Acts 10: 34-43
Psalm 118
1 Corinthians 15: 1-11
Mark 16, 1-8
April 8, 2012

In the movie “Little Kidnappers”, the main characters are two boys who are being raised by their grandfather. Their father has been killed in the Boer war and the grandfather blames the Dutch, ALL the Dutch, even his new Dutch neighbours, for his son’s death. The boys want a dog but the stern grandfather refuses to buy such a useless animal.

The boys go to the local beach to do whatever it is boys do at a beach when they have nothing else to do and find an abandoned baby - in a basket. Just like that! All alone in the world. No one to look after him. All by himself. Feeling certain that this baby is just like them - all alone in the world, they hide the baby and try to look after it. Of course the baby has parents and someone was supposed to have been looking after it at the beach; a brother who was very careless with his responsibilities and more interested in boyhood adventures than babysitting responsibility. The authorities are soon on the hunt for a kidnapper. The boys are eventually caught, the baby returned to his parents. The boys put on trial for kidnapping.

The prosecutor was clearly in favour of sending the boys to a “reforming school”, but the judge was only interested in the reasons for the boys’ actions. As I remember the movie the boys explain that they took the baby because they were “afeared” and thought that since the baby was all alone in world, like they were, someone had to look after him. They received a conditional sentence - no more kidnapping babies and they would stay out of jail.

The grandfather takes the boys home and telegraphs the money required for one of the puppies they had seen advertised in the newspaper.

It seems that the grandfather had his own fears - but coming close to losing his grandsons was able to let go of the past and embrace the new life that was in front of him.

There are a lot of reasons to be afraid. Be careful when you drive at night on the roads between Port Elgin and Moncton - there is more than one moose that is loose. We would be out of touch with reality if the current economic situation did not make us a little fearful. If we have been diagnosed with a serious illness, fear is a natural part of our many responses.

Sometimes life and what it throws at us can be terrifying. The women who went to the tomb early on that first Easter morning were terrified - and really and truly who wouldn’t be. They had probably spend the last three days in fear - but unlike some of the disciples their fear did not prevent them from doing what was right. They went to a grave expecting to have to hire two burly passers-by to roll the stone away so that they could properly prepare Jesus’ body for burial, but when they arrived they discovered it has already been moved aside.

In today’s reading the angel says to the astonished women, “Do not be astonished”! In the King James version the angel says, “Be not afrighted”. Well, if you ask me anyone encountering such a situation SHOULD be “afrighted”, scared out of their minds, terrified, and whatever other words you might use to describe the situation.

Yet, in the majority of the biblical encounters with angels the message is “Be not afraid”. “Fear Not, I bring you tidings of Great Joy” says the Christmas angel. “Fear not” says the Easter angel.

It seems that this is a common message. It is a common message because it is a common human predicament - fear. Fear is a natural response to situations of peril.

Fear is part of being human, well it is part of being alive - all animals can sense danger and respond appropriately.

Some people think that it is wrong to be afraid and that if we have fear there is something wrong with our faith. I think that this is taking the message a little too far. It seems to me that the message of Easter is that Emmanuel, “God with us”, is still with us. Somehow, through the resurrection, this God with us has been raised so that we will never be alone. Somehow we can walk into our fears knowing that we are not alone.

At the end of the day, the real miracle of Easter was not the empty tomb, but the presence of the Living Christ in the lives of the disciples and those who would later join their number. AND THAT INCLUDES YOU AND ME!

Amen!

Acts 4: 5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3: 16-24
John 10: 11-18

Who Are the Other Sheep?

One day a minister in a small rural church arrived at the first service to find the organist and ONE parishioner. The young minister asked the one worshipper what he should do.

“Well”, he said, “When I go to the pasture to feed my cattle in the morning and only one is there still feed that one.”

With that bit of advice the minister read all of the scriptures, had the orgainst play all the verses of all of the hymns, told the children’s story and preached the whole sermon. The only thing that was faster was the offering - as it does not take long to pass the plate to one worshipper!

As usual the minister greeted the worshippers at the door and was received just one comment, “Reverend, I told you that I would feed just one animal, but I didn’t say I would feed it the whole load.”

As I was reading over today’s passages the other day, in order to prepare for my sermon, I realized that I would need to preach many, many sermons in order to exhaust the material in these texts.

