The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost: Sunday, July 8, 2007

As we watch Jesus send people out on what is essentially a healing mission, we realize that healing may be the primary Christian vocation in a world of great dis-ease.

Our Lord had begun by drawing around him a small circle of twelve. It was the number of Israel's tribes and was very significant for Jesus, who sees his task as bringing into being a renewed people of God.

He now takes the the next step in his mission. He selects seventy people and sends them into the surrounding countryside two by two. One thing we can't help noticing is that he gives very few directions. They are "to greet no one on the road". They are to say "Peace be to this house". They are to accept hospitality where it is offered. If they are not received with hospitality they are to leave. In addition they are told to heal the sick, and to say to them, "The kingdom of God has come near to you".

As with any scripture, there is something for us as we seek to be Christian in today's world. By telling them not to greet anyone on the road - eastern salutations tended to be long and elaborate - Jesus seems to be giving their task a sense of urgency. We need to have this sense in the tasks we take on as Christians. Very often in church life we can lack a sense of urgency about what we are attempting to achieve. We can regard our church commitments as casual and of rather low priority.

It should be significant for us that the only specific action Jesus commands those whom he is sending out is to heal the sick. Increasingly for Christians today the healing ministry is becoming strong and widespread. Furthermore there is a realization that in a frantic, tense and fearful world Christian faith can bring healing to the lives of individuals, healing fears, anxieties, angers.

Perhaps just as valuable is the ability of Christian faith to offer a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in people's lives. The faith can also be immensely healing where its truths are expressed in the insights of psychology. To do so is not to diminish Christian faith in the least. When both of these gifts of God, Christian faith and psychological insight, are used together, there can be deep healing.

Our generation of Christians may well be called to a ministry whose primary task is that of healing, both in individual lives as well as in the wounds and divisions of our society.

That is the Good News for this Week.

The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost: Sunday, July 1, 2007

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 9:51-62

Our Lord warns us that we can become so locked into our patterns of life that we cannot break free and grow.

“He set his face to go to Jerusalem” Anyone who thinks of Jesus as being dragged unwillingly to his fate has only to look at this statement. His decisions are being made with complete awareness of the possible consequences. Jesus is never the helpless victim of events, the well meaning but unlucky character in the drama. He is in charge, not in any overbearing sense but in the sense of his being a free person, one who knows the situation and its cost. At this point he sets out.

“He entered a village of the Samaritans." As a rule Jewish travelers did not go through Samaria. While it was not regarded as exactly enemy country, it was an area to be despised and avoided if at all possible. However Jesus is not prepared to write off a whole community in that facile way. We might ask where our own “Samaria” is, those areas of our lives, whether they be races, communities, or individuals, whom we despise for reasons we could not justify if challenged.

We now see Jesus in three different situations. His reactions are interesting. The first situation is one of rejection. The Samaritan village is not prepared to accept him and his group. The disciples are enraged. Here they are, being generously “liberal” to these people and they don’t appreciate it! How dare they! Notice how a latent hatred and violence flash out in James and John. Jesus “rebuked them”.

The second incident is one of seeming acceptance. Someone comes to Jesus and offers to follow him unconditionally – “wherever you go”. We all feel wary of over expansive gestures made in an enthusiastic mood. They have often not been thought through, and the chances of the person following through are slim. Jesus issues a warning about the cost of this kind of emotional offer and the person seems to fade away.

Now we see Jesus actually inviting a person to follow him. Taken aback by the offer, the man asks for time to go and bury his father. Jesus says what in that culture would have been a shocking thing. “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

As with many of his statements Jesus is resorting to extreme language to make a point. He seems to be telling us that we can allow the past to capture us in such a way that we can never get free of it. We find that we cannot change or grow. However, implicit in that statement is the offer that with grace we can break free of past things that tie us down.

This is the Good News for this week.

The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost -- The Nativity of Saint John The Baptist

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 1:57-80

Once again we meet John, this man nicknamed “the Baptist” because of something he invited people to do if they wished to associate themselves with his movement.

John is convinced that the world as he knows it is on the verge of massive change. He can only gropingly describe the terms in which he sees this change coming, but he reaches for an ancient image in his culture that he knows will be familiar to everyone.

Change, John declares, will come through a person, someone who will be known as the Messiah. Some of John’s contemporaries thought the change would be political. Others thought it would be in radical social reforms. John seems to have been in this latter camp.

Significantly John does not go to Jerusalem. He would have had a large audience, but I suspect he did not wish to work within the existing structures. Instead he decides to get the urbanites of Jerusalem to come to him. He begins with those few people who happen to be in the southern reaches of the country, trusting that word of mouth will reach the city. Eventually he succeeds in luring people into a desert environment so that they may look at their society from the outside and realize what a moral wasteland it has become.

