Brutally Honest

‘On avoiding the dangers of prosperity’

A sermon blog from Tim Chesterton

Sermon for Thanksgiving: Deuteronomy 8:7-18

I don’t very often announce titles for my sermons, but today I want to do so. My title for today is ‘On avoiding the dangers of prosperity’.

Now, it might come as a big surprise to you that prosperity can be dangerous. It certainly isn’t a message that our politicians want us to hear, because they are committed to the position that prosperity is an unmitigated blessing which must be cultivated at all costs. Our economic masters don’t want us to hear it either, because their entire strategy is to encourage in us an attitude of discontentment with our current level of prosperity, so that they can sell us more things.

Nonetheless, when I read what Jesus has to say in the Gospels about money and possessions, it sometimes sounds to me almost as if he’s talking about radioactive materials; they can do a great deal of good if they’re used properly, but you have to be extremely careful how you handle them if you want to avoid being poisoned! And the authors of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy have the same viewpoint. To them the prosperity of the nation of Israel is a blessing from God  for which they give thanks, but it also has potential dangers. How do you handle prosperity without being poisoned by it? That’s the theme of our Old Testament reading for today.

First, let’s get the context. The Hebrew slaves have been set free from their bondage in Egypt, they’ve received God’s commandments at Mount Sinai, and they’ve then spent forty years wandering in the Sinai desert. They are now standing on the borders of Canaan, their promised land. Moses is an old man and is about to die, and he has gathered the people together to give them what you might call his ‘Last Will and Testament’. Deuteronomy is presented to us as a sermon preached by Moses, in which he restates God’s laws to the people and encourages them to remain faithful to their God. Listen to what he says in verses 7-9:

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper”.

No doubt this sounds pretty mouth-watering to the Israelites as they stand on the borders of Canaan. But there’s a potential danger, which Moses outlines for them in the following verses. They might go into the Promised Land, settle into their new homes, enjoy the prosperity of the land and then get so used to it that they forget it’s a gift of God to them. As verse 17 puts it, they might start to think ‘my power and the might of my own hand have gained me this wealth’.

I would suggest to you that today, as we celebrate Thanksgiving, we may need to guard against a similar danger. Despite our recent economic woes, we still live in one of the most prosperous societies that has ever existed on the face of the earth. I’m not very old, but even in my lifetime our expectations around ‘standard of living’ have increased exponentially.

I remember when I first heard that a machine had been produced that would take movies and play them on your television. I knew for a fact that I’d never be able to afford something so extravagant! But now they’re old fashioned, and being able to watch movies at home on the Internet is seen as almost a human right! When I was a little boy one bathroom per house was the rule, and in hotels you assumed you’d have to share a bathroom with others. Not so nowadays! And so it goes on – microwaves, personal computers, smart phones - all of these very new things have become part of the standard expectations of most people.

I enjoy these things, I give thanks for them, and I don’t relish the thought of living without them. Nonetheless, from a spiritual point of view, not all is well with this picture. First of all, in this prosperous society the danger of what Moses calls ‘Forgetting the Lord your God’ is very real; we can get so self-satisfied with our prosperous lifestyle that we lose all sense of need for God at all. And second, of course, not everyone shares in the prosperity. Twenty years ago the average American CEO of a large corporation earned about 44 times as much as their lowest paid workers. Today the average CEO earns more than three hundred times what their lowest paid workers earn. That’s a dramatic example of the way the gap between rich and poor in society is increasing.

In our Old Testament reading for today Moses points out this danger to us and gives us three strategies for dealing with it.

Strategy number one is to ‘Remember’. When I first came to St. Margaret’s nearly twelve years ago, we did a number of ‘Meet the Rector’ evenings at which we used an exercise called the ‘Four Quaker Questions’. Two of the questions were “Where did you grow up and what were the winters like?” and ‘Describe the house you lived in? How was it heated?” So we spent time sharing stories about our roots with one another. A couple of things were very interesting to me. Firstly, many of us grew up in circumstances much more humble than those we now enjoy. Second, many of us have very fond memories of those simpler times!

Moses’ first strategy for the Israelites to protect themselves against the potential dangers of wealth is to remember where you’ve come from. Before our reading starts, in verse 2, he says “Remember the long way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness”, and in verse 14 he goes on “…do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness…and fed you in the wilderness with manna that your ancestors did not know”.

Moses reminds them that they were slaves in Egypt in conditions of backbreaking labour and unimaginable suffering. He reminds them of the long forty-year trek through the desert. But he also reminds them of the good things: how God set them free from their Egyptian taskmasters, how God provided them with food every day on their desert journey. “Remember how you depended on God day by day”, he’s saying, “and how God came through for you”.

The interesting thing is that the people for whom the Book of Deuteronomy was written had no personal memory of the slavery in Egypt or the desert years of Israel. In writing these stories down and passing them on, the authors of Deuteronomy were encouraging the cultivation of a kind of ‘ancestral memory’. The same thing happened when Israel celebrated the Passover every year; they re-enacted the night before they left Egypt, so that the younger generations could, in a sense, enter into the experience for themselves.

Those of you who have visited Fort Edmonton Park will probably have seen the house Premier Alexander Rutherford lived in during the early part of this century. The interesting thing to me was that many of us in this congregation now live in larger houses than the Premier of Alberta lived in less than a hundred years ago! Moses would encourage us as a society to remember where we have come from. Our present standard of living is not something we enjoy as a human right; most people on the face of the earth do not, in fact, enjoy it. It is a privilege that ought to lead us to thankfulness to God.

And that brings us to Moses’ second strategy for dealing with prosperity. Verse 10 says, ‘Bless the LORD your God’. In other words, we are to continually thank God for all the blessings we have received.

