, the children, the people who need their help. Don’t take that road either, Riley, because many people get lost on it, and end up where they discover they don’t really want to be.

What your parents and godparents are doing for you today, Riley, is setting you on a different path. It’s not a four-lane highway; it’s more like a country road, winding through some beautiful but rough landscapes. It’s the path of Love, and there are some extraordinary people on it with you. At first you might think how ordinary they are, not particularly spiritual or special. And you’ll notice that some of them are limping and pretty banged up. Some seem really poor. Some seem to be doing crazy things, like sharing everything they’ve got, giving away their stuff, going out of their way to help others, even risking their lives. Riley, I’ve known some people on this path who have died for the sake of others. As you grow up, I hope you’ll learn about them: people like Archbishop Oscar Romero in Central America, who wouldn’t stop preaching about God wanting justice for the poor; or Martin Luther King Jr., who taught people that God loves everyone equally no matter what colour their skin is. Jesus walked down this path ahead of all of us, and cared so much about others that he gave his life away completely.

There are people right here in St Aidan’s, Riley, who are quietly walking along this path with Jesus, doing their best to live with compassion, generosity, courage, and to make this world more like heaven.

It isn’t an easy path that your parents are setting you on today. There will be times when it seems too hard, too steep, too demanding. But Riley, you can trust it, because it leads you to what we call the kingdom of God, where no one gets left out or rejected, no one is hurt, and God’s light shines so brightly we can see what really matters most. Did you guess what that is? It’s love: God’s love for us, our love for one another. In other words, Riley, this path leads you home, where we’re all meant to be.

In a few minutes you’ll be baptized, as a sign that you’re starting out on this path of Love. Everyone here will be praying for you, Riley, and for your parents and godparents as they guide you along the path. Best of all, Jesus will be walking right there with you all the way, with God’s Holy Spirit deep in your heart to guide you.

So let’s get going! There’s a great adventure ahead.

Amen.

Easter 2 – April 15, 2012

Peace * Shalom * Wholeness for All Creation

“Peace be with you.” It’s what the risen Christ says repeatedly to his friends when he appears to them. “Peace be with you.” Not, “Shame on you for running away and leaving me.” Not, “See what I had to go through because of you.” Not even, “Weren’t you paying attention when I was telling you about the way of the cross?” No – “Peace be with you.”

Liturgically we call this the peace of the Lord, when we exchange a handshake or hug with each other. St Paul calls it the peace of God which passes all understanding, and you’ll often hear those words in the blessing at the end of the service. The Hebrew word for it is Shalom, and it has many layers of meaning that I want to explore today.

The first dimension of this shalom is a very personal one – it means peace with God through Jesus Christ. It means that our broken relationship with God is healed. The disciples badly needed to hear that. They were mired after the crucifixion in shame, guilt, fear, grief, literally locking themselves up behind closed doors. So Jesus speaks to them this word of healing, forgiveness, restoration – “Peace. Shalom.”

It’s the word that is always being spoken to us: Christ is always holding out his hand to us with forgiveness, healing, acceptance. That’s one of the reasons that in our services the priest says to the congregation after the confession and absolution, “The peace of the Lord be always with you.” It’s an assurance that we are forgiven and brought back into relationship with God through Christ.

But shalom has another very important dimension, which is communal. It means peace with one another. The oneness with God that we experience (or glimpse) always leads, if it’s genuine, to a desire for peace and right relationships with one another. So after hearing the priest say, “The peace of the Lord be always with you,” there’s a verbal response (“And also with you”) and a symbolic action as we pass the peace to one another. It’s a deliberate disruption from our quiet time of prayer and confession with God, to reconnecting with the community of faith around us. It’s meant to get us on our feet and out of our places to physically reach out to one another. God’s gifts to us are never meant to be guarded as private and personal; they’re always to be shared.

So we reach out to each other at this moment in church, and after the service we hear the words of dismissal: “Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.” We’re sent into the world to reach out to those beyond these walls, and especially to those people and places that are most in need of God’s shalom. Shalom means wellbeing in the fullest sense – not just peace as a nice spiritual feeling, but peace as justice, safety, the absence of violence or inequity. We also call it the kingdom of heaven – a way of being with one another where no one is downtrodden, no one goes hungry, all are provided with the necessities of life. The Old Testament prophets have a lot to say about God’s call for this way of life, where “none shall hurt or destroy” [Isaiah 11:9].

It’s that communal or societal dimension of the peace of Christ that makes our faith have political aspects. We do have to care and be active about how we treat each other, how the poor and vulnerable are treated, how nations treat one another. We do have something to say when profits are protected and people are not, or when the rich are allowed to accumulate wealth and the poor are left to fend for themselves, or when dictators deny their people freedom and security. Our vision of shalom, of the way things should be, makes us get involved with changing the ways things are.

But there’s yet another dimension of shalom that I want to talk about, especially as we look ahead to Earth Day next week, and that’s the environmental dimension. Shalom means peace with all of creation – peace with the myriad species with whom we share this planet. Shalom means care for the earth and all its creatures. The peace of Christ calls us into relationships of inter-dependence, not of domination and control. And that means respecting and cherishing the many forms of life that sustain this complex earth. It’s a perspective that hasn’t been prevalent in our faith traditions, but is urgently needed now.

You won’t find prayers for the environment in our prayer books. The BCP has prayers for good weather and harvests, and some prayers for agriculture and fisheries, but the focus is on the need for plentiful yields for human use. There was no awareness that the earth itself is sacred and in need of care, or that its creatures and produce were for anything other than our use. In the BAS, published in 1985, there are prayers that we may share the good things the earth provides, and prayers for good harvests, but still there was no awareness of how fragile the web of life on the earth is, or how significantly human behaviour is damaging it.

