Let's talk about sin, shall we?

I’d like to talk about sin for a minute.

And I’d like to do it in a completely non-judgemental manner.

Now, I know what you may be thinking: minister writes about sin and isn’t judging?  Is that even possible?  I hope so.

Still, in the church’s defence, we kind of invented it.  Not all the sinning – we’ve all had a creative hand in that through the years – but in the concept.

We use the word “sin” in a pretty generic way these days.  It tends to mean anything anyone considers wrong, especially morally or ethically wrong.  And we usually use it when describing something WE have judged to be so.

But that’s not what sin really means.  The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says that sin is “the purposeful disobedience of a creature to the known will of God.”  So sin is a theological concept – it is fundamentally about our relationship with God.  Sin distances us from God and the life God intends for us.

That pretty much covers anything, doesn’t it?  Yes it does, but here’s where it’s different to a moral or ethical right or wrong: sin is God-centred, not human-centred.  Hmm, that sounds funny doesn’t it?  “Sin is God-centred.”  Let me come back to that in a minute.

The problem, of course, is discerning what is God’s will.  The bible is a good place to start, because it gives is two helpful perspectives.  First, the word we translate as “sin” in the bible literally means “to miss the mark.”  In other words, if our goal is to be close to God, to have a relationship with God, sin is the stuff that knocks us off course or sends us in another direction.  Second, the other word we use with sin is “transgression.”  That’s when we “cross the line” – violate a law or a commandment.  The are many laws in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus (some of them are, um … interesting, too) and there are the Ten Commandments, fundamental guidelines for living.  And there is the “Great Commandment” in Christian scripture: to love God with all my heart and soul and my neighbour as myself.

Our interpretation of those laws and commandments changes over time.  I know that stoning your neighbour for working on the Sabbath certainly has, for example.  (Although, you may feel like you want to if they’re running a chain saw at 6 am when you’re sleeping in.)  But that doesn’t mean that the concept of respect for justice and for what is right should change.  Nor does the concept that right relationship with God and each other and the world – to “love” as Jesus taught – should be our goal in living.  In her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris writes that “I can find all too many ways in which I transgress regularly against the great commandment, to love God with all my heart and soul, and my neighbour as myself.  On a daily basis, I fail to keep the balance that this commandment requires of me: that I love and care for myself, but not so well that I become incapable of loving and serving others; and that I remember to praise God as the author of life itself, but not so blindly that I lose sight of the down-to-earth dimensions of my everyday relationships and commitments.”  But we always need to continue to try.

Which brings me back to that phrase above that sounded funny, “sin is God-centred.”  I think it seems odd to me because sin is the antithesis of a God-centred life, the thing that drives us away from God.  So what draws us to God.  Salvation?  Redemption?  Fancy terms, but I think they’re only the process of returning to God after sin.  The opposite of sin?  I think it’s love, love as God loves us and as Jesus showed us.

Appropriate and Balanced

I was going to write about how we tell our stories today.  We recently had our annual summer kids program and the theme this year was Superheroes of the Bible.  We had a story each day of a character in the Bible who exemplified a “super power,” things like caring, bravery, friendliness and wisdom (and there were lots more, we discovered).  On the last day we talked about Jesus and how Jesus shows us that we all have those “super powers” in us and we can all be like Jesus and share those powers loving each other.  We’re all superheroes.

It was great and we had fun.  Connecting the kids with these “super powers” and how we treat each other  - love each other, as Jesus would say - was meaningful, I hope, and I hope that we sent some more confident superheroes out into the world.

The thing I wanted to say was that, when it came to telling the stories of Miriam, David, Abigail, Solomon and Jesus, I told them with a bit of, well, let’s say “creative license.”  When David fought Goliath, for example, there was no sling and stones and he didn’t chop Goliath’s head off (1 Samuel 17).  He made Goliath slip on a banana peel and, when he fell, David hit him over the head with a turnip.  David was vegetarian, by the way.  The whole story tells much better, really, but the point is that I kept the essential truth about David being brave and adjusted the narrative to make that point in a way more appealing (no pun intended) to kids.  Really, it did work.  It was fun, engaging and meaningful.  And then we had crafts and games and awesome snacks that were pretty much like having a meal.

So, yes, I was going to write about how we tell our stories - I guess I have a bit - but then I realized the more significant thing: we made being in church fun, engaging and meaningful.

