How should God act?

How should God act? Many of us have from time to time wondered if we have believed in vain. We find ourselves in hard spots and in dark times and we wonder, sitting in whatever prison we are locked up in… and we question whether it was worth it or not.  This is where John the Baptizer certainly was when he heard what Jesus was teaching and preaching and doing. Jesus wasn’t acting like the Messiah. He was acting far too weak and wimpy. The Messiah, once he was revealed, should be confronting all the people who were making life difficult for the chosen people kicking butts and taking names – preferably in that order. But Jesus wasn’t doing any of that. So he asked one of his followers to go and speak with Jesus to find out who Jesus really was. Had John made a major mistake? Did he back the wrong horse? He couldn’t help but wonder because he thought God wasn’t acting like himself.  

Advent gives us an opportunity to hear the voice of Jesus and to be more aware of his presence in our lives, both individually and corporately. We need to hear his voice and listen to what he is saying to us. Then we need to start being the people Jesus is calling us to be. This does not mean that we can think of ourselves as better (much less perfect) when comparing with other people; far from it! We are called to live within his will and to do his will in our everyday lives. And as we listen and try to do his will we need to open ourselves to the presence of the Holy Spirit that we would be filled with the strength to serve Christ in our neighbour and clothed with his love that we would make the world aware of how much God loves them. In essence, we need to hear, live, act.

Why is it important to do this? Because we tend to live with the idea in the West that the world is albeit slowly getting better, day by day, day after day. But is it really? We have a lot of technology that can help with life and do things for us but does it fundamentally change who we are as people? Will we ever see the secular utopia that we think we want? The future that God is building in his realm is very different from the one that the world thinks it is coming to. Even in the Church there are great demands made for the Church to be relevant and to “get with the times”. I would rather think that the Church – if it wants to be relevant rather than reactive to the latest trend in society – needs to be what God calls it to be: His own. The Church, in order to be relevant in our current society needs to speak and to demonstrate those things that are consistent with the nature of a holy and loving community because we are in relationship with a holy and loving God. Moreover, the Church needs to be reminded that salvation is a joy to be shared with the world and not just a prize to be won.

Isn’t this why Jesus told the sent disciple to go back to John and tell him that he needs to recognize the presence the kingdom; to know his presence in the world because the blind are gaining their sight, the lame are walking upright, the lepers are being cured, the dead are being raised to life and the Good news of the growing realm of God is being made known to those who desire it and need it. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me telling him to have some patience and wait… the realm of God will come, even if it does not come in the ways and means most expect it to and on human terms.

In this moment, are you willing to continue to believe and to be the person that God has called you to be, hearing his voice, living his life, and acting according to the leading of his Spirit? Are you willing to expect the unexpected from God and live it out? Are we as a church, willing to stake our common life and work to endure for the coming of the full version of the kingdom (in essence, heaven and earth 2.0)? Come and see him who is present in us and is with us, our Immanuel. Then go and share the joy of knowing him with others. And in the going, hear, live and act like God.              

... In line to see the King

This must be a Sunday for preachers. And I say that in light of who we have to focus on this Sunday in terms of the text: John, the one who baptizes. Which immediately makes me want to stop and ask, “Do you know a preacher when you see one. No doubt that you know a preacher when you hear one, but the rest of the time, would you know a preacher if you saw him or her?

The nation of Israel seemed to know him. The people had not heard such a voice nor had they seen such a sight in 400 years. The prophetic voice reverberated through the cities and towns. The people were drawn to this preacher and his wilderness pulpit, if for no other reason than he had to be seen and heard for one’s self. They came from all over the country to see this man out in the middle of nowhere who was boldly preaching and calling people to repentance – to their Wabush. This man who is dressed in a way that no one else would dress to show that he is different and determined; that he is not afraid to be who he is and to boldly proclaim the message he is sent to bring. This audacious preacher was nowhere near the places of preaching in the city or at the center of religious life. And like any popular preacher he made many glad and many more people mad with what he had to say.

Wherever the preacher John found sin, disorder and evil he confronted it boldly and with great passion. Whether it was in government, in religion or in everyday living he was willing to call people from their complacency to turn around, to see God, and to make their lives different. He did not preach solely a message of condemnation. After all, wouldn’t you run like a snake whose home is being burnt to the ground? Who blames the rat for wanting to get off the ship when it is sinking? The preacher John held out the standard to which all of us are called to live by God and challenged his generation to live the way that God expects them to. It is important to confront sin and evil in our lives. It is also important that we have a standard that we can live up to not just to be told that we are bad and beyond help. John was, in a real sense a light in a dark place, a voice to call people to right living and a sign post to help others to find and know God. He helped people to know the presence of the Messiah. Preacher John pointed his life and his preaching to show people the one true King.

