There is still work to do

As I wind down for some time to have with family across this country and take some holidays to rest and reflect on the last year, I thought it might be good to take some time with this week’s Epistle and think about the life of the Church as a missional community and what might be ahead of us.

Our Lesson (Ephesians 4.1-13) is a transition from teaching the Church in Asia Minor about the nature of the single confession that every Christian makes, whether that person is a Jew or a Gentile to an exhortation to live a life worthy of the call that God has placed on every Christian – to come to him and to his kingdom. St. Paul calls on each of the believers to forgive each other whatever has happened in the past and to let go of that past so that together, as individual believers and as the Church, can embrace a common present and be prepared for what is to come.

I point this out to say this to the Church in North America, we have too often been told and have bought into the lie that the Church is dying. We have bought into the lie that the Church has no future. How do I know this? Think about what God has said through the prophet Jeremiah to the Exiled people of Israel, “For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jer. 29.11 NIV) The problem with the Church is that it is not dead in North America: it is something far worse. It is become irrelevant. And the world knows it.

God has brought many people, of many different languages, cultures, races and nations together to be his people; his holy nation and his royal priesthood. God us brought us to himself to be his people. And since the kingdom of God has not come to fruition yet, God is still at work. And if God is still at work, then so are we. God isn’t finished yet and as the old saying goes, “God don’t make no junk.” Beyond that, God has broken down and removed himself the barrier that used to be between people. In Christ, he broke down the dividing wall of hostility and made all who take Christ as Saviour to be one people.  

And as such we are called to be a community of hope, of the resurrection and of life, not a society for despair, destruction and death of the whole world. Our response to the world in the face of despair, destruction and death is to hold out to people the courage, the hope and the life that we have with and in Christ because we have chosen to surrender to him. People believe that Jesus is the truth but so often, as the Archbishop of Canterbury recently pointed out about his own self, he did want all the moral stuff that came with being “Christian” when he first came to faith. What stops so many from being followers of the Lord Jesus is not Jesus himself but the thought of what life with Jesus and the Church would be like.

So how do we live to win people to Christ and then the Church? St. Paul lays it out in a simple manner. We are to live in humility, gentleness, patience and loving forbearance. These are the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.23) and are a part of the work of the Spirit in the life of the Church and therefore of every believer. These fruit are more than just a once given, always gotten type gift. They have to be used, developed, and maintained.

So don’t buy into the nonsense of the culture. The Church is not dead. There is a God and he loved the world so much that he has given us bread to eat and his Son to believe in. Until he comes again we are called to hold out life and hope for the world that they might come, receive forgiveness and know that they are adopted into the family of God, becoming beloved children of the Most High.  God is here, and we are with him.

Have a safe and happy holiday. We have work to do this Fall because God is not done just yet.

Jason+  

Working to be a leader and a servant

Do you know what a leader looks like? Would you know a king if you ever met one?  The Gospel this week (John 6.1-21) is about kings and kingship – or in modern day terms about “leadership”.  The world has its ideas and demands of what good leadership is about. And in a democracy, we reserve the right to call in new leadership and dismiss poor leadership. We will here all about that in the next few months through elections and the electoral process both here in Canada and down in the United States.

But let’s come back to the Gospel and the people whom Jesus fed in that lonely place for a moment. The Gospel notes, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!” Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself. (John 6.14-15) People understood what Jesus was claiming about himself and who he was for Israel. The nation had not seen a sign like this since the days in the wilderness with Moses. People, having witnessed what Jesus had done, had their own expectations raised. The people were expecting Jesus as the Prophet God had promised, to be more; do more. The people were expecting the Prophet to bring back the good old days of David and Solomon. This is significant because they wanted to have their own kingdom back, and I suspect because they want to be great amongst the nations of the earth.

What they and the Church these days in North America often miss, is that we are different. We are not called to be like the other nations of the earth, only more glorious. As followers of the Lord Jesus, we are called by God to be A chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that (we) may proclaim the excellencies of him who called (us) out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2.9) In essence then, we are called to some more, something bigger something better that we might participate in the coming of the kingdom of God and at the same time, draw others into it as well.