I think that’s a sentence we don’t hear often enough.  Unfortunately.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thinking that “church” should be all about having fun and being entertained.  Appropriate respect and reverence for things sacred is important and there can be serious issues addressed when we gather as a faith community - anytime we gather as a community.  But that needs to be balanced with lighter moments, moments when the learning and the worshipping comes from engaging God with some humour and a little friendliness.  And maybe a snack.

Right there are two key aspects of “church” we need to be constantly considering, appropriateness and balance, and they are reflected in two key aspects of Jesus’ teaching ministry, and we worked them both: stories and food.

Jesus was rarely about doing what society thought was “appropriate.”  In fact, an important lesson in all the stories Jesus told - parables and otherwise - was that they challenged the most common thinking in society, they challenged the status quo.  Jesus’ behaviour was often inappropriate according to the society of his day: he associated with all the wrong people, he taught and healed on the day of rest, he challenged authority.  He challenged what was conventional and appropriate.

Jesus also balanced his teaching with humour and wit.  Maybe we have a little different perspective now than first century Jews, but many of Jesus’ stories are humorous and – here’s the food part – much of Jesus’ teaching happened informally with the sharing of food. Some of the stories are about food, too, as is the occasional miracle story (changing the water to wine and feeding the 5000 with a few loaves and fish).  Again, maybe it’s less so today, but in Jesus’ day a meal was an important time of gathering and sharing.

All of this is brought out in the Bible stories we hear in church this summer in the gospel of Matthew: the parables, Jesus sharing a meal, feeding the multitude.  And it reminds me that we need to be constantly thinking about what we teach and how we are teaching it, how we are engaging each other and how we are engaging God in our liturgies.

I think we had fun with the children and I hope they did too.  I hope that they also had a good feeling about being in a church, about hearing stories from the Bible and engaging each other with what’s in those stories.  I hope they remember that Jesus wants them to be the superhero they really are and God is always with them to help.  And I hope they remember that sharing food is a good way to engage people.  We all need nourishment for body and soul.

Making time for prayer

Do you pray?

Just to be clear, I'm not asking about those times in church when the pastor says "Let us pray" and we all bow our heads or kneel and share in a prayer made on our behalf.  Nor am I talking about those times we share in the Lord's Prayer, the prayer Jesus taught us, whether we understand it as an example of how to pray or "the" prayer to be shared.

I mean, do you pray?  You.  By yourself.  With God.  Or by whatever name you call God.

In the gospel of Luke, the author gives us one of the two stories of Jesus answering the disciples request to teach them to pray (Luke 11).  His response includes a short version of what we refer to as the Lord's Prayer.  But Jesus goes on, first with a parable that reminds us to be persistent in prayer and second, a reminder that God answers with what God knows is appropriate.  It seems a little like saying - and I'm paraphrasing Luke with some additions, here - "ask, and it shall be given to you, though maybe not exactly what you were expecting; search, and you will find, though maybe not exactly what you thought you were looking for; knock, and the door will be opened to you, though it may be a little like playing The Price Is Right, 'cause you might find something you weren't expecting."  God knows what is best for you and will answer with what is best for you.  Trust God.

That's a good way of explaining that, I suppose.  At least, we want it to be.  Sometimes it's hard to make that enough.  Like when we pray that God will help someone with cancer get well and they don't.  Or we pray that God will protect us from abuse, but the abuse doesn't stop.  Or we pray that a loved one travels safely and they're hurt in an accident.  Or we pray that God will help us find a job so we can care for our family, and there's no work to be found.  Or we pray for good healthy crops and there's a drought.  Is it enough then?

I want to say it is.  But if you've been in one of those situations when you appeal to God for help and it appears that the help isn't coming, it's seems harder to believe, doesn't it?  And not just in God, but in ourselves.  After all, what if our prayers weren't answered because we prayed wrong?

Maybe the key to understanding that better is in the examples Jesus gives, comparing prayer to persistently asking a friend for help, or comparing how God might answer to a parent's response to a child.  It seems, in Luke's gospel, like Jesus is saying "you must understand the relationship as if God were a friend or parent who knows us, who really knows us, not like some distant, all powerful entity."  God is not the Great Oz, but our dearest friend, a parent, a lover that knows us intimately, genuinely, uniquely.  After all, if we come from God and return to God, how can God not know us so deeply?