That reminds me… there will be line ups to see Santa Claus over the next few weeks. Who will be lined up to see the King when John points him out. Will we have the courage to seek his presence? Will we go to be with him and to follow him?

And what about us? Have I bothered to preach any of the six sermons that will get me fired? If not, am I doing my job where preaching is concerned? As you and I bring the presence of Christ into this world in this Advent, let us call people to turn around, to see God and to move into his presence. And let us make sure that as we do this, that we do it in genuine love of and for them. Let us come to people in deep humility and true tears know that what we have to offer them is the real presence of the King and his love for them.

Along with everything else you have to offer others, especially those you love, this Christmas offer the presence of yourself to others and in the process, help them to get in line to see Jesus. He came not only with good gifts. He came to offer us his “everything”. Give those you love the presence of Christ this Christmas. Whose going to line up first? Who can hear his voice?

Coming home - Maranatha!

It has been said that, “you can never go home again.” And while there is some truth in such a statement, it also falls short where the Christian faith is concerned. There are lots of songs that we are going to hear in the coming weeks with phrases like, “I’ll be home for Christmas, you can count on me.” Christmas is more likely to register in bank accounts (pun intended!) than it is in the lives of the people around us. And many more will welcome the quiet of the week after Christmas because of the blitz that most of us have endured since All Saints Day. That is if they are not out to Boxing Day Sales, bravely hunting with the crowds for more bargains and treasures for another occasion including next Christmas. Somehow it seems as though we have tried to fill that emptiness we feel inside ourselves with everything the but the One presence we really need. That’s why I believe there are still lots of people who make the effort to go to Church services that one night of the year. People pause for a moment to see if there is something more to Christmas than what they have been able to find at Wal-Mart™. In some sense they are looking to go home again but have forgotten their ruby red, glass slippers!

If we are to come home again we need, as Church to believe and to know that the purpose of Christmas is to change lives; that the presence of Christ does make a difference in the world to enable change. And if change is still possible then that means life as usual will not be possible. But where does it all start? Believe it or not, it starts with you and me. We have to be willing like Isaiah to stop and see the coming King and his approaching kingdom. We need to be ready to live in the light. We need recognize that Christ is the light and that we are called to live in his light. This means we need to actively look for him not just passively peruse the glitz, glamour and glitter in front of us.

Isaiah demands that we see past all that the world has to offer to gain a fresh sight of what it is that God is calling us to so that we can be enabled to help God draw into this world the coming kingdom. We are called to take a step back and look at the big picture to see what God is doing in all the world and what God might do in the future so that we can be ready and participate in the things God calls us to do.

The coming of Christ into the world means that life in the Church cannot be business as usual. We are his hands, his feet, his face and his heart in the world. We are the ones who bring Jesus in to the places and spaces of our community. We cannot expect to live in the field of dreams anymore where we can build a building and expect people to come and fill it. We as the Body of Christ must reach out and be real with those around us so that we can draw them into Christ and into our fellowship.

This Christmas, in the midst of your business, remember to give the most important thing you can give – presence! His presence! Make his presence known for the sake of the world and the coming of his kingdom. He is coming home again and soon. Maranatha!

Are you coming or are you staying?

Where would you look for a powerful king? In a castle? On a boat? On a throne, dressed in dreadful splendor and wearing a crown of mighty splendor? Where would you look for your king? Would it be in a place of crying? Would you find him on a hill of pain and suffering; on a tree of agony and death? Where would you look for and find your king?

I have to admit that I was surprised when I realized where the Gospel was going to take us this week. Good Friday seems like it was so long ago and yet here is it in all of its brutal reality. The people who wanted him dead stand there now and observe the pain and suffering that has been inflicted. They acknowledge, however tacitly, that he is the king or more likely that he pretended to be the king and they challenge him to be great and terrible one last time. “He has saved others. Let him now save himself” some of the onlookers scoffed! Most of the crowd watched in silence as they stood by and did nothing. They leave that awful place beating their breasts and wonder, “Oh God, what have we done?” everyone including his own followers believe that this is the end of it all. All the hopes and dreams of the future are nailed to that terrifying tree with its victim. We haven’t fully realized yet that god in his Christ is on a mission and that this mission cannot be deterred, diverted or stopped by us. We can ridicule it. We can refuse to participate in it. But we cannot and will not stop the mission of God in Christ.

