The fourth week of Easter is always “Shepherd Sunday”, in all three lectionary years!!

(Those compilers of the Lectionary must have really liked this metaphor of God and of Jesus!)

This Year B version of Shepherd Sunday uses as its texts,   John 10:11-8 and Psalm 23. You can find them(and the passage from Acts)  at this link: http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=89#gospel_reading

It makes life as a preacher a bit challenging though…. how many times can you preach on ‘dumb, ornery sheep’ without it getting, well, repetitive??    This time last year, our interim minister, Rev. Ron, was off on sick leave, and I stepped in to preach…”Shepherd Sunday”, so I’ve already done the “sheep are stupid, and we’re the sheep” sermon.  I don’t think I should do it again so soon, do you?!  So here I sit, Friday morning, asking myself what I shall discover in the texts this year.  The danger, for someone with a very low threshhold for boredom (that’s me), is to seek novelty for novelty’s sake, rather than “host the text” long enough for deep wisdom to emerge in our mutual encounter.

I used that phrase last week “hosting the text.”  It’s a gift from a friend and colleague from BC, Rev. Ed Searcy, who attributes it to his mentor, Walter Brueggemann, one of my favourite authors on the interpretation of Scripture. ”Hosting” these texts for a few weeks has helped me to appreciate the beauty of the cadences of the  23rd Psalm, and its power to speak into the Shadowed, Death Valleys a word of confidence in God.

The Gospel reading it seems to me is a double layer cake (rich dark chocolate, with subtle hints of coffee, and red wine).   Although John situates this “I am” statement of Jesus in themiddle of his teaching and healing ministry, and therefore before his death, it is really a word of ‘confidence in God’ (like the Psalm), spoken to the small, embattled, newborn, community of John in the years after  Jesus’ death, and also likely after all hell broke loose in Jerusalem, Judea and Palestine in the wake of the Roman destruction of the city, temple and any last pockets of Jewish (and new Christian) resistance to Roman rule.  Those were tough times, they were fraught with anxiety and danger. Followers of Jesus had no friends to protect them from Rome, or from the continuing Jewish religious movement.  Where would they go? Was Jesus still worth following in this climate of persecution?

In this context, the promise that the risen Christ is one who has already laid down his life to keep God’s Dream of abundant life available to all, takes on fresh potency.  God’s Dream is worth the agony for them, as it was for Jesus.  (This is NOT about Jesus paying some hostage price, but simply living passionately a dream, and a love for God and God’s people so intently that he would  spend his life for this passion and dream.)  Resurrection is only powerful if people somehow experience the power of life over death and fear for themselves, and these words are meant to help that first community, and ours,  ‘connect’ with that power of life over fear and even death,  the power of Love and Life that outlasts crucifixion and funerals, that we experience in the aftermath of the death of a loved one,  or even a revered one, such as a Martin Luther King.

Shepherd was a metaphor that worked for Judeo-Christians in the first and second century. Perhaps it’s not such a ‘realistic’ analogy in our day, so we have to work a little harder to get the fullness of its meaning and potential.  “I will never leave you, or lead you astray” is at the core of this message from the risen Christ to them, and to us.     If that’s what it means, I’m okay after all, that “it’s that Shepherd again!” He’s a welcome, presence after all.

See you Sunday, or on the comments page!

The Moderator of the United Church of Canada, Mardi Tindal, will be hosting a live interactive webcast at 3pm Eastern on Sunday.  You can find the link to the webcast here: http://www.united-church.ca/earthday.   The page also includes links to sites that suggest various ways to rise to the Earth Day challenge of living with respect in creation.

After the Service, the cross stood proud and joyful on our lawn for the rest of the day.

Thanks, Tom Kingsbury, for this photo.

