Simple Beginnings

It’s the simplest things, sometimes.

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is September 30, a day also known as Orange Shirt Day. Most Canadians know the story told by Phyllis Webstad about how, when she was a child, she went to a residential school. Her Granny had bought a new orange shirt for her and when she arrived at the school it was taken from her and never returned. The story has become a symbol for all that was taken by the residential school system: culture, traditions, language, families, childhoods, lives. It’s become an inspiration for the sharing of stories and for honouring the experiences of survivors and those who didn’t, their families and their communities, and acknowledging the impact the tragedy has. Every child matters.

A shirt. It was just a simple shirt. Except it wasn’t, it was a precious gift from her Granny who was the centre of her life. It was a connection to the life she knew and loved, a connection broken when it was taken away. And it was just the first of many things to be taken away. Now the orange shirt, and its story, are a sign of the beginning of telling the stories, of sharing the truth that offers the hope of reconciliation.

The Gospel of John tells the miracle story of Jesus feeding a large crowd with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Then, a short while later, people from that same crowd follow him and ask him to do more to show that he’s the one sent by God. After all, they say, Moses fed their ancestors with bread in the wilderness. Jesus points out that it wasn’t Moses that did that, but God, from heaven. When they ask him to do the same, he tells them “I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”

It’s bread. Just plain, simple bread. Except it isn’t, it’s a precious gift from God who is the centre of Jesus’ life. The people were fed, their bodies nourished with the most basic of foods, but there was something beyond that, something that inspired the miracle in the wilderness with Moses and the miracle by the Sea of Galilee with Jesus, there was something that fed hearts and minds and spirits: God.

This is what Jesus offers them. It’s not Jesus pointing to himself, but to the divine spirit that’s in him and, in inviting us to that spirit, to see it in ourselves as well. When we connect with the spirit of life, our minds and hearts are energized with love, kindness and care and we are inspired to those same miracles of feeding hungry bodies. In other words, there is a wholeness to this gift of spirit that feeds the wholeness of our being: spirit, heart, mind and body. This is the gift of the bread Jesus talks about. It’s not just bread, it’s being Jesus, and in being Jesus, we are being bread to each other. 

A shirt that reminds us to listen to the stories of what was taken from others and bread that reminds us of what can be given to nourish them. Bread was not offered. The churches who ran the schools did not offer Jesus. What we can offer now is listening. We can offer truth sharing. It will be a long journey. We can offer bread.

It's there. Look closely.

I don’t know exactly why there’s ten Commandments or why those ten are the ones. It seems to me there are some other things that ought to have been included, but I wasn’t there at the time, so I didn’t have a say. Anyway, I don’t know for sure, but I have an idea.

I also don’t know if they were handed to Moses by God the way the movie “The Ten Commandments” shows it, with the fiery finger of God writing on tablets of stone while Charlton Heston stands trembling nearby. Maybe Moses was inspired by the Spirit to carve them or maybe it’s just a great story about how the people received some really great sayings in a way that prompted them to consider them “cast in stone.” Like I said, I don’t know for sure, but I have an idea.

What’s most prompted my thinking this week isn’t even the perspective of what’s there. Rather, it’s what isn’t. Simply put, I have this question: why isn’t one of the original Ten Commandments “thou shalt not hate?” Seems to me we could use a little direction on that right now.

Thing is, what I do know is that’s exactly what the Hebrews were getting out there in the wilderness, a little direction. To Jews, they’re ten sayings or ten words. They weren’t called “commandments” until the Geneva Bible in the 16th century. Then the King James Version picked it up and it became, as it were, cast in stone and, since then, the common way to refer to them. But they’re not orders or regulations, they’re wise sayings that are about how to live well together. To be clear, they’re not about behaviour, but about living. As will be said many times later, what’s important is what’s at the heart of them.

Life. That’s what’s at the heart. And what gives life: love, grace, respect, kindness, honour, trust, justice. These are the things that give life. Hate is destructive. It breaks things. It breaks people and relationships. It breaks wonder and imagination, creativity and construction. It corrodes living things. So, again, why isn’t there a “thou shalt not hate?”

Well. There is. At the heart of things. Take away all the “thou shalt nots” (there’s a lot of those) and the “thou shalts” and at the heart of things is what gives life. From the very beginning, God gives life. However you know God - God is the name I’ll use - God is the source of life, the spirit of creation. God is the energy of being. God is love and all those other things that bring life. So, right from the start, these ten sayings begin with “there is God” and then speak of our relationship with God. There’s one God, don’t try and replace God with idols, be sure to take sabbath time to rest with God.