And as we stand there on that ugly little hill outside the city looking up we only begin to realize that our secret is out: that we aren’t the people that God wanted and created us to be. That we have become in a real sense the very opposite of what we were intended to be. In this king and in this little realm this is how God is going to draw us in and bring us back to him and to ourselves. Our hope does not live within ourselves except that it comes from acknowledging the mercy that only the king can provide. From his mercy he gives us grace and in that grace we find the peace he provides. And in know the king’s peace we find that hope and that life which is so freely offered. Those who live in denial, find it easier to stand there and mock the savagery we have inflicted while we fail to recognize the brutality we have become.

So as we stand there in the lowly, blood stained realm of our king… which will you choose? Will you go with him or will you stay behind with the mob? Your king makes this demand of you in this moment, “Are you coming or are you staying? It’s up to you. This is not a democracy. I am your king. Do you love me or do you reject me. Are you coming or not?” there will always be moments to be powerful – at least by human standards – and there will be moments to be impressive or to look intelligent. These are all fleeting, mere shadows of things.   

I welcome you to the throne. This is our king. Are you coming or are you going? You decide. 

Its the end... but not just yet!

Perhaps you have seen the large desk diaries that many of the clergy carry with them. I know that mine is very important to me and I cannot think of what I would do without it. I have carried one since the summer of 1990 when I was given my first one by a supervisor and was encourage to write everything I need to do and everything that I had done down on paper. It has helped me to do things and get things done. My calendar has even helped me to have the occasion rest on a day off and get me organized for an annual holiday. I’d like to think that my life because of this particular book is organized and helps me to be productive for the Church and therefore faithful in my priesthood to God.

And then I reminded that it is the end… but not just yet. I was recently reminded that the Church is what you have left after the building has burned down and the clergy has fled town. I often think of a particular moment in ministry when I walked into the local store to get things for New Year’s Eve and the little gathering we were planning with friends at their house. There was lots of fear that particular year around the turn of the century because of something known as Y2K. Remember the Y2K bug? People were discussing the heavy subject of the end of things, time in particular when I walked in the store. Of course when I was spotted, some said in a loud voice. “O look there is the Minister. Ask him!” One of the regulars came to me and asked the question they all want to know, “What’s the world coming to, sir?” In one of moments of clarity, I pulled off my cap and scarf and boldly pronounced, “An end.” The once bustling store, thrumming with enthusiasm and excitement fell suddenly quiet. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

Realizing I said something that could be earth shattering to the folks around me, I asked for a few minutes to go and get what was on my list and then I would come back to them and we would talk.  This gave me time not only to pray, furiously, it gave me time to organize my thoughts so that I might help these folks understand that thought things are crumbling, God is still with us. And having just come through the feast and were still in the season of Christmas I realized that something really powerful had happened. God’s salvation had come to us in the form of a child; someone who is small, is weak and who to most of the world anyway is hidden from plain sight. And look at what the Church has grown into. It has grown. There was a time in the life of the nation of Israel where the place of meeting was a tent. Yet we as humans fell the need and desire to manage things. And because we take charge the walls once soft and supple, allowing the Spirit to billow through have instead become stiff, rigid, calcified. The tent has filled with lots of furniture. And the Church builds its weight and height until it is unmanageable and is ready to topple in on itself.

Jesus calls to those who live in the rubble of this exiled age and invite them to follow him into a new way. A way that is not easily determined nor is it found with quick decisions or undemanding choices. Jesus offers the courage and the trust necessary to way a new way of life, a life that will in the face of the culture and society that we live in will face ridicule and persecution. And some of those who will pursue you will be those you would call family and friends. Yet, we to not walk this new path alone. Jesus walks the path with us. Jesus has promised that we will not be alone. He has promised that he will be with every step of the way. Whenever we gather in twos and threes for prayer in his name, he will be there. Whenever we gather to share in the bread and wine through thanksgiving, he will be there. When he is actively proclaimed by word and deed, he will be there. Whenever the least, lost and the last of his brothers and sister is served, it is him we serve. And we wait for the kingdom that is here and yet we are still waiting for it in full. Until then Jesus is with us and we are not, in the face of disaster, alone. That is in short, what I told those folks at the store more than ten years ago. I told them it was the end... but not just yet. He is with us and we are not alone no matter what date or time it is, no matter what the calendar says. Thanks be to God Christ is with us.  

