“Our Crosses Are So Shiny”: Christian Faith and the Seduction of Power and Privilege

Preached at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday, February 25, 2024.

Scripture reading: Mark 10:17-45 NRSV

Introduction: The Life of Clarence Jordan

There was a Baptist pastor named Clarence Jordan. Has anyone heard of him? He was born in 1912, and he died in 1969. Jordan was from Georgia (By the way, a fun fact about me is that my grandmother, my Father’s mother, hailed from Georgia). He was born into wealth and privilege, but at an early age, he felt a profound call to help others. He did his education in agriculture in 1933, so this is during the great depression, and he did this because he believed he could help farmers develop more scientific ways of farming at a time when poverty was widespread across the land. But as he was doing this, he became increasingly convinced that his calling was in ministry. He saw poverty as just as much an economic problem as a spiritual one. So, he did a master’s as well as a Ph.D. in New Testament. Challenged by his in-depth studies of the New Testament, he came to realize that the teachings of Jesus were simply incompatible with racial segregation that was not only tolerated in his community but also taught in the churches. God put it on his heart to do something about this.

In 1942, Jordan and his wife, along with a couple of former missionaries, bought a 440-acre chunk of land. Jordan used the savings he had received from his affluent background to do this. They called the farm “Koinonia,” after the Greek word in the New Testament for the community, and they founded this community on the refusal of racism, violence, and greed. They opened up their community in hospitality to anyone who might come who needed a place to stay, in particular, black people who were fleeing abuse. There, at the farm, people could live for a time, learn how to work the land, learn skills like how to fix and build things and leave when they were back on their feet.

For almost ten years, Koinonia did its work, living in a radical community largely unnoticed by those around it. However, when the civil rights campaigns began in the 50s and 60s, Koinonia became a target. The community was a church part of the Southern Baptist Convention, but it was disfellowshipped for its “communist race-mixing.” However, as it has now been brought to light, many people in the South, many Baptists included, were members of the KKK at the time, and these individuals saw what Jordan was doing and saw his community as a threat to God’s order of things.

In fact, some tried to organize a boycott so that the farm would no longer receive oil in the winter. The oil delivery people were threatened as they confessed to Jordan. “I could lose my business if my other customers boycott me for supplying you,” one man said. Jordan would respond back, “You know we have children on the farm. Do you want people to freeze during the winter?” After the man protested, Jordan put it this way: “The choice is clear: lose your business or lose your soul.” He had a no-nonsense way of putting things.

However, that man had reason to fear. As tensions escalated, so did the violence. The community experienced several bombings, and even members of the farm were fired upon folks from the adjacent farm. The buildings of Koinonia farm were bullet-ridden from folks firing at the buildings, trying to intimidate those inside.

By the way, if we somehow believe that terrorism is a problem for other religions and not us, go ahead and google the history of “Christian terrorist groups.” You might be, unfortunately, surprised by what some people have justified in the name of Jesus.  

In dire need, Clarence Jordan appealed to his brother, Robert Jordan, a lawyer who later went on to become a senator and judge. Clarence Jordan recorded their conversation:

“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know I have my political aspirations. Why, if I represent you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I got.”

“We might lose everything too, Bob.”

“It’s different for you.” (As if to say, you are one of those weird religious types that actually takes this stuff seriously).

“Why is it different? I can remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday as boys. I expect that when we came forward, the preacher asked me the same question he did you. He asked me, “Do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior.” And I said, “Yes. What did you say?”

“I follow Jesus, Clarence, to a point.”

“Could that point by any chance be, Bob, the cross?”

“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I am not getting myself crucified.

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple. You’re an admirer of Jesus but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to and tell them that you’re an admirer, not a disciple.”

“Well, now, if everyone who felt like I did do that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question,” Clarence said, “is ‘Do you have a church then?’”

Would that even be a church at all?

Eventually, Jordan had to close down his farm and leave the area. He eventually came to be the mentor of a young Baptist politician named Jimmy Carter (if you have not heard of Clarence Jordan, I hope you have heard of Jimmy Carter). Carter went on to become the governor of Georgia and helped dismantle segregation. He then went on to become President, and after that, he formed a charity, inspired by Clarence Jordan’s witness to housing the less fortunate, called Habitat for Humanity.

The Difference between Merely Believing in Jesus and Taking Up the Cross

So, if you have been tracking with us in this series, we have been reflecting on the life of Christ. We have been going through his teachings and major ideas about who he is.

The last time I spoke, I noted that there were folks today who tend to think the apostles invented Jesus as a divine messiah as time went on. But as I said, when you look at some of the earliest stories about Jesus, some of the earliest writings of the Apostles, Jesus seems to be doing things that only God could do. While this was surely a mystery, something the Apostles admitted they did not fully understand, Christian thinkers have looked back at these narratives and suggested it looks like Jesus had two natures, that in all the ways God is God, Jesus is God, and in all the ways humans are human, Jesus is human, and that doctrinal rule is the best summary or encapsulation of what is going on in all these rich and multifaceted stories in the New Testament.

And so, Christians throughout history have insisted that Jesus is very human and very God and that this truth is essential to understanding God’s love and presence in our lives. It is a matter of what is called “orthodoxy,” meaning “right belief.”

Now, there is also a truth that Clarence Jordan’s life and experiences show us that gets to the core of what our passage today is trying to tell us, which suggests to us another layer or facet to this exercise we call “believing.” You see, understanding who Jesus is necessarily means changing how we live, and more than that, in particular, it confronts how we understand privilege, status, and power. However, this part of our convictions is much harder to measure. Some things can only be lived and shown.

It is one thing to believe in Jesus, quite another to live like Jesus.

It is one thing to believe all the right things. It is quite another to believe in the right way.

Or worse, we can actually use our sense of believing in Jesus as a means of getting power, staying in power, and staying comfortable.

To be a Christian means, as James and John show us, we must be aware that there are ways we can use believing in Jesus to get out of living the cross.

The Rich Young Ruler: Piety Masking Privilege

Our passage today begins with Jesus being approached by a rich ruler, who runs to meet Jesus and kneels down to him, asking, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This question sets up the whole section, as we will see. Jesus is rightly skeptical. Nearly all in the ruling class at the time did so by exploiting and extorting the poor peasants, and to have this man come to Jesus acting this way looks like a display of theatrical flattery. “Why do you call me good?” Jesus inquires.

Jesus responds to his question, telling him to follow the commands of God, which the ruler proudly announces he has been following them just fine since his youth. That is doubtful. Then, Jesus hits him with a request: “If you want eternal life, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me.” The ruler could not do it. Apparently, he has been living out this holier-than-thou mentality, but that has really been a cover for greed, materialism, and exploitation, and Jesus sees right through it.

It is funny how we treat our sins as the ones that are easily excused while another’s sins are the real bad ones.

The disciples see this man leave dejected, and Peter turns to Jesus and says that they have left their homes and families to follow Jesus. To which Jesus responds, “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

That statement is one of Jesus’ most important teachings. It is really at the core of what his teaching on the kingdom of God is all about.

It seems this story that happens just before our passage today sets up a contrast between the disciples, who are poor but also, for the sake of following Jesus, give up home and family (and, as we know, eventually their lives) and a man that has power and wealth who cannot part with it, yet believes he is fully obedient to God.

It seems that for some, being a member of God’s people is a way of getting us off the hook for the really difficult stuff.

For some, being generally good and generally obedient is a way of getting off the hook for being radically and totally obedient.

It seems that this rich ruler has used his sense of faith and piety to make sure he stays first in this world. It is something we can all do. We can use our faith and our beliefs to reinforce and prop up our position in our communities and our jobs, to elevate ourselves, and to absolve us from doing the things God is challenging us to live: things like deep humility, radical justice, self-sacrificial love, etc.

James and John’s Request: Seeking Power through Jesus

So, Jesus continued on his way but started to talk about what was going to happen to him. Jesus knows that trouble is coming. He tells them that soon he is going to be betrayed. He is going to be arrested, tortured, and killed, all by the religious establishment and Rome, yet he tries to say to them, I will rise again.” Evil will not have the final say.

There is a saying by one theologian that goes like this: “At the core of the Christian faith is this paradox: it holds that if you do not love radically, you have not fully lived. However, if you do love radically, the world may end up killing you for it.” That is exactly what happened to Jesus, and here he is, trying to get his disciples to understand this.

After he tells them this, however, John and James, two brothers, come to Jesus with an unusual request. It sounds like they really only heard that last part about Jesus rising again in vindication and victory. They ask Jesus: when you come into your kingdom, can you make us your first and second in command?

And Jesus turns to them. Did you not just hear all that I said about what was going to happen to me? Do you still think my kingdom is about getting power?

Do you still think following me is about staying comfortable and not having to sacrifice status? Do you still not get it? He says, “You know the world has rulers,” not unlike the one Jesus just chatted with, “who lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you.” James and John try to exploit their connection to Jesus as a way of getting power and prominence over others. “Do you still not get what my kingdom is about?”

My kingdom, as Jesus says in Matthew 5, is for the poor in spirit, the meek and humble, those broken in mourning, those that hunger and thirst for justice, those who are merciful and pure in heart and peaceful, and those that hold to the truth and to justice even if it costs them.

My kingdom is for those who are last in this world, those who make themselves last, sacrificing wealth and status, and those who take up their cross and follow me. Do you still not get it?

Our Temptations to Power

Do we not get it still today? Sadly, this temptation of James and John’s does not go away in Christianity. We see this temptation again and again.