However, when it comes to preaching I see the Bible a little like a restaurant when it comes to writing sermons. When we go to a restaurant unless our appetite is very big we have to choose. So we make a choice between the roast beef, the roast turkey or the three piece fish and chips! I am assuming that you don’t have the appetite for three sermons - whether there are ten of you or a hundred or more.

I realized that the phrase that had stuck in my mind was the one which John’s Gospel places on the lips of Jesus: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

What does it mean, I wonder about there being other sheep in other folds? Of course this passage is not about raising animals; the sheep are other people. Who are the people who are in these “other folds” I wonder if the people listening to Jesus are being told that these other sheep are sheep (or people, rather) who aren’t like them! All these years later, are they people who are not like “us”.

One day I was discussing a news story about an incident that had happened in a foreign country. The person with whom I was having the discussion said, “Well, the thing you have to understand is that those people are not like us!”

We have used the excuse “those people are not like us” in order to undertake or excuse all kinds of actions. The Holocaust was a result of one group of people trying to get rid of as many of “those people” as possible- whether they were Jewish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled, homosexual, Romani, Soviet POWs or Soviet or Polish civilians. Somewhere between 11 and 17 million of “those people” were killed in the “Holocaust”.

It was after the invasion of Poland that Canada declared war on Germany and eventually on Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania and Japan. Between 1939 and 1945 the army and the citizens of these countries became “those people”. In any time of war various methods are used to distance the soldiers of each army from one another. To de-humanize the other through name calling is probably the most obvious of methods.

There are many stories of people who did not “buy into” the propaganda that effectively dehumanized the so-called “other” and they risked their own lives and the lives of their families to do what they knew was right.

After the so-called “Christmas Truce” of 1914 the senior command of both the allied and axis powers realized that this kind of fraternization must be severely punished as it would have been impossible to fight a war in which the enlisted men regarded the ones across the trenches as friends.

In 1994 in Rwanda a the mass killing of Tutsis by Hutu extremists may have cost 1,000, 000 lives, rape was used as a weapon of war and neighbours turned in neighbours as the flames of ethnic difference were fanned to a white heat.

The distancing of the “other” can also occur in peace-time. I find it both amusing and shocking the lengths to which those who are against the Presidency of Barack Obama have gone to try and prove that he was not born on American soil but is an immigrant and thus ineligible to be president! Like it or not the rhetoric of our own election campaigns is becoming more and more divisive. I suspect that “attack ads” will become more commonplace in Canadian elections unless we decide as a country that this is not who we are!

Immigration is sometimes a hot-button topic. “Why are we letting so many of “them” in”, we might hear. Of course if “they” are white and speak English without much of an accent they are hardly noticed’ but if they look or sound different, they are easy targets for resentment.

Ethnic division seems to be part and parcel of human existence - but it seems to me that religion can be part of the solution, rather than contributing to the problem.

For a long time the church saw it as necessary to convert the world’s peoples to Christianity. For a long time the western church saw it as- necessary that we force the ways and values of the western world along with our culture upon those we were trying to convert. So along with telling them they HAD to accept Jesus, they also had to accept western modes of dress, and housing and worship. Our ancestors told them that their ways and spirituality had no value and must be given up. We destroyed their sacred objects and outlawed their sacred rituals. In Canada, to serve the interests of European settlers we moved the native people to reservations and made it law that all children be educated in residential schools where the “Indian would be taken out of the child”. Many of these children were sexually and physically abused and returned to their communities without finding a place in the white world but not knowing how to live in native culture. The native communities have been suffering the effects of this for generations and we will have to seek a way forward together for several generations to come.

We need to take a serious look at what is part of the Christian faith and what belongs to “western culture” and is not part and parcel of the Christian faith. The United Church was born out of a sense that Christians of the Protestant persuasion could do much more for the Gospel if we worked together, rather than competing against one another in this sparsely populated country. For a long time this ecumenical outlook has been gradually broadening to other denominations as well as beyond Christianity itself. For a long time the United Church has sought a broader spiritual dialogue with people of other faiths rather than feeling a compulsion to “convert them to our ways”- or else they are doomed to an eternity in hell. While this might put us at odds with those Christians who feel differently, it does open us to the “others” who are around us.

While I was in Vancouver at a Worship Matters symposium a few years ago I was at a worship service in which Sikh musicians provided music for our worship and it was a deep and moving experience.

Perhaps we will find that we can learn from the differences of the other and we can both become richer for the dialogue without either of us feeling the need to make the other just like us!