But we didn’t stay jubilant for long; we “walked through Holy Week”, marking the passing time of each day, using the Gospel of Mark as our guide. We watched and listened as Jesus  taught about the Dream of God on Monday and Tuesday, and Wednesday. We helped to prepare his Passover meal in the upper room, setting out haroset, bitter herbs, lamb, an egg, parsley and salt water, unleavened bread, and wine.  We went with Jesus to the garden of Gethsemane to pray on Thursday evening, we watched Jesus get arrested for talking about God’s Dream, and be dragged off to the Temple prison, and then to be handed over to Pilate to be executed. The choir sent shivers down our spines with their striking, poignant – yet- hopeful anthem “Christus Paradox.” And we left the sanctuary in quietness, moved.

What moved us? Participation of our full community in an act of worship? Yes. Great singing, and helpful visual aids to the service? Yes. The story itself, told with lots of action, and taste, and touch, and smell? Yes. I also believe we were moved by how like real life this ancient, middle eastern, almost mythical story is when you get close to it.  Moved because in that cross we saw our own crosses. Moved because we too know the taste of tears, the sting of hurtful words, the sense of powerlessness in the face of injustice, the easiness with which some life is  extinguished.  And I know for me, I was moved, because in the company of the community I serve,  I know I felt God close by.  That’s the only way such a horrible week – the metronomic inevitability of a politically expedient  execution – could possibly become ‘holy’.   When God and humanity, for a few heartbeats, recognize one another in the face of suffering love.

When I was a child, “Palm Sunday” was one of my favourite Sundays… children joined in the choir procession, we got to wave palm fronds (a decidedly romantic-exotic item in our Northern English parish), sing “Hosanna” at the top of our lungs.  It was the one Sunday  of the year where we kids were allowed to be heard as well as seen!  I think the sense of forboding of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey, just a week before his execution, was lost on most of us under the age of 12. We truly were part of a jubilant crowd having no thought or concern for what would follow in the days ahead.

But, Palm Sunday in my childhood parish was also the beginning of a weeklong marathon of Church services:

• “Stations of the Cross” on Wednesday night, (a Roman Catholic tradition in which parishioners walk around the church and stop to meditate and pray at various “stations” – graphic depictions of the events leading from the Last Supper to the placing of Jesus’ body in the tomb).
• Thursday was “Maundy Thursday” with its bizarre ritual of footwashing.  (“Maundy” from the latin “mandatum” meaning “command”, it’s a reference to Jesus telling the disciples  (John 13:32) why he washed their feet, as a sign of the servant-love of Jesus, which we too must exercise: “A new commandment I give you; love one another”). You may want to check out the sermon for March 11, 2012 “It begins with a Towel” http://www.cedarparkunited.org/2012/03/12/march-11-2012/
• “Good Friday” – a day drenched in sadness.  The Good Friday service was long, painfully so for a small kid, but nevertheless enthralling, graphic, tangible. While we read the version of the story from Luke in my home parish, Mark’s normal brevity is replaced by graphic bluntness in chapter 15. Mark even tells the time all the way through, “the third hour, the ninth sixth hour”… and so on.  When Jesus’ last words on the cross were read (15:37), the church bell rang slowly, nine times. Not another word was spoken, but a series of actions took place which spoke volumes:  the gold coloured altar cross was taken down and replaced with a very graphic ‘Crucifix’ complete with dying Jesus.  The organist played Stabat Mater  (an ancient hymn about Mary standing at the foot of the cross) while all the church banners were taken down, and women in the congregation covered all the statues (it was a Catholic church) with deep purple cloth. Even the baptismal font was emptied of its water, and draped in black cloth, something I found particularly sombre, full of forboding and dread.   We filed out of the church in silence, an unspoken rule that no-one conducted church business or gossip on the steps on this day.
• Good Friday was also a ‘day of fasting and abstinence’ in my tradition. We ate no meat, no treats, no dessert. We made (but did not eat) Hot Cross Buns, the cross symbolism self-evident, the spices symbolic of the spices used on Jesus’ dead body, the raisins symbolic of the blood he shed.
• Holy Saturday.  Was a long, draggy day, brightened only by eating the Hot Cross buns for breakfast. (In our house, still no meat on Holy Saturday).  Nothing happened that day until long after my normal bed-time, when we would be bundled back to church for the Easter Vigil, beginning at 10:30 pm, a service with lots of kneeling and silent prayer in a darkened church lit only by four small candles.  …Then…… ( What happens next belongs to Easter Sunday, so you’ll have to wait til next week for that!!)