Whether it is the rise of Constantine a few centuries later, where Christianity turned from a marginalized, illegal religion to a culturally dominant religion enforced by the state, since then, Christians have been quite fond of feeling called by Christ to hold power, and this has set a pattern repeated in many Christian empires and nations thereafter.

Sadly, we can see many examples where Christianity became wedded with quests for power and wealth where Christians in the name of Jesus have done things that are categorically against Jesus’ way: the crusades, the Inquisition, colonization, segregation, etc.

Or, sadly, what we are seeing now in the United States, South of the border. To denounce American politics almost feels too easy some days, something best left to jokes around the office water cooler, but the reality is these things are deeply serious. Some of us feel like we just keep watching some TV drama that is so bizarre and brutal it doesn’t feel real, but it is.  

Just this week, as more evidence regarding the women the former President has abused comes forward, more evidence that he paid off a porn star comes further to light, as well as his many fraudulent claims in his businesses, as well as his role in inciting insurrection—as all of this continues to mount—the former President held a rally to garner further Christian support. His words sent chills down my spine as he promised that support for him would be rewarded with him making Christians powerful and prominent in ways never seen in this country before. And these words were met with applause and amens and people shouting out, “Thank you, Jesus!”

Again, going after American politics feels like going after the low-hanging fruit, and I feel obliged to say that we in Canada have our own temptations. Who have we supported purely because of the carrots they dangle over our faces?

I would also say that it is not just an American problem. This week, I was invited to sign a letter to the major world Christian leaders as a Baptist theologian in response to the actions of the Russian orthodox church and its continued approval of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, has called the war a divine mandate and has made statements that soldiers who die fighting are given special forgiveness in heaven. Thousands of innocent people are dying because, in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church, God desires some kind of restored Holy Russian Empire.

And so one cannot help but notice the irony that these things are being done by an ancient church tradition that has the word “Orthodox” in its title. It reiterates the fact that no form of Christian faith is immune to the seduction of power.

Now, we can do this politically, but this also happens in much more mundane ways.

For instance, when Meagan and I were first married, we attended a Pentecostal church in Newmarket, Ontario. It was a great mission-focused community. We were a part of a young adult’s bible study that grew. It was great. So many young adults started getting back into church as we read through the Bible and prayed for one another. People experienced a renewed sense of Christian community and discipleship.

However, things started going pear-shaped. One evening, one of the leaders of the group brought a DVD they loved on how to be “Blessed.” It was a DVD of a preacher who said that the Christian life is about trying to find God’s blessing, and God’s blessing means, clearly, “getting stuff.”

Meagan and I just looked at each other.

The preacher continued that if you are living in accordance with God’s ways, God blesses you with abundance; it is a sign of his approval of your life.

In fact, he then invited two testimonies of women in the congregation. One said that when they started being obedient, and by that, she meant that she started tithing money to the church, and she reported that God started blessing her husband’s business, and now they are millionaires (and you can, too, apparently). The other, much more modest in her testimony, said, “All I know is that when I give to God on a Sunday morning, then I go to the mall, it is like God opens all the sales at the mall for all things I need and desire. God is raining down his blessing on us.” I am not making this up.

At the end of the DVD, you know I had to pipe up. I said to that group leader, “So what do you do with a bible passage like the saying, ‘Blessed are the poor’ or the one just after it, ‘Woe to you who are rich.’”

The group leader looked at me skeptically and said, “Where is that in the Bible?”

I said, “It is in Luke chapter 6. It is the words of Jesus.”

I would like to tell you that my efforts to challenge that group were successful, but they were not. It ended up being a very disappointing experience for many of us who were in this group that originally set out to study God’s Word but ended up getting hijacked and ruined by all kinds of motives that drew us away from the things that mattered.

Now, some of us might not put it so obtusely as that preacher on that DVD put it, but the fact is there are so many ways we use our faith to stay comfortable. We can back our privilege with Bible verses when we want to, rather than taking up the difficult, costly way of the cross.

It can look like the repulsive theologies that Clarence Jordon confronted where overt racism was preached from the pulpit. It can look like the dirty politics and the mixing of church and state power that we are seeing in the world. It can look like the distorted theologies of blessing that say health and wealth are a sign of divine approval, which suggests that if you are poor, struggling, or sick, you are not loved by God. But it can look so many other ways, too, often covert and concealed, often cloaked with pious concerns.

These are all the ways we can make our faith about us rather than the way of Jesus, all the ways we can use the Bible to reinforce how we ought to come first.  

We find ways of saying, “I deserve what I have, and I don’t need to share it. I don’t need to do this or that; I’m good enough. I don’t need to sacrifice for them; that’s their problem…I don’t need to take up the cross to have Jesus.”

The Ransom of the Cross: Jesus Becomes Last for Us

To this, Jesus makes his most explicit statement about the meaning of the cross: “For the Son of man came not to be served by to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The language of ransom comes out of the book of Exodus, where God acts powerfully against Pharoah, a self-proclaimed god over an oppressive empire, ransoming God’s people out of slavery with signs and wonders.

Jesus is leading us out of slavery into a New Exodus. But what are we enslaved to? Mark’s Gospel makes that explicit: We are enslaved to the forces of darkness and the devil; we are enslaved to the fear of death, but to our own disobedience and despair. We are enslaved to our distorted religiosity just as much as we are to our political enemies.  

These two are linked. God wants to liberate body and soul, not just one or the other, and that liberation comes together in things like our social status, where our spiritual pride and our material privilege are linked.

How does Jesus liberate us? By showing us God’s way. The cross is Jesus, the Son of God, the rightful king of Israel, who ought to live in a palace, who ought to command the legions and slay anyone who opposes him. This messiah did not come to be served by to serve, but by challenging oppression with his way, he knew it would end up with execution. It would mean the ultimate sacrifice.

To die by Roman execution would have meant the most humiliating and painful death a person could die: stripped naked, mocked, beaten, and pierced.

The cross is God himself becoming last in this world for us.

The cross is God becoming last in this world, and if we can humble ourselves, repent, and resolve to change by God’s grace and spirit if we live with an openness to the breaking in of God’s kingdom, we can know the promise of the resurrection. Jesus rose again.

The first will be last, and the last will be first.

We can’t have faith in Jesus without the cross.

Even then, Clarence Jordan had a saying. He looked at so much of the piety of the day, the comfortable ways of being Christian, and the tendencies to complain about how we don’t hold power as if we are now persecuted. He says this:

“Our crosses are so shiny, so polished, so respectable that to be impaled on one of them would seem to be a blessed experience.” 

I will leave you with this thought: For many of us, our crosses are simply too shiny.

May we, in renewed ways daily, be challenged and convicted to take up Jesus’ cross. Amen.

A Different Kind of Christmas

Introduction: Which Jesus?

Scripture Reading: Matthew 2:1-23 and Luke 2:8-20

I am going to say something controversial: I think the movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, is Will Farrell’s funniest movie. Ya, Elf is a modern classic at Christmas. Ya, Anchor Man is probably the most quotable. However, Talladega Nights has a moment in the movie that gives one of the most pointed comments on popular cultural Christianity.

Ricky Bobby is a champion Nascar Driver, and there is a scene at the dinner table where he is instructed by his wife to say grace in order for God to continue to bless them with more Nascar victories.

Rick Bobby prays, “Dear Lord Baby Jesus,” and as he proceeds to thank the baby Jesus for all the good things he has, his wife stops him and says, “Sweetie, you know Jesus grew up, right? It’s kinda weird to pray to a baby.” Rick Bobby responds indignant: “I like the Christmas baby Jesus the best. If you say grace, you can pray to whatever Jesus you want: teenage Jesus, bearded Jesus, whatever.”

After which, his friend chimes in and says, “I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt…because it says, like, I wanna be formal…Right. But I’m here to party, too. Because I like to party, so I like my Jesus to party.”

His son pipes up and says, “I like to picture Jesus as a ninja fighting off evil samurai.”

This goes on for a little bit; Ricky Bobby continues to pray: “Dear 8-pound, 6-ounce, newborn infant Jesus… don’t even know a word yet…just a little infant and so cuddly, but still omnipotent… we just thank you for all the races I’ve won and the 21.2 million dollars…Love that money! Amen.”

Now, I hope no one is offended by my quoting this in church, but while this scene is ridiculous and theologically wrong, it also speaks of a kind of culture that has mixed consumerism with popular Christian religion, the cult of prosperity and achievement, health and wealth, with biblical illiteracy: Jesus is who I like him to be.

According to a 2015 survey by the Barna Group (and admittedly, these are American statistics), people believe the following things on average about Jesus: The vast majority of people believe Jesus was a real person. “More than nine out of 10 adults say Jesus Christ was a real person who actually lived.” However, “Younger generations are increasingly less likely to believe Jesus was God…Most adults—not quite six in 10—believe Jesus was God, while about one-quarter say he was only a religious or spiritual leader like Mohammed or the Buddha. The remaining one in six say they aren’t sure….” There is similar confusion about Jesus’ life: “About half agree, either strongly or somewhat, that while he lived on earth, Jesus Christ was human and committed sins like other people.”

That is perhaps somewhat typical given what we assume about living in a post-Christian culture, but one of the surprising statistics found was that the overwhelming majority of Americans say they have made a commitment to Jesus at some point in their lives.

What does this mean? David Kinnaman, President of Barna Group, commented at the end of the study: “This impressive number begs the question of how well this commitment [to Jesus] is expressed…dedication to Jesus is, in most cases, a mile wide and an inch deep.” As I said, these are American statistics, and you can imagine smaller numbers but similar factors going in for us.