To me this passage is about gathering together, welcoming and nurturing. Its not about forcing everyone into the same mould. If we look at the broader teachings of Jesus he spoke about peace and fullness of life, abundance of life. When we speak of believing in him we can see it as believing in and committing ourselves to the way of life to which he was committed.

We are called to be people who follow in Jesus’ way - and if we commit to that way we are called to a life of following and discerning what it is that this faith journey requires of us. The answers of a previous generation may no longer serve us.

In this season of new life and Easter, let us look for the new life that is all around us - let us seek this new life for all - no matter who they may be.

Amen.

Acts 8: 22-60
Psalm 22
1 John 4: 7-21
John 15: 1-8

The following poem has been attributed to Martin Niemoller, a German minister, who was imprisoned by the Nazis from 1937–1945 after he went to Hitler in person to protest their purges of various groups of people.

And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.

He once confessed, "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He is not even the enemy of his own enemies."

When I was in university one of my favourite books was a little paperback with the intriguing title, “A bag of Noodles”, by Wally Armbruster. (Show Book) In this book, “Noodles” are defined as a picture or writing or combination of both, which one needs to mull over, to chew on, to digest slowly. The “noodle” on the last page has a heart and the phrase: “I love everybody” in red up at the top - and then in an attempt to clarify, is the rest, beginning with “EXCEPT”. So it goes like this: I love everybody except Jews, Catholics, Texans, women drivers and continues on with many others mentioned, some referred to impolite, quite demeaning names, until it concludes with “flag wavers, draft dodgers, accordion players AND BIGOTS”.

Ouch! Despite the fact that the whole book speaks to the context of the USA in the early 1970's, most of the pieces are still very thought provoking. They lead us to ask the question, “Do I really think this way?” It seems that writers and poets have always taken on the task of challenging people’s prejudices and pre-conceived notions about “the other”.

In the passage from the book of Acts the apostle Philip encounters a man from Ethiopia, who could be regarded as having several strikes against him, who ends up asking the question, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Of course there was nothing to prevent it, so the baptism took place and his mission accomplished, Philip was whisked away to another opportunity to spread the gospel.

The question rings in our ears, over the centuries; people ask the same question today. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” What indeed?

This passage is more than once verse; this passage is a story and in order to understand it we need to understand the story and its context.

This passage describes the encounter in terms of the obstacles that might have prevented it, sometimes repeating them several times! The road is described as a wilderness road. The wilderness is a place of danger and is a place where most people only travel when they have to do so. John the Baptizer lived in the wilderness, but he was odd. You travel through the wilderness, but while there you can encounter wild and dangerous animals, bandits, or the Holy Spirit of God. It was in the wilderness that the people of Israel became a true people and it was the wilderness experience that formed them as a nation as no other experience could. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus went into the wilderness to wrestle with the form and content of his ministry and he frequently went to quiet places to pray.

Just by the brief description we can tell several things about the man in the chariot and each is an important detail. He was an Ethiopian - a different nationality with much darker skin than the average Palestinian. He was rich - otherwise he would not have the resources to have his own scroll, a chariot and presumably a driver at his disposal - just you try and read a scroll out loud while driving a chariot; but this other slave or servant is not mentioned! They had no books, as we know them back then; reading aloud was the normal method of reading. Silent reading did not come into vogue until the age of the monastery, where both silence and Bible reading were required! This unnamed man is referred to as “a eunuch” or “the eunuch”, but not by a name. It was common for young boys to be castrated before puberty so that they would be considered fit for royal service - safe to be around the king’s harem or the queen. Presumably the physical characteristics resulting from such a surgery would have been obvious. This man had risen to the status of “minister of finance” or “chief treasurer”. Why is this such an issue. Well, the book of Leviticus makes it quite clear that such men are not welcome to worship with the other men of Israel as they were considered “imperfect” and people like him would probably have to worship in the court of the gentiles. Like the animals sacrificed in the temple: only bull calves and ram lambs were allowed! The fact that someone else had made this decision was a moot point - he was an outcast, plain and simple. He was one of “those people”.

So Philip, at the Spirit’s leading ran alongside this man’s chariot, heard what the man was reading and asked him if he understood what it was that he was reading. Think about that! That would have been a very gutsy thing to do. Despite this man’s status as “an outcast” by the definition of the people of Israel, he was probably able to defend himself or had a guard. I doubt Philip had a sign on his head that said, “You can trust me, I am a disciple of Jesus who was a pacifist, I will not hurt you!”