Thankfulness is a habit that needs to be cultivated. Some people never learn to cultivate it; I believe we live in a culture that has largely forgotten how to cultivate the habit of thankfulness. Rather, we’ve developed complaint into an art form, and we usually aim our complaints at different levels of government. Our modern governments of course provide us with incredible services and benefits that most of the people of the world can only dream about, but so often our response is complaint: we’re not being given enough, or we’re being charged too much for it.

Thankfulness is an antidote to this. The way Moses tells it here, thankfulness is not a feeling but a habit. He doesn’t say, “Feel thankful”; he says “You shall eat your fill and bless the LORD your God for the good land that he has given you” (v.10). Thankfulness, in other words, isn’t a matter of waiting until we feel gratitude; it’s a matter of saying thank you, and saying it every time we eat. Our words, you see, have the power to transform us. The more we repeat something, the more it sinks into us and becomes true for us.

This isn’t just about saying grace at our daily meals – although that’s important. It also includes making a habit of including a good dose of thanksgiving in our daily prayers, and pausing often during the day to say “Thank you” to God. It includes experiencing the truth behind the words of the old chorus: “Count your blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done”. I challenge you to do that: count your blessings, name them one by one. Then do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Do it until it becomes a habit. It’s a habit with the power to change our hearts.

So Moses has given us two strategies to guard against the dangers of prosperity: we’re to remember where we’ve come from, and we’re to cultivate the habit of thankfulness. The third strategy is to keep God’s commandments. Look in verse 11: “Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today”. Obedience, in this passage, is not a way of buying blessing from God; rather, it’s a way of saying thank you to God for the blessing we’ve already received.

But I have a question: which commandments are we talking about here? When we hear the phrase ‘God’s commandments’, we tend to think in terms of the Ten Commandments and other laws about personal morality, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, the Law Moses was commanding the Israelites to obey was much bigger than the Ten Commandments. It is embodied in the first five books of the Bible, and it includes not just laws about personal morality but also laws about building a just society.

For example, when you were harvesting your field you had to leave some grain standing at the edges so that the poor could glean a living from it. You had to let the land lie fallow every seventh year and rely on God sending you a bumper harvest in the sixth year. When you sold land, you had to offer it first within your own family so that equality of wealth between families was preserved. And every fifty years the Year of Jubilee was celebrated. In this year all land was to revert to its original owners, all debts were to be forgiven and all slaves set free. The ideal was equality; that society as a whole should prosper, and not just individuals in it.

My point in bringing this to your attention is not to suggest that we should revive the entire Jewish civil law. Rather, it is to remind you that God’s law has never been solely about personal morality; it also requires that we work toward the creation of a just society where the rights of the poor and vulnerable are protected.

Today at St. Margaret’s we gather to give thanks for all the blessings we have received from God. Moses encourages us to cultivate this habit. We ought to verbalise this as often as possible – both to God and to others. So let me encourage you to be intentional about growing the habit of thankfulness. My observation, over thirty years in pastoral ministry, is that people who make thankfulness a habit are happier people who enjoy their lives more.

But the other side of thankfulness is to show our gratitude by making sure others also enjoy the fruits of prosperity. Today at St. Margaret’s we’re doing this by our offering of non-perishable food items for the Food Bank. We’re also doing it by our special offering today for the work of World Vision’s Cambodia Trauma Recovery Centre.

But of course it can’t end there. We’re encouraged in the Scriptures to move through our lives with our eyes wide open, ready to see the needs of others and look for ways to help them – not just in our community, but in the world at large as well. This is another way we show our thankfulness to God for all the blessings we have received.

Prosperity can be a blessing, but we have to handle it carefully. We have to remember where we have come from; we have to cultivate the habit of thankfulness; we have to live in obedience to God’s commandments, especially the ones that require us to care for those less fortunate than ourselves. In other words, we have to learn to see our prosperity as a trust from God, to be used to advance God’s purposes in the world. If we can do that, we might just be able to handle it without being poisoned by it! May the Holy Spirit guide and strengthen us to use what has been entrusted to us according to the will of God.

Cross posted at Faith, Folk and Charity.

How God Reveals Himself to Us (a sermon on Psalm 19)

A sermon blog from Tim Chesterton

Imagine with me a great sculptor who has been working for a year on a sculpture; it was commissioned by city hall, and it will be located in front of the building for the public to enjoy. The day finally arrives; the people gather around the sculpture - which is covered by a veil - the mayor and council members make their speeches, and then the sculptor steps forward and pulls a string. The veil falls to the ground, and the sculpture is revealed to the public in all of its glory for the first time.

If one of the New Testament writers had tried to describe a moment like that, the word he would have used for it is the Greek word ‘apocalypse’. We’re used to hearing that word in the titles of films like Apocalypse Now, and we forget what it means in the original. In our English New Testament, the word ‘apocalypse’ is usually translated as ‘revelation’. Something that was hidden from us before has now been revealed. That’s an apocalypse, a revelation of God to us.

God, you see, is not a being we can discover with our five senses. Therefore the ordinary scientific methods of discovery don’t seem to work when we’re trying to get to know God. In fact, we could never discover anything about God at all, unless God had made a prior decision to reveal himself to us. Our psalm for today, Psalm 19, shows us two ways in which God is revealed to us, and then ends by giving us a hint about how we ought to respond to God’s revelation.

First, in verses 1-6, we are taught about revelation through the things God has made.

Stories about experiencing the presence of God through nature are as old as humankind and almost as universal. Speaking for myself, I find that when I’m hiking in the mountains and am confronted with the beauty and majesty of God’s creation, it gives me a really important perspective on God and on what’s important in life and what isn’t. I tend to do a lot of my praying in small rooms, and so I can very easily slip into thinking of God as ‘a being who lives in small rooms’.  But then I climb a mountainside, and I’m brought face to face with the grandeur of God – God’s sheer ‘bigness’, if you like – and my own relative smallness. In the truest sense of the word, it’s an awesome experience.