So we have to be creative. We need to write prayers and dig into the Scriptures so that this dimension of God’s peace is brought into people’s consciousness, and brought into church. We need to take action and understand that that is as much part of being faithful Christians as supporting missions or foodbanks is. We need to examine our conscience not just about things like whether we have been unloving, or dishonest, or selfish, but also about whether we have damaged the environment or hurt other creatures by the way we live and consume.

In the Lord’s Prayer we pray every week that we may learn to live here on earth as in heaven. This living in God’s shalom, in the peace of Christ, is meant to begin here, now, with us. St Paul writes that all creation is groaning and longing for redemption, and waiting for us to truly become the children of God. [See Romans 8.] That is our calling: to live in the peace of Christ in right relationships with God, with each other and with the earth and its creatures.

I will close with part of a prayer by Hagen Hasselbalch (about whom I know nothing) in a favourite book of mine – a collection called Earth Prayers.

Let there be peace in every part of the world.

Let friendship prevail for the good of all humanity.

Let the people inspire their leaders, helping them to seek peace and build a better world.

Let those who have power deal respectfully with the resources of the planet.

Let trees grow up by the billions around the world.

Let green life invade the deserts.

Let industry serve humanity and produce waste that serves nature.

Let ordinary people meet by the billions across the borders.

Let them create a universal network of love and friendship.

Let billions of human beings co-operate to create a good future

for their children and grandchildren.

Let us survive in peace and harmony.

Amen.

Easter Day 2012

“While It Was Still Dark”

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…..”

That’s how the resurrection story in John’s gospel begins. The other gospels say “As the day was dawning” (Matthew), “When the sun had risen,” (Mark), or “At early dawn” (Luke). But John says “While it was still dark.” Darkness and light are important metaphors for John: darkness represents lack of faith, sin, blindness, ignorance. Light represents faith, clarity, salvation. And here, as he begins to tell the great story of the resurrection of Christ, John says that “while it was still dark” Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found the stone rolled away. The Easter miracle happens in the darkness. In the midst of a world of sin, blindness, folly and faithlessness (a world we all know only too well), resurrection happens.

For Christians, it’s not either/or, it’s both/and. It’s not either the cross and the darkness, or the resurrection and the light; it’s both. One of our prayers in Holy Week says, “May we, walking in the way of the cross, find it is for us the way of life.” One of the great Christian leaders of our time, the martyr Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, said, “I do not believe in death without resurrection.” From that first Easter morning, when in the darkness new life dawned, followers of Jesus have always held death and resurrection together as inseparable.

This isn’t about fairy-tale endings where everyone lives happily ever after. And this isn’t about a hope for a future heaven where everything gets put right. This is a deep spiritual truth that as we follow Jesus we walk with him into the darkness, and we discover that that is precisely where resurrection happens.

It seems counterintuitive: surely our faith should bring us into the light, not lead us into darkness. Yet the wisest teachers of our faith know that it’s in darkness, in times of loss and brokenness and not knowing which way to turn, that God’s miracles have fertile earth in which to grow. As one Christian writer put it, “God is met in dazzling darkness.”

Last night we gathered here as it became dark, and lit the Easter fire outside – a symbol of the resurrection happening in the dark of night. Then we lit the great Easter candle, and processed it into the dark church, each holding little candles. It was our third procession since Lent began: on the first Sunday of Lent we processed inside around the church, chanting the great litany of prayers of penitence, and then last week, on Palm Sunday, we processed outside, along Queen Street in front of the church, recalling the crowd that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem as their Messiah. We love processions!

And there’s another great procession in the Easter story. Matthew’s gospel says that after Jesus was raised from death the saints came out of their tombs, and legend has it that it was as Jesus was leaving the realm of the dead, he led a huge procession out of death into new life on the first Easter.

We follow Jesus into the darkness, and “while it is still dark” something happens, a procession forms, and we follow again – limping and hobbling, bandaged and bruised from the wounds we’ve sustained, but following nonetheless. And as we come into the light we realize that nothing has been lost, every tear has been caught, every scar kissed, every heart held.

And now here we are celebrating in the light: a community of saints and sinners (every one of us both), called to support and inspire each other, called to be Christ for each other. Here heaven meets earth, darkness and light both have their gifts for us, and we trust what we cannot fully understand. But that’s alright. Because while it’s still dark God is at work. And we join the Alleluia procession. Amen.

Easter Vigil, April 7, 2012

God’s Cosmic Joke

There’s a tradition in the Eastern Orthodox Church that at Eastertime you tell jokes, because the resurrection is God’s great cosmic joke perpetrated on death. I like that idea. We can be terribly serious about our faith, and about the resurrection. We can get bogged down in the different theories about what actually happened; or we can talk theologically and solemnly about the vindication of God’s chosen one who laid down his life for us. We might simply see the resurrection story as a metaphor for the coming of new life, like the return of spring. But to see it as God’s cosmic joke – that gives it an edge of holy hilarity that breaks us out of our usual ways of thinking.

In all the gospel stories of the resurrection one common theme is that the friends of Jesus who experienced it did not in the least expect it. They thought the worst had happened with Jesus’ arrest and execution, and the women came to the tomb simply to be able to tend his dead body and grieve, The last thing they or the other disciples expected was to meet him again.

A colleague of mine once said that in the Easter gospel, where Jesus meets the women at the tomb and says “Greetings,” a theologically better translation might be “Surprise!” (Or even “Boo!”) And there’s something profoundly true about that comment. The resurrection is the work of a God of surprises.

When the worst happens, we tend to expect the worst. It seems to be human nature to catastrophise. But the Easter gospel says that in the midst of the deepest darkness, God is at work. The darkness can’t put the light out.

Just when we think we’re coming to a tomb to mourn and grieve, and encounter only death, God pulls off a cosmic surprise. It’s like a wild flower growing through cracks in the pavement. It’s you or me simply being surprised by joy, or by love, or by healing.

