Pentecost + 10, 2022
Friends,
A couple of thankyous I meant to offer last week but missed: First, I’m grateful for the sense of inclusion that Preston offers the other clerics who are part of this community. Preston is generous and involves us such that we might play to our strengths and honour our vocations. Second, I love to tag-team with Ken. Ken is a gentle leader and a great friend in the chancel. I think also of James who’s doing music, Paul who wrote the prayers, and Eileen who’ll be up here next week.
Today’s Gospel contains several ideas brought to mind by Luke. Luke is writing a couple of generations after the execution of Jesus and the great Three Days. Among these memories, there’s his memory of Jesus’ feeling stressed the size of his work: his memory of families coming apart over how to follow Jesus; and his memory of Jesus saying his followers needed to know how to interpret the present time.
My guess is that these memories were informed by Luke’s present age with its missionary challenges, family divisions and new signs for new times. This morning, I want to comment on the first item, that Jesus is stressed, and talk about the third, the business of interpreting the present age.
Every so often, we are given glimpses of Jesus’ true humanity when so often the Gospel writers are more interested in Jesus’ divinity and the neat things he could do: his healing the least-likely, his apparent walking on water to get where he was going; his feeding of the hoarding multitudes, etc. etc.
That Jesus is truly of God and truly human is a truth that is baked into our Christian DNA. It’s the stuff of the ecumenical creeds, and it is the stuff of a great deal of theological ink. But the thing that interests me is the idea that Jesus stressed about stuff. Jesus worried.
I don’t sleep well. In earlier years I read or wrote in the small hours of the night taking advantage of a couple of sleepless hours. Barbara’s theory is that I worry about things. And I know she’s right because I’ll wake from sleep mulling over some aspect of my work or ministry.
Sleep has been a good friend, though. It is the place where I have found the best solutions to life’s problems. But it is worry, at the heart of it, and worry is stressful.
I think pastors, like Jesus, do a lot of worrying about their people and how they’re getting on and how the fractures in family or community life are important places to be. Leonard Cohen has this lovely refrain “Ring the bell that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Cohen is reminding us that it is in the bruised and broken places of God’s world that the brightness of the light may be most apparent.
So, somehow, I am grateful that Jesus was stressed about stuff. He may have had more on his mind, and bigger fish, but I think there is something about God’s mission in the world being to seek out the cracks, the bruised and broken places, the places of greatest stress and worry, and to salve the wounds and herald the light. Just a thought.
Then there’s this business of being able to interpret the present age. That’s where this Gospel text goes, does it not? When Pope Francis visited a couple of weeks ago, like a great many, I felt that there was a lot riding on what Francis did or said. It would be hard to get it all right. And so I was tracking his most every move and I hung on his words and pored over everything he said.
When I was in the ecumenical office, that the Pope would apologize was a very live concern and the hope that he might visit Canada to make his apology was a matter of open discussion for a great many years. It didn’t all start a month or a year ago. Anyway, the Pope’s central messages began to emerge on Day 2 of his visit.
On Day 2 he made his way to Maskwasis, outside of Edmonton, where he gave his first real speech. And I was disappointed. What he offered, I wrote somewhere else, was a non-apology apology. That was a view that prevailed among many First Peoples leaders and followers. There was palpable despair on the part of many. The first speech landed with a thud.
At the time, I wrote “I’ve been thinking about what the pope offered as an apology yesterday. I am not unfamiliar with non-apology apologies. Sadly, I think that’s what we got. The whole matter of the church’s agency and role as a prime mover and instigator was brushed under the carpet. The mechanism of the Doctrine of Discovery in creating an ethos of subjugation was unacknowledged and in no way repudiated.” I said, “I feel an ache deep within.”
People like Cindy Blackstock and Murray Sinclair weighed in with not unsurprising and similar takes about what was said. Thereafter, the pope gave speeches of one sort or another in Edmonton and Quebec City and Iqaluit. On his way home, on the plane, he revisited his trip one last time and in that unscripted moment he spoke of “genocide.” And I, with many, was flabbergasted. The word simply had not come to him earlier said the Holy Father.
What happened, I think, is that over the course of several days, Francis read the signs of our present age, better and better with each event he attended, each community he visited, each person he embraced, each wound he salved.
I’m not sure that Pope Francis got it all right, but I do think he rethought his public proclamation as he went along. Each speech he gave picked up on something which he missed in an earlier moment. And in touching the bruised and broken places of Canada’s First Peoples, he allowed his audience and the rest of us to perceive ever more brilliant and Gospel-centered flashes of light.
I think Pope Francis offered a lovely witness of humility and a little bit of courage and daring which might not have been possible without the human encounter in which humility and courage could flourish.
When I was on the road for Bishop Susan, I had a mantra, a personal formula which I would sometimes reveal or interpret to mark a point of inflection in the diplomatic to and fro. In his second missionary journey, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is visiting Athens. This is his opening salvo to the people he encountered at the city limits:
“From one ancestor, God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God, and perhaps grope for God and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For in God, we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, for we too are his offspring.”
Paul is quoting the Greek poet and philosopher Epi-meni-des. Epi-meni-des was actually writing about Zeus. No matter, Paul steals a good line, proves that he’s well read and knows well one of the great mythic figures of the people of Athens. For Paul, though, it’s about God in whom we live and move and have our being. So I took that phrase to myself as a mantra for my odyssey as sometime train-bearer and sometime diplomat in the church’s ecumenical and interfaith journey.
Mine is a journey “with God in whom I live and move and have my being” I would say. That was how I framed my truth in whatever context. But then I would interpret “to live and move and have my being” as to live on someone else’s land; to move in a world of astonishing diversity; and to have my being in Jesus”. There’s the flesh on the bones. I tried to read the signs of this present moment as best I could. Not the signs for all times but the signs for my age, this age. You see, to live on someone else’s land is about our relationship to First Peoples. To move in a world of astonishing diversity is to confront the issue of racism which is everywhere and in my own family and likely, sometimes, in me. And to have my being in Jesus offered me the opportunity to interpret in context what it means “to love my God with all my heart and strength and mind, and my neighbour as myself. In other words, to take up Jesus’ agenda for this world and for this time and this generation.
So, some homework: If someone were to ask you “Where do you live? Where do you move? In what or in whom do you have your being?” how would you answer? How would you read the signs of the times, as you encounter them, and their urgency, and “what would it mean, then, for this time, and this word, for you to have your being in Jesus?” Silence.
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in God’s sight. And let the church say “Amen.” R/ Amen.
André Lavergne, CWA (The Rev.)
Church of St. John the Evangelist, Kitchener