It is not lost on me that these who went seeking the powerful and miraculous Jesus in the place where they had been blessed, where they had eaten and had their fill, to discover that Jesus and the 12 had left and moved on. They searched and searched for him until they found him on the other side of the Lake, unaware of what had transpired overnight between the 12 and Jesus. Jesus himself rejected the temptation to make a fantastic earthly kingdom in favour of the rule of his Father in the kingdom that is to come. Jesus rejected the idea of earthly leadership as he did when it was offered to him by Satan. This is why Jesus withdrew from the people and went to a lonely place and to watch his followers out on the lake who, without him were struggling to get where they needed to be next.   

This is what makes the walk on the water so powerful. The Church gathered in that boat, struggling to learn to trust in the Lord in the rough water. There is another danger that the Church faces and that is thinking that we are on our own. Jesus is always watching, waiting and walking to us and reminding us that it really is him. The question for us is, “Will we let him into the boat?” Someone once quipped that, “If we took the Holy Spirit out of the Church, 95% of what we do would still go on.” The interesting thing is that Jesus, according to John, waited until he was invited into the boat by his disciples. It was not a matter of manners, but of choice. And in choosing to let him in they reached their goal immediately. So there is something important about the life of the Church and the need to recognize the import of the presence of the risen Christ being in our midst. Without him not only can we do nothing, as Church, as a holy nation and priesthood, we are nothing. It is in Christ that we are competent. It is in the presence of Christ that we live and move and have our being.

We must work to seek Christ our King and when we see him, serve those who are with him, in the least, the last, and the lost. After all, did Jesus say that whoever wants to be the greatest, the one who wants to be a leader, must be the last and servant of all?

Jason+

On Fidelity

The theme of our upcoming Diocesan Synod is “Faithfulness to the Gospel”. The word “faithfulness” caught my eye and my imagination and so I thought that I might spend some time playing with it to see if I might learn something new about it that I could share with you. It might be that the word “faithfulness” is something that we all seek to be but often find that, sooner or later, we are not. We struggle mightily with this idea of fidelity (of being faithful). We find it almost impossible to be faithful to anything else, anyone else in our North American culture because by enlarge because only the self counts. We live as if only ‘I’ matter: it is my truth, my way, my life that counts. As a consequence therefore, faith and faithfulness fall by the wayside because a lack of faithfulness leads to the degrading of our abilities to communicate with each other, which cause our communities and our society as a whole to fracture and crumble.  

Fidelity, according to an online dictionary (Merriam-Webster.com) I consulted is the quality or state of faithfulness. Fidelity is an exercise in exactness, working to be accurate in detail. Fidelity is the effort one puts into whatever is being done to be true to the facts, to a standard that needs to be lived and to the original text of writing. So if I have my understanding correct, fidelity is living out the command that Jesus gave us: love one another as I have loved you. Faithfulness moves from being adverb to be a verb. Faith and faithfulness are not just some that a person has, it is something that a person becomes that quality, enters into that state by living it. And in order to live it, it must be connected to others, beginning with God and then to neighbour. The interesting thing about this word faithfulness is that according to the same online dictionary, faithfulness is “obsolete”.

We are moving into and have come to an age in North American society where we are able to create social situations of “liquid gender”. People are able to choose what gender they are and to create that reality for themselves. More and more in civil society, we are trying to uphold a person’s right to choose for themselves, without regard for the impact on and the consequences for the community in which everyone needs to participate to help maintain community and society. Even within the Church, we fail to recognize that such belief and social action have an impact on the sacraments of both baptism and marriage. So rather than dealing with what is going on, we being to act and sound like the rest of the world rather than resisting the tide and choosing swim upstream. And in living this way we create an inability to be true to the Scriptures and to our relationship with the Almighty.

So what can we do, to stop and try to reverse the degradation of relationships and fracturing of our society? We must be the Church, wherever and whenever we are and are together. We must be the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ when we are apart and be his Church when we are together for worship. We must be choosing to be in worship regularly, to participate in the Eucharist thereby ridding ourselves of our idolatries and being empowered to live his life in this world. And we must make strides to aid each other in our walks, day by day. None of us can do it alone. Being a faithful follower means that we know that God is here and we, as his Church are with him; for now and for always.