Today Mark is choosing to be baptized, and he along with all of us will affirm our faith in the resurrection. We’re saying we believe in the power of God to break through our expectations, to break into our cold dark places, and to break open our hearts to deeper faith and love than we could ever imagine.

Mark, may you be surprised by joy many times on your journey of faith. May you be surprised by new life. May you be surprised by the power of love.

And may all of us be surprised once again by this Easter God, whose laughter dries our tears. Amen.

Palm Sunday – April 1, 2012

Holding the Cross

Today we condense into one liturgy the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. We’ve heard the two stories, moving from the joy and celebration of the crowds to see their hero Jesus riding into Jerusalem, to the numbing horror of the crucifixion just a few days later.

It’s a lot to take in. I hope many of you will be able to come back here on Thursday to celebrate the seder and the last supper Jesus shared with his friends, and then return again on Friday to a meditation on the cross told through images, words, sounds and music.

In Holy Week the greatest themes of human existence are brought into worship and presented: success and betrayal; celebration and despair; sin and suffering; good and evil; life and death.

As a priest in a busy church it means preparing for eight services, including one baptism, plus the seder supper and an all-night vigil – not forgetting the Easter parade! As parishioners it means being involved in at least some of the above, plus family time, kids off school, juggling work, church and home, shopping and cooking for special meals, buying Easter eggs, and on and on. It’s very busy.

The question is, will we be ready? Not for the Easter Bunny, but ready and spiritually prepared for those profound commemorations of Christ’s suffering and death?

The answer is probably No, just as his disciples weren’t ready for those events. One day their beloved teacher and friend Jesus was being fêted by crowds and hailed as King; a few days later he was being hustled away by armed guards, interrogated, condemned to death, and crucified. The disciples were taken completely off guard. They were terrified, shocked, unable to react except by running away. Only Jesus himself remained clear, calm and steady as the events unfolded.

It’s the same with us, when we’re caught off guard by a dreadful turn of events. Life is rolling along as usual, then the phone call comes, or the diagnosis, or the unbearable thing that changes our lives for ever. Normality gets turned upside-down, even as we can barely take it in. In a crisis there’s often a feeling of unreality – “This can’t be happening.” Then, as reality sets in, the blackness engulfs us.

What do we do then? Where do we turn for help? Where is God in the darkness?

The central symbol of the Christian faith is not sweet baby Jesus in the manger; not Jesus performing a miracle or teaching. It’s the cross – the instrument of death; the symbol that St Paul said was a stumbling block to the world, because it was so outrageous. Who would want this instrument of torture and execution as the symbol of their faith?

Yet it’s central and vital because it affirms that in the midst of our inevitable suffering, Jesus meets us. In the words of one of our Eucharistic prayers, “He chose to bear our griefs and sorrows, and to give up his life on the cross, that he might shatter the chains of evil and death, and banish the darkness of sin and despair.”

The cross is central not because a punishing God demanded that Jesus die on it, or because we want to glorify suffering, but because the cross is the place where God’s great love, embodied in Jesus, meets the depths of our suffering and sin.

If you contemplate, really contemplate, the palm cross that you received today, you can bring all your pain and the pain of the world to the place where Jesus bears it for you. You don’t have to bear it alone. And that means it’s safe to go there. We don’t have to skip from Palm Sunday to Easter for fear of the darkness in between. In fact it’s important that we don’t skip it, because it’s part of the human condition. If our faith has nothing to say about the darkness, it’s not worth having. And our faith says, “The light entered into the darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.” “Come to me, you who are burdened.” “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.”

I sometimes pray with a rosary. When times are hard and I’m feeling sad or worried or hurting, I hold the cross that hangs off the circle of beads, and I pray, “Christ, let me hold fast to you.” It’s like the hymn about clinging to the old rugged cross. Then I pray around the beads, repeating a simple prayer, until I come back to the cross. It’s simple and calming and helps me hand over the burden of life’s darkness to One who can bear it.

The cross is the place where all God’s love meets all our pain.

So don’t throw your palm cross away after today, or put it in a drawer, or shut it in a book. Pray with it in your hand when you need a reminder of the power of God’s love. Put it in a place where you’ll see it often. Cling to it when your life is turned upside-down by the pain that assaults us all from time to time, by virtue of our being human and fallible and vulnerable.

And today, if you like, when you come to the altar to receive communion, bring your palm cross with you. Hold it in one hand, and offer your burdens to Christ, as you receive the nourishment your soul craves in the other hand.

Today, as Holy Week begins, we walk into the way of the cross – into the valley of the shadow of death. But we fear no evil, because in that very place Christ meets us, and as we follow we are led out into the light.

Amen.

Lent 4 – March 18, 2012
Turning our Eyes to the Cross

Our readings this Sunday begin with poisonous snakes in the wilderness. The Israelites are living in the wilderness as they make their 40 year pilgrimage through it, and they’re a grumbling, obstinate, difficult bunch. No longer do they see themselves as the people of God miraculously brought out of slavery in Egypt – they see themselves as poor wretches stuck in a wilderness living hand to mouth. And they’re sick of the food. What happens next? – poisonous snake bites that kill some of them.

The Israelites see this as divine punishment for their grumbling: “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you,” they say to Moses. “Pray to God to take the serpents away from us.” So Moses prays, and God tells him to make a bronze version of the poisonous snake, put it on a pole, and walk through the camp with it. Anyone who’s been bitten by a snake and looks at the bronze serpent is healed at once.

Now there’s a lot to this story. And in John’s gospel it’s used as a way to understand who Jesus is and how the cross is central to salvation. Before that well-known verse from John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life,” John writes this, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…”

Jesus is the good serpent. Jesus is like the healing snake. It’s a startling image. So let’s explore it.