So we have this wealthy man reading as his chariot rumbled along and out of nowhere a stranger comes running alongside, and asking, “do you understand what you are reading.” Sounds very risky to me!

However, you might say that in spite of the risks -and both Philip and the eunuch took risks in this encounter - Philip and the eunuch developed a relationship which made proclaiming the gospel possible.

You may think that Ethiopia was a strange place for this man to be from, but since the time of Solomon - if we remember hearing about the visit of the Queen of Sheba - there had been trade and diplomatic relations of sorts with Ethiopia. Even though many would have converted to Judaism they were probably still considered “the other” by residents of Palestine like Philip. Far from continuing the culturally acceptable exclusion, according to the writer of Acts, the Holy Spirit has other plans, other game changing, ground breaking, barrier crashing plans.

This passage is about pushing the boundaries. Philip is one of the disciples charged with the responsibility of mission to the Gentiles but this man was seen by some as beyond even that.

If he had been reading the book of Leviticus there would have been plenty of reasons he could not have been baptized but it was a passage, interpreted by the early church, to point to the ministry of Jesus if Nazareth, and it became for Philip an easy stepping off place to talk about Jesus. Interestingly, elsewhere in the book of Isaiah eunuchs are spoken of in a positive light.

The question asked by this long ago man rings in our own ears: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” “What is to prevent me from belonging to this community?” “What is to prevent me from taking upon myself the promises of God as revealed in Jesus of Nazareth?"

This passage challenges those of us who have been here forever; we are not to fee smug or put up rules around the font of baptism and inclusion that keep people we don’t like out. This passage shows that well meaning rules can backfire- the point is to look at ourselves, not others.

When we begin from a stance of inclusion, rather than a stance of exclusion, we are much more Christ-like in proclaiming the Good News proclaimed by Jesus.

If we say, “do you meet the criteria for inclusion”, “do you meet the strict requirements to earn God’s love”, we have missed the point entirely! We have missed the point of grace; the point that God loved us first. We have missed the point that God called the whole creation Good. We have missed the point that we are all in need of God’s grace and have received it in abundance.

A minister in North Carolina recently made national news in the US when he called on parents to physically abuse their children if they showed signs of being gay. I signed an internet petition Friday night that said that not all churches believe this and not all minister’s preach this. If you would like to sign ti as well you can go to my facebook page or I can send the link to you by email. (The church’s email address is in the bulletin). The “It gets better campaign” is aimed at teens trying to get through the already tumultuous teen years with the added burden of being ostracized because they are perceived as being gay. This is a good program but it is simply not enough.

We need to make our homes safe places for all of our children to grow into mature loving, responsible adults regardless of their sexual orientation - and the best medical science says that is a given, not a choice. We need to make gay bashing and bullying, in schools and in adult circles, completely unacceptable. If I have to bully someone else so that I will feel better about myself, there is something wrong with me, not the other person. As adults we need to model and teach this acceptance to our children because they pick up everything, whether we want them to or not.

A strong community values all people and all healthy committed relationships and knows that recognizing one does not diminish the other.

In some places there are churches and denominations that intentionally, or by default, attract similar kinds of people and everyone looks basically the same and has the same background, but even there, even in those churches the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion need to be tested.

We may encounter the stranger, at Robins or Timmys, Robins Donuts and Tim Horton’s - Coffee Chains in the nearby towns at the church door, at our place of work, or in our own wilderness place and we are asked the question, “What is to prevent me from belonging to your community?”

What will our answer be?

Amen!

Love One Another!

Most of us want our churches to be welcoming places. If we had a church that had an office in the church we would probably want it to be a place where someone can walk in and find a smile, a friendly face and a listening ear. I suspect that you could find that in Trinity, Park Royal or Spring Park Charlottetown Churches . or any of our other larger churches! Now, remember last week I spoke of the risk Philip took in encountering the stranger, the eunuch from Ethiopia on the road in the wilderness? When I was in Rexton I locked my office door almost all of the time, not because I was afraid of who would come in, but mostly because my desk faced the opposite wall and I did not want someone creeping up behind me, unaware that I was not aware they were there.