Jason+

Seek the help and the face of Heaven

                                     

This week’s Gospel (Mark 5:21-43) has two stories: one about a woman with an issue of hemorrhaging, the other about a little girl and the love of her father who would not let her die. The section picks up after Jesus returns from Gentile territory and the healing of the demonic on the far side of the lake (Mark 5.1-20). In his absence, the popularity of Jesus has not abated in the life of the Jewish community. Many people were seeking Jesus out, including the two people that come seeking him in the Gospel.

First there is Jairus. He has a little, beloved daughter – not quite yet a woman. She is sick and she is near death. Only help from heaven will save her from death. This is why Jairus goes looking for Jesus and when he finds Jesus, he pleads earnestly for him to heal his daughter. It is interesting that Jairus is seen and known to be a powerful man in the life of his family, his community and his nation and yet he is powerless to help his daughter. How the mighty must fall in the face of the things they cannot buy, cannot control and cannot coerce into their own worldview.

The amazing thing is that it does not take too much for Jairus to convince Jesus that he should do this for him.   Jesus is not only willing to go he is ready to go; immediately. I suspect that Jairus, being strong and powerful, was ready to do anything to get Jesus to respond to him and save his little girl. Therefore, I suspect there was some surprise at having Jesus ready to go.

Then, as they are making their way to Jairus’ house, something happens. Someone touches him and his healed - woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years. Like Jairus, she was a person of means and importance and she had been used by many who had tried to heal her. She had spent her fortune, lost her husband, family friends and her faith because she was constantly “unclean”. And because she had lost all these people, she had lost her heritage and chance at family, and she as a consequence, lost her nation. She was spent physically, emotionally, financially and spiritually. But she had this one last hope: if she could get to Jesus and touch the hem of his robe she would be healed. She reached him. She reached out for the hem of his robe and touched him, and she was healed.

It is at this point that Jesus stops and asks a question, “Who touched me?” And with what I discern as being a certain amount of sarcasm from one of the disciples because of the crowd pressing into see, hear and touch Jesus, comes the reply, “With all these people, you want to know who touched you? That’s nuts!” So Jesus asked again, “Who touched me?” and the unnamed woman comes forward, with fear and trembling and expecting wrath for touching Jesus because she was unclean. What she got was not wrath and indignation, but acknowledgement that she was cured and was being given a chance to confess her faith in Christ, her healer.

Reaching Jairus’ house, they find that the little daughter has died and the mourners had arrived to do their thing, weeping and wailing, especially wailing. Remember the boat and the commotion on the Sea of Galilee? Why do you still have no faith? (Mark 4.35-41) When Jesus questioned the uproar, I think he was challenging the disciples with him (Peter, James and John) to recognize and connect that moment and this moment and the people who come as mourners laughed at Jesus when he declared the little girl not beyond help.  But first Jesus put the mourners outside.  

And to reassure the parents and the disciples, when the little girl got up, he asked them to feed her because being dead does tend to make one hungry for the living God. It also proved that she was not a ghost and that she was indeed alive.

What matters most in all this is two things: (1) How willing are you to get people, including yourself to a place or a position where you know you are in God’s presence? (2) Have you ever noticed that the people who have been with Jesus, that his presence shows and shines in their faces? So will you be that kind of person this week, someone through whom Christ shines?

Jason+

Placing courage in our faith and our convictions

This week’s Gospel (Mark 4:35-41) has an interesting twist as I look at the choices that are before us as a congregation (in deciding how we are going to approach the future with regards to our beloved building) and the choices and decisions that are before the disciples as they row for shore in their boat. Now, let’s be clear about something. Many of those men in the boat were experienced fishermen. They knew the lake. They understood the dangers and they were accustomed to being on the lake in the dark. So it must have been a very scary situation to have been in with the water coming in over the gunnels, water spraying them in the face from every direction. And to top it off, this master is asleep in it all.