Then, what gives life to our relationships with each other and the world around us. Take “you shall not murder,” for example. We can parse that to death and argue about kill versus murder and what’s justifiable and all, but what’s the positive expression of that? It’s “love life, honour it and keep it safe.” That’s the heart of it.

The point of the ten sayings is to provide a framework for a lost and broken people to renew and rebuild themselves into a community, to give them a new life together in relationship with the source of life, with each other and with themselves. Love does that.

What's in it for me?

Perhaps I’m being cynical.

In fact, it’s pretty much the dictionary definition of cynical, but it sure seems to be a pretty common theme these days: what’s in it for me? It may be subtle, it may even be stated, but the tendency to individualism and what we can get from life for ourselves seems to pervade a lot of things. So often success seems to hinge on what can be acquired, how much of it and at what little cost.

I wonder if it wasn’t a fractured, individual centred world that became so broken that it inspired the story of Noah. Remember the story from Genesis? God decides the world is too evil, too broken to fix in any other way, so God decides to wipe it all away in a great flood, saving one family and two of every animal in order to start again.

You may remember it differently. We tend to make it a story for Sunday school children, a story of cuddly animals all warm and cozy on an ark, getting along just fine and floating on a gentle sea. The sun comes out, they all get off the ark in a green and pleasant land and everything is just great again under a rainbow.

Except it isn’t. And that’s not how the story really goes. It’s horrific, brutal and disturbing and, in the end, the passengers in the ark disembark with only a promise of a new creation. But it’s a huge promise: a covenant with God.

God blesses the family of Noah and, as one would expect, encourages them to be fruitful and multiply. God promises that this great destruction of creation won’t happen again and offers the promise of life and God’s presence in it always and forever. And God makes this covenant with all living things. Yes, don’t forget that part: all living things. The symbol of that covenant is a rainbow and God promises to remember the covenant each time it appears.

I think that’s the really meaningful part of the story. God offers a covenant. Not a deal or a contract, or a treaty or an agreement, or a bargain or an arrangement. None of those things. A covenant. What could that mean for us today?

What if we could understand that the point of the covenant is what it creates? It’s not about the individual party or the return on their investment. Rather, each party to the covenant brings themselves to it, all that they are, and helps create a new thing: a community, a wholeness to which everyone belongs, from which everyone benefits, and through which everyone can live and thrive.

The story tells what God brings to the covenant. But what does the rest of creation bring? What do we bring? God offers God’s true self: life. Doesn’t creation, too? Couldn’t we offer our true selves? Remember, what was carried by the ark through to the new creation is that we are created of the divine spirit, in the image of God. Like all that was created, we too are good.

The rainbow calls us to remember that. It’s a sign of diversity and inclusivity, of the connectedness of all things, of the wholeness of all that is. It’s not just seven colours, but every shade of the spectrum, seen and unseen, connected to each other in one great community.

A Leap of Faith

The Fall. That's what most Christian traditions call the story in Genesis when all is perfect in creation until the devil, disguised as a snake, convinces Eve to eat the apple from the forbidden tree of knowledge. Eve gives into the temptation and then seduces Adam into eating it, too, and before you know it, they're naked and ashamed and on their way out of the Garden of Eden. It's the Original Sin, the one that establishes our guilty, sinful nature, the one that casts us out from the perfectness of Eden into, well, whatever this is. The sin that makes the sacrifice of Jesus necessary. And, don’t forget, it's all the woman's fault.

Or so we’ve been told. Is that really how the story goes? Is that what it means? Or is that the doctrine talking? That's centuries of  "Christian" interpretation and church teaching that emphasizes temptation, sin, guilt, fear and all those great things, not to mention the patriarchal society of the church founders.

Maybe it's time, like it has become so often, to revisit the story, not the interpretation.  What if The Fall wasn't a fall at all, but a Leap? A Leap of Faith.

The story doesn't make the snake the devil, for starters, nor is the snake evil, just crafty or cunning (and not necessarily in a bad way). At most, the snake is a “satan” in the traditional biblical sense, that is, it’s a tempter. The snake makes a case for eating the fruit. Eve considers it and makes a reasoned decision. "She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate" (Gen. 3:6). There's no seduction, no coercion. Adam makes a choice, too. And their choices bring them awareness. It also brought them some fear, but was it fear that they'd done something wrong or were they simply afraid and anxious in that way we all are when something is suddenly different and the future becomes unknown and unpredictable?