If we listen to John we realize he is not merely shouting out condemnation of his generation. There is an element of that, but he is also offering a blueprint for a better society. We see this in the very precise and focused responses he makes to different people.

John realizes that something more than the nodding of heads in agreement is needed. If there is any truth in his intuition that a different kind of future is ahead, then it follows that a different kind of human being is needed for that future. That’s why John calls for a gesture of radical trust and commitment to his vision for the future.

First, one has to step out from among others, itself a commitment. To remove one’s outer garments was itself a gesture of self-revelation and renunciation. This response, that we know as baptism, was powerful on many levels.

John’s greatness shows in his refusal to make himself the centre of his own movement. Always he points beyond himself. And one day his cousin from Galilee steps from the crowd, slips off his outer robe, and asks John for baptism.

Much more happens in the following months as Jesus’ movement grows. John does not forsake his ministry. He may even have intensified his efforts and accepted a higher degree of risk. Certainly he must have realized what he was risking when he challenged Herod’s marriage to Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife.

There follow months in the dungeons of Herod’s Dead Sea fortress at Machaerus. From there one more echo of John’s voice comes to us before it is silenced by the executioner’s axe.

The Third Sunday in Pentecost

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 7:36 - Chapter 8:3

Theme: To have no illlusions about ourselves, to realize who and what we are, and at the same time know that God accepts us, is to taste the kingdom of heaven.

A theme constantly in Jesus' teaching and obviously very near to his heart was the necessity for forgiveness in human relationships. The day the disciples asked him to teach them to pray, Jesus put the issue of forgiveness at the heart of our relationship with God. In two simple and inseparable petitions he teaches us for all time that forgiveness is conditional. We cannot find forgiveness unless we ourselves forgive.

I mention this because something very like that is the heart of this episode. At a meal given in the Graeco-Roman fashion in affluent Jewish houses it was customary for the guests to lie on couches while strangers were allowed to stand around the edges of the room. Because this part of the space was covered it would also be shadowed. The people given permission to stand around could be poor or they might have some other need, something about which they wanted to attract the attention of a prominent guest.

In this case there is a woman in the shadows who wishes to express gratitude to Jesus for something she has received from him. Luke recalls how she does this effusively and passionately. Jesus' host is appalled by her behaviour and our Lord notices this.

From what Jesus says, we can assume that he and this woman have had a previous encounter. She is known in the community as a sinner. It is possible, though we have no evidence, that this could have meant prostitution. Whatever the woman's struggle, it is obvious that Jesus has made all the difference in her life, perhaps making it possible for her to deal with the angers and resentments, perhaps even the self hatred, that may have been part of her daily struggle.

Anger and resentments - even self hatred - are part of the lives of many people. To get across his point Jesus tells a story of a debtor who, having been forgiven a great amount, turns and refuses to forgive a tiny debt owed to himself. Jesus' message is quite simply that the greater someone's sense of being forgiven, the greater his or her gratitude will be. Jesus then applies that to our inner lives. The key statement he makes is in verse 47 - "I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little".

This theme is central for Jesus. We hear him speak of it again in the parable of the Pharisee and the publican in the temple. We hear it again in the story of the two sons, the story we often mistakenly call the parable of the prodigal son.

In every case, what Jesus seems to be trying to get us to understand is that to realize without illusions who we really are, to realize how little we can claim to be, yet at that same moment to realize that we are accepted by God precisely on these terms, is to discover the secret of inner freedom and self acceptance. To taste this is to taste the Kingdom of God.

This is the Good News for this week.

Second Sunday after Pentecost

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 7: 11-17

Theme: There are times in our lives when we feel dead, when our Lord bids us to come alive again and gives us the grace to do so.

As we encounter Jesus and his work in the Gospel story, we are constantly faced with two things. The first is the Jesus saw his vocation very largely in terms of healing. He spent a great deal of time healing people of every description and of every kind of disease.

We always want to know how Jesus did these things. There is no harm in the question as long as we realize that it will never be fully answered. In Jesus of Nazareth we encounter a person who possessed an extraordinary gift of healing. What is important to realize is that our Lord has shared, and shares, this gift with many men and women in every age. Such people, far from being mysterious or exotic, have often been quite ordinary. What they have in common is a complete absence of any illusion that they themselves are the source of healing. They know themselves to be mere channels of their healing Lord.