It appears that there are lots of people familiar with Jesus in our culture, but not a whole lot that actually want to follow him. Lots of folks agree that Jesus claimed to be God, but that ultimately means they can carry on with their lives no different than those who don’t.

Pastor Chris and I got together for lunch one day, and out of that conversation came the idea of a series going through moments in Jesus’ life, taken from the four Gospels: His incarnation, core teachings, death, and resurrection, unpacking what these mean. So, that is what we are going to be up to leading up to Good Friday and Easter.

We have made Jesus Safe, Sweet, and Sanitized

Again, while Ricky Bobby is a buffoon in a comedy movie, what he says is brilliant satire. Notice how he prefers the Christmas Jesus, which, for him, means that Jesus is warm and cuddly in a golden diaper. I suspect many of us have a depiction of Christmas, as well as the portrayal of Jesus and his teachings, in our heads that is similarly safe, sweet, and sanitized.

Some of our Christmas Carols don’t help. Take “Away in a Manger”: “The cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes / But little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.” Why would someone assume that Jesus, as an infant, did not cry, whether hungry for his mother or because he had a dirty diaper? Isn’t Jesus human in all the ways we are human?

Take “Silent Night”: “Son of God, love’s pure light / Radiant beams from Thy holy face.” I love the song “Silent Night,” but I clench my teeth a bit when it depicts Jesus with beams glowing from him.  

“All is calm, all is bright…” Why do we assume everything was calm? According to Luke’s Gospel, Mary, and Joseph got into Bethlehem, and it was so crowded and chaotic that she had to give birth in what is probably most accurately the equivalent of an alleyway, where the household animals were kept and were probably dangerous, loud, and dirty. Jesus is laid to rest not on golden, soft hay but in an animal’s feeding trough (some of you folk know full well what that might look like—it probably had bits of slop in it). Jesus was wrapped not in beautiful, bleached linens, but the word in Greek describes the ragged bands of cloth one used during traveling, wind-torn and caked with sand.

Those are details of Luke’s Gospel, and when we come to the events of Epiphany and the visit of the wise men in chapter 2 of Matthew, we have to admit this story has been packaged and sanitized as well.

By the way, I called it Epiphany—did you know that it is called Epiphany? I didn’t know this until literally four years ago when I preached at another church over the Christmas break, and I spoke on an unrelated scripture and was scolded for not upholding the church calendar, which apparently has 12 days of Christmas like the song says (that always puzzled me growing up—why are there 12 days?—also why does a person’s true love give them a bunch of birds?) I get the golden rings but If my true love gave me “eight geese a-laying,” can’t say I would feel very Christmasy about it. I apologize if I have yet again ruined another Christmas song for you.

Well, Epiphany is the last day of Christmas, twelve days after Christmas day that usually celebrates the next event in the Gospels: the dedication of Jesus in Luke, the coming of the wise men in Matthew, and the baptism in Mark and John, who do not have a birth narrative in them. Again, don’t feel bad if you did not know that. My family still puts the Christmas tree away after New Year’s.

However, as further evidence that we have the idea of Christmas so often packaged to us, in a lot of Christmas scenes, you have the shepherds at the manger scene from Luke’s Gospel with the wise men from Matthew’s. But notice what Matthew says: Jesus was a child when the wise men found Mary and Joseph living in a house in Bethlehem. This is a different timeline from Luke’s version.

Matthew tells the story differently and emphasizes certain things he wants his readers to see about Jesus. The churches of Matthew’s day were facing persecution and expulsion from the Jewish Synagogue: Jewish Christians, who seemed to be Matthew’s audience, were being seen as heretics and apostates for following Jesus. This compounded an already tense state of affairs where the people lived under Roman occupation, under the boot of a tyrannical empire, where violence and oppression were already a daily reality.

Again, we so often present the Christmas scene with clean and calm figures, but that is simply not the case for Matthew’s Gospel, which sets the scene for Christmas with a backdrop of tyrants, intrigue, and a bloodshed. That probably would not go as well on someone’s front lawn with lights and bows. Your front lawn would like that guy by Aldershot School that goes way too far in his Halloween decorations. You know who I am talking about, right?  

If any of these elements of the story is a surprise to you as it was to me when I learned about them many years into my adult walk with Christ, I think we all have inherited our own pleasant, packaged, safe, and sanitized version of Jesus.

One reason why we like a safe and sanitized version of the Jesus story is that we don’t have to actually contend with what the Gospel demands.

When I was pastoring First Baptist Church of Sudbury, I had a congregant complain after I preached a sermon mentioning the Charleston shooting. This was in 2015. A deranged white nationalist walked into a church in a black community and killed nine people at prayer, hoping to start a race war. I had someone complain that I was mixing politics and religion in the sermon. I was confused by that criticism because that sermon never mentioned politicians, political parties, voting, or anything of the sort.

I soon found this man, a man raised in the church his whole life and even served as an elder in another church, openly espoused that he did not think Jesus ever spoke about racism or justice and even said to me that he did not think racism was sinful. I soon realized that despite his objection, he very much did mix religion and politics. It was just the worst version of both.

His was an extreme case, but we all so often give into a picture of Jesus, sweet, safe, and sanitized, that absolves us from having to do something about it.

1. A Different Jesus: True Moses, True Israel

But Matthew is different. Matthew presents a different Christmas story and a different Jesus. He is barely done mentioning the birth of Jesus when he starts mentioning the politics of Jesus’ day. It says the people were ruled by King Herod. Herod was a tyrant. Herod was not ethnically a Jew, but he claimed to be a faithful Jew for political purposes, nor did he have a royal lineage. His mother was from Arabia, and his father was an Edomite who found favor with Rome because Rome wanted a puppet king over these lands. Herod remained in power because he was very good at squeezing the people for more tax money to fund the imperial war machine, and he was absolutely ruthless at dealing with any threat to his power. In fact, he killed several close relatives who he thought might challenge his power.

Yet, a group of wise men from the east show up at his door wondering where the new king of the Jews is because a certain star sign has risen. Herod’s title was king of the Jews. You can imagine today’s ambassadors showing up to the White House asking the President, “Hey, we are here to honor your country’s new and true President. Where is he?” Yes, the messiah is political, just not in the way earthly politics want him to be.

Herod tries to trick and scheme, then intimidate and murder his way to stay in power, but God whispers in the dreams of the wise men and of Joseph, and both get out of Bethlehem before it is too late.

Matthew says that the holy family fled the massacre to go to Egypt and that they returned home years later when Herod was dead, coming to reside in Nazareth.

By doing this, Matthew’s story makes two subtle references here that tell us who Jesus is.

Who do we know in the Old Testament that had to escape the slaughter of infants? Moses the man who gave the Jewish people the law. In Matthew’s time, Christians are being attacked because their radical way is seen as a betrayal of the Jewish law, yet here, Matthew wants to say that Jesus is not only like Moses, Jesus is the true Moses. Jesus is showing us the true way to be faithful to God. And so, Jesus says in Matthew, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”

Second, who in the Old Testament came out of Egypt? Israel did. God’s people did. Matthew says that these things were done to fulfill what the prophet said, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” That is a scripture from the prophet Hosea, and if you look at it, Hosea is talking about the people of Israel as God’s child, and Matthew sees this as pointing to Jesus. Again, as Jewish Christians in Matthew’s time were persecuted and excommunicated from their families and friends for worshiping Jesus, Matthew says that Jesus is the true Israel. What God was longing to do with his people, a people set to be a redeeming presence to bless the rest of the world, God is fulfilling this first and foremost through Jesus and Jesus’ way. This is what God’s people are meant to be like.  

Now, Christians throughout history have looked at passages like this in Matthew and concluded two problematic things: one is that God is done with the Jewish people or, worse, the Jewish people are evil for rejecting Jesus. This has led to some terrible stuff in church history. Others today do the opposite and look at what the modern state of Israel is doing in Palestine and automatically assume that Christians should support this country because this is biblical Israel. Matthew suggests something different.

If Jesus is the True Moses and the True Israel, God has not forsaken the Jewish people. Paul says the promises of God are irrevocable. Jesus is the very sign that God had refused to give up on his people. However, this also comes with the challenge that God’s people are called to follow God’s ways not the ways of this world, and God’s ways are most clearly shown in Jesus.

2. A Different Way: Jesus’ versus Herod’s

Between God and the world, we all have that choice presented to us.

Jesus’ way is different, and it is in brutal contrast to Herod’s.

Herod’s way of ruling involves lying and scheming, deceiving the wise men.

Herod’s way looks to religion to manipulate and maintain his power.

Herod’s way, worst of all, believes that peace and order are maintained by violence, even killing the innocent.

Herod is an especially cruel tyrant—he was a paranoid psychopath—but Herod’s way of ruling is known all too well:

It is the way that sees truth purely as what one wants it to be.

It is the way that puts one’s comforts always ahead of another’s needs.

It is the way that treats others as objects, valuable only if useful and worthless if not.

It is the way that looks at one’s enemies and sees something only to humiliate or annihilate.

It is the way that looks to God and sees religion as a source of power and God as nothing but the idolatrous echo of one’s ego.

Yet, just one chapter later, we see the contrast to Herod’s way as Jesus begins to announce the kingdom of heaven:

A kingdom not for the people who think they are spiritually rich but for the poor in spirit.

A kingdom not for the prideful and powerful but for the humble and humiliated.

A kingdom not for the compromised and the complicit but the pure and the peacemakers.

A kingdom for those willing to sacrifice for the sake of what is true and right, just as the prophets did.  