Back here at home, I’ve discovered a different way of experiencing God’s presence in creation; I enjoy sitting out on my deck early in the morning to pray Morning Prayer. This is almost always an experience of tranquility for me, and I keep up with it for as long as I can in the Fall; I’m always sorry when the arrival of winter means that I have to give it up for another year!

Perhaps the writer of Psalm 19 had a similar experience, which he has recorded for us in verses 1-6. Maybe one night he went for a walk under a clear, starlit sky. This was ancient Israel, remember, so the street lamps were at least two millennia in the future! Perhaps on his walk he sat down on a hillside and spent half an hour just looking up at the night sky. Of course, he didn’t know astronomy as we do today – he didn’t write a poem like that beautiful one in the B.A.S. which talks about what God has made: ‘Galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home – by your will they were created and have their being’. But nonetheless, the majesty of what he saw brought a sense of awe and wonder at God’s creative power.

Perhaps the next day he went out again at dawn and was captivated by the experience of sunrise. The sun seemed to leap into the sky so enthusiastically – it reminded him of a wrestler jumping into the ring, or a bridegroom emerging from his wedding chamber with a new spring in his footsteps! All of this, too, taught him about God’s creative power.

What does the writer learn from contemplating God’s creation? He learns that ‘the heavens are telling the glory of God’ (v.1a). When we lived in the Arctic I discovered that the word ‘glory’ is a tough one to translate into central Arctic Inuktitut. The word that’s often used in the prayer book is kaumanek, which means something very close to our English word ‘shining’. I think this is a pretty good translation. After all, when you experience ‘shining’ you know that a source of light is present. And in the same way, the writer is telling us, when we experience creation we know that the Creator is present and real. Whether we’re looking at the grandeur of the mountains, or the vast distances of the ocean, or the glories of a prairie sunset – when we look at this as believers, we get a sense of the power and majesty of the Creator who could make all this. ‘Shining’ tells us that a lamp is present; creation tells us that the Creator is present; it is a sign of God’s glory.

Hebrew poetry often uses parallelism: that is, the second line says the same thing the first line does, but in a slightly different way. So it is in this verse: we read that ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork’. ‘Firmament’, to the ancient Hebrews, simply meant ‘the dome of the sky’, but it’s God’s handiwork – in other words, his creativity – I want to focus on. Every artist puts something of themself into their work, and every picture tells you something about the artist who created it. What does creation tell us about God? Let me respond by quoting to you some questions from Philip Yancey’s book I Was Just Wondering:

‘Why are there so many kinds of animals? Couldn’t the world get along with, say, 300,000 species of beetles instead of 500,000? What good are they?

‘Why is it that the most beautiful animals on earth are hidden away from all humans except those wearing elaborate scuba equipment? Who are they beautiful for?

‘Why is almost all religious art realistic, whereas much of God’s creation – zebra, swallowtail butterfly, crystalline structure – excels at abstract art?’

God is undoubtedly the most prolific creator we know – I mean, what about those 500,000 species of beetles? I sometimes get the sense that God enjoys creating totally useless stuff, just for the fun of it! Does that idea do something to the way you think about God?

So the first half of Psalm 19 shows us God revealing himself to us through creation. This is often how people first get a sense of the existence of God as well; many of us had our first experiences of God through the natural world. But by itself this is not enough. It gives us that vital sense of the glory and creativity of God, but doesn’t give us God’s wisdom for daily living. It doesn’t tell us how we ought to live our lives to reflect the glory of God in the world. For that we need the second source of revelation the psalmist is going to tell us about: revelation through what God has spoken.

We can learn a great deal about people through observing them. We can learn whether they are male or female, young or old, rich or poor, old fashioned or up to date. We might even be able to learn something about what they do for a living, or about their religious beliefs. But if we really want to get to know someone, sooner or later we’re going to have to talk with them, and listen to what’s on their mind. A person’s words reveal their thoughts in one of the most intimate ways we know.

The Old Testament writers all believed that God has spoken to his people through what they call ‘the Law and the Prophets’. In them, God has not only revealed what he is like but also what he wants us to be like. The Hebrew word that we often translate ‘Law’ is ‘Torah’ which actually means something like ‘instruction’. In Psalm 19 it is described in several ways: God’s ‘law’ and ‘decrees’ (v.7), his ‘precepts’ and ‘commandments’ (v.8), and his ‘ordinances’ (v.9).

The psalmist thinks that the people of Israel are the luckiest people on earth, because God has given them this Law. In verse 7 he points out that it gives them ‘wisdom’ – in other words, it teaches them the appropriate way to live in any given situation. In verse 8 it brings them ‘enlightenment’ – knowledge that they couldn’t gain in any other way. It brings revival and joy to the human soul. It warns them of ways of behaviour that are dangerous for humankind. The psalmist’s attitude is like the manufacturer’s: ‘for best results, follow Maker’s instructions’.

For me, the most telling of these sentences is the end of verse 11: ‘in keeping them – that is, God’s commandments - there is great reward’. Listen to that sentence carefully; it’s a bit different from the popular view. The popular view is ‘Well, keeping the Ten Commandments is tough, but you’ll get a great reward’. But that’s not what the writer says. He doesn’t say ‘For keeping them there is great reward’, but ‘in keeping them there is great reward’. In other words, it’s not “Well, if I learn to be unselfish on earth I’ll get a great reward in heaven” (if you think about it, that’s a pretty selfish reason to be unselfish!). No; the psalmist’s view is “As I learn to live in unselfishness, I’ll gradually discover that here and now it is the most rewarding way of life”. The good life that God reveals to us is its own reward.