But, about ten days ago a homeless man walked into an Episcopal church in Maryland and opened fire. When all was said and done the suspect, the parish administrator and one of the clergy were dead. (The prime suspect was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)

As the community was still reeling in the aftermath of the shooting and of planning the funerals. In response, one person commented that more needed to be done to keep guns out of the hands of those who were mentally unstable! (Of course, as Canadians, we can’t just go to the local hardware store and buy a gun we can carry in our jacket pocket!) The other response I noted was that of the local bishop who said, “We are followers of Christ, and so the process of forgiveness has already begun.”

Corrie TenBoom, along with a number of members of her family, was sent to a concentration camp for hiding Jews from the Nazis who occupied the Netherlands during WWII. Her father died ten days after being incarcerated and her sister before the end of the war. Long afterward she said, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and then to realize the prisoner was you.”

The passage I read this morning follows immediately after the one read last week about Jesus being the vine and disciples being the branches.

In this passage, living a life of love, is seen as the primary way in which one abides in the vine and shows discipleship. The two go together; you cannot have one without the other. The life of love is part and parcel of being a disciple and part and parcel of being a Christian community. Forgiveness is also part and parcel of living a life of love.

About 25 years ago one of my friends, a year ahead of me at AST Atlantic School of Theology went to her “ordination interview” and one of the first questions was asked by a middle aged minister from Cape Breton, with an accent that was a unique mixture of Boston, Alabama and Edinburgh. He said to her, “Speak to me of love”. It was a somewhat unusual approach, to say the least, but they must have liked what she said because she was approved for ordination. Interestingly they both died in 2008 about a week apart; at ages 85 and 47 respectively.

In the movie, War Horse, set in the county of Devon, England the tenant Naracott family fall on hard times when their turnip crop fails and family patriarch Ted sells Joey, the prize thoroughbred; the race horse turned plow-horse, that had previously saved the family from ruin. The cavalry officer promises to return Joey to young Albert after the war, that he was only renting him.

Ted’s wife Rose is very angry with him and he says something like this to her, “Rose, I don’t blame ye if ye stop loving me.” She replies, “I might hate ye more but I’ll never love ye less.” !

We usually think of love and hate as opposites but we also think of love and like as if they described the same emotion. Both of these assumptions are incorrect.

Unlike the original Greek in which much of the New Testament was written we have only one word for love, Greek has at least three: for self giving love, for romantic love, and for love of country.

We all know that we over-use the word love. I might say that I love chocolate and I do. Give me a “Bounty” Chocolate Bar of the dark chocolate variety or bring a “Mounds” bar from south of the border and I will love you forever (or at least a week). I love the Black Angus sub at Quiznos. I love the Quarter-Chicken Dinner with white meat and french fries at Swiss Chalet.

I love my cat (except when she deposits a wet hairball in front of the bathroom door - late at night and I don’t know it’s there until my bare foot finds it in the morning.

I love the new clothes I bought in Moncton on Tuesday.

I love my Mom. (Good thing because today is also Mother’s Day.)

I love my family, (most of the time.)

When I perform a marriage ceremony two people stand in front of me and say to each other “I will LOVE you till my dying day”, or words to that effect.

All of those sentences are true but in each sentence the word “love” is used in a different way. Some of these are rather frivolous; some quite profound. Surely love for a Quizno’s Sub and a love for a mom are not the same!

There are times when love is easy - but there are also times when it is not.

The reality is that Rose Naracott was right - love and hate are not opposites and that you can love and hate someone at the same time.

You see we think of love as an emotion, but it is NOT. Emotions and feelings just are. You cant command someone to have a certain feeling but in this passage we find Jesus commanding that his disciples be a people and a community of love. For Jesus love was as much about the action as it was about any kind of underlying feeling or emotion. In the Gospel passage I read just a few minutes ago and in the life of the early church love was clearly a verb. Love was not something one only felt, love was something one did. Love was an action; an action on behalf of another.

Jesus knew that human relationships were difficulty especially those relationships where the people in love lived with or close to one another.

As I was planning her husband’s funeral, I once asked a woman married well over 60 years if she had ever considered divorce. With a twinkle in her eye she replied, “No, but murder crossed my mind more than once!” It’s easy to love people we don’t know and people we will never meet or only meet on the street, we don’t need a command for that! It’s the people with whom we are in daily relationship, or the people whose lives significantly encounter ours that we need this command, BECAUSE IT IS NOT EASY! It’s the people who hurt us even though they say they care for us that are hard to love. It’s the people who let us down; it’s the people who ignore our feelings and needs; it’s the people who break promises and who just “don’t get it” who are hard to love. It is those people who it is the most necessary to love. It is because love is a two way street that makes this kind of love possible as well.