That is Jesus’ way, and it cannot be reconciled with the way of Herod. Jesus is the narrow path that leads to life, whereas Herod’s way is the wide highway that leads to destruction.

3. Different Seekers

Which way are you on? Will you seek Jesus? In Matthew and Luke, it is surprising who does. Jesus has seekers who are different from what we expect.

The wise men seek Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. Who are these wise men? Tradition gives them names and says there were three of them, one for each gift, but Matthew offers no specifics. Who are wise men? The word in Greek is “magos,” and it is used in the Old Testament for Pharoah’s magicians that oppose Moses in the Book of Exodus and the officiants of the king in the Book of Daniel. These are not particularly positive references: these men are a king’s astrologers and fortune tellers, and often, a king would send officials like them to honor an allied king. In the year 66 AD, magi from an eastern nation beyond the Roman Empire visited the emperor Nero to honor him.

Whoever Matthew’s magi were, they came to recognize Israel’s true king, even though they had no relationship to God’s covenant with Israel, and they are the ones who found Jesus while Herod and the rest of the people in Jerusalem were clueless. Let’s just appreciate this little irony of the story: When God’s people completely miss their messiah being born on their doorstep, a group of pagan fortune tellers travel across the known world led by an ancient horoscope in the sky, a notion Jews would have regarded as false—everything their religion stood against—but the magi did so to find and honor Jesus.

That might lead us to be a bit more humble in how we speak about people of different beliefs than us. For all we know, they may actually be pursuing Jesus—or Jesus is pursuing them—in ways we have fundamentally missed in our own lives.

In Luke’s Gospel, it is the shepherds who seek Jesus. Shepherding was one of the poorest jobs one could have in that society (and not to mention dangerous, out in the wilderness with the elements, wild animals, and bandits). It was a job for outcasts. The shepherds come and find Jesus, and the angels say that you will find your messiah wrapped in ragged cloth and lying in an animal feeding trough, a manger, and these things will be a sign to you of God’s good news for everyone.

If this event were to happen here, today in Kentville, you can imagine Jesus being born by the dumpers in a parking lot at center square, wrapped in someone’s second-hand coat, and the poor, the drug addicts, the folks that work night shift at the gas station or in the warehouse at Walmart realize if this baby is going to be our leader, things are going to get better, but he’s one of us.  

A messiah born into poverty rather than power and privilege: This messiah is good news. He gets us. He is on our side because if God is on the side of the least of us, God is for everyone. And so the shepherds search out Jesus. Will we?

This chapter ends with the full display of what Herod is capable of: a massacre of the children in Bethlehem to try to find and eliminate Jesus. Matthew says this speaks of another prophecy from the book of Jeremiah chapter 31, “Rachel weeping for her children / She refused to be consoled because they are no more.”

Scholars have been puzzled about how this passage is actually a prophecy. It does not actually predict anything specific. It just speaks poetically of Rachel, one of the matriarchs of Israel, weeping over the casualties of the fall of Jerusalem several hundred years before Jesus. These were people slaughtered by the invading Babylonian army, who then carried off the survivors into exile. It speaks of the despair the survivors expressed as they mourned their deceased, walking off into slavery with nothing but ash and rumble behind them. Matthew cites it and by doing so connects their pain with the pain of the victims of tyranny in his day. And by doing so, anyone who read this and knew that scripture would also know what that passage promises to those who have suffered tragedy. The verses before and after proclaim hope. They say,

The Lord will ransom you…

I will turn your mourning into joy;
    I will comfort you and give you gladness for sorrow…

There is hope for your future, says the Lord…

I will surely have mercy…

I will satisfy the weary,
    And all who are faint I will replenish.

To the victims of tyranny and tragedy, Matthew is saying there is hope. Through Mary and Joseph, through wise men and shepherds, Luke and Matthew have been giving us unlikely examples as signs that if God is with these kinds of people, God is with us all.

To the victims of the violence in the Middle East, to those who have lost so much to the war in Ukraine, to those in Japan sifting through the remnants hit by the earthquake, to the broken and the hurting, the starving and the scared, God is with you. God is for you. God will ransom you. God will restore you. God will have mercy. There is hope.

God’s kingdom is here, and this is good news.

Jesus’ way is different because Jesus isn’t like how the world operates. He does not conform to our assumptions and expectations.

God cannot be bought, boxed in, owned, or sold off. God has come as the gift of grace, unlimited as it is undeserved.

Trust it. Let it sustain you in tough times. Let it transform you. Let it flow through you to transform others.

Let’s pray.

Loving and gracious God revealed in Jesus Christ.

You are God, Immanuel. God with us, God for us.

You lead as the true Moses; you teach us what it means to be Israel.

God, we repent for all the ways we honor you with our lips, but our hearts and our actions are far from you and your ways.

Forgive us and guide us by the leading of your Spirit on the way of Jesus.

We pray for these things in your name, amen.

The More Lost, The More Loved

Are you the kind of person who loses their car keys all the time? Full confession: I am. My wife is giving me that look like, “Oh yes, he is, and it drives me nuts.”

“Honey, where are the car keys?” She has asked.

To which I respond, “Well, they are either on the key hook, or on my dresser, or on my desk, or in my coat pocket, or in my pants pocket from the previous day. It’s a simple list of options, Meagan.” To which she looks at me like that.

It is amazing how important a set of keys can be at the right moment. The other day, I was doing work on our vehicle, and I went into the house. I was in there for a bit, and I realized I had to go somewhere. Where are my keys? Where did I leave them? When I came back out, thinking I might have left them in the vehicle, there they were. I could see them through the glass, but—and you know where I am going with this—the door—I realized out of habit, I locked the door and closed it.

This was a holiday, and so I figured CAA would either not be around or charge an arm and a leg to come or take forever to come. So, I tried to get in the car with a coat hanger and something I was using to wedge the door forward a bit. I came so close to getting the hook on the door handle to open it. So close. I have never wanted to get those keys so bad in my life.

In the end we called CAA. They came pretty quickly. They had a special tool that got the door open in about three seconds.  

Anyways, you don’t realize just how important something is until it is lost.

So, as I said last week, Pastor Chris slotted me in for two weeks during his vacation way back when. It was when he was going through his series on the parable of the Prodigal Son, and my thought was to go into some of the parables, particularly the two that occur before the Prodigal Son in Luke chapter 15: the Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. These are two parables that I keep coming back to, reflecting on. They go like this:

15 Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. 2 And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” 3 So he told them this parable: 4 “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. 6 And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ 7 Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. 8 “Or what woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? 9 And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ 10 Just so I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

Gospel of Luke 15:1-10, NRSV

I have been enjoying reading a collection of sermons on the parables as I reflect on these passages. It is a book by Howard Thurman. Thurman was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., and his books have been as beautiful as they are challenging for my faith. In his sermon on these parables, he suggests something profound: Sometimes, we take the parables as stories merely about how to get saved, which is an important topic, of course. But let me suggest to you that if you read these parables asking, “What do I do?” You have fundamentally misunderstood it. Thurman pointed out to me that these parables are whole accounts of God’s character in miniature. They are here to tell us what God is like and what God does.

So, the parable asks this question: What is God like? In these parables, Jesus gives us two surprising metaphors that answer this question.

What is God like? God is like a Shepherd

The first might seem obvious or old hat to some of us who have been around the church for a while, but it is surprising because it is loaded with implications. If you look at certain passages in the Old Testament, God is the shepherd of Israel.

But notice something: Jesus is scolded by religious teachers because he is the one eating with the riff-raff of the town. Sinners and tax collectors are coming to him, finding the grace they have never experienced, and religious folk are indignant. To this, Jesus says that God is like a shepherd who goes out and rescues a lost sheep and that heaven rejoices each time one lost sheep is brought home. Who is this heavenly shepherd in this parable, then? Its Jesus. Jesus just gave us a clue about who he is here. Jesus is God Immanuel, God with us.

But notice something further: What is God like if God is like Jesus? Is God the kind of God that loves only his flock? Does God only love the ones that stay in the flock, who are smart enough and competent enough and loyal enough to keep themselves out of trouble? Is that what God is like? Is that what Jesus is like? Hold that thought for a moment.

What is God like? God is like a Poor Woman

The second metaphor is even more surprising. God is a woman who has lost a coin.

I know what you must be thinking: “You mean God isn’t an old white guy with a long white beard up in heaven?” Believe it or not, while Jesus certainly uses the analogy that God is like a Father for very important reasons, there are other passages that say God is like a mother who comforts her children, or God is Lady Wisdom who guides Israel, or God is a mother bird protecting her young. Look them up. They are worth a Google. The Bible speaks about God in a number of ways to communicate God’s love, and here, Jesus uses the analogy that God is like a woman searching for a coin.

Now, who is this woman? We are given some clues: She has ten coins. A silver coin was a day’s wage. Angela suggested last week that ten silver coins could have been her dowry (the money her father set aside to pay for a wedding); sometimes, the ten coins were laced together onto a headdress for unmarried women to wear. Either that or it could be her life savings. Whatever the case, it suggests she is very poor. If it is her dowry, in a culture where women had very little, marriage was the means of provision and stability. This coin was her future. Or, if it was her life savings, as you can imagine, having only ten days’ worth of savings is not much, and losing even a little would cause panic and desperation. This could be money for her next meal.

It also says she lives in a home that apparently does not have windows (she needs to light a lamp in order to see). In other words, her home is not large and not that nice. This is a person that lives on the brink of destitution.