That is the twist – of a sort. Over the past few weeks I have had to ask myself over and over again – when it is just me, and things are hard, where do I go? What do I do? To whom do I turn? The natural thing, when looking at the Gospel, is to think, “Well the boys, went to Jesus ad they got told off because they didn’t have faith.” That’s not it. Those men had watch Jesus for days and days, healing the sick curing the lame, opening the ears of the deaf, loosening the tongues and driving out demons. Why didn’t one of them take a stab at trying to claim the storm themselves? Why didn’t they trust God enough to hear the plea and act on their behalf?

The different times that the disciples had to go and find Jesus because he had gone off somewhere else to pray or heard him pray something like, “I thank you Father for hearing me but I know you always hear me...” (John 11:42) Is it possible that we are so often frightened and fearful of the choices we need to make, because are not willing to trust and to pray? What I see in Jesus is the confidence he has in the Father. he is confidence enough to trust God for what is next so that he can continue to do what he needs to do is incredible. So incredible, that this kind of trust allows us to sleep and to rest when things appear to be at their worst and even when they could be deadly.

When Jesus responds to the appeal of his disciples he speaks peace to the creation and calls on the disciples to be still and witness what God can do when you trust him. We want God it make the sailing smooth. We want God to fix all our problems and to take away all the pain. That’s what we want. It is how we want life to go – nice and smooth. The difficulty is often that is not what God calls us to. He insists that we follow and walk with him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. We are called in those moments not to be filled with fear but to take the time to recognize that God is here and we are with him. He gives the comfort we need and the strength we must possess to walk and to heal and to pray.

If I had to sum it all up, I would do so this way: Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in the face of it. If you need courage then be at peace. Be still. Know that God is God (Psalm 46:10). It is much better and much easier to live as a peace filled person rather than trying to control everything in the world around you, so that you can have a peaceful existence.

Jason+

His kingdom, his way, growing in us.

The parables of the seeds are the focus this week. Farming and the best practices might be a model for Church growth. Maybe. Nevertheless, there is something more important that we need to consider here than the usual. For example, Jesus talks about the “sporous” or spores that need to be planted.  We translate the word sporous as seed in the Gospel (Mark 4.26-35) but in fact, we are talking this week about some things that are the smallest things in the plant kingdom, that we they reach their fullness are, in their various ways something to behold.

For example, spores are microscopic and need to protect by other plant life. Unlike a seed, they are unicellular and they must hide on the underside of leaves and move around as the wind blows them. And unlike seeds, they are not multifaceted things, with internal resources to draw upon. But you might wonder knowing about plant life has to do with the Gospel and preaching this week. Quite a bit actually.

Parables tell us about God and his nature, who he is and what he does. The parables of the seeds shows us that God loves to take the little things, things that we discount or cannot see and make them count for something. He can cause them to grow into things that we could not have imagined and would not have planned to have happen if we could have conceived of it. So is the nature of the kingdom of God. It is here on earth and in earth (us) and the kingdom is growing. One of the things that we often miss in the Church is that the community that is the Church, like the kingdom that is to come in God’s time, is built to grow. We are not responsible for its growth. We are only expected to participate in its life. We are meant to plant seeds and water the earth to help provide the right conditions for growth but we cannot make what we plant grow. As St. Paul points out to the Corinthian Church,

“What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.” (1 Cor. 3:5-7 ESV).

As Christians and as Christian community, we are called to participate in the kingdom that is in the world and in our lives and bodies through putting our trust in God and live our faith in the present tense. We need to do this because the presence of the kingdom of God in this world is a direct threat to the powers and principalities, dominions and princedoms that are in this world. The presence of the living God and his kingdom is slowly but inextricably growing in such a way as to crowd out and choke out all the other powers and places that would take his people away from him.