For the Israelites to be healed from their snake bites, they had to look at an image of the very thing that had bitten them. They had to face their fears. They had to face up to what had come in and poisoned their environment, their bodies, their lives. And that’s exactly how it us with the deep inner healing that Jesus brings. Unless we look at the things we fear, the things that poison us inside, and wreck our lives, we can’t be healed. Unless we face up to the way we mess our lives up and hurt ourselves and each other, we can’t receive the grace that God is constantly offering us.

No one gets to adulthood without some woundedness, some hurt. It might be something big like family violence or abuse; it might be more subtle like a sense of insecurity or inferiority or loneliness. But either way, it’s like a poisonous snake bite. It has the power to poison our lives if we shut it away and don’t bring it into the light to look at it and ask for God’s grace to heal it. Therapists talk about family systems and the way one person’s dysfunction affects the other members of the family, and problems get perpetuated over and over again. But when a person is able to say, “No, I’m not going to let this keep damaging my family, my children, my relationships,” and when there is support and help available, healing can begin and the pattern stops. But it takes courage, and it means facing what hurt you.

The Christian tradition affirms that this stopping of the pattern of hurt and hurting, this transformation of a wound into a healing, this bringing of things into the light, is exactly what God does and is always doing. It’s the gospel that Jesus taught and lived. There is a constant, unstoppable flow of God’s grace from sin and death to healing and life. God doesn’t condemn us for the mess we make, but saves us, heals us, brings us into the light. That’s what grace is: not our own cleverness, whereby we cover over our wounds and fool others into thinking we’re fine, well-adjusted individuals, and not our spiritual pride whereby we tell ourselves we’re so close to God we’ve dealt with all our short-comings. No, it’s just God’s grace, and our willingness (by God’s grace!) to face up to the poison and darkness and frailty inside.

This Lent I’ve been reading daily extracts from the Franciscan teacher and author Richard Rohr, and he has a lot of wisdom about finding God’s grace in what he calls the shadowlands of our souls, letting go of our pride and independence, and allowing God to heal us. Rohr says that it is chiefly through suffering, when we truly experience our powerlessness and brokenness, that we let God in and discover what grace really means. Up till then we’re too much in control and too much in the way. The ego, he says, has to die if we are to be led by God’s Holy Spirit, and it dies as we confront our own shadow and weep over our sins. Then comes what he calls the Great Mystery: “God’s one-of-a-kind job description is that God actually uses our problems to lead us to the full solution. God is the perfect Recycler, and in the economy of grace, nothing is wasted, not even our worst sins and our most stupid mistakes.”

Jesus the good serpent, Jesus lifted up on the cross, is the image of this healing love of God. We turn our eyes to the cross, and we see the very worst that humankind can throw at God, the cruelty, violence, sheer evil – and God’s response is forgiveness and healing. We turn our eyes to the cross and we see the evil that we are capable of, too. We turn our eyes to the cross and we see how much God loves us. We turn our eyes to the cross and we see the place where compassion meets suffering and transforms it. We turn our eyes to the cross and find the place where we can lay down our burdens and pretences and woundedness at last.

The cross, this ambiguous image, is at the heart of our faith. There has been controversy in England recently about whether wearing a cross is a religious freedom that shouldn’t be denied, or is just a fashion choice. But let’s be clear: for Christians the cross – and specifically the crucifix – symbolizes both the sin and suffering of the world, and the grace and healing of God. Whether it’s displayed openly or contemplated in private, it has tremendous power for those who have grasped something of its meaning.

So here we are, two weeks away from Palm Sunday and Holy Week, when we’ll tell the great story of Christ’s death and resurrection. Come, and hear the story once again. Come, and see the cross. Come, and bring your fears, brokenness and wounds into the light. For at the cross our deepest needs are met by God’s greatest love.  Amen.

Lent 2 – March 4, 2012   Keeping the Faith: Living for God

I want to pose two questions this morning, arising out of the readings, and explore them with you. (As always, when I’m preaching I’m also challenging myself and putting into words what I need to hear for my own walk of faith. If it resonates with you as well, so much the better!)

The questions are these:

- What does it mean to you to keep the faith, to be believing and hopeful, as St Paul says Abraham was? And can you keep the faith against the odds?

- Secondly, how far are you willing to go in your journey of faith? What price are you willing to pay to be a follower of Jesus?

First, keeping the faith. To Paul, Abraham is a model of faith. God promised Abraham and Sarah that through them would come numerous descendants, many nations, even kings. The problem was, they were old and childless when this promise was made, so they both had difficulty believing it. In fact they laughed at the idea.  And when their son was miraculously born they called him Isaac, which means “laughter.”

They became the forebears of all the children of Israel – Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, the twelve tribes. Against all the odds, when it looked more than improbable, they believed and it happened. And that, says Paul, is the kind of faith we need to have – the faith that we are never over the hill as far as God’s concerned; the faith that dares to hope and trust no matters what. That sort of dogged faith leaves a door open for God to come in and work in our lives, even when we thought it was game over and we might as well give up and go home. That sort of faith dares to hope, dares to believe, dares to trust.

I had a lesson in this recently. David and I were at the airport last Wednesday afternoon to meet our son Tom from 4 months of traveling in Asia. His flight was due in at 3 p.m. from Heathrow, so we expected that by 4 he would have cleared customs and should be emerging through the frosted sliding door. So we stood right in front of it, along with a big crowd of other people meeting friends and family, and we waited… And we waited… 4 p.m. came and went…. 4:30 ….. By 5 p.m. I knew something was wrong. The arrivals area had fewer and fewer people in it. The sliding door was opening less and less frequently. For the first hour I’d been on tiptoes with excitement, scanning every face coming out, holding my breath. For the next long hour I was hanging on to the belief that he was in there somewhere, and surely he’d be out any minute. By 5:15 we were planning what to do, figuring out how to check our phone messages remotely in case he’d called, discussing what time to give up and go home. I’d let go of the excitement and expectation, but I was keeping faith that eventually he’d emerge and appear through the sliding door. And 5 minutes later, he did. He’d been acting as a good Samaritan to a woman with a young baby and some lost luggage, and they’d been held up in long security lines, but he finally came out and we were reunited.