Desperate and destitute—let’s just let this sink in for a second: God is like a poor, desperate peasant woman looking for the money that she desperately needs to sustain her well-being. If you did not know it was Jesus telling this parable, you might feel like this is an irreverent idea. God is like a woman? God is like a poor woman? God needs the lost desperately?

It begs the question: Do we matter to God? Do the lost matter to God? If so, how much? Is God the kind of God that is unaffected by whether we are saved or not? Or is God like a poor woman desperately trying to find her lost coin?

I was raised with a certain belief about God that said God is the kind of God that chooses some to be saved, some to be God’s elect, and the others, God in his sovereignty, chooses to leave them in the judgment of their sin that they rightly deserve. Perhaps you were raised with that belief, or perhaps you are looking at me thinking, “What! There are Christians that believe that?” Yes, a lot of them, actually (particularly in the United States for some reason), and they find lots of interesting verses in the Bible to support this idea. But then again, you can cobble together a verse here or there in the Bible to justify almost anything.

Now, if you were raised with an idea like that, you probably were also taught that this was a very good and biblical idea because no one deserves to be saved (which is true), but God, in his grace, has chosen certain ones to be saved, and thank goodness, you are one of them.

Many Christians get by immensely comforted by this notion, but to me, as a young man, it caused profound distress. How could God love some with a saving love and not others? How could God love anything with a less-than-perfect and powerful love?

This became particularly disturbing when a person started coming to the church I attended with my family. He came to faith from a completely non-religious background. I remember him being so passionate about God, and, of course, the church rejoiced. He was the evidence that we were reaching the lost. In fact, I remember, right around that time, a sermon on this very parable, praising how this church was seeing the lost sheep come home.

However, as I learned, this young man had a lot of difficult stuff in his life, and one Sunday, I noticed he just stopped coming to church. When contacted, the guy just said he wasn’t interested in all this religious stuff anymore. It wasn’t helping him with whatever he was going through (which, to this day, I don’t know what that was).

This created a dilemma for me because I was raised with the notion that God chooses some for salvation, and for those he does choose, we would say the phrase, “once saved, always saved.” And so, I had to ask my pastor: Is this person still saved? And if so, how could he just walk away from his faith like that? My pastor thought about this and said, with a bit of ire in his voice, “Obviously, he just wasn’t saved to begin with then.” He thought this was a satisfactory answer to my question.

I did not think so. You see, if a person that at one point confesses Jesus is passionate for him as this person clearly was, but then gives up their faith—if this person was never saved, to begin with, how can anyone really know whether they are saved? If eternal security works like that, how can anyone feel, well, secure? I didn’t.

I can tell you that many times in my younger years, I worried whether or not I was saved. Because if God is the kind of God that has only chosen some people to be saved and others not, and there is a whole bunch that think they are saved but actually aren’t, I needed to know for certain that I am one of those chosen, and the only way I could know, I reasoned, is that I believe the right things, I do the right things, or I feel close to God, all of which confirm in some way that God chose me.

The problem with that is that if we believe we know God chose us for salvation because we have the right doctrine, anytime we question our beliefs, we end up feeling uncertain about our salvation. Or if we believe we are saved because we have done something right or keep doing what is right, then anytime we fail, we can feel our salvation is in jeopardy. Or if we think we are saved because of how we feel, there will be times of grief, dryness or loneliness that might make us feel God is far away. Now, all of these things have their place in the Christian life—beliefs, actions, and feelings (a deeper relationship with God involves believing what is true, doing what is right, and being sincere, sensing God’s presence)—but anytime they are used as the sole indicator for whether God loves us, they get distorted. They get used to something they were not meant for. I talked a bit last week about how we can do that.

The reality is the only way we know whether we are saved is not in anything we are or do or have. It simply comes down to this question: Who is God when we realize we are lost?

What is God like? That is what these parables tell us.

God is the God who loves the lost.

God is the God who sees the lost as essential to God’s self.

God is desperate for us, frantic for us, persistent for us.

God is the God who seeks out and finds the lost.

God is the kind of God that brings the lost home when we don’t know how to get home.

God is the kind of God whose deepest joy is seeing the lost realize they are found.  

Why? Why is God like that? The only answer possible at the end of the day is simply that is who God is.

What does God Do? God Finds the Lost

Now, there is another question here: What does God do?

God is like a shepherd that goes out and finds and brings home lost sheep. God is like a poor woman who lights a lamp and searches till her coin is found. God is the active agent here. This once again confronts a distortion we so often have in our faith about God.

Sometimes, I think we conceive of God as the person on the other end of a help phone line, which is to say, is not super helpful usually.

My wife and I tried to apply for a grant to get our house off of oil and onto heat pumps. There is an initiative by the government to help homes become more energy efficient that we learned about and decided to go for. I don’t know if you noticed, but the price of oil has increased a wee bit lately.

Now, what seems like a simple thing—install heat pumps and get a grant—is not so simple. You have to have an inspection on the heat usage of the home. You have to send in that report. You have to use government-certified products and certain government-certified companies to install the heat pumps. They have to do a report to the government; you have to submit papers; you have to have another heat usage inspection; you need to submit papers from the bank, etc.

At some point, we had to call the government helpline. I am sure you all know how delightful this can be. You call, and you get that automated voice that gives you a list of options, which really none of them fits what you want, so you kind of guess. It keeps giving you prompts to enter information on the number pad, but in the back of your head, you keep saying, “Please, I just want to talk to a human.” Finally, the automated secretary sends you to a representative.

Somehow, if the stars align, if you are able to provide every piece of meticulous paperwork, you are put on hold listening to that terrible elevator music for what seems like an eternity, and then finally, the representative presses the magic button they must have on their desk to do what you were hoping they would do.   

Like I said, I think some people think God is like that. If you come to God, and you have your proverbial paperwork together, then God is helpful.

I knew someone very dear to me who loved to recite the folk saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Have you ever heard that? If that is the case (and there is truth to that saying, don’t get me wrong), what about those who can’t help themselves? What about those who are beyond help?

Notice what these parables don’t say. It doesn’t say the shepherd went out to get his lost sheep, searched for a bit, it got dark, and so the shepherd called it a night and cut his losses. It doesn’t say that.

It doesn’t say the shepherd found the sheep, but the sheep was caught in a thicket so dense the shepherd just couldn’t get the sheep out. It does not say that.

It doesn’t say the woman searched but, in the end, gave up. It doesn’t say that.

It doesn’t say she looked high and low, but realized 9 out of 10 coins is still pretty good. It just does not say that.

It says God goes out actively and persistently, and God finds the lost.

Sadly, I think we often think about God like sin does stop; it stops God from finding he lost. Yet, when we look at Jesus, who bore all sin at the cross and rose from the grave to new life, we see that God has overcome sin, all sin. The very power of death itself does not stop God’s grace.

I once knew a man named Alexander, who started attending the church I pastored. He started attending the church because of the community garden we organized, which was kind of a surprise to me because the community garden was a project we did just as a service to the community. I did not expect folks to start attending the church over it. But he liked what the church was about and started coming.

He shared his story with me. Alexander was an older man, but when he was a boy growing up, he told me that at a Catholic school, a priest tried to sexually assault him. Thankfully, he kicked the man off of him and ran away, but he said from that day on, he hated God, and he hated all things having to do with religion, and his life became a big mess for years.

Years later, he had an accident. He was in a coma, and he said he woke up from that coma, and he described to me that it was like God turned his heart back on. He woke up with a powerful sense that God loved him, and he did not have hate in his heart anymore about the things that had happened to him.

Yes, God can do that. God can turn back years of hurt and hate. God is the God that finds the lost. God can break through the walls of rebellion and resentment. Why? Because that is what God does.

I could tell other stories like that, but these experiences have impressed upon me that I simply do not believe there is anything that can ultimately prevent God’s grace from finding those that are lost. Nothing limits God’s grace.

This is where things get complicated: God wants a daily relationship with us, where we live God’s grace, showing it to others. We know that our choices matter and that God’s love desires us to choose him. Yet, I can only surmise that any choice that rejects God’s love and life, embracing darkness and destruction, is no real choice at all. It is a delusion. It is enslavement.

And when we make bad choices, when we get ourselves lost, is God done with us? Is there ever a point where God says, “Okay, fine, you and I are through”? Is that what God does?

One time, I was asked to go visit an older lady, one of those beloved saints of the church, who lived in a retirement home. Her husband had passed away a few years earlier, but recently, her son passed away, and someone suggested to me that I should go visit. So, I went, and I sat down with her at her apartment.

She shared with me that she spoke with her son just before he died in hospital. She pleaded with him about whether he believed in Jesus anymore, and his answer was, “I just don’t believe in religion anymore.” That was the last response she had on the matter before he died. When she told that to one of her Christian friends, that friend gave a blunt response: “Well, then it is obvious where he is.”

This broke her. She told me that she had prayed for her son every day for decades, trusting that God hears and answers prayer, that God is mighty to save, and that God’s will is to save sinners. How could this happen? How could God not answer her prayers for her son? How could God not change his heart?

At the thought of it, she began to weep and wail with a bitterness I could not even begin to describe to you. I did not know a human being could cry like that. I remember getting in my car after and shaking; it was so disturbing.

In the moment, sitting with her, fighting back tears myself, all I could manage to choke out of me was to say that I didn’t know where her son was, but I do trust that God is merciful.

I have thought about those moments many times since that day. It makes you ask what do I fundamentally trust about God?  

I trust in the God who finds and saves the lost; I cannot believe otherwise.

I can’t believe in a God that lets our sin win.

I can’t believe in a God whose grace loses to human ignorance.

I can’t believe in a God that is obstructed by death.