Jesus knew that his life of living out love would not be easy. Laying down his own life would be the hardest thing he would ever do. Living in love no matter what happened would be the hardest thing the community of Christians ever did.

The early church was a persecuted community and many lost their lives as the state tried to rid the community of this “dangerous” group who refused to toe the party line and “keep the peace”. They were peace loving, to be sure, but you see, their declaration that “Jesus was Lord” flew in the face of the declaration by the community at large that “Caesar was Lord”. In a totalitarian state you cant have people who do not subscribe to the basic premise that holds everything together! You just cant have it! Despite all of the fear and the pain inflicted on the community, love became the mark of the community, love for one anther and even love for those who persecuted them.

The news this past few days has been filled with news of the conviction of Michael Rafferty for the murder of 8 year-old Tori Stafford of Woodstock ON. Rafferty’s girlfriend, Terri Lynn McClintic had earlier confessed to her part in the murder. This murder, like most child murders shocks us to our cores. Last week a young Canadian-born father arrived at his London UK home to find his two children dead, murdered by their mother, possibly suffering from post-partum depression.

What does the command to love mean in response to these and similar situations? Well, first we need to say that love (and forgiveness) in such horrific situations does not mean that all is forgotten - as if what they did was of no consequence, such as eating the last piece of your favourite cheesecake - it does not mean a restoration of previous relationships, if the perpetrator was known to those who have been hurt, and it does not mean that people like McClintic, Rafferty and others get off “scot-free” and do not do significant jail time.

What the command to love does is to set a goal for those most affected to carry something other than the burden of hatred and anger with them the rest of their lives.

Healing from such events is a process that takes time, that must take time; sometimes it is a life long process. Remembering what was lost is much easier to bear than carrying around the weight of how it was taken and why.

Jesus’ call to discipleship is not meant to be a cakewalk, it is not for the faint of heart, but we are promised the strength of the spirit and the accompaniment of a community with a similar goal - to love as Jesus loved. For each of us, that should be enough.

AMEN!

Acts 1: 15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
1 John 5: 9-13
John 17: 6-19

“Oh, those were the days. “

As a minister I hear lots of nostalgia.

”Oh, I remember when we had a big UCW in each church and now we have none.”

“Oh I remember when the church was full, twice a Sunday. ”

When I was in Thunder Bay in 1985 for my first summer internship I heard, “Remember when we had the largest Sunday School in Canada. They even wrote us up in the Observer”. I believe that at some point in their past they had 600 in their Sunday School - imagine the noise of all of those children, most of them in one big room. It must have been quite something.

The other comments could easily apply to any of our former congregations, or to many in the Maritimes, for that matter.

The early part of the book of Acts picks up where the Gospel of Luke leaves off and tells us how things went just after the resurrection. The disciples’ lives had been changed forever when they responded to the call of Jesus. After the chaos immediately after his death, they were certain of one thing: Jesus’ work must continue. They were certain that their job was to proclaim the resurrection. They also seemed certain of another thing - that they needed 12 core people to do this work, which was to be witnesses to the resurrection. The criteria was that the person chosen had to have accompanied them on their journeys from the very beginning. Not only was this person to be a believer in the resurrection but this person also had to be a person who was familiar with the earthly ministry of Jesus. It boiled down to two well qualified candidates: They were the man with three names, Joseph Barsabbas Justus, and Matthias) Their method of selection could be considered somewhat unusual! I am not sure who was involved in the final “choosing” but it involved both prayer and the casting of lots! In that time the Holy Spirit was thought to work in the “pick the short straw, the throwing of dice or the flipping the coin” methods of choosing.

I don’t wish to comment on the ways and means by which the choice was made as much as on the need that was felt to do the choosing and to and to continue on with the ministry. At this point in their lives as a community of faith, they needed to come together, strengthen their ranks and go forward to proclaim the resurrection. Some time later, when the next disciple was killed, he was not replaced - but for this time - the disciples saw it fit to go forward by replacing the one who had betrayed them with one who could help them with the tasks at hand - their new ministry of proclaiming the resurrection.

Matthias was a person with a foot in the past but also someone who could lead them into the future, and their only future lay, not in bemoaning Jesus’ death, but in the proclamation of the resurrection.