What was interesting for me was to notice how I went from excitement to boredom to anxiety to near panic and then to trust. I see that same trajectory playing out in our faith: we have times of spiritual highs and great conviction; but they often give way to habit, just bumping along, coming to church, working on committees, all the mundane stuff; and then when things don’t go so well we get anxious, think of quitting, feel disappointed, let down. It gets harder to believe God’s promises to us – promises about life in all its fullness, death being conquered, sins being forgiven, Jesus being with us to the end of the world.

For me in the airport there came a time of having to let go and just trust. I couldn’t do anything to make him appear. It was out of my hands, and it became a great lesson in trusting and waiting. It was a relief, actually, to stop worrying and just see what would happen next.

That brings us to the second question: how far are we willing to go down the road of faith? What cost are we willing to bear? Are we willing to let go of control even over our own lives?

Another story: a friend and colleague of mine, Irene, was in a critical car accident when she was a young mother with small children. She was almost killed. The accident injured her so badly that she was in rehab for a long time. But it gave her a strong sense that she had been given back her life after almost losing it, and that totally changed her perspective. She knew she wanted to live differently once she was well again – more selflessly, more generously, more freely. She trained to become a social worker, and has dedicated herself to working with children who are survivors of abuse. She’s unassuming, modest and completely openhanded with her life’s energy. She’s given it all back to God.

Jesus said, “If you want to be a follower of mine you must let go of your own life, take up your cross, and then follow.” It’s the ultimate practice of trust. When your live is falling apart, keep faith! When you can’t see how things can possibly turn out well, keep faith! When God asks something of you that seems way too difficult, impossible even, keep faith!

And one thing is for sure: if you’re following Jesus, you will be asked to take up your cross and let go of your life. For the first disciples that often meant physical death, as it did for Jesus. For others it meant enduring great hardships to spread the gospel. For all Christians it means swimming against the tide and values and priorities of the dominant culture, and that can be dangerous. For us in our day and our culture it means saying No to the dominant values of competition/conflict and consuming/possessing. These are the demonic forces that are increasing the gap between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have nots at a greater rate than ever before; and at the same time are depleting and destroying the earth’s resources, and threatening our very existence.

This isn’t meant to be a doom and gloom sermon. What I want to ask myself and you is whether we can trust God enough to give up our lives and then live for God. It can sound so terrifyingly difficult, but it’s what we were born for. Life is an invitation, not an obstacle course. And God’s promises are sure: fullness of life, amazing grace, infinite forgiveness, unconditional love.

Standing in front of that sliding door in the airport waiting for Tom I learned a little bit more about trust. Thinking of my friend Irene who was given back her life and is now giving it away again for God’s hurting children, I see how far I have to go. But this I do know: God is good, and will never give up on us. So let’s follow where Jesus leads.             Amen.

Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2012

 Give, Pray, Fast

 Lent has always been observed by Christians as a penitential time of self-denial and self-discipline. I expect many of you have given things up for Lent, or maybe taken things on. Less wine, more vegetables – that sort of thing.

Jesus’s words from the gospel tonight indicates that he takes it for granted that his followers will give alms, fast and pray, as any good Jew in his day would. He doesn’t say, “If you give alms….” But “when you give…” And he teaches that it’s not the outer practices that matter, so much as the inner attitude. In fact the outer practices can be spiritually harmful to us, if they make us feel self-righteous and proud of our goodness. They lead inevitably to hypocrisy.

Instead, Jesus teaches that giving, praying and fasting must come from the heart’s deep desire to be one with God and God’s way. In this he is just like the prophet Isaiah who said that God wants justice, generosity and compassion, rather than sacrifices and penitential practices.

Giving is about what we do with our lives and energy; praying is about what goes on in our hearts; fasting is about how we use our bodies, what we consume.

When we give, may it be more than writing a cheque or dropping money into a box. Let it be a giving that comes from the heart; a giving of part of yourself. And that can be costly. Giving time, energy, care, compassion. There are a million ways to give from the heart.

When we pray, may we do more than say the words on the page in church. Jesus said, “Go into your inner chamber and pray in private, in secret, with God.” Make a practice of taking quiet solitary time to be alone with God, and to listen more than you talk. And bring before God those who are outside your immediate circle of family and friends. Find out about one or two of the desperate needs in the world today, educate yourself about them, then pray.

When we fast, may it be a way of being more conscious and careful about what we’re consuming, how it’s produced, its effects on the environment, on the workers involved in producing it.  Consider fasts of different kinds: fasting from your car, the internet, multi-tasking, busyness.

Tonight we examine ourselves as honestly as we can. We look at the ways we give or withhold, pray or harden our hearts, fast or indulge. And we repent, turn back, say sorry for the things that separate us from God and God’s way. As we receive the sign of ashes that remind us that we’re mortal, just here on earth for a very short time, we humble ourselves, empty ourselves before God, and start again.  May we put on Christ, and live so as to draw closer to God and God’s people with justice, generosity and compassion. Amen.

Last Sunday of Epiphany – The Transfiguration February 19, 2012

Light for the Journey

About 30 years ago, in a church I served as a deaconess in England, we had a parish study group based on a series of audio tapes that dramatized some of the conversations between Jesus and the disciples. I’ve forgotten most of them, but the one that still stands out for me was the dramatization of the Transfiguration – that strange mountaintop experience that Peter, James and John had with Jesus.

The drama begins with Jesus saying to them, his three closest male disciples, “Come on. We’re going to hike up that mountain.” And then you can hear the three grumbling and muttering to each other under their breath, as they try to follow and keep up. They’re tired, and confused. They’ve seen some extraordinary things – healings, miracles, Jesus facing down his opponents, and teaching like no one they’d ever heard before – but things have changed recently. Jesus has begun to talk about his death, and about his followers having to be ready to give up their lives. As they climb, Peter, James and John are asking each other what’s going on. They don’t understand anymore. They don’t like the way Jesus is talking.