I believe in a God that conquers death.

I believe in a God that loves so much, so ardently, so fiercely that God willing dies the death we deserve in order to give us his life.

I believe in a God that does not give up on us.

God is the kind of God that finds and saves the lost.

While there are dire warnings in Scripture about rejecting God and we can never presume a future that is only up to God, nevertheless, the whole sweep of Scripture impresses on us that God’s mercy simply cannot be limited, and when humanity shows God our very worse, and God even says he is in his right to punish, God surprises us with just how much greater his mercy is.

It does not make sense, but that is who God is, and that is what God does.

I think that is what these parables are trying to tell us. One writer suggests that when we look at the parables, there is always something that does not make sense about them. For instance, why does the shepherd leave the ninety-nine —in the “wilderness,” it says, by the way—to go look for that one sheep? No smart shepherd would risk that. It is like the shepherd loves the lost sheep too much. And don’t you think it is a bit odd for a woman in severe poverty to throw a party just because she found a coin—remember that her ten coins were very likely the dowry that would pay for a wedding celebration, and yet she throws a celebration because she found one of the coins. That does not seem particularly frugal. That does not seem to make a lot of sense, does it? It almost seems gratuitous, even wasteful, so much so that it makes certain religious folk upset.

But it seems that Jesus weaves these details in to try to drive home the truth about God that does not conform to our reasoning. We so often assume that because we are limited beings, God’s grace has limits too.

For us, when we or others get in trouble, we eventually hit that point that says, “We’re done. It’s over.” And yet, God is the shepherd that goes out and finds the lost sheep, leaving the 99. God is that poor woman who so desperately needs her lost coin that she lights a lamp, tracks it down and finds it.

These parables tell us the other-worldly truth that the more lost we are, the more loved we are. The more hopeless we feel, in reality, the more God is pursuing us with a love more powerful than death itself.

This he invites us to trust now, to step into and live now, to be changed and healed by it now and to bring this hope to others right now.  

Because it also says that the greatest joy in heaven is seeing the lost get found.

That is who God is and what he does. Let’s pray.

Loving and gracious God, you are the shepherd who seeks, the poor woman who searches; you are the one who finds the lost.

God rebuke in us any pretension that leads us to believe we earned your grace.

You are the God that saves sinners.

So, God, we pray that you would save all sinners just like us.

Reassure us that no one is out of your reach. Comfort us that we are all in your grasp.

God, we long for all people to know you, to know your love.

And so, teach us how to be witnesses of your good news so that we can see the joy of salvation in others and more deeply in ourselves as well.

Strengthen us with your Spirit for this good work.

Amen.

The Faith We Do Not See

Preached at Third Horton (Canaan) Baptist Church, Sunday, July 16, 2023

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves, will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 18:9-14, NRSV

As I said before, I was pastor of First Baptist Church of Sudbury for five years before coming here to Nova Scotia.

One time, I remember doing a house call, and the person who attended my church had a friend there. This friend asked for my card and messaged me about going for coffee.

When we met for coffee, this person confessed to me her struggles with drug addiction, and while I said she needed to seek out addiction counselling, we decided we would go through a book called Addiction and Grace by Gerald May, which is a really powerful book.

So, this became a weekly thing, us meeting and discussing some bible verses, a chapter of this book, and praying, and this really became something I looked forward to. This is why I became a pastor: my love of encouraging folks to grow deeper in their faith in God, to instill some good teachings about the meaning of grace, and to see how that affects a person’s life. I had something she needed.

I remember one morning getting up, hustling to get my kids out the door to the bus, get my breakfast, and shower to make it to coffee with this person. I made it on time despite the coffee shop being on the other side of the city. I remember asking her in our conversations, “What does faith in God mean for your day-to-day life?” I was expecting the usual vague answers I got from folks. She responded by saying, “I don’t know if I really have faith. I don’t know whether or not I am a Christian. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. I have done so many terrible things. One pastor told me that if I really had faith, I wouldn’t do those things. All I know is that every day, I wake up feeling so lost. I pray God be merciful to me today, and all I know is that if I don’t do that, I just can’t get out of bed.”

It struck me that I had gotten up and rushed out the door that day without much thought about God at all. Ironically, I did this in my pursuit to come and help this woman to have more faith.

The thought struck me that maybe this woman, in her own way, knows something about faith that I could learn a thing or two from.

I was so eager to think I was the faithful one (pastor man) here to improve her faith (an addict that really did not, by most outward appearances, live her faith) that I failed to realize that perhaps God sees something different.

As I said last week, I teach theology. And so, if you ever took a theology class with me, you would investigate things like what the Bible says about certain topics, how Christians have thought about things through the ages, and what that means for our times today. Over the centuries, there are those classic statements Christians have been convinced are true that form the core of our faith, one of which we explored last week: We believe God is one being, three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit, all equally and fully  God, which speaks deeply of how God’s essence is love itself. Others include the statements that show up in the creeds like the Apostles Creed or Nicene Creed. These sorts of statements Christians have, throughout the centuries, come to regard as orthodox, meaning “right belief.” If we did not have these, our Christian faith could be compromised.

And so, one of the jobs of theology is really to reflect as best we can on what is true and good, what they mean, so that we can believe truly and act well.

Now, in its own right, this is something all Christians, indeed really any human being, are tasked with doing. We ought to believe what is true over what is false. We ought to do what is right as best we can over what is wrong. When it comes to our faith, it is obviously better to have a good understanding of what the Bible says and what the faith teaches if we want to follow it effectively. Such things are virtuous.

But there is a kind of problem that pops up throughout the Bible that cautions us when we undertake this activity, a kind of Achilleas heel to the whole endeavour. We all must seek to do what is right, but does God love us only when we do what is right? Are outward actions always an indication of what is going on inside?

We all know the answer to this, but we often don’t practice it to its fullest extent. We, Protestants, tend not to believe that we are saved by works, but we are quick to use beliefs to do the same thing. Many of us use theological tests to prove we are good. One writer suggested that we often believe in salvation by mental works, theological righteousness. You see, we must believe what is true, but does that mean God only loves us because we have these ideas in our heads?

And so, we are left with this kind of conundrum. We strive to think what is true and do what is right, and in so doing, we use categories like good and bad, true and false, and we might even use terms like orthodox and heretical (“heresy” means “error” by the way), or just Christian versus non-Christian. But scripture warns that when we use these categories (and use them, we must) there is always a tendency for the human heart to distort them into ways of presuming this is why I know I have an authentic relationship with God and you do not; or that my faith counts and yours does not; or why I belong in the church and you do not.

There is a big difference between believing in the right things and believing in the right way. Both are important, but one is a lot harder to see.

This causes a lot of problems for folks like me as a professor because I can evaluate beliefs, whether in an exam or an essay, how well someone thinks about something, but I can’t see why people think it or, more importantly, how they hold these convictions in their heart. You can test words on a page quite easily. The heart is a bit more tricky.

Yet, it is there that faith really resides. This is something only God can see, and we so often miss. We often only get little glimmers of what is going on in a person’s heart when all the layers of performance and presumption are pulled back. And these moments are really when the reality of the kingdom of God shines through the clouds of human religion most powerfully.  

It is this fact that Jesus tries to instill in this parable. You see, throughout the Gospel of Luke, Jesus has been teaching folks about what the kingdom of God means, what it looks like when God has his way in our world, and, more surprisingly, who belongs in God’s kingdom.

God’s kingdom is, says Luke’s opening chapters, for a poor, young Jewish girl whose fiancé discovers she was pregnant before they were married, but she is, in fact, the mother of the Messiah.

God’s kingdom is for some rough around the edges fishermen, folks from the wrong side of the tracks in Galilee, yet these are the people Jesus makes into apostles.

God’s kingdom is for the sick and the suffering, the poor and the hungry, and against the proud and the powerful: the people that seem to have their faith well put-together.

In this kingdom where the lowly are raised up, where the first are last, and the last are first, I am constantly bewildered at who Jesus sees as having faith.

Jesus sees the trust of a centurion, a military commander of the legions that are oppressing God’s people (the man literally had idolatrous images on his breastplate and shield) – Jesus sees this person as having profound faith.

Jesus sees a sinful woman who comes to him when he is surrounded by religious folk, a woman who pours wastefully-expansive perfume on him and weeps, and without her even saying anything, Jesus says she has saving faith.

Jesus uses the example of a Samaritan man, a person who was regarded as a heretic by the Jews, over a priest and a Levite, as an example of someone who really knows what eternal life is about.

Here, it says Jesus tells them this parable because “some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Jesus tells the parable of a Pharisee, a religious expert, you might say, coming into the temple and praying, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ 

While the Bible does say to do pious things like give of one’s money and fast and pray, and obviously condemns stealing and things like that, it is how he does it that is the problem. Notice that he thanks God for all the things he does, not what God does. And when it comes down to it, his faith rests on comparisons to others, how he is superior. As I said, there is a big difference between the right belief and believing in the right way.

Do we ever do that? Perhaps we have more subtle ways of saying it: “Thank God I was never exposed to those kinds of things. Thank God I wasn’t raised like that. Thank God my life did not turn out like that.”

Thank God I am not like those others. Who are “those others” for you?

Is it our coworkers, friends, or family members who just refuse to take God seriously and come to church? Unlike us! Is it those lukewarm Christians that don’t take their faith seriously? Unlike us! Is it those liberal Christians who have allowed the culture to infect their faith? Unlike us! Is it those fundamentalists who just refuse to open their minds and educate themselves? Unlike us!