We often remember the past with nostalgia. As we look through our rose coloured glasses, we see the past as a time of glory and perfection. We can forget about the trying times - we can forgot the very hard work it took to keep things going back then. For example, First-Thunder Bay had to find teachers for all of those children - and imagine if they decided to serve juice and cookies! How many dozen cookies would you ask the UCW to bring - for 600 children! At least one of my former churches had to re-build after a fire that destroyed either its own building, or half the town as well.

In our own personal lives, we know the past was not as wonderful as we sometimes make it out to be. More than one older person in the charges I have served has attributed a continuing health problem to there “being no money for a doctor” when they were young. I read church minutes and found out that “back then” there was the struggle to pay the minister and put on the new church roof - and all of this in the days when there were more people in the pews and the church was more important in people’s lives.

As we know, if we are truly honest, the “good old days” had as much “bad” as our days do and our days have much that is good about them. Regardless, yesterday and all the days before are gone and our only choice is to live in the present as we journey to the future.

I see in the passage some solid guidance for our current situation. I was talking to a man who worked for the United Church and was based in our General Council Office in Toronto. He told us that in the congregation in which he worships the one question that is rarely asked is, “What did we do last year?” They only ask, “What will we do this year?” Now, that may indeed work for a suburban congregation of people where almost no one has been there for his or her whole life, but it certainly does not work in rural ministry.

However, if the disciples had continued to lament the betrayal of Jesus by Judas and the death of Jesus to the point where they became a memorial society to their recent past, where would they have been. These despondent and confused disciples quickly realized that their job was to proclaim two things: the life of Jesus and his teachings AND the movement of the Spirit as the result of the resurrection, in the time that was their present.

As I was choosing music for this service I came across a piece that my university roommate used to play almost every morning. This being the internet era, I decided to try and reconnect with her. Through the wonders of facebook I managed to do so. I reconnected with my high-school best friend in a similar way. In both cases, however, our lives have gone in different directions and reconnecting to resume our old relationships is probably not going to happen.

Sometimes I envy those of you who have always lived here, married your high school sweetheart and have known 90% of your friends all of your lives. Then I think of the people I have met because I have moved around and have had to go through the difficult process of making new friends while saying, “We will stay in touch”, to others. Thank goodness for cheap phone plans and the internet!

Even in small, rural communities, the one constant in life is change. Just ask someone who has been away for a few years and they will recount the changes they have seen.

This passage speaks of the Spirit guiding the change into the future; the spirit leads into a future filled with life.

It seems to me that the role of the faith community is to point to life, to point to the God of life and to the Spirit who goes with us. The role of the faith community is to bring the truth of the Gospel to the life we now live, not to force us into some kind of mirror or repetition of the past. We need to be able to discern the difference between tradition and traditionalism. Professor, Jaroslav Pelikan, whose writings I was introduced to in University, has said,

 "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in  conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."	

The disciples were going to be encountering new things on a daily basis and what Jesus did and said formed only part of what they needed to consider before they made a decision about their response. They needed to take their present and unique circumstances into consideration and decide with the guidance of the spirit, the actions and outlook that was needed in the place where they actually were.

And to be clear here, it was not an easy thing, to be Christian in the first century Roman Empire. Yet they must have dome something right because even with the heavy persecution, their numbers grew.

2000 years later our task is not to go back, discover their magic formula and then copy it. Our task is to keep in mind what was done in that time, and in other times that are now past, take into consideration the direction we feel the Spirit is moving us, and holding both of those together in prayerful dialogue, move in the direction we feel is right for this time and place.

The disciples made a decision to replace Judas on that day. Our ancestors made choices in their day. Our task is to make our choices and to move forward in faith.

Amen!

Acts 2: 1-21
Psalm 104
Romans 8: 22-27
John 15: 26-27; 16:4b-15

Babel or Pentecost

I love er. It’s a TV show set in the emergency room of a Chicago hospital. It’s no longer airing new episodes but it is on every day in the early afternoon. Most city emergency rooms are busy places where the people who work there see more than their fair share of sickness and sorrow, violence and heartbreak and occasionally, small amounts of joy. I was watching an episode the other day when a flower delivery van sped around the corned and crashed into another vehicle and a man in a wheelchair. The driver began talking very excitedly in an unknown language and gesturing excitedly. One of the doctors figured they should check the back of the van and they found two boys in the back. Turns out the van driver was a good samaritan who ad picked up the boys off of the street because one had stopped breathing and collapsed because of an asthma attack. The boys spoke English and did not know who their rescuer even was. Since no one could figure out what he was speaking, it took quite a while to find someone who could translate!