On the tape you can hear the wind whistling, as the disciples climb higher up the mountain. You can hear them panting, talking less, struggling more. And then they reach the top, and there’s this stunned silence because of what they’re seeing – Jesus, surrounded by dazzling light, his face shining, talking with Moses and Elijah. It’s overwhelming, terrifying. They cry out in fear, and Peter’s babbling about making three tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah.

And then comes the voice – “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!”

And it’s over.

Listening to that very simple tape – no visuals, no computer-enhanced special effects, just an imaginative recreation of the scene from the disciples’ point of view – I realized how ordinary they were, and how extraordinary their experience with Jesus was. They were so close to Jesus, but they were constantly trying to keep up, trying to understand, trying to make sense of it all.

We know the whole story. We can say, “Ah yes, the transfiguration – the prefiguring of Christ’s glory, shown to the disciples to reveal to them the true divine nature of Jesus.” But put yourself in their shoes for a moment, and you can begin to feel how completely out of their depth they were. It was only much later that they were able to speak of it and make sense of it.

This is a story that has come to us layered in the rich symbolism of the scriptures. We know that Moses represents the law, and Elijah the prophets – the two great strands of the Hebrew religion. We know that light represents God’s presence, as does cloud covering a mountaintop. We know that the voice that they heard was the same as the voice that spoke at Jesus’ baptism, saying, “You are my Son, my Beloved.” The whole story has been skillfully woven together for us, and we have our Bible commentaries and studies to help us. But Peter, James and John were simply experiencing it raw, with all the confusion and terror and awe that entailed.

If we’re honest, isn’t that what our lives are like? Raw experiences, without a handy commentary telling us how to interpret them. We have our mountaintop moments, our epiphanies, and our moments of fear and confusion. We have experiences which are life-changing when we look back on them, but at the time were chaotic and seemed meaningless. A lot of the time we’re winging it, hoping for the best, managing as best we can, without a clear road map.

But we’re people of faith, and although that doesn’t give us all the answers it does give us two things: a belief that our lives aren’t random and meaningless, but are a journey; and a light for that journey.

St Paul, in today’s epistle, writes that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

“God has shone in our hearts” – that’s why we’re here; that’s what drew you to faith, no matter when or how it happened.

“To give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God” – this spark that was kindled in your heart is meant to draw you to the great blazing light that is God. Everything we experience in our lives, the good, the bad and the ugly, can draw us closer to that blazing light.

“In the face of Jesus Christ” – in Christ we see God revealed. In his healing, teaching, suffering, death and resurrection, we see the truth of who God is.

Peter, James and John arrived at the top of the mountain out of breath, tired and confused, and they witnessed something that overwhelmed and terrified them. But later they understood it for what it was – a glimpse of Jesus’ glorious reality as the Beloved of God. And that experience became part of their journey of faith. They trusted it and valued it enough to tell it to us.

We live our lives without commentaries and study notes. We don’t have theologians writing it all down and explaining what it means. But we are children of the light. God has shone in our hearts. Our lives are not random, but are part of a journey towards the great blazing light.

As Lent begins this week, give yourself time to ponder and pray. No matter where you are in your journey – just beginning to follow Jesus, or slogging halfway up the mountain, or dazed and confused, or standing in awe at the top – remember that God has shone in your heart. You too are God’s Beloved.  Follow Jesus, and listen to him.  Amen.

Epiphany 6 – February 12, 2012 Healing, Mystery and Prayer

 What does it mean to be healed? Why are some people healed, while others succumb to their illnesses? What role does faith play in healing? The Hebrew scriptures and the gospel reading today raise these questions, and healing has been much on my mind lately.

I think we come to this with various assumptions. Naaman, in the first reading, an army commander and “a mighty warrior”, certainly had assumptions, and they nearly ruined his chances of being healed. He had a skin disease, and went to Elisha who had a reputation as a healer. But he assumed that Elisha the great prophet of Israel would do certain things, perform certain rituals. When Elisha didn’t even come out to see him in person, but just sent a message telling him to wash in the muddy waters of the Jordan river, Naaman was not impressed. He was disillusioned and angry. He stomped off in a huff, saying, “I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy.” He was a proud man: he wanted special treatment and a spectacular miracle. And he didn’t fancy washing in a river he considered inferior to those in his own country.

It was Naaman’s servants, perhaps because they were more used to obeying instructions, who persuaded him to do what Elisha had said, and then lo and behold he was healed.

Naaman’s pride almost cost him his healing. But he was desperate. His disease had cast him low enough to listen to his servants and carry out the instructions of a prophet in a foreign land.

Illness and pain dethrone us. They cast us down. Our language makes that clear: a patient is literally one who is passive. We’re no longer masters of our own destiny when we’re sick. We become dependent, we need others, we can’t manage alone. Worse yet, sickness is a doorway into not knowing: there’s so much we don’t understand and can’t know. Why does one person develop cancer, not another? Why does one respond to treatment, and another doesn’t?

It’s tempting to run to easy answers to make ourselves feel better, feel more in control. That person got sick because they smoked, or didn’t exercise, or whatever. Or that person died because they didn’t have enough faith, didn’t use positive thinking, or the right sort of visualizations, or vitamins, or whatever. Or, the ultimate answer, it was God’s will. We embrace a sort of “Que sera sera” fatalism, and close the door to the mystery, because we’re just so uneasy with not knowing, not understanding. We hate the powerlessness of it, the darkness within it.