You see, these commandments aren’t an arbitrary set of rules God has revealed to us. Some religions do really seem to believe this. Muslims, for instance, believe that many of the pleasures they think of as sinful in this life will in fact be given to them as rewards in the next life. The Muslim writer Yahiya Emerick says ‘Nearly all the pleasures of Earth are regulated or even forbidden for a Muslim, so their reward for obeying God in this life is guilt-free indulgence in the next’.

On this view, you see, these things aren’t really wrong in themselves – if they were, they would be forbidden to us in the next life as well - and the only reason for avoiding them in this life is to be able to enjoy them in the next. But the Biblical view is different. These things are harmful for us. In warning us about them, God is doing us the biggest favour imaginable. And in describing the ideal godly life for us, God really is showing us the most rewarding way of living.

For us Christians, of course, this revelation doesn’t stop in the Old Testament scriptures. John calls Jesus ‘the word of God’. He embodies God’s speech for us; his life is a concrete embodiment of the Torah, the Law. His teaching brings out the deeper meaning of the Old Testament commandments, and he sums them up for us in his two great commandments to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. As we faithfully follow Jesus, we are living out the deepest meaning of God’s Old Testament law.

So we have these two sources of revelation, the works of God and the words of God, creation and scripture. And we need them both. We need to look for God in creation to get a sense of God’s grandeur, God’s ‘bigness’ if you like, and the sheer fun that God takes in artistry for its own sake. But we also need the scriptures for clarity about God’s inner thoughts and God’s will for us as human beings. Perhaps temperamentally we all tend to incline toward one or other of these sources of revelation, but I would encourage you to seek a proper balance between them.

However – and this is the final thing – we also need to consider our response to what God shows us and says to us. In our Sunday services, after we have heard God’s word proclaimed to us, our response is to say ‘We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves’, and to ask for God’s forgiveness and strength to do better. In other words, God’s revelation often makes our shortcomings clear to us, and encourages us to ask for help to learn the new way of life.

That’s what we see in verses 12 and 14: ‘But who can detect their errors? Clear me from hidden faults… Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer’. The psalmist recognises his own faults, and asks God’s help to avoid them in the future and to live an acceptable life.

This is the purpose of God’s revelation, in creation and in scripture. I’m told that in the intelligence community they sometimes talk about the ‘need to know’ principle – you won’t be told something just to satisfy your curiosity, but only if you ‘need to know it’ to be able to do your job properly. Well, there are a lot of things we’d like to know that aren’t in the Bible – the answer to the mystery of evil, for instance – but God doesn’t seem to think that we ‘need to know’ them in order to live our lives properly.

We don’t go to Scripture to satisfy our curiosity about everything. We go to seek God’s wisdom for our daily life. Let me close by pointing you again to the prayer in verse 14: ‘Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer’. I suggest that whenever we go to God’s revelation, either in his works or his words, we go with that prayer. That’s the way to get the most benefit from what God reveals to us.

Cross-posted at Faith, Folk and Charity

Please continue to pray for Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani

By Tim Chesterton

I hope that Brutally Honest readers will forgive me this morning, as I am in some haste, for simply posting a couple of links to my blog. Suffice it to say that Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani seems very likely to join the ranks of the martyrs in the next few days, as a court in Iran seems poised to impose the death penalty on him. Please pray for him and his family, and please email your local Iranian embassy on his behalf. Links to posts on my blog here and here. Thank you for your prayers.

What Back to Church Sunday is All About

Sermon for September 25th: Matthew 21:23-32

A sermon blog by Tim Chesterton

Today, in many different countries around the world, thousands of Christian churches are observing ‘Back to Church Sunday’. The idea behind the day is simple: regular churchgoers invite friends, who are not normally in the habit of churchgoing, to come and join them for worship. It’s not meant to be a big song and dance, and we’re not meant to put on a show that’s hugely different from what we normally do on a Sunday. It’s simply an invitation for people who may be standing on the edge of the swimming pool to put their toe in and see if they like the temperature of the water. Some might decide they like it, and dive right in. Others might say, “No thanks”, and turn away instead.

But some may well ask, “Isn’t this really just about recruiting? Aren’t you just trying to get more people to come to church and put more money into the collection plate? After all, we’ve all heard the statistics about how church attendance is declining; isn’t this ‘Back to Church Sunday’ just a desperate attempt to reverse those statistics so that you won’t have to close down more struggling churches?”

Well, I can’t speak for other churches and what they may or may not be trying to achieve today. But as for this church, I have to say that we’re not in decline; in fact, our average Sunday attendance grew by 15% last year. And far from wanting more money on the collection plate, we’d like those of you who are our guests today to just ignore it when it comes your way. When you invite guests for supper you don’t normally make them pay for their meal, and the same is true here. The collection plate is the main way that we, the members of this church, support its ministry, but we don’t want you, our guests, to feel you have to contribute to it. 

But this does beg a further question: What is it that we actually want to see happen in the lives of those we have invited to come to church with us today? That’s a fair question, and we need to be up front about the answer. Is it just about persuading more people to join us for services each week? Is it just about getting more volunteers to help out with our job roster and more money to help us meet our budget? Or is it deeper than that? Is it in any way about God, and about Jesus, and about the enrichment and transformation of our daily lives? 

To answer this question we need to think about the reading we just heard from the Gospel of Matthew, and I need to start by filling in some back story for you. 

Today’s reading comes toward the end of the biography of Jesus that Matthew wrote. Jesus and his followers have made a pilgrimage from Galilee in the north, where most of them live, down to Jerusalem for the annual festival of Passover. We who know the whole story of Jesus know that this story is going to end a few days later with his death and resurrection, but of course most of those who are actual participants in the narrative don’t know that yet. 