I don't have an answer for how God responds to each individual and unique prayer.  I can't imagine that anyone does.  But I know this: prayer is the voice of our relationship with God.  God hears all that is said from our hearts and you can't - you can't! - pray wrong.  God loves us for who we are and God loves us regardless of how we live.  God answers all prayers with love, whatever that love may look like to us.

Talk regularly with God.  Pray for needs, but pray with thanks also.  Pray because God is listening like a best friend or a parent or a loved one.  Pray however your heart needs to speak.  But do pray.

Can the seed grow anywhere? How do you know?

Jesus told a lot of parables.  The Parable of the Sower is a familiar one that appears in each of Mark, Matthew and Luke’s gospels.  It’s one that Jesus, himself, explains.  I think that’s a feature that’s part of his explanation to the disciples of why he uses parables, but that’s for another time.  Let’s look at the parable itself for a minute.

A sower goes out to sow some seed, Jesus says.  As he tosses the seed - by hand in those days, of course - some lands on the stone path and is eaten by birds; some lands on rocky ground and grows, but withers quickly without soil; some lands on ground and grows, but weeds grow with it and choke it out; and some lands on good soil and grows, thriving and producing a great harvest.

The seed, says Jesus, is the “word of the kingdom.”  When it’s heard and not understood, that’s the seed that falls on the path; when it falls on rocky ground, that’s those who hear, but the word doesn’t take root and when things are difficult, they readily give up; when the word is heard, but those who hear it choose wealth and the pleasures of the world, then that’s the weeds overwhelming it; the good soil is when the word is heard and understood and lived, that’s what produces a harvest.

Well, that all seems clear: Jesus wants us to be the good soil, to hear the word, understand it and live it.  Yes.  And we should, hard as that may be at times.  Because, aren’t there times when we’re being all of those things in the landscape of our lives?  Sometimes we’re like the stone path, sometimes the rocky ground, sometimes challenged by weeds - especially if we’re already challenged to be able to recognize what is a weed.  And yes, we can be good soil.

Thank goodness the sower is who the sower is.

You might be tempted to think that you don’t have to be a farmer, in this century or in the first century like Jesus’ first audience, to know that this is one really incompetent sower.  Seed is precious.  No one would toss it so casually that it went pretty much everywhere.  That would be foolish and wasteful.  You would want to be careful and cast the seed only where there is a certainty of it having a chance to grow.

Unless ... the seed was, literally, life and the sower could see the potential to grow in every landscape.  Why else would the sower cast the seed everywhere?  Wherever we find ourselves, the word is there.  God generously, graciously and lovingly offers life to all.  Hear, says Jesus, and listen.

Where's the love?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there always seems to be a lot of talk about love in church.  Yes, I confess that I tire of it, sometimes, too - when we just talk.  It does seem like it’s one of the two most talked about things in church and it always seems like we’re saying the same thing: God loves you, Jesus loves you, love your neighbour.  Good stuff.  Okay.

That other thing we talk about the most, by the way, is money.  At least, everyone thinks we talk about it a lot.  I’m not so sure we do.  I think it’s just that we talk about it so badly, that everyone thinks we talk about it a lot.  The church needs money to keep its doors open, keep on doing good things and keep on paying their very gifted clergy.  But when are the doors open and for whom?  And what “good things” exactly?  We seem to just assume that everyone knows what the church does and why more is always needed, so we talk very broadly and in generic terms.  And who is this “everyone,” anyway?  Shouldn’t we know people a little better?

Sometimes I think we handle love like that, too.  We speak very genuinely and authoritatively and we talk about how God loves you, Jesus loves you, and you should love your neighbour (often by making a financial contribution to this church-based program or that one).  But there’s more to love than that.

The Bible includes at least three kinds of love and, because the earliest translations of the Bible were in Greek, we often call them by their Greek names.  There’s “filio” which means, literally, brotherly – and sisterly – love.  Philadelphia, for example, is referred to as “the city of brotherly love” because that’s literally what it means.  There’s “eros,” which is physical, sensual love (this is where we get the word “erotic”).  And last, there is the one we don’t hear quite so much about, “agapé.”  This is the kind of love Jesus speaks of, the all encompassing unconditional love of God.

More often than not, it seems like the church – the institution – speaks about love in only two dimensions, with moral pronouncements on filio and eros (especially eros…) on the one hand and encouragement to just go love everybody, on the other, because that’s what Jesus says we should do.