The drama of Palm Sunday and Holy Week was powerful, visceral, evocative, dramatic, ‘liminal’ (hovering on the edges of holy and ordinary), and it had a profound impact on my faith, not only as a child, but I suspect also as an adult.  Although my understanding of God’s role in the ‘passion of Jesus’ has undergone transformation, it is still a story central to who we are as followers of “the Way” of Jesus Christ.  I am grateful to have grown up in an era  and in a tradition that ‘walked’ so graphically through Holy Week.

Perhaps all this liturgical drama was unnecessarily sombre?   I’ve wondered, but I don’t think so.  Life isn’t easy, while it has its measure of joy, delight, growth and wholeness,  it is as full of chaos, malevolence, injustice, hurt and hatred, suffering, grief, loss, despair.  This Gospel  narrative of Jesus’ last week, is the story of the hard side of human living. Perhaps this is the hardest part of the Gospel, one that on our best days we wish wasn’t there at  all, but it’s Gospel – “Good News” -  for the worst days.

At Christmas we celebrated the birth of Jesus as this miracle of God-with-us.   This week’s narrative tells us  that God-With-Us  will walk to the gates of Hell with us, will suffer injustice with us, will hurt physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally with us. God-With-Us. No Matter What.  It’s worth walking with God-With-Us, right through the palm-waving throng  best days, right through the last meal and betrayal  worst days, the dying days, the empty silent Saturdays, because when we do, we will, we most assuredly will, find ourselves on the threshhold of Easter…… but that’s next weeek!

Last Sunday (March 18th) I preached on the John 3:14-21 text,  (the sermon: “Please can we have our Gospel back?”  is on the web at this link: ) and promised an explanation on this blog of some of the translation and textual issues.  Keep reading this post and you’ll find them here. But first a preamble.

Why the sermon title? “Please can we have our Gospel back?” is, in case you were wondering, polemic.  Even though I’m new to the role of congregational minister at Cedar Park, we’ve known each other long enough for me to be blunt once in a while (okay, a lot of the time!).   I am to be counted among those people who find much of what passes for Christianity in North America to be narcissistic, narrow minded, prosperity-oriented, bigoted, fear-driven.  So much so that I can sympathize with many of you who get a little nervous about the word “Christian.”   Quite a few years ago now, I decided that my model for being a ‘progressive’ Christian in North America would be the little child who stuck a finger in the dyke to stop the waters flooding the fields.   I am determined not to cede our land to a form of Christianity that threatens to overpower our culture with its narrow-mindedness.  This means that for me I will continue to use the moniker “Christian” even if it means I have to follow it immediately with a series of adjectives to distance myself from restrictive, exclusive religiosity.

So, when the lectionary gifts us with “John 3:16″ I know I have a task on my hands:  is it possible to rescue this incredible Message of limitless, self-giving Love, from those who use it as a fence, and a battering ram.  I WANT the Gospel of this passage back!!  I want to be able to give it back to those who gather at CPU on Sundays, and those who ‘watch us via the web’, who join us, hoping that God has Good News for us.

Let me first give you the verse in question, in the KJV, since this is the one most of us learned by heart:

“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish but have everlasting life.”

Now to promised word studies which I didn’t do in the sermon.  John3:16 has a few words that have not one possible meaning, but many.  1.The first on the list is “so” (KJV and NRSV translate the Greek ΟυΤω (outo) as “so”.  The trouble is, “so” has itself changed meaning in the 400 years since the KJV was printed.  Back in 1611 ‘so’ normally meant “in this way”, rather than the meaning it often has now, as an emphatic of degree, as in  “She loves her daughter ‘soooooo’ much….”.   For us to get a true sense of the opening phrase now, we need to translate outo   as “God loved the world in this way”.   This sets us up to read the next as a description of ‘the way God loves the world.”