God is making all things new

When I was last out to my home, I had to opportunity to go through the two neighbourhoods where I lived as a child. It wasn’t hard to tell that things were different from when I lived there. But then that was – relatively speaking – a long time ago. Of course there had been more development in the last 30 years. There were a lot of houses in the fields where my friends and I road our bikes and played. There are no more backyard rinks to skate on. No roar of the go-cart engines as we putted around our homemade track. There was no game of ball hockey out in the middle of the street. There were parents teaching their kids how to ride their bikes, chasing behind them as the rider learned to hold the balance. Families and individuals have come and gone from the neighbourhood. Some have grown up and moved away while others have died and still a few remain as if lingering and waiting for something. I fill in the people that I remember and fill in their place… how they sounded; the things they used to say and do. I remember the way things used to be.  

Things are much quieter now than I remember. To my eyes, things in the old neighbourhood have grown old and tried. Things have changed and we wish that they could have stayed the same, thinking that we could be forever here and forever young.  I wish that I could make it all new again. I wish I could walk down those familiar streets, seeing familiar faces and greeting friends. I wish I could go for one more ride with my dad to the local arena and score one more goal to be able to feel the thrill of it all. I wish I could make my family and friends young again and take away the pain and struggles that time has placed on them. I wish I could but I can’t. I wish I could do these things but I can’t. But God can. In fact he promises that he will make all things new.

This is why Christ came at Christmas and that is why we not only remember his death; we also proclaim his resurrection from the dead and his ascension to glory. In fact we celebrate that through this month – that Jesus is King and that he is coming again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead. Christ came to begin the process of the new life and the new creation. It is why he was found in a manger by shepherds and crucified by spiteful people who wanted a demonstration of power before they would believe the message, and though his death was the sign that he wasn’t able to deliver. But they were wrong, way wrong. They took Christ’s death as his defeat. It was the path Christ had to walk to free those who would believe from sin and death. We need to stop and realize this is going on today; that the new creation and the new life starts here and is still coming. God is still working out his new creation that Christ made possible through his incarnation. God still works to make all things new. Thanks be to God that he does and that he calls you and into this work with him.    

I just wanna be a sheep - and a saint too!

When I was leading a ministry to and of children a few years back, traveling across Southern Ontario, I would teach the following song to children (and adults too!):


I just want to be a sheep, bah, bah, bah, bah

I just want to be a sheep, bah, bah, bah, bah

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

I just want to be a sheep, bah, bah, bah, bah


I realize that being a sheep these days is probably a negative thing. It is used for people who just follow the rest of the flock and never critically consider what is going on. No… in this day and age everyone is expected to be a hero or heroine; a person who is master of the destiny and who takes orders and nonsense from no one. Everyone has to be super. And you cannot be super if everyone else is super. And this is as true inside the Church as it is outside of the Church.

Now I not suggesting that everyone give up the hopes and ambitions, fall back in line with bowed heads behind the Shepherd, unless you find yourselves in the position that you need to. In fact I would encourage us to ask and try to imagine what this world would be like if the Church really was following the Shepherd. What kind of difference could we as Church make in the world if we were the sheep we ought to be, as often as we can be?


Christians are supposed to be people through whom the grace, love and mercy of God flows; the Church are people through whom the Son shines. In a word, we are supposed to be saints. Saints, not sheep. There is nothing particularly holy about sheep until you stop and consider that the Shepherd is also the Lamb. And that the Lamb surrendered his life so that we as his sheep, his flock might live. We follow the Lamb through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and we recognize his power to feed us, to clam us and to and protect us. We know that he has the kind of grace and mercy that will pursue us right into the House of God. That is the kind of sheep, the kind of shepherd he is.

As sheep, as people who are living the risen life, we can live in ways that take us beyond the limits of just life because we know the powerful grace of a willing Saviour and the love an eternal Father. Eternity is not just what happens at the end of life. It is happening right here in the middle of life, just as God has intended. Heaven is no reward for being a nice or even a good, law abiding person. Life with God is not an extension of this life. This life and this world have been overcome by Christ through his death and resurrection. This means that the old has going and the new is coming. And in all this, God binds them together, guiding us into the new life in the new creation. God still lives, still works, continues to transform and to reign in the lives of his people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. People like you, like me. We are made God’s people, God’s flock through the Spirit of Christ who is leading us on the way to home pastures. So, may you find yourself whistling, humming or sing, I just want to be a sheep and discover that you are a saint too!