We can participate in the growth but we need to recognize that it is God who makes things grow and who gives the harvest in its due time. We need to concern ourselves with being the tool in the hands of the living God, sharp and ready for the next task. We need to be about the business of the king. We need to choose to live lives that are dedicated and consecrated to the kingdom. This means we are given solely to the goals of the kingdom and not to another purpose while recognizing that we are giving ourselves completely to God. To recognize that we actively pray for God’s will to be done “on earth (in earth) as it is in heaven.” Being consecrated to the kingdom also means that we chose to have no happiness, no w well being and no salvation other that what is given in the kingdom through the divine community of the Church. What should make each of us happy as believers and followers is the welfare of the community of followers of the Lord Jesus.  

So there is a challenge that St. Paul offered to the Corinthians that I will offer to you: Follow me as I follow Christ. The life of a follower of the Lord Jesus is a life that is meant to be lived in community with shared gifts and shared joys – something that goes well beyond personal appetites and satisfactions. And remember it’s not about us. It is about God and his will to bring us kingdom. It is Christ’s prayer and ours too.

Jason+

Celebrating the life in the Spirit

                                           

This week we celebrate the feast of the coming of the Holy Spirit – Pentecost. So I wanted to take some time to do some teaching on the Christian life as it pertains to life in the Holy Spirit. In the Church we call this “Pneumotology” or the study of the things of the Spirit. No let me say up front that most of the Christian life is not about the overt gifts that are given – especially the gift of tongues. While these are powerful gifts, this is not what is meant by life in the Holy Spirit. Gifts like prophecy and speaking in tongues (which are also a prophetic gift and must be given an interpretation by someone else) are meant for the edification of the Body of Christ and for the glory of God. These charisms (gifts) are an outflow of the life that is lived in the Spirit, but are not the base of that life.

If we are to get to the root of all this, we need to consider who the person of the Holy Spirit and what the ministry of the Holy Spirit is and does. The Spirit for example, is the creative power of the Father and the strength of the redemptive power of the Son as well as having the ministry of sanctifying the saints and bringing creation to its perfection through the redemption of the Son. The Spirit is present to the world for the convicting of sin and for making Jesus present to the Church and known in the world. The Spirit inspires the prophets and equips and enables the servants of God. The Spirit causes the stirring up of holiness in individuals and in the churches.

We recognize that the Spirit was and remains a part of the ministry of Jesus and of the Church that follows him. The Spirit was involved in the incarnation of Jesus – conception, baptism, ministry, passion, death, resurrection and ascension. The Spirit unites the Church to Christ and Christ with his Church. And because the Spirit indwells the Church, he is capable of transforming the Church into the likeness of Christ who is its head. The Spirit causes the Church to be faithful, producing the fruit that is in line with the Christian life: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. (Galatians 5:22-25 ESV)

The Spirit is a witness and a teacher of the Church. The Spirit shows and convinced the believers of the reality of the person of Jesus Christ in the Gospels and the presence of the Lord Jesus in their lives and that of the churches and the world. In essence, the Spirit is a spotlight on Jesus so that the Church can see him, know him and follow him in what he is doing in the world. Such seeing and hearing and doing results in the Church being obedient to Christ in everyday life.

Spirit also moves the Church to bear witness to the Christ we see and know through Scripture and in the world. In doing so, the Spirit enables the faithful to receive the divine witness: For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1.15-22 ESV)

So, if we are to live life in the Spirit, we ought to be aware that we are being, in this moment, led, fed and enabled to be the people we are called to be by God. We are called to live in the Spirit in everyday life. And we live this life in the full knowledge that we are the beloved children of our heavenly Father and are coheirs with Christ and the rest of the Church of the kingdom that is yet to come.

Until then there are two things to keep in mind: (1) each and every believer has a gift that God has given to them that is meant for the good of the Church and the benefit of the wider community, which ought to be used for serving God’s people and glorifying God who is the giver of all good gifts. (2) Remember that the giving of the Spirit is a present and ongoing thing – yes it happened all those years ago. It is still happening. The power is available for us today. The Spirit is still filling, still giving, and still working to bring about the coming of God’s kingdom in the lives of men, women and children. Let us avail ourselves of the blessing the Lord gives and the power he provides and actively proclaim all the wonders that God is doing in this world for the sake of the kingdom and those who would be a part of it. Go and live the Spirit filled life and do so in Jesus name.  

Jason+