2.”the world” sounds easy enough, until we realize that in John’s Gospel “the world” is code.  For the community of John, living in a time of great turmoil and persecution, from both Rome and from the Jews,  “the world” was code for all that was hostile to the newborn community of Jesus’ followers.  Perhaps to put it in terms we can grasp, it’s as if John writes “God loved all who are hostile, who are enemies, who haven’t a clue about Jesus, who are scared by his message, who’ve never heard his message, all who follow the rules of Empire……..”  -  Well, doesn’t that put a spanner in the works! God’s love is shown ‘in this way’ to all who DON’T get it!!  This isn’t the way God shows love to ‘insiders’, but to ‘outsiders’.

3.”gave” is right.  The Greek verb is not “to send”,  but rather the verb “to give” as one would give a birthday gift to a loved one. It’s a verb of love, intimacy and grace.   This is important when you see that in some parts of the Christian tradition, there is a sense that God “sent” Jesus to die on a cross because that ‘nasty world’ needed him to atone for all their nastiness.  Try imagining what it feels like to see this little verb ‘gave’ as a new parent holding out a newborn baby to you so that you too can hold that baby close to your heart.

4.”his only begotten son” is also right on.  The Greek takes two phrases, “the son, the only begotten”.  Again, imagine the intimacy of this statement.  A loved, only child.  We are not being set up for a contractual transaction, but for a beautiful love-scene.

5. “believe”.  A tricky little word because it can mean so much to so many.  There’s a long-standing tradition that “believe” is static. You’re presented with a series of propositions (many of them incredible!), and you are then asked to choose “do you believe this lot, or not?” The Greek noun/verb pistis/pisteuein is used a lot by Paul, and very rarely by John, so we have to be careful not to assume John means the same as Paul.  In John, the verb isusually one of “choosing to trust”  – so perhaps it means here “anyone who chooses to trust God”, which is ever so slightly more expansive in possibility than someone agreeing to a set of propositions.

6. “everlasting life”  or “eternal life”.  After two thousand years of Christians spending a lot of time on ‘the afterlife’, ‘heaven’ (or hell), ‘salvation’ or ‘damnation’, we would be forgiven for thinking that this term refers to what happens to the ‘believer’ after she dies.  It doesn’t.  In John 10:10, Jesus speaks of his coming so that ‘everyone may have life and have it abundantly’  – fullness of life is how we often refer to this.  The meaning in 3:16 is similar,  a life that is full.  This life, that is full, complete, or as I described it in the sermon: as if one instant is filled with eternity.   You may recall what it felt like in the first flush of true love, to spend what you thought was 3 seconds holding hands on the porch, only to discover that 3 hours have flown by in one another’s company.  Conversely, that a life-time of  loving can be so completely summed up when your beloved looks at you on your 86th birthday and says “I love you.”  There’s little doubt that for John,  ‘eternal life’ meant NOW as well as in the future, after death. BOTH/AND.

I’ll leave it to the sermon for you to see how, for me, this one verse is not a message about judgment, and ‘who’s in’ in a limited schema of salvation. But rather it is “GOSPEL” – Good News of the self-giving love of God for ‘the world’ -all of it.  The choice to trust is the only limitation placed in or on this verse.  God’s self-giving love is for all time, for all things, completely.  When we let go of limitation, and trust that God’s love is for all time, for all things, completely, we get one of those timeless instants of recognition that eternity, and love are now and for always.

It just takes some serious unpacking of baggage to see this beautiful treasure box, wrapped in the tissue of faith, ready for us to open.

God Blesses!!!

For this reason we at Cedar Park this year, will ‘pay attention’ to various dimensions of the Lenten Season, and how these dimensions can add richness to our journey of faith.  We’ve created a “Lenten Activity Calendar”  and booklet, suitable for all ages, which we’ll be handing out to the KidZone at Church on Sunday. Each week of Lent ‘pays attention’ to a different theme: family, self, creation, others, our spiritual wellbeing, God’s Blessings, and finally to the journey of Jesus.  If you don’t want to be left out of this tool for paying attention, you can download a copy here.