At this time of year crowds of pilgrims were streaming into Jerusalem for the festival, but when Jesus and his followers arrived they did something unusual. One of the prophets of the Old Testament, Zechariah, has a passage in which he talks about Jerusalem’s king coming to the city in humility, riding on a donkey. And so Jesus, who had walked everywhere he went up ‘til now, took a donkey and rode it into the city; his followers waved palm branches and shouted ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’. The title ‘Son of David’ was another way of saying ‘The Messiah, the anointed one’ – that is, the king God was going to send to set his people free. 

When he arrived in the city Jesus went straight to the Temple. In the outer court he found the place full of merchants who were changing money and selling animals for sacrifices and so on. Jesus drove them all out, kicking over the tables and acting as if he owned the place. “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’”, he told them, “but you are making it a den of robbers” (Mt. 21:19). Jesus then say down in that very place; crowds of people surrounded him, and he taught them and healed the sick. 

Now, how would you feel if you were one of the legitimate authorities in the temple – one of the chief priests and elders of the people – and this upstart with a funny northern accent, who was not a properly trained rabbi and had no connection with any recognized authority, had come charging into your domain and taken over the facility? More than that, to Jewish people it would have been clear that Jesus was acting as if he was the Messiah – the one God had sent to be the king who would set his people free. That would be a clear challenge to the existing authorities, and they didn’t like it. 

And so, in today’s reading, the leaders come to Jesus and challenge him: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” (v.23). In other words, “Uh, remind us of who you are, exactly? Who signed your ordination certificate? Who made you the boss of the Temple? Which royal court were you born in? A manger in Bethlehem, you say?!!!” 

Jesus’ reply sounds strange to us, as if he’s avoiding the question, but in fact it would have been crystal clear to the original hearers. “I’ll ask you a question first; if you can answer it, then I’ll answer your first question. Tell me - when John the Baptist came preaching about the Kingdom of heaven and baptizing people who repented of their sins, where did he get his authority from? Was it from God, or was it just an idea he and his followers dreamed up out of their own heads?” 

Now the leaders were in a tight spot. They were standing in the Temple surrounded by a mob who venerated John the Baptist – who had since been executed by King Herod Antipas – as a true prophet of God. If they said what they really believed – “We think he was a fake” – the crowd would probably riot. If they lied and said, “Of course we believe he was a true prophet”, then they would be admitting that Jesus was also a true prophet, because, you see, it was John who had baptized Jesus! At that baptism, the Holy Spirit of God had filled Jesus, and a voice from heaven had said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased”. 

Now some of you are sitting there in your pews listening to me impatiently and thinking, “This is all very interesting, but what’s it got to do with the question of Back to Church Sunday and what you want to see happen in our lives?” Well, the moment has arrived to give the first part of the answer to that question! 

Here’s the issue: ‘Who does this Jesus think he is?’ The chief priests and elders asked it because he rode into their city like a king, marched into their Temple, chucked out the legitimate businesses they had licensed to be there, and took it over as a teaching facility! But if you hang around a Christian church long enough, you might ask it for a different reason. You might notice that we call Jesus ‘Lord’, that we bow at his name, that we venerate his words over all the other words in the Bible. You might notice that we pray our prayers ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ and that on most Sundays we remember his death by enacting a ceremony with bread and wine as he told us to. And you might well ask, ‘Who do these people think Jesus is?” 

The answer is, we think he’s not just a great religious teacher or a prophet, on a level with all the others of that ilk. We think he’s God. We think that, in some mysterious way, the God who created everything that exists actually came to live among us as a human being on this planet. He was like an author writing himself into his own story, while at the same time continuing to exist outside the story as the supreme originator of the whole narrative.

Now you might find this an outrageous idea. You might think, “How could a human being be God? And if it’s true, when they nailed him to the cross, who was looking after the universe at that time? And isn’t it arrogant to think that the founder of one religion of earth was somehow better than all the other great religious leaders who have ever lived?”

Those are really good questions, and unfortunately I don’t have time to answer them today. What I do want to say is this: this is one of the things we want to see happen in the lives of the people we’re trying to reach. We want to help you grapple with the question of who Jesus is. We want to help you look at the story of his life, the sort of person he was, the way he reached out to the poor and marginalized, the women and children, the lepers and the ones no one else had time for, the way he related to ordinary people and the things he taught about what God was like and what life was all about. But we also want you to come to terms with some of the things he said about himself: the way he assumed he had authority to forgive sins, for instance, or the way he claimed to be the one who had sent the prophets and preachers of hundreds of years ago, or his claim that he and God the Father were one, and if you had seen him you had seen the Father.

How do we make all this fit together? What do we do with a man who lives such an attractive and godly life - who says such wise and powerful things - and yet seems to have this fundamental megalomania about his own identity? What if the answer is that his claims – his direct and indirect claims – are true? ‘What if God was one of us - just a slob like one of us?’ What if God has come among us to show us the way and to save us from ourselves? Well, then, I’m sure you’d agree that if that is who Jesus is, it would be important for us to listen to him, and to follow him.

You might say, “Well, I’m not there yet. I’m prepared to consider the question, though, so what’s the next step for me?” Well, let’s read on in the gospel text for today.

Even though the religious leaders took the safe way out and refused to answer Jesus’ question, Jesus wouldn’t let the matter rest. He told a story to make a point (if you start looking into Jesus you will find that this is something he does quite often!). In this story, a man told his two sons to go and work in his vineyard. The first said, “I don’t think so”, but later on he changed his mind and went. The second said, “Sure!” but then did nothing about it. “Which of the two did the will of his Father?” Jesus asked. The answer was obvious and the leaders couldn’t avoid it: it was the first.

Jesus’ reply was devastating:

“Truly, I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him” (vv.31-32).

To the surprise of the chief priests and the elders, Jesus had them pegged as the ones who said they would work in the vineyard, but then didn’t! But when John had preached his message, hundreds of so-called ‘sinners’ – traitorous tax collectors who worked for the hated Romans, or prostitutes and people like them – had listened and believed and changed their lives. They were like the son who at first had refused to work in the vineyard, but had then repented and done what his father asked.