With our Lord I think we must go further. Luke writes "The dead man sat up". There are occasions in the Gospel, such as this one, that are told with the immediacy and the simplicty of absolute factual truth. How are we to respond? I think we can say one of two things, each of which gives glory to our Lord. We can conclude that the young man was indeed dead and that there stood beside his bier the one actual conquerer of death who has ever walked this earth. On the other hand we could believe that among Jesus' healing powers was the capacity to tell death from coma. William Temple, one of the great and devout Christian minds of the last century, remarked of another such incident, the healing of Jairus' daughter, that he could never understand how people presume that incident to be a raising of the dead when Jesus categorically said that the child was not dead but asleep.

There is a further way in which a passage like this can speak to our lives. What does it mean for our lives when Luke says that the young man was "carried out of the city dead". What would it mean if we spoke of ourselves as being "carried out of the city dead"? Could it mean those many occasions when we head home in the evening, parts of us in a sense dead, perhaps numbed by a hurt done to us, a cutting remark, a threat made, a mistake we could not avoid, a harsh confrontation, hours of tension. Sometimes we can use the privacy of the journey home, or the affection of those who welcome us home, to allow Jesus to touch us by his loving compassion. We can experience him calling us to come alive again.

This is the Good News for this week.

Trinity Sunday

The Gospel according to John
Chapter 16: 12-15

Theme: Our pilgrimage in Christ is never done. We are always being called to further insight and inspiration.

We are still in those hours of reflection that Jesus shared in the upper room. It is as if Jesus saw the shadowed walls of that room dissolve, allowing him to look across time and generations to all those - ourselves among them - who would come to these words and find grace in them.

"I still have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now". What a challenge is here. Our Lord seems to be telling us that Christian experience has no horizon. To say this makes us feel a kind of awe and wonder. Our Lord is promising to call us to further discovery until the end of time. In his own earthly time Jesus himself pushed at the boundaries of his contemporaries, forcing people to think and to imagine beyond the narrow categories of their spirituality. In our time Jesus continues to do this, his holy spirit pushing us towards new ways of responding to the change and turmoil of our own age.

"When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth". Again we are being told that the adventure is only beginning. It was only beginning for those long ago disciples around that table, yet it is also true that it is only beginning for us two millennia later. If God be truly God then there is no end to what can be learned, discovered and lived. I think of this whenever I hear or sing the verse in the hymn "Amazing Grace" that says - "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun; we've no less days to sing God's praise, than when we first begun".

Jesus continues. "All that the Father has is mine". I find that for me this statement of Jesus speaks to something exploding around us in recent decades - the immense variety of ways in which our world today pursues its spiritual questing. For many of us that world of many faceted spirituality is fascinating. Yet as Christians we also need to remind ourselves that, if we search the riches of Christian spirituality down the centuries, we come to realize that it has treasures far beyond our ability to exhaust.

In one of his letters Saint Paul wishes the early Christians to realize that in Christ they possess all things. In this shared moment in the upper room Jesus promises that we can find in him all we need in our search for God.

This is the Good News for this week.

The Day of Pentecost

The Gospel according to John
Chapter 14: 8-14, 25-27

Our Lord speaks to his disciples and to us, pointing out that his life is both our window into God, and our introduction to the Holy Spirit.

All through these weeks after Easter millions of Christians are reading this Gospel according to John. We are going back over all the things Jesus said to his disciples in the upper room just before he was crucified.

Why are we doing this? Why are we going back? I think it is because now that we know he is risen we can hear these things in a new way. There comes a moment when Philip says to Jesus "Lord, show us the Father." Philip wants something that all of us want from time to time, particularly at those times when our faith is strained and we are no longer sure of anything. Philip - and we - want certainty. We long for the specific response from God that leaves us in no doubt.

Jesus says to Philip - "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father". It is important to realize that Jesus does not say that he "is" the Father. He says that he is "in the Father". At this point words almost betray us, because at this moment we are at the heart of the great Christian mystery we call Incarnation, the meeting in Jesus Christ of humanity and divinity. We can ask our "how" questions for ever and we will not unravel this mystery.

Jesus continues. "The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do". All we know is that sometimes when we look at Jesus we are looking through a window into the nature of God. What our Lord says to us is what God wants to say to us. Our Lord's actions are his carrying out of the will of God in the world. If our lives and actions in any way reflect those of our Lord, then we are carrying out the will of God, and in some way - albeit a very inadequate way - we are reflecting the nature of God.

"If you love me" says Jesus, "you will keep my commandments". Once again, not for the first time, we hear Jesus link love to obedience. For our Lord, love is never just a nice feeling - as our culture very often understands it. Love abides where there is obedience.

"He (the Father) will give you another advocate." We are hearing a favourite theme of our Lord. He is saying that the relationship of his disciples with him cannot and will not stop at this point. These short years they have been together is no more than a beginning. The relationship will grow and deepen throughout their lives. In saying this in that long ago upper room, Jesus says this to us. The relationship between a Christian and his or her Lord must be a growing and deepening thing.