Those choices have consequences, but I can't help wondering that God knew what was going on all along. Maybe we needed to acquire freewill, maybe we already had it, but we needed to use it in a way that had consequences in order to grow. And God wants us to grow.

What if, Adam and Eve being created in the image of God and of the earth, God provided the opportunity for them to make a choice - their own choice - one that was a leap of faith into their own being? What if God wasn’t afraid of them becoming self aware, but God inspired it? Maybe Eden wasn't "lost," it was left, maybe even out grown, so that we could have a garden of our own and participate in this creation, freely, experiencing life. And death. And love and fear, temptation and grace, sorrow and joy.

What if the story is just that, a story. The truth that’s at its heart is that we are of God and the earth, that we have our own garden to live in and the choices we make can either distance us from God or bring us closer to God - the source of life, the spirit of being, the love of relationship. We’ve struggled with that, with what might be good choices, and we’ve moved further away from the God, the source of life. We’ve even neglected the sacredness of our own garden and our relationship with it.

So along comes Jesus - and others, too - showing us how to embrace the divine again, to honour the earthly, to live in love. Leap or fall, that’s where I’d like to land.

A Symbol of Something More

Imagine, for a minute, that you’re Jesus.

Now, I know that I frequently talk about how we are Jesus, that the spirit of Jesus is alive in the world because it’s alive in us. I’ve said the life of Jesus is meant to show us how the divine spirit and earthly humanity that is Jesus is in all of us, and Jesus is showing us how to reconnect with the divine spirit and live it into the world. I even called it “Jesusing” because Jesus is a verb. I’ve talked about that at length elsewhere, but that’s not what I mean this time.

Imagine you’re Jesus back in the day. Imagine the world of Jesus, if you can, that would have been challenging, to say the least. A 1st century life wouldn’t have been easy to live in that part of the world. Roman oppression was just the cap on an already difficult life. Jesus spent his time with the marginalized, those who found themselves broken and hurting, the poor and sick, struggling through each day. And don’t forget the sinners. Jesus spent a lot of time with people judged by religion and society to be cast out for their sins, whatever those sins maybe.

So you collect around you a small group of ordinary, everyday people who live in that world. They follow you, learn from you and work with you, even live with you. And then, one day, you ask them “who do you say that I am?” One of them answers “you’re the messiah, the son of the living God.”

Okay, so they’ve learned something. This is great, so you go on to explain what’s happening next, how it’s going to be a tough road ahead, people will turn away from your message of love and grace, and the religious authorities, in particular, will feel so threatened, they’ll have you killed. And then, just when you thought they understood you were the messiah, that same follower tries to rein you in and stop you from what you’re doing. Sigh. It’s like he got the label right, but not the content.

Look, you say, it’s a real temptation to be that old-time messiah that raises an army, goes to war, overthrows the oppressor, defeats all our enemies and makes the country great again, just like in the good old days, but that’s not what this messiah brings. This isn’t about the power of one, but of everyone, it’s not about power over, but power with, it’s about relationship, not control. And that journey’s going to be challenging, there’ll be struggles and suffering and hurt, just like life, but it will be worth it because we’ll be doing it together. We’ll build community, with love and grace, and it’ll be just like … it’ll be just like heaven on earth.

Now. You think, what’s a good symbol of that journey? Something heavy and awkward, something that’s difficult to carry, something representing the burdens of this life that we can overcome together, something so dark and sinister that it will represent all that love can overcome, because the love that is God can even outlast death. So you say, look, it’s like carrying a cross. Yes, I know it’s a symbol of the worst that our oppressors can do. But we can carry it together, we can make the burdens lighter and make a better world and we can do it together. Together. 

Who do you say I am?

There’s a Jesus meme that’s been going around for awhile. I don’t know for how long or where it came from originally. It sometimes has different pictures, but always Jesus and a group of people. The text goes like this.

And Jesus said to the theologians, “Who do you say that I am?”

They replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma of which we find the ultimate meaning in our interpersonal relationships.”

And Jesus said, “… What?”

Sorry theologians, no offence meant. It’s just a funny take on that scene in the gospels when Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is. They have a few answers - John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah or one of the prophets - and then Jesus asks them who they say he is. Peter answers that he’s the messiah. Jesus blesses him for giving the right answer, there are fireworks, a marching band plays, there’s confetti and a parade. 