This is what Jesus wants – he wants people not just to think or talk about doing the will of his Father in heaven, but to actually roll their sleeves up and get busy doing it. And if we ask “What is the will of the Father in heaven?” Jesus is not shy about answering our question. The big picture is that we are to love God with everything in us and love our neighbour as ourselves. The detailed picture involves not accumulating lots of luxuries, but living simply and giving to the poor instead. It involves forgiving those who sin against you and learning to love not only your friends but also your enemies. It involves turning away from lust and being faithful to your marriage vows – keeping your promises and being a person of your word – looking out for people in trouble and helping them – living to please God instead of trying to be popular with everyone else – and so on, and so on.

You see, coming to church is the easy part. We’d love to think that some of you who are our guests today would come back and join us on a regular basis, but that’s only the beginning. What we’re really about is helping people figure out who Jesus is, and then helping them to follow Jesus by learning to do the will of the Father in their daily lives.

So let me close with a suggestion. I make this suggestion not just to our guests, but to our regular members too, because I’ve learned over the years that regular churchgoers aren’t always as sure about Jesus as I’d like to think they are!

Here’s my suggestion. Maybe you’re not sure you believe in God. Maybe you believe in God but you’ve always thought Jesus is just a human being, not the Son of God or anything like that. Now today you’ve heard me say that it really matters who we think Jesus is, and this has got you wondering whether or not there’s more to Jesus than you thought.

I suggest you do two things. First, pray to God for help. Maybe you’re not even sure God is there; that’s fine. A prayer something like this would be good.

“God, I’m not even sure whether or not you exist, and if you do, I’m not sure whether Jesus is your Son – whatever that means – or if he’s just an ordinary religious leader, or if he’s a charlatan or a lunatic or something worse. But I really want to know. So I’m going to try to find out, and I want you to make it clear to me. Please help me to know whether or not you are real and whether or not Jesus is your Son. Amen”.

The actual words aren’t important – God knows what’s on your heart – but something like this will do the trick.

Here’s the second thing. There are four biographies of Jesus in the Bible – the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. John is a bit harder to understand, but the first three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are very accessible. Pick one of them – it doesn’t matter which one – and commit yourself to reading from it every day. But here’s the catch. I can guarantee you that on some days, in the bit you read, there will be some command of Jesus that jumps off the page and hits you between the eyes. If that happens, stop reading right away, think about what it would mean for you to obey that command, and then ask God to help you obey it.

Sound radical? I believe that anyone who starts making a serious attempt to actually put the teaching of Jesus into practice will sooner or later discover for themselves that Jesus is in fact who Christians say he is – the Son of God. And on the other hand, I think that people who are only willing to study Jesus on an intellectual level, or are only willing to become churchgoers and nothing more, will not be in a position to receive any sort of revelation from God about who Jesus is. They’ll be like the son who said he would go and work in the vineyard, but then didn’t.

So this is what we want to see happen. We don’t just want more people to come to our church, although we’d be glad if that happened. We want more people, in and outside the church, to understand who Jesus is, and to commit themselves to doing the will of the Father as Jesus has explained it to us. We believe that’s how God is changing the world, one life at a time. That’s what Christianity is all about, and that’s what Back to Church Sunday is all about too.

Cross-posted at Faith, Folk and Charity.

‘Unfair’ Grace

Sermon for Sept. 18th: Matthew 20:1-16

A sermon blog from Tim Chesterton

I’ve heard it said that there are more people who know the words to ‘Amazing Grace’ off by heart than know our national anthem. Isn’t it incredible that a hymn written in the eighteenth century still has such staying power today? And what’s even more incredible is the fact that ‘Amazing Grace’ is one of the most requested hymns at funerals! Why is that incredible? Well, at funerals most people want to talk about how good the dead person was, and how they’re now being rewarded in heaven for the good life they’ve lived.

It’s amazing the lengths to which people will sometimes go to give this impression. The story is told of the children in a prominent family who decided to give their father a book of the family’s history for a birthday present. They commissioned a professional biographer to do the work, carefully warning him of the family's ‘black sheep’ problem - Uncle George, who had been executed in the electric chair.

“I can handle that situation so that there will be no embarrassment”, the biographer assured the children. “I’ll merely say that Uncle George occupied a chair of applied electronics at an important government institution. He was attached to his position by the strongest of ties and his death came as a real shock”.

That’s the kind of thing that often happens at funerals! How incredible, then, that more often than not people want to sing a hymn by John Newton, a converted slave trader. Newton wanted the world to know that even though he had been an undeserving wretch for the first twenty years of his life, God had reached out to him and given him a free gift which he did not and could not ever deserve! His life was an illustration of a saying of Jesus’ that is repeated more often than almost any other in the gospels, and is in our Gospel reading for today: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). In other words, don’t think you can predict who will be the first in the Kingdom of God by outward appearances, because this isn’t about human achievement; it’s about God’s free gift.

To illustrate this point, Jesus told the story of the workers in the vineyard. Some of the details in this story seem very strange to us, but in fact this is just the kind of thing that could happen regularly during the grape harvest in Israel. Storms could easily ruin the crop and it was important to get the harvest in as quickly as possible. So for a time, anyone who wanted a job could have one. The work was hard; working hours were from dawn to sunset, which in a Mediterranean country means a twelve-hour day. The wage was a standard one, a ‘denarius’ or silver coin. A denarius was the average daily wage for a worker, but it’s important to know that it was also the average cost of surviving per day for the masses of poor families in Israel. It didn’t allow any room to manoeuvre; a denarius would buy your family what they needed to stay alive, no more and no less. It would get you basic food on the table, but not Shaw cable or Internet service!