This is the Good News for this week.

Seventh Sunday of Easter

The Gospel according to John
Chapter 17: 20-26

In His last ours with His disciples our Lord prays passionately for their unity. He is also praying for the same unity for all Christians.

As we read the Gospel according to John we can find ourselves in very deep waters. More than any other Gospel writer, John recalls the reflections of our Lord, most of them from the last hours Jesus spent with his disciples. There are many levels of meaning and we have to probe deeply for them. Here are one or two simple thoughts I think worth sharing.

As we begin this passage we are listening to Jesus as he nears the end of his long prayer for the disciples. Jesus knows that there is very little time left before he will be taken. Here, around this table, are the hands that will in the future be his hands to do his work in the world, the tongues that will speak for him. Knowing this, Jesus is also only too well aware of the humanity and limitations of our humanity. All this we hear in the intensity of every thought in this prayer. Above all, Jesus prays that the group will remain united amid all that the future will bring.

"I ask...(for) those who will believe in me through their word". Jesus is now praying for the church that will form from the work and witness of those here in the room with him. When we think about that for a moment we realize that Jesus is reaching out across the centuries and praying for us!

"That they may be one, as we are one". All through this prayer Jesus is asking that the relationship among his followers may resemble that between himself and the Father. Everything we know of that relationship is that it was one of the deepest intimacy. Therefore we know that our Lord wishes this intimacy and trust to exist within the life of his church. How very much we have to struggle for this in contemporary church life. Congregations, especially large congregations, find both unity and intimacy elusive at best. In a strongly individualistic culture, unity can be elusive because of the wide spectrum of opinions, attitudes, hopes and expectations across its spectrum.

Some congregations have found that the development of small groups can help some people to discover intimacy and acceptance. I recently came across an estimate - not a statistic - that surprised me. Robert Wuthnow, the Lutheran sociologist now at Harvard, estimated that of every ten people in the United States - and I think we could assume something similar is true in Canada - four or five were in a support group of some kind, whether it be merely for company in what can be a society of much loneliness - let's say, reading and discussing a book together regularly - or one of the many aspects of Twelve Steps - struggling for recovery from various addictions, or people supporting each other in cancer survival, and so on. Then of course there are the many kinds of groups centred around some religious quest - prayer groups, study groups, healing groups.

Even the simple act of exchanging of the peace within worship, though it may still be difficult and seem even intrusive for some, can be a reminder to us that in Jesus Christ we are called to be one. If we have any doubt about this we have only to read our Lord's prayer in entirety.

This is the Good News for this week.

Reflecting on the Gospel for the 6th Sunday of Easter

This is my first venture out into the world of the Web. I thought I would share some reflections on the Gospel passages of the Three Year Revised Common Lectionary in the hope that they might be of use to anyone who has the responsibility of doing a homily on the passage.

The Gospel according to John
Chapter 14: 23-29

Our Lord is reflecting on our relationship with God, and we see how it resembles our human relationships.

Jesus has just been asked a question. Someone says to him "How is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?" The rest of this passage is our Lord's reply.

The first great truth in that reply is that our Lord shows himself to the human heart. There are no vast planetary wide manifestations that some Christians tend to long for. Back in his early desert experience Jesus was tempted to such displays and he rejected them. Instead he returned to Galilee, walked the lake shore and began capturing human hearts one by one.

In this upper room he is saying that it will always be this way. In her poem "Immanence" the English poet Evelyn Underhill expresses this perfectly. She writes of God - "I shall achieve my immemorial plan. Pass the low lintel of the human heart."

"Those who love me", says Jesus, “will keep my word". Our Lord shows us love in terms of obedient action. Love is not just a feeling or a sentiment. Where there is love there is obedience.

"We will come to them and make our home with them". If we live a life of intentional obedience to God as we have experienced that God in Jesus, then a relationship is formed. Because we are human this relationship will never be constant or perfect. Our human nature will interfere and put up blocks. Our faith will go through periods of confidence and periods of doubt. But if we strive for an obedient relationship with God we will have moments of natural encounter with our Lord. He is both the object of our obedience as well as being the source of grace that makes our obedience possible.

"The Advocate, the Holy Spirit...will teach you everything". Our relationship with our Lord, like our human relationships, must grow and deepen if it is to be real. My childhood relationship with God, while it affects all my subsequent life, will not itself suffice for my adult life. Very often we fail to recognize this.

"I am going away, and I am coming to you". This is a deliberate paradox whose truth is borne out again and again in our relationships. It’s true between parents and children. If it does not happen the relationship cannot develop. The same is true in our relationship with God. Each stage of it must change. Each stage must "go away" to that the next stage can develop or "come again".

That is the Good News for this week.