Whoever it is, we know we are saved, we have an authentic relationship with God, and they do not because we believe these things and we do these things, unlike them.

Jesus sees it differently, and he tells us about a tax collector: tax collectors in those days were people that the Roman Empire recruited to intimidate and extort money from their own communities to help fund their own oppression. They were traitors and thugs who got rich off of extortion. To put it plainly, there is simply no way a member of God’s people could do those kinds of things.

What does this person do? “Standing far off,” it says, “he would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his chest and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”

Mercy for a tax collector? Some might call that cheap grace. I knew one pastor who would call grace without changing one’s ways “loosey-goosey, lovey-dovey grace” (a good theological phrase if there ever was one).

And yet, Jesus says, “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jesus uses a really important term here: justified. Paul uses the same language to say that Gentiles can be members of God’s people by trusting what the Spirit has done, despite not being entirely obedient to all of the laws of the Old Testament.

Paul says we are justified by faith. Luke records a tax collector being justified by humility.  

If you were to ask me whether that was enough, enough to be a church member or something like that, I would struggle to say that this is enough to go on. What the tax collector says is hardly a doctrinal statement. It falls short of the other statements about what is required for salvation in other passages. But this tax collector is one of those people like the centurion or the woman who anoints Jesus’ feet or the good Samaritan that really are outsiders to the community, on the margins of religion, people that we might be tempted to say they don’t make the cut of what faith looks like, and yet God sees something different.

Who is that for you? Who do we exclude that God might include?

One time, I was asked to speak at another church for a conference in Sudbury. The theme of the conference was “Living in Exile,” and it explored how we live in a secularized culture. Pastors from the evangelical ministerial came, but also a number of catholic priests. I remember one pastor seeing the priests show up in their collars, come up to me, and say, “Interesting that Catholics would come to this. Perhaps we can witness to them what the Bible says.”

I remember at the beginning of my talk, I had a number of Bible verses I wanted to talk about, and for fun, I said, “Hey, let’s do an old-fashioned Bible drill.” Have you all done one of these? You hold your Bible up, the leader calls out a passage, and you try to find it before anyone else. Well, guess who won those Bible drills? Father Jim beat all the Protestant pastors in the room. Badly. I remember on another occasion, one pastor admitted to me, sheepishly, “I don’t think Catholics are Christians, but I think Father Jim is born again.”

It is funny how we can have our paradigms turned upside down with little experiences like that. Again, who is it for you? How have we seen and made a judgment that might not be how God sees things?

There is an old parable that goes like this:

In heaven, one day, the angel Gabriel was given a gift to deliver to whomever he chose. The person who received this gift would know that fully that God was with them. Gabriel dutifully went out into all the land to find one deserving of such a precious gift. He looked at all the kings and tried to find the one that upheld justice like no other. He looked at all the priests and monks to find one whose piety was beyond the rest, and yet, each came up short. Frustrated, he returned to heaven and cried out to God’s Spirit, “Lead me to the one you choose as deserving!” and so the wind of God blew Gabriel far, far away into a distant land, and the wind of God led him to a house where he found a man weeping bitterly in prayer to an idol. Gabriel was indignant, “God, there must have been some mistake!” The parable ends with the voice of God answering, “O, Gabriel, do you not know that I see the human heart? And O, Gabriel, after all this time, have you still not seen what my heart is like?”

I remember coming across that parable and being deeply moved by it. I looked down the page to see who wrote it. I was surprised to find that it was not a Christian parable. It is actually a Muslim one. It is a well-known parable in Sufi Islam.

When I was a chaplain at Thorneloe University, I made a point of getting to know the other chaplains, one of whom was a Muslim chaplain. He drove a taxi as his day job, but he volunteered his time to encourage the students at the university. He was someone that always had a beaming smile.

I remember having coffee with him, and before I did that, I went over in my head various ways I might give a reason why Christianity is true and Islam is not. I remember being a bit braggy in our conversation, describing all the good things I did in my ministry (you know, to be a good witness). He nodded along. In the course of the conversation, I remember asking him, What does your religion mean to you? He replied, “Spencer, I wake up in the morning with joy in my heart because God is merciful to me, even though I don’t deserve it. I try to trust this every day, and so, I try my best to show that grace to everyone around me.” I remember stopping and pausing, a bit stunned. I was not expecting that answer.

One theologian once said that the kingdom of God is like an uncle who gives you a coin. Every time you think you have God in the palm of your hand, the Spirit reserves the right to pull off a magic trick and surprise you.

I think Jesus taught me a thing or two that day about what sharing the Gospel means or, better yet, what it doesn’t. My prayer was and very much still is that all will know Jesus as their lord and saviour, but I have also learned the hard way that how God is working around me is not always the way I assume it to be.

Sometimes, when I think I am the one God is using to show other people grace, I end up realizing God is using someone else to teach me a thing or two about grace.

While experiences like that can disrupt us, perhaps confuse us, but hopefully humble us, I find myself deeply comforted by the fact that daily, I am surprised by how much more gracious God is.  But with that comes the realization that so often I have missed this because I have treated God’s grace as limited.

It reminds me that at the centre of our faith is the story of how when Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, turning people’s expectations about God upside down, and God’s own people, the leaders of biblical religion, and even Jesus’ own disciples refused to see it, and while we might be quick to shake our heads at those disciples, we are so often no different.

Jesus was betrayed and crucified, treated as a blasphemer and a rebel, executed on a cross, dying as one, as Paul says, “under the curse of the law,” dying outside the bounds of religion.

We know mercy because Jesus bore our sins.  

We are saved because Jesus counted himself forsaken.

We are included because Jesus was excluded.

Despite all the ways we can take our faith and still make it about us, about how we are better, about how we are safe, about how we are deserving, and others don’t measure up, God does not give up on us. God sees our hearts, all that we are, and all that we have done, and in this, God chooses to love us with his very body and blood. God says his kingdom is for you.

The question is whether we will daily choose to see it.

“Longing to be at One”: Sermon for the CTS Prayer Service

Meg Wroe, “Trinity – After Rublev, Southwark,” 2018

Preached at the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Sacred Heart University for the Prayer Service of the College Theology Society and National Baptist Professors of Religion (Region at Large)

Friday June 2, 2023, in anticipation of Trinity Sunday

Scripture Reading: John 17: 1-26

As I said before, my name is Spencer Boersma. I am a Baptist pastor and theologian, and I teach at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. My regular courses are Introductions to Christian Theology, parts 1 and 2, at the grad level there. What that often means is that I get to take some plucky grad students through doctrines of incarnation, atonement, soteriology and such. Some I get the sense they come to class from churches so dogmatic, I think in their minds they do not need this class. Others come from churches that don’t go near theology with a ten-foot pole. Well, needless to say, it makes things interesting.

When we get to the doctrine of the Trinity, there are always mixed feelings. It’s important for most people in their minds, but they don’t get it. It’s fundamental but fuzzy. I tell them about Dorothy Sayers (which they have no idea who that is), and how she once joked that she felt like the Trinity was something theologians thought up one day to make life harder for the rest of us. To this, I like to admit to my students, “Ya’caught me, Dorothy! You do know how I love to make things difficult for my students!” (That is when I say it is just a joke, and the students look at me unconvinced).

As we come upon Trinity Sunday, we have to admit that probably most of us at one point have sympathized with Sayer’s feelings on the matter. Why has the mystery of the Trinity been so onerous? Too often, the Trinity has been captured in impersonal analogies – if any of you have ever wondered why it just wasn’t comforting to know that God is like a clover or like an egg or like an ice cube. And we wonder why it does not connect with people.

Too often, the Trinity is relegated to an appendix of theology: an unnecessary fixture some will just eventually have removed.

Or worse: Too often, the Trinity is the club to bludgeon the dissenter rather than nurse the sick soul.

Dorothy Sayers followed up her joke about the Trinity with a really good piece of advice about understanding the doctrine: if you want to understand the doctrine, you need to look at the drama. If you want to understand the our Triune God, look at the narrative of the Bible.

To confess Christ is to attest to how we have found ourselves in a story where the Creator, who reveals Godself as One, the I am who I am – this God, who appears to the men and women, who rescues and redeems Israel out of bondage, who makes covenants and sends prophets – this God longs to be with humanity fully and unreservedly. This God longs to be at one with us.

This God, who is beyond all things, is also the root of all existence, in whom we live and move and have our being. This God is transcendent and infinite, but this God is also Spirit, the breath of life, closer to us than we are to ourselves.

It is this God who has chosen to come in the form of Jesus Christ, God Immanuel, the messiah who perfectly enfleshes the presence of the God Israel worshiped but also fulfills the longing for righteousness Israel was called to. Jesus shows us that God has come to be at one with us.

Yet, we are not at one. Oh no, we are not at one.

As I said, we travelled down from Nova Scotia. It was a beautiful but long drive. It was made a bit longer to get stopped and searched at the border (that is a story for another time). Anyways.

I live about an hour outside of the province’s major city, Halifax, and if you did not know, we left in the knowledge that parts of Halifax, a city of about a million people, are being evacuated due to a forest fire that is right now about 20 000 hectares (that is over 75 square miles). Hundreds of homes have been destroyed by a fire caused by such dryness that is unheard of for a province that literally has ocean on all sides of it.

Of course, the news is quick to point out the obvious answers as to why: They say the fire was probably caused by someone walking along in the forest having a cigarette and turning and flicking their butt into the dry grass. The weather is getting more and more severe because we are dealing with the effects of climate change. While Nova Scotia has moved to have among the best recycling practices on the continent, there is still so much to be done in our energy sector, which is still very reliant on oil, and our climate is affected by practices all over the world. And at the end of the day, all it took was one person to flick a cigarette, and now, 200 families might not have homes to come back to.  