Except it isn’t, exactly.  Jesus is a lot more specific.  What Jesus says is that we should do more than love at a distance, as if it were some warm fuzzy sweater we can put on.  Jesus says we should love one another as he loved us, and while that’s most clearly stated in John’s gospel, it’s as readily enacted in the others.

Jesus engaged people, got to know them, shared with them.  Jesus asked people to come and do as he did, to learn about what it means to love by getting to know people, especially the people we least wanted to know, and find out what love means to them.  Jesus calls us to let go of those things that get in the way of relationship, like hate and anger, and to try to see things as others might and to do that with compassion and understanding.  Filio and eros are spiritually empty without relationship.  And yet, as much as the love of agapé is unconditional in itself, living it out is not: it’s work, it takes time and investment and how much or how little can only be found out in relationship.  What does love mean to you?

It's an encounter with God

We talk about being welcoming a lot.  I mean, a lot.

Oh dear, you may be thinking, he’s going to talk about being welcoming.

Yes, I am.

I’m going to talk about the church specifically in a minute, but creating a welcoming environment is not something that’s specific to church.  Countries - some of them, anyway - cities, towns, organizations, teams and businesses, most of them want people to feel like they are welcome and that they belong there.  A local business owner was telling me just the other day about how important this concept can be to a business. Everything from banks to grocery stores want people to think of themselves as “guests” not customers, “members” instead of clients, a part of the “[insert business name here] family.”  Creating a community around your product creates loyalty and a sense of trust towards the company and future products.  That’s good for business.

It also creates investment.  People want to invest their time, energy and money in something they feel they’re a part of.  And then the whole is made greater by our participation in it.  That’s fundamental to a sense of belonging, isn’t it?  It’s not just that you fit in because you’re just like everyone else or even that you like everyone else or you like the ideas or goals of the group.  It’s also that you feel that you, with your own uniqueness and gifts, contribute something that impacts the greater community and is, hopefully acknowledged and appreciated by the rest of the community.

So I think the strength of the community is in the balance between what its members put in (whatever that may be) and what they get out (whatever that may be).  There’s lots of variables, it’s much more complicated and I don’t really know anything about socio-economics, but still, that seems to make sense, even if it’s somewhat simple and idealistic.  Of course, it can also all be manipulated for gain, rather than balance.  That, some would argue, is just good business, too: profit is what’s important, profit for you paid for by others.

But it isn’t good for building community.  Community is built around everyone profiting, in a way, so let’s get back to churches being welcoming.  Churches, I think, like many communities, sometimes waffle between what they want to offer to people and what they want people to bring.  And when I say that, I mean what they think they need to offer people and what they think people should bring.  That thinking is understandably rooted in the perspective of evangelism (even if we’re not so good at evangelizing), the idea that we, the church, have God and we’d like to share the Good News with you.

But what if we saw each other as an opportunity to encounter God, not just share God?  What if we took these words of Jesus to the disciples as being applicable to everyone, not just disciples: “whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Matt. 10:40).  I believe we come from God and that God is in each of us and in all creation in the love that we share.  How can we not think that every encounter with another person could be an encounter with God?  How, then, could we not be open to the gifts they bring, the thoughts, ideas and skills they bring that may challenge us or bring us peace?  How could we not want to share ourselves with others the same way?

And this isn’t about acting selflessly.  There is a reward.  When we welcome someone simply as a child of God, even with the smallest action of love (Matt. 10:42), there is reward: the first step in relationship.  The steps that follow bring their own rewards.  And dangers.  The urge to have our own way and impose ourselves on others is strong.  But keeping God - that is, love - at the heart of it, rather than ourselves, can bring mutuality rather than dominance, and that’s a key to community.

Matthew puts these words of Jesus about hospitality and welcome at the end of his instructions to the disciples, right before he sends them out to be, well, “Jesus” to others.  He’s told them what they need to do, who to go to, what to expect (it’s not all good), and reminded them that his presence isn’t meant to bring the kind of peace they’d expect.  He knows that there will be conflict from his actions and his teaching, he knows that there’ll be division and he means for it to cross the existing familial structures of society because recognizing that we’re all children of God is something deeper.

It’s something deeper than a handshake, a comfortable seat and a coffee bar in the lobby.   It’s deeper than sitting in the same room together or singing hymns everyone likes.  It’s deeper than just saying what people want to hear.  It’s an encounter with God.