During the grape harvest, men who wanted to work would go to the marketplace and stand around; it was like going to an employment centre in the morning to look for a job for the day. They would work the twelve hours, and then they would be paid at the end of the day so that each man could go home with money to buy food for his family. If a man was unable to find work on a particular day, then his family would not eat. If he found work for only a part of the day, and thus was unable to earn a whole denarius, his family would eat, but not enough to stave off hunger pangs.

Thus far, there are no surprises in Jesus’ story. But now come a couple of unexpected twists, and these are the details that would have stood out for the people who first heard the parable. So let’s spend a few minutes looking at these unexpected features in the story.

First surprise: It was not the custom for the owner of a vineyard to go himself into the marketplace to hire workers. The usual practice would be for the owner to send his manager or some other employee. In fact later on in the story, when the time comes to pay the workers, we do see the owner working through his manager in this way; if you look in verse 8 we read ‘When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay”’’. But when it came to the actual hiring, he went out into the marketplace and looked after it himself.

So what we have here is a very unusual boss. He actually cares about the down-and-outs in the marketplace who are desperate to earn a silver coin so that they can feed their families for the day! He cares about them so much that he goes out, not once, but five times during the day to see if there is anyone there standing around looking for work.

What is this telling us about God? The gospel teaches us that God doesn’t stay safely in heaven, insulated from the pain and sin of a broken world. Jesus told us that God is like a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep who are safe in the fold and goes out into the wilds to look for the lost one. And of course in that story Jesus is describing himself. In Jesus, God has come among us to search for the lost. He cares about every human being in this world, and so he has come among us to live and die so that we can come home to him.

Archbishop Ted Scott liked to tell the story of how, when he was a minister in Winnipeg in the late forties, he helped to fill sandbags during a major flood. Someone recognised him working there, came up to him and said “You don’t look like a minister today!” To which Ted replied, “What does a minister look like?”

And this of course is the problem a lot of the Jewish people had with Jesus. He didn’t look like God; he looked like an ordinary wandering preacher who spent time with the wrong people. But if they had come to him and said “You don’t look like God today!” I wonder if he would have replied, “What does God look like?” Maybe it’s our image of God that is wrong. Maybe we’ve pictured him too far away and have never imagined him getting involved in the dirt and pain of everyday life. If he’s like the vineyard owner in Jesus’ story, then he certainly does get involved in it. And that’s the first surprise.

Here’s the second surprise: Everyone, even the latecomers, gets a full day’s pay. Of course, that was what the contract said. They’d all agreed to work for a denarius. But when the ones who had worked all day long saw the eleventh-hour types getting a denarius, they naturally thought that they themselves would get a lot more. After all, they’d worked twelve times longer!

We can certainly sympathise with their thinking. In fact, a few years ago there was a very similar story in the news in Canada. A lawyer who divorced his wife had agreed to a certain level of child support for each of his two children. However, he had then gone on to become extremely wealthy, to the point that he could well afford to give much more than the legal agreement specified. He refused to do so; he argued that he was not breaking the law, he was giving exactly what he had agreed to give, and they should be satisfied with that. But we might well agree with his ex-wife and children when they argued that a man making over a million dollars a year ought to give a lot more than he had originally agreed to. And that’s the situation these workers were in. Of course the owner had a contract with them for a denarius a day, but surely if he was going to give the latecomers the same wage, then he was morally obligated to give them a lot more, wasn’t he?

Their problem was that they were understanding the money in terms of wages. But a landowner who pays a full day’s wage to someone who has only worked for one hour is obviously not paying a wage; he’s giving a gift. Paying them all at prime rate was not an economic decision; it was an act of grace. 

And it’s the same with our place in the Kingdom of God. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God today, not because of anything good we have done, but because of God’s free gift of grace to us. It was secured for us long before we were born, when Jesus gave his life on the Cross for our sins. What he did there for us was a perfect work, to which nothing needs to be added. We don’t have to earn it; in fact, nothing I could do in my entire life would ever be enough to earn it.

I once heard a story about a man who had been the churchwarden at an Anglican cathedral in Texas for over thirty years. He died and arrived in due course at the Pearly Gates. Peter met him there and said, “You need to have a hundred points to get in here. Tell us the reasons you think you should get in, and we’ll start adding up the numbers”.

The warden was a little surprised, but he began. “I was the warden of the cathedral in Dallas, Texas for over thirty years”. “Very good”, Peter replied; “One point”.

The warden was more than a little alarmed when he heard that that was only worth one point, but he pressed on. “I was baptised when I was a baby and confirmed when I was a teenager”. “Very good”, Peter replied; “That makes two points”.

“Er – I tried to live a good life and keep the commandments”. “Excellent: three points”.

Well, he tried hard to think of anything else, and he was able to name a few other things, but after he got to seven points he just couldn’t get any further, no matter how much he wracked his brains. Eventually he cried out in frustration: “It’s no good, Peter – I can’t think of anything else! If it’s not for the grace of God I’ll never get in here!”

“That’s a hundred points”, Peter replied; “Walk straight through!” 

So let’s get out of our minds the whole concept of what we deserve; the kingdom of God does not operate on that basis. C.S. Lewis once received a letter from someone who was complaining about an evil act that had been done to them, and was praying that God would give the perpetrator his just deserts. Lewis replied gently “I would rather pray for God’s mercy than God’s justice, for my enemies, my friends, but most of all for myself”.

The good news is that God doesn’t give us what we deserve - he gives us what we need, whether we deserve it or not. And that’s the whole point of the fact that every worker was given a denarius. As we said, a denarius was what a family needed in order to survive. Those who had worked only for an hour may not have deserved a denarius, but if they didn’t get it, their families would go hungry that night. So the owner gave them what they needed. And that’s what God has done for us in Jesus.