In another episode a man comes in, high on magic mushrooms. He is given a stretcher and a chart is started. When the man on the next bed does not receive speedy enough treatment this other fellow hypnotizes him and sets and puts a cast on his broken wrist. It is at this point that the er staff find out that this funny, high, hippy type man is in fact an orthopaedic surgeon at another hospital!

This is Pentecost - the day when we remember the powerful visitation of the Holy Spirit Fran read just a few moments ago. In case you wouldn’t understand Hungarian, I out an English version in your bulletins - the Spirit can use all he help she can get.

We need to remember that the church did not invent Pentecost. The people had gathered for the Jewish festival of Pentecost - celebrated 50 days after Passover and commemorating the giving of the law to the people of Israel in the desert.

Since this event is said to have taken place on that day the church adopted the name for the Christian festival of the power of the Spirit.

Back in the early part of Genesis is a story shrouded in the mists of time. It’s reason for being there is likely to answer the kind of question a precocious kid would ask. “Mom, If all the people of the world are related, from Adam and Eve, or from Noah and his sons, how come we speak different languages? These days adults know better than to ask such questions?

But, as we know, children step in where angels fear to tread. When kids ask them we wonder why we didn’t think of that ourselves.

In case you don’t remember it - the people built a high tower, a tower so high they thought they would soon be equal with God. So God came down and mixed up their languages so that they could no longer work together and would not be able to focus their combined energy on such a grandiose project.

These kind of ancient stories seek a spiritual explanation for the things people cannot figure out themselves. Where did those towers come from and why cant we speak with the people across those mountains or on the other side of that lake?

The book of Acts tells us that Pentecost is the reversal of that - by the power of the Spirit the Gospel overcomes the barriers of language and ethnicity.

The experience of that first Pentecost after the resurrection was so hard to describe that the accounts are full of fantastic images. When I was a kid I read this story in a Children’s Bible and the writer took it literally and all the people looked like little candles.

A ragged group of believers, still reeling from Jesus’ death and still in hiding from the authorities are immediately driven into the streets to proclaim the good news of Jesus to the crowds who had come to town to celebrate Pentecost at the temple. Imagine all the people milling around and talking at once in different languages - and all of a sudden realizing they were hearing the excited disciples speaking in their own language and there were many because people came from far away for this important.

Imagine that emergency room scenario again where a patient does not speak English and the doctors try to understand what is wrong. Sometimes even English speakers need other methods of communication. I recall someone telling me of a doctor in Souris who asked patients to describe pain with hand gestures and facial contortions - apparently it was a very effective diagnostic tool.

Sometimes we rely too much on language. In the course I took at the hospital many years ago we were supposed to become comfortable visiting patients who could not talk - I’m not that good at it but there are usually several residents at the Manor who cannot speak or who take a long time to form even a few words. Sometimes we communicate with smiles and music - sometimes we walk away in frustration, but we need to know how to communicate love and caring in ways that are non verbal.

When working with children or animals who are ill we know it would be much easier if they could speak. I know when my cat is racing around the house, seemingly going nuts I wish she could speak so I would know what she wants - and so that I could tell her she cant have it!

What we need in all situations is the guidance of the Spirit, which according to this passage enables communication. Notice that the people do not learn to understand the disciples language but they hear in their own language.

We are probably more amazed when people who are very different, get along than when they don’t. We are probably more amazed by acts of caring than acts of indifference though it’s not as bad here as in a big city. (Or at least that’s what we country folks think). In one of the places I have lived previously, native people often got a bad rap. A friend of mine, a non-native was driving in winter about an hour away from home and her car slid into the ditch, just like that without warning, she was in the ditch. The first car to stop contained four burly native guys. They picked her car out of the ditch and set it back on the road. She thanked them and all of them continued on their way.

St Francis of Assisi, who lived about 900 years ago is thought to have said, “Preach always, if necessary, use words”.

We really don’t know exactly what happened on that long ago day, but we are fairly certain of the results. A group of fear-filled people were transformed into faith-filled proclaimers of the Good News.

What is our Good News and to whom are we called to proclaim it?

Amen.