Kidding. That’s as ridiculous as the joke about the the theologians. Jesus does seem to indicate that he’s right, but there’s none of the other stuff. 

I wonder, though, if Peter’s anymore “right” with his answer than the theologians. We certainly celebrate him as giving the correct answer, divinely inspired and all, but there ought to be a followup question, just like with the theologians: what do you mean by that, Peter?

In Jesus’ day, as today, there likely would have been some very different ideas of what the messiah would look like, sound like and act like. Maybe the reason the people thought he was John or the return of Elijah or one of the prophets was because they recognized that in him. He looked and sounded like them, or at least the stories they knew about them, and they found that familiar. For many, it’s likely that Jesus didn’t act like the messiah they’d learned to expect, if, indeed, they’d learned exactly what the messiah would be. Some would have expected a warrior leading an army, some a great king, some may even have hoped for a humble, peaceful, inspired preacher who taught love and lived everything he taught. The point is, “messiah” is just a label until you unpack it.

And how do you? I think that’s one of the great things about this story. I imagine Jesus asking the disciples what others are saying and the disciples are happy to answer what they’ve heard. After all, they’re simply reporting what they’d been told. But then, Jesus asks what they think. I bet there was quiet for a minute or two, maybe a few sideways glances, pensive looks, maybe even a few incomplete sentences as they try to formulate an answer. And then Peter answers “the messiah.” Imagine Jesus then saying “what does that mean to you, Peter?”

I think that’s the question for all of us. Sure, we know what others have said, what we’ve been told, even what we learned in Sunday School or Bible Study, and we for sure know what Peter answered. But ultimately, we need to ask ourselves the same question: who do I think Jesus is? And if your answer is the messiah, then what does that mean to you?

I wonder. If Jesus had asked Peter what “messiah” means to him, I wonder what he would have said. Whatever answer he gave, I bet Jesus just said “okay, I’ll show you. Watch and learn.”

The Jesus You Know

I call it “the stained glass Jesus.”

You probably know what I mean. The Jesus that appeared in old stained glass windows, solemnly looking ahead or with eyes raised heavenward or benevolently gazing  at the disciples or some other biblical character. A mostly benign figure, unsmiling, but still kindly, the very essence of divine perfectness. The Jesus that goes so well with soaring arches, high ceilings, polished wood and tall spires. The Jesus of tradition. The Jesus who reminds us of where we’re going (we hope).

There's nothing wrong with that Jesus. I love that Jesus. He speaks to me. Sometimes.

But I also love the very human Jesus who I think laughed and played, probably told a good joke, smiled a lot and wasn't always perfect. To me, that Jesus — down to earth, rough and unpolished, flawed and conflicted — goes well with the world we live in.

I love that Jesus. He speaks to me.

This is the Jesus in Matthew 15:21-28 who tries his best to ignore a Canaanite woman pleading for help, and then, when she won’t go away, he informs her that he's not here for her, he's here for “the lost sheep of Israel.” It’s not fair to take the children’s food and feed it to dogs, he says. Yes, Jesus said that, according to Matthew. Apparently short-tempered and exclusive, this Jesus doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with her.  So she points out that even the dogs get crumbs from their master's table. All she wants is what might be a "crumb" to Jesus, the healing of her daughter. Jesus acknowledges her faith and heals her daughter.

Now, before you’re tempted to dismiss this as “not the Jesus I know,” fake news or, worse, justification for excluding others (definitely not any Jesus I know), consider why the author of Matthew might think their audience needed to hear this kind of a story.

Connect this scene with the one before it, in which Jesus challenges the pharisees' criticism of the disciples not observing the appropriate cleanliness rituals. It's not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, but the words that come out of it, he says, challenging both tradition itself and the use of it to hurt and exclude. Then Matthew gives us a demonstration of that by having Jesus cruelly reject this woman's pleas just because she’s Canaanite, a traditional enemy of Jews. Matthew wanted their audience to feel the hurt of the woman, and they would have. And her power, too.

The point isn’t just the action, but the result: Jesus learns. And if the very human Jesus can learn that God is for everyone, then why shouldn’t you and I? The crowds have followed him everywhere, the pharisees challenge and test him, there are so many sick to heal. And there are the prejudices and traditions he grew up with as "a good and faithful Jew." If Jesus can learn and grow, then so can we, can't we?

Sometimes you have to break a window to be able to see clearly.