But wait a minute. Doesn’t God always want wholeness for us? The leper said to Jesus, “If you choose, if you want to, you can heal/cleanse me.” And Jesus said, “I do want to! Be cleansed/healed.” Jesus never refused to heal someone who asked. God always wants us to be healed. But, but… that isn’t the same as being cured, getting physically better. Sometimes death is part of the healing. Sometimes sickness can be an invitation to a deeper letting go of the illusion that we’re in control of our lives.

Let me give you a small example. Last March I was skiing in Whistler when I fell, on my second run. It wasn’t a bad fall, but I landed badly on my right shoulder, and it snapped the collarbone. I had to be taken down the mountain on a toboggan sledge, loaded up with painkillers and sent back to Victoria for surgery and a metal plate to be screwed onto the bone to put it back together. I was off work for a month, and in worse pain than I’d ever experienced before. And I felt like a total, useless idiot! A skiing accident, of all things. How gratuitous. It was utterly humbling. I couldn’t dress myself, sit up or lie down in bed by myself, wash myself. I had to let other people do almost everything for me. I hated it! I had to let go – stop being busy and productive and independent and capable. And I kept thinking, why me? Why did it have to happen?

It was a difficult emotional and spiritual journey for me. And that was just a broken bone! How much more so when we or someone we love falls gravely ill and doesn’t recover?

In the Christian tradition, week by week we pray for those who are sick and suffering. We name them aloud before God and with each other. And I picture that prayer as being like the safety net spread out underneath the tightrope and trapezes in a circus: if an acrobat falls, the net is there to hold them up. The prayer of the community holds up those who are suffering – it holds them up before God, and wraps them round, and makes it possible for them to let go into the mystery of God’s healing power.

And yes, it’s a mystery. We can’t make it all come out right. We can’t guarantee a miracle. But our prayer is never wasted. I believe that prayer works in ways we can’t begin to fathom or measure. It may bring the energy to bounce back and live another day; it may bring the sense of being loved; or it might bring peace, and the surrender to a quiet death. These are all different aspects of healing. And these are all signs of God’s presence with us.

Someone said that to walk with God is to walk into the unknown. Mystery is part of the deal. We can only see through the glass dimly; only understand a tiny part of the whole picture. But faith is what we have to hold onto in the darkness – the faith that God is with us, no matter what; the faith that prayer makes a difference, whether we can see it or not; the faith that God always wants us to be healed, to journey to wholeness.

So let us stretch wide and strong the net of our prayer to uphold others. Let us become more comfortable with saying, “I don’t know,” about some of the deep questions in life. And let us trust God’s love enough to let go and fall into the mystery of grace.             Amen.

Epiphany 4 – January 29, 2012

 Discerning God’s Word and Jesus’ Way

 When you’re a priest, people often seem to feel compelled to tell you why they don’t go to church. And the number one reason I’ve heard over the years is the bad behaviour of Christians through the ages – the wars they’ve started, the atrocities they’ve committed, the hypocrisy, the judgmentalism…. The list is a long one. Maybe it’s the same for other professions: lawyers probably get sick of hearing jokes about sharks, and doctors must get tired of the endless anecdotes about when the health care system has failed.

But the matter of Christians living unchristian lives is a serious one, and today’s readings all have something to say about this.

In the passage from Deuteronomy Moses is talking about the terrible danger of claiming to speak God’s words when in fact the message is not from God: “Any prophet who presumes to speak in [God’s] name a word that [God] has not commanded the prophet to speak shall die.” It’s a dire warning, because the danger is so great. And far too often religious leaders of all sorts, Christians included, have committed this offence – speaking in God’s name when the message is their own.

It happened at the times of the crusades, and the witch-hunts, and the Reformation burnings of so-called heretics on both sides. Horrendous cruelty in the name of God. We see it today in the violent fundamentalism in Islam, Judaism and Christianity in many different countries, that promotes racism and war. In the name of God people are taught to hate and kill each other. And I think it must make God weep.

It can happen in more subtle ways, too. In today’s epistle reading Paul is talking about how Christians should live once they know that they are no longer under the rules and taboos and traditions of their old lives. For Jews who became converted to Christianity, that meant knowing that they didn’t have to obey the Jewish food laws, or Sabbath restrictions, for example. They were living with a new ethical freedom. As Paul puts it in an earlier chapter, “All things are lawful for me.” But he goes on to warn that “not all things are beneficial.” And he says that we have to be careful that we don’t cause another to stumble because of our new found spiritual freedom.

I think in our day a case in point is the way the worldwide Anglican Communion is trying to grapple with sexual ethics. Some parts of the church hold to the traditional teachings on marriage, for instance, while others have developed more progressive teachings. It has the potential to break the Anglican Communion apart very nastily. It has had Christians vilifying each other in the name of God. But enormous efforts are being made, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to handle this dispute with care and respect, so that each can hear the other’s perspectives and seek a deeper mutual understanding. We are learning how to agree to differ lovingly, rather than denouncing each other with hatred.

This is all about discernment, at root: discerning how to know what God’s will is, and God’s way, in the midst of life’s complexities. We do that by learning to see life through the lens of God’s values: love, understanding, compassion, forgiveness. And the best lens of all is Jesus – God’s word in human flesh and blood. As we look at Jesus, and how he lived and taught and treated people, we learn how to be better, more faithful followers.

In today’s gospel reading people are beginning to ask themselves who this Jesus is, because they’ve noticed that he teaches with authority, he speaks from his own deep wisdom and understanding, unlike the scribes – the religious experts – who taught strictly from the traditions handed down to them. And paradoxically, it’s the man with the “unclean spirit” (mentally ill, perhaps, or suffering from epilepsy) who identifies Jesus: “You are the Holy One of God.” It’s spoken in fear, but Jesus heals the man and the readers of Mark’s gospel know that the truth has come out – Jesus is God’s Holy One.