In the first half of the twentieth century a Church Army officer called Sister Doreen Gemmel worked for many years in central London among the prostitutes. When the respectable people in the London churches asked her how she could do it, she always replied “I keep reminding myself of this one truth: the ground is level at the foot of the Cross”. In other words, none of us comes to Jesus at a higher level than anyone else. At the end of the day - at the end of every day - all I can do is come to him with the words of the confession: “I have not loved you with my whole heart, and I have not loved my neighbour as myself”. The miracle is that when we come to him day by day, asking for mercy, forgiveness and grace, we receive it - over and over and over again. But the catch is that we all receive it in exactly the same way - not because we’ve earned it, but because of God’s generous love. ‘The first shall be last, and the last first’. The ones who you think would deserve more end up receiving exactly the same gift as the ragamuffins and scumbags who sincerely cry out to God for his mercy and grace, because God has the generosity to give us, not what we deserve but what we need. That’s what grace is all about. And I, for one, am very thankful for it.

Cross-posted at Faith, Folk, and Charity

Prayers for the town of Slave Lake

Received the following early this morning from Tim who has guest blogged here at Brutally Honest in the past:

I wonder if you might post this news item on your blog and ask for prayers? The town of Slave Lake is only 250 kms north of Edmonton and many people in this city have family and friends there. I myself led a couple of workshops at the ecumenical church there back in the 1990s. It seems that hundreds of buildings have been burned down and there is no sign yet that the fire is anywhere close to being under control.

Details from the Globe and Mail:

Flames continued to flicker into the night time skies above Slave Lake after a devastating, fast moving wildfire caught community officials off guard.

The damage is catastrophic. Hundreds of homes, churches and businesses in the northern Alberta town have been destroyed. So too has the town hall and radio station. The power’s out, cell phone service has been spotty, and 7,000 residents have been forced to flee through a single road, the only highway open as fires rage on all sides.

As dusk fell Sunday, fires continued to burn within the city and around it. Fire crews had little control – they’d managed to save the south part of the town, but remained at the mercy of strong winds, gusting up to 100 km/h.

“It’s extremely devastating, our loss. It’s difficult to articulate,” Slave Lake Mayor Karina Pillay-Kinnee said late Sunday, adding: “A lot of things we’re battling now.”

Prayers from south of the border Tim...

Mary Magdalene: A story of transformation

Posted by guest blogger Tim Chesterton.

My sermon for August 30th is up on my blog now. Here's the beginning:

Last Fall I preached a series of sermons here at St. Margaret’s about ‘Bible People you Might Not Remember’. These were not the ‘stars’ of the biblical stories; they weren’t the people who would have gotten their names up in lights in movies. They were the ‘ordinary people’ in Bible times, the people who were only mentioned a few times in the scriptures. But their stories are still interesting and compelling, and there’s a lot for us to learn from them about how God uses folks just like you and me in his plan to share his love and his message with the world.

Well, I had a lot of good comments about that series, and since there’s no shortage of Bible people to talk about, I thought I’d have another kick at the cat this Fall. So for the next six weeks we’re going to think about ‘More Bible People You May Not Remember’. And we’re going to start today with the story of Mary Magdalene.

Now, I must admit right off the bat that Mary Magdalene is hardly unknown these days. Thanks to Dan Brown and his bestselling book The DaVinci Code, pretty well everyone knows – or at least thinks they know - that Mary Magdalene was secretly married to Jesus, that they had children whose descendants are still alive today, and that there is a secret society, the Priory of Sion, that exists to protect those descendants and preserve this story. And because everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, especially if it involves taking a kick at the Catholic Church, these ideas continue to thrive in our popular culture, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of historians think there’s absolutely no evidence for them.

I’m not going to spend any time today going through the various theories mentioned in Dan Brown’s book; it would take a good hour just to examine them all, and I don’t think you want to sit here for an hour while I do it. What I want to do instead is simply to examine what we can actually know about Mary Magdalene from the pages of the New Testament, and then ask what her story has to say to us today as twenty-first century followers of Jesus.

Read the rest here.

Sermon for July 12th: Mark 6:14-29

Posted by guest blogger Tim Chesterton.

 

My sermon for July 12th, on Mark 6:14-29, is now posted on our church website. Here's the beginning.

It will be ten years next month since I was interviewed by the search committee for the position of rector of this parish of St. Margaret. It was a memorable interview in many ways, but one thing I especially remember was a question I was asked by Murray Tait, who was the People’s Warden at the time; some of you here will remember Murray and his wife Diane, who were very active members of this congregation and now live in Calgary. As near as I can remember it, Murray’s question went something like this: ‘Do you consider it to be part of your job as a preacher, not just to comfort us, but also to challenge us?’

Preachers - who are, after all, paid by their congregations - often have difficulty with that question! And yet we know that this is indeed an important part of our calling. The message of Jesus will not always come across as good news, especially when it calls us to leave sinful ways behind and put God’s word into practice in our daily lives. How do we react to that challenge? Today’s gospel tells us about two people who were challenged by God’s message, and how they reacted to it.

Read the rest here.

This One Takes the Biscuit

Posted by guest blogger Tim Chesterton

Further to my last post on the humorous agnostibus ads, this one from Malcolm at Simple Massing Priest is the best one I've seen yet.

Cross posted to Tale Spin.

Agnostibus humour

Posted by guest blogger Tim Chesterton

The recent atheist bus campaign in Britain has generated quite a lot of conversation on the Internet - and also a good bit of humour. Someone who loves a good laugh has produced a website by which you can generate your own slogan and plaster it on the side of a bus in a photograph, and Mad Priest is running a competition for the best one. I thought this one by Doorman-Priest was pretty good:

As I have recently had to give up beer for medical reasons, this one by JimB just about made me cry:



Here's my offering:


Cross-posted to Tale Spin.