Back in the day, my New Testament professor bluntly proclaimed to us aspiring preachers of Good News,  “Have at this one. It didn’t happen, y’know.”  In all likelihood, the events as Mark describes them probably didn’t. When you start looking carefully at this text, filled as it is with tiny clues only Poirot could decipher, you can see allusions to the books of Daniel, 2 Kings, Deuteronomy, Malachi, and more. To original hearers/readers of the Markan text, many would have seen/heard the echoes/shadows of other ‘theophanies’ – manifestations of the holy in the ordinary world, and particularly that of Elijah’s fireball bright entry to heaven in 2 Kings 2.  So we have to ask, “What was Mark up to?”

In a nutshell, Mark is telling us – again – that Jesus Christ is Son of God (Mark 1:1),  or put another way, Jesus  is an anointed one of God,  a “messiah”, and that what he proclaimed is nothing less than the dream of God, here and now.  After telling this mountaintop story where earth and heaven touch in conversation, Mark drags us unwillingly down the mountain,  down the painful pathway to betrayal, trial and brutal execution.  But before we get there, Mark wants us to understand that while Jesus of Nazareth was one among thousands who were victim to this excruciating penalty for crossing swords or words with the Roman empire, he is much is more than ‘one among many’, according to Mark.  His way of walking his talk, to death and beyond if necessary, was unique, and Mark needs his readers to ‘get it’ that Jesus has God’s blessing for his message and his ‘way of life’. In Mark’s words “Jesus, the Messiah, child of God.”

And his way of showing us that is in this tale of ‘transfiguration’ – a long latinate word which means the complete transformation from an ordinary to a more beautiful state.  You could read Mark 9: 1-16 and paraphrase it (VERY loosely!) as  Mark saying to us, “You may think this Nazarene rabbi, all ratty hair, worn sandals, and calloused hands, is ordinary, or if not ordinary, just vaguely special. Well let me show you what God thinks of him…,tada!! …….Transfigured. See him for a moment in this dazzling state and realize who he is.  Wonder-full.

But does it have anything to do with us, today?  Desmond Tutu says of Transfiguration that it happens all the time, and in the strangest of places: from the ‘transfiguration’ of winter brown grass into lush bright green of spring grass,  to the ‘transfiguration’  of a white defender of ‘apartheid’ into a ‘brother whom God loves just as much as God loves me’.   I was deeply moved by Tutu’s capacity (in God has a Dream,  3-9) to take this long word, from a weird story, and turn it into a word that is promise filled, and salted with hope.

Take a moment or two this week to look at something ordinary (or ugly) and imagine what God perceives it to be, transfigured into something glorious and beautiful and hopeful.

Let us know what you discover by posting a comment below.

Now, to the text at hand. It comes from 2 Kings 5: 1-15.  This was a period in the life of the people of God when all their attempts to ‘be like everyone else in the region’ were falling flat.  Larger powers with more might, more soldiers, more firepower, were threatening on all sides. Among those threats, to the North, was Aram.  At first blush the story seems inconsequential, personal, a side-plot, and to some degree it is, unless we see it as one way to establish the ‘authority’ of the new prophet Elisha, who had (literally) assumed the mantle of that great prophet of the age, Elijah.

As so ably portrayed in our dramatic reading yesterday, it’s a mighty strange way to show Elisha’s authority. He says and does next to nothing in the story. Sends a couple of messages, but that’s about it.  But oh, what those messages do!!  The first is typically Old Testament prophetic; he tells the feckless King of Israel to stop throwing a hissy fit over something that he can’t do anything about!  “Power to heal doesn’t rest with you, Majesty, but with God!”  In similar fashion he takes Naaman down a few pegs too.  Naaman – the Mighty Warrior was used to people jumping to attention when he so much as coughed, so to be virtually ignored by this “man of God” doesn’t sit well with the leprous legionary.  Nevertheless, in two text messages, Elisha manages to lift the story into the realm of the mysterious Creator-Redeemer God, whose influence isn’t bounded by politics or geography, or by human notions of ‘power’.   The drip of water from healed hands signals the infinited capacity of God to mend, restore, heal, make new.

That’s worthy of our attention, don’t you think?