The world needs both of us, Pastor

Well, right off the bat, the title’s not correct, really.  The world needs all of us.  We’re all connected, all needing to honour our related-ness, all needing to recognize we are part of the same family, like it or not sometimes. We’re all God’s children.  There’s no exclusivity in that.  But I’ll come back to that because I want to be specific for a minute.

I was pretty excited last week - I still am - because I recently wrote a column that elicited a response from another minister, a pastor of another denomination, one which takes a very different view than I do.  We all know that not everyone’s going to agree with everything we think, say or do, but we don’t always have the opportunity for dialogue.  So, thank you, pastor, for writing your’s as a column in response to mine.  It inspires me.

I wrote a column in which I challenged the understanding that Jesus is the only way to God.  Jesus is, indeed, my way - and may be yours - but I believe that we all come to the one God, however we understand that God, in different ways and, for some, that way may not be Jesus.  Specifically, I suggested an alternate way to interpret John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father but through me.”  Rather than meaning “me, Jesus,” I suggested that Jesus simply meant “me, as in The Way that I teach you to live, the way that is true and life-giving.”  

That is not “correct,” was the response.  Jesus is the only way to God and this message is exclusively for those “people who recognize that they are sinners in need of a Saviour.  Sinners need a Saviour, not a good example.”

Okay, well, we don’t agree.  I do have a little trouble with the language of “correct” and “exclusive” that I want to say a word about, but I would like to thank you for expressing a contrary opinion.  Because it’s just that.

I was fortunate to have a professor in seminary who reminded people that the Bible speaks to people how it speaks to them - that’s what makes it so meaningful.  I’m paraphrasing her a lot, but she said that we interpret God’s Word as it speaks to us and you can’t tell someone that their interpretation is wrong.  You can challenge it with a different one, you can suggest that it’s a misunderstanding or that it’s misguided based on context, historic or factual knowledge, but you can’t say that it’s wrong if it leads to what is true and life-giving, because that’s what the Bible is all about.  It’s why it still continues to be meaningful, not matter how much work it can be to understand it: what’s important is its truth, not its literalism.

You write, “is this message only for certain people?  Yes.  The Good News is only for people who recognize that they are sinners in need of a Saviour.  Sinners need a Saviour, not a good example.”  But you also say that “we have a sin problem.  Outside of Jesus, the entire human race remains in a state of sinful rebellion against God.”  If we are all sinners, is the Good News only for those who realize it?  I can’t agree with that.  I think the Good News is for all, particularly whether they realize it or not.

The thing is, we could debate at length about all the things we disagree about, but ultimately I think that we’re headed to the same place, just from different directions.  And when I say “headed to the same place,” I mean building communities of people who live God’s love in the world, trying to be better followers of The Way that Jesus teaches us with his life.  Even as I write that, I think but that’s just it: that’s my view of Jesus’ life. Your’s - equally valid - is the view from Jesus’ death.  Jesus died to redeem us from sin.  It’s Jesus death that brings salvation.

Sinners do need a Saviour, but we also need a good example to follow.  Or maybe that could be the other way round: we need a good example to follow, but we also need a Saviour.  The point is, we need both and sometimes we lean to the direction that speaks most clearly to us, most clearly of what is true.

All the more reason, I think, to refute the idea that Jesus is exclusive.  You suggest that “in all the gospels Jesus encounters hostility precisely because he was exclusive in his teachings.”  I think he encountered hostility because his message was distinctly inclusive, available to all and worthy of engagement.  Both Matthew (10:34) and Luke (12:51) record stories of Jesus talking about how he brings conflict and division.  That’s not because he’s exclusive, but because inclusivity brings engagement, difference of opinion, debate, the sharing (often forcefully) of our uniqueness.  I don’t think for a minute that Jesus thought those conflicts would be settled by victory for one and defeat for the other.  Rather, I think he wished the result to be growth and learning, the rebuilding of relationships and the restructuring of society on the basis of love, respect and grace.  In short, the kingdom of heaven here on earth.

We are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  Yes, maybe as you suggest, that image may be broken.  But I cannot agree with you that it “has been shattered like a mirror” and “is no longer functional.”  We may be broken, but our brokenness is healed by Jesus, by love, by grace, by death and by life.  We’re all God’s children, we come from God and we’ll find our way home to God.