And Jesus is the one who shows us what God’s words and God’s will are. For the disciples that learning is a life-changing relationship. He doesn’t teach them lists of new commandments – just one: Love one another. He doesn’t sit them down for long theology lectures with an exam at the end – he simply asks them to follow him, and they watch what he does. He doesn’t set himself apart as someone impossible to emulate, but tells them to be like him – to be the light of the world, as he is.

So our calling is very simple, at the same time as demanding everything of us: we’re to be like Jesus. What would Jesus do? In our hearts we usually know the answer. It’s because we don’t want to do it that we get into destructive conflicts and hurt one another, sometimes justifying ourselves by doing it in God’s name.

In this Epiphany season we’re asking all the time, how do we see God revealed now? Where does God show up in our lives? In our Epiphany Moments in these services you’ve heard some of your fellow parishioners answer that question, and speak about God touching and changing lives. Part of our calling as Christians is to be awake to these things, to pay attention to our lives and the world around, to spot where God is busily, often quietly, sometimes dramatically at work.

But above all, we need to be seeing our lives through the lens of Jesus, God-with-us, God-here-among-us. When we’re faced with a conflict, a decision, a hurt, we need to contemplate it through Jesus, in his light. What would Jesus do?

My father, a lifelong sceptic, used to say that Christianity is too complicated with all its theologies of atonement and incarnation and eschatology and so on. He had all kinds of questions about why evil exists, how Jesus’ death changes things, why Christians can be so nasty. And I used to get tied up in knots trying to defend my faith to him. But if he were alive today, I’d want to say, “Dad, it’s really very simple: we’re meant to be like Jesus. Everything else follows from that.”   Amen.

January 22, 2012 – Epiphany 3

The Time is Now!

 Jonah said, “Look out! It’s coming.”  Paul said, “Drop everything! It’s soon.” Jesus said, “Repent! It’s right here at hand.”

It’s coming. It’s soon. It’s now.

What were they talking about?

Jonah was warning the people of the city of Nineveh that God’s punishment was coming soon. It was a notoriously wicked city, so the story goes, and Jonah told the people that God was going to destroy it in forty days.

Paul was teaching that this temporal world was soon to pass away with the return of Christ, so everything people usually focused on and were busy with would be irrelevant.

Jesus, right at the start of his ministry, was announcing the good news – that the kingdom of God has come near, has in fact arrived, for those who believe.

A warning. A hope. A reality.

So which is it, for us?

Should we be warning people of the wrath of God? Is that what repentance is about? – saying sorry quickly, before you get punished?

Should we be holding out the promise or the hope that Christ is coming back any day now, so repentance is about getting ready for that?

(You may know the story of the Pope who was told by one of his staff that there was incontrovertible proof that Jesus was due to return to earth the next day. “What should we do?” he asked the Pope. “Look busy, look busy!” was the reply.)

A warning. A hope.

But Jesus says, “It’s here! It’s right beside you. It’s near at hand, all around.” In Luke’s gospel Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” or among you. That’s the good news. The time is fulfilled. And Christians believe that in Jesus heaven and earth are united. God and humanity are at one. Jesus himself is the good news – even before the cross, even before the resurrection. Jesus himself is the dawn of a new age, the light shining in darkness.

So we live with one foot in this messy, painful, broken world of sinners – knowing that we ourselves contribute to that mess and pain and brokenness through our sin, knowing that we stand in need of God’s deep forgiveness; and believing that we live with Jesus in the kingdom of heaven here and now – in the light and glory and wonder of God’s love.

There are greater glories to come. There’s a heaven we can’t even conceive of.

Yet eternal life in Christ is already a reality for us. (That’s why the priest says, in the prayer of absolution after the confession, “Almighty God have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins, confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and keep you in eternal life.”) In Christ we are already living in the kingdom of heaven, already living in eternal life. As Paul puts it, we are a new creation.

The trouble is, we lose sight of that. You might glimpse it and feel it and really know it at certain moments. For me that happens sometimes on a retreat, or when I’ve experienced a desperate need and prayed, and God has come close and changed things. Sometimes, like the first disciples, I’ve followed a calling and felt that I’ve stepped across some sort of threshold and touched the kingdom of heaven. But then normal life kicks in again: I go home from my retreat, or the sense of urgency fades, or the calling becomes disappointing and jaded. The kingdom of heaven came near, but I slipped away.

So Jesus says, “Repent – turn back again – and believe the good news!” Believe that the kingdom of heaven is near. Believe that Jesus brings our hope and our reality together in one new way of being. Then anything is possible. It’s a whole new life, like being born all over again.

When you know that this world with its material things and obsessions and occupations is passing away, your perspective changes. It’s like being hit with the realization that today might be your last day of life: it makes you see everything differently – what matters and what doesn’t. When I’ve had the privilege of being with someone as they’ve been dying, I’ve often seen how the fears and hurts and anxieties gradually fall away, and the person becomes more and more full of love, and less and less attached to this world – as though they’re becoming lighter, more full of light, as they approach the great Light. They’re given the grace to let go of the dross, the junk that gets between us and God, and see with a clarity and peace that amazes me.

That’s what it’s like to live in the good news of Christ: to let God take the junk away, set us free from the wounds that inflict us and the darkness that overshadows us, and bring us into the light where we can see more clearly, love more dearly, and follow more nearly.

David and I are trying to teach our dog Kita to come when we call, instead of running off further and further down the beach to play with other dogs, and possibly get into trouble. We can’t punish her into obedience – that doesn’t work. We want her to learn to recognize her name when we call it, and come because she chooses to, and she wants to be with us. It’s a challenge! And so it is with us and God. We’re called by name and invited to follow, invited into a relationship, but so often we’re like dogs running off down the beach and into trouble.

So repent! Turn around! Not for fear of divine punishment, but in order to be open to receive the immeasurable love of God. Repent, turn around, open your eyes, and believe the good news that God is in Christ, reconciling us, making heaven and earth one. And then follow – follow the One who is the good news, and invites us into relationship. The time is now!   Amen.