It is things like a forest fire that remind us that a city of a million people still is a community, depending on one another, needing one another; affected by the choices of one another; that our states and providences and nations, just like individuals are not self-enclosed, independent, self-reliant units, able to carry one without help or to help others. We are dependent on the earth and the seas, the fish and the animals, for the very processes of life that sustain us. We are learning the hard way that we are all connected. Where one acts irresponsibly, all are affected, but also, where one suffers, all suffer.

And yet, history is a sad record of humanity, Christians included, choosing to ignore this fact. Our lives are marred with reminders that we are living alienated from nature and each other. We are divided against the very things we need most. We are killing ourselves because we are constantly failing to see ourselves, our fate, and our identity, as dependent on others. We know we need to be one; we long to be at one with each other; we long for unity and harmony where we can all be ourselves, and others can be themselves in peace with the earth, and yet, we are not at one. We have given in to greed and selfishness or just slipped into an easy thoughtlessness, too concerned with the rat race of life.

We find ourselves reliving this story of humanity again and again, which comes to a particular apex and intensity when people rejected Jesus’ invitation to step into the oneness of God, the kingdom of heaven. Jesus died on the cross, executed by an instrument of imperial oppression orchestrated by the corrupt religious institution, but also betrayed by the ones Jesus was closest with. The cross discloses the tragic depth of our proclivity to refuse to be at one with God and others.

It is here we must remember that Jesus bore the consequences of human division. As the people cried out, “Crucify him!” he prayed for their forgiveness.

And yet, for Jesus, God in human flesh, for him to die as one counted as a sinner, yet one with the Father, God has revealed through Jesus Christ God’s loving solidarity with every human being, no matter how lost or sinful. God chooses to see Godself in us and with us.

So often, we are tempted to lose heart, to recoil and collapse under the weight of our guilt and shame, when we think about the state of our world, our complicity in things like racism, colonialism, climate change, or just our individual apathy to the needs of others we encounter on a daily basis – there is so much that might cause us to shrink back and say we don’t deserve a better world. We deserve what is coming to us.

It is in these moments of condemnation that we are encountered by a presence, a love that invites us to see that we are loved with the same perfect love the Father has for his own only begotten Son.

Our Gospel is that in the cross and resurrection, God has shown us who God is.

God is the God that stands with the least of us, the god-forsaken, the oppressed, the outcasts, the sinners: all of us.

God is the God who, in our darkest moments, the comforting Spirit comes, one with us, bringing the presence of undeserved hope.

This God who is God above has come and walked with us in Christ as God beside us and has redeemed us with the Spirit, leading us forward as God within us and through us.

And so, the Apostle John challenges us to be at one with each other in a similar way to how the Father is at one with the Son and how God is at one with us: May they be one as we are one. He prays for his disciples, and he is praying for us today: God knows I could use some prayer on this.

I had my family call me from Ontario, wondering if I was safe and okay with the fires they had heard about in Nova Scotia. I caught myself saying, “I am okay. This does not affect me.”

I caught myself doing something we all too easily do: since hardship or oppression does not touch my immediate experience, my job and family, I conclude I am not affected.

One reason the Trinity feels abstract is that we so often use it as just one more way to honour God with our lips (and perhaps our cognitive minds), but the reality is our hearts are far from God.  

Again, folks are so often tempted to see the Trinity as some abstract idea (and we theologians can admit some part in that), but the Trinity flows from our relationship with God. It is an invitation into the movements of worship and prayer, service and sacrifice that speaks to the essence of who we are and the only way we can move forward: We are connected; we belong to one another. And in God’s choice to be bound to us, to refuse to let us go, we are awakened to our responsibility to others – more than this, our sacred privilege, our witness – beginning with our fellow Christians, whether we are Catholic or Baptist, American or Canadian, whatever our race, sex, or status – it begins with us who have awoken to the reality that we are all children of God.

As we leave this place, will we persist in seeing ourselves as removed and unaccountable and unaffected? Or will we choose to see ourselves in others? Will we weep with those who weep, seeing others suffering as our suffering? Will we see choose to see the success of others as the measure of our success?

May we, daily in choices, grand or small, step into the oneness of God, who will one day be all in all. Amen.

The Unexpected Messiah

The reading is Matthew 21:1-17 from the NRSV:

21:1 When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. 3 If anyone says anything to you, just say this, ‘The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” 4 This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,

5 “Tell the daughter of Zion,
Look, your king is coming to you,
    humble, and mounted on a donkey,
        and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

6 The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; 7 they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. 8 A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. 9 The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!
    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

10 When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, “Who is this?” 11 The crowds were saying, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.

12 Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. 13 He said to them, “It is written,

‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’;
    but you are making it a den of robbers.”

14 The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” they became angry 16 and said to him, “Do you hear what these are saying?” Jesus said to them, “Yes; have you never read,

‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
    you have prepared praise for yourself’?”

17 He left them, went out of the city to Bethany, and spent the night there.

What do we expect kings to look like? What do we think of when we think of power? 

Three hundred years before Christ, there arose a man named Alexander the Great. One of the most successful conquerors of all time – up there with Napoleon and Genghis Khan. 

A Macedonian prince, schooled by the brightest in the world, his tutor was the philosopher Aristotle, and early in his life, the prince burned with a violent ambition for conquest.

After his father’s assassination, Alexander assumed the throne at age 20. Alexander feared rebellion, and so, he quickly worked to eliminate all possible challengers to his throne. He killed his cousins, two princes, his father’s other wife, her father, who was a general, and her daughter. He killed his whole family.

Once he had done this, he pursued his real agenda. He assembled his army: 48 000 soldiers, 6000 calvaries, 120 ships with crews that amounted to 38 000, and battle after battle, he conquered the known world.

His army was nothing short of impressive. Without radios, without motors, without any of our modern luxuries, his army ran with an efficiency and discipline that would make modern generals blush. 

He was without a doubt one of the most formidable commanders in world history, ingeniously outflanking armies several times larger than his own. His victories are the stuff of movies.

In ten short years, his army had conquered all the way to Egypt then out all the way to India, where his soldiers finally persuaded him to turn back and go home. 

When he came through Israel, he laid siege to the cities, and as they fell, he ordered his soldiers to kill all military-age males and to take all male children to sell them as slaves, funding the war effort.

Along the way, he founded 20 cities, most of them creatively named, “Alexandria.” As the army returned home, Alexander figured that he would set up a new capital in Babylon, however, one day, at age 32, after drinking some wine, he fell violently sick and died. Most historians suspect it was an assassination.

Alexander’s life was short, but spectacular. This young man conquered the known world by age 30. If you could describe his life in one word, it might be “glorious”: the glory of battle, of brilliance, of victory and conquest. That is why they call him Alexander the Great.

History is full of these kinds of “Greats”: Rameses the Great, Antiochus the Great, Cyrus the Great, Herod the Great, etc.

When Alexander conquered a city he rode in on his favourite horse.  He rides his mighty horse, Bucephalus. 

Look at almost every city in the world and at the heart of the city is a statue of its great man riding a horse. 

Look Rome. Look at London. Look at Washington. Even look at Ottawa. They all proudly display the conqueror on the horse. It is the fundamental symbol of worldly power: The man on the horse, who has brought peace by victory. This is our image of power, wealth, stability, glory. This is what we expect a king to be like. Riding in with his army on the stallion, a Brucephalus. 

Jesus did not ride in on a horse. Jesus did not do what we think kings should do. He wasn’t the messiah God’s people were expecting.  He came in an unexpected way to give an unexpected message. And who Jesus is and what his message says, still today, two thousand years later, upsets our expectations of what we think God to be.

That is our challenge this morning. Jesus is still the unexpected messiah. 

1.    The people had the wrong expectation

Throughout the Old Testament, it is the people’s perennial temptation to want a conqueror on a horse. The people saw the great kings, and unfortunately, they wanted to be like the nations.

Look at the horse in the Old Testament, and frankly, sorry horse-lovers, the Old Testament does not look well on horses. Nearly every mention of horses is negative. 

Why? Horses were exclusively used in war. You used oxen for farming. You used camels for long travel. Horses were much more expensive. They were kept for a singular purpose: battle.

Horses were the tanks of the ancient world, able to outflank foot soldiers and plow throw them like a knife through butter.  

Israel’s prophets watched men like Alexander the Great riding on their horses. Deuteronomy warned that if Israel trusted in human power and a human king over God, the king will trust in his military more than God and lead the people astray. Deuteronomy 17:16 warns that the king must never accumulate horses, “lest they go back to the ways of Egypt.” 

But they did. 

The Old Testament is a sad narrative at many points. It is the story of God longing to be the king of his people, for them to trust him and accept his reign over their hearts and lives, but they resist for they want a king like the nations do. They want the wealth and security and grander of an empire. And they were willing to follow other gods, if those gods promised these things.

The apex of this quest is during King Solomon’s reign. His God-given wisdom brought wealth and prosperity beyond measure. 1 Kings records that he had so much gold that silver was virtually worthless, as common as rocks. But then he grew arrogant. The Bible records that he started to accumulate horses. It says he amassed 12 000 horses and 1400 chariots. He started to stockpile weapons.

He brokered alliances with pagan kings, and they gave him their daughters in marriage. His greed caused him to collect women like he did gold and weapons. And these wives persuaded him to worship their idols, perhaps because they promised power. Solomon grew corrupt. His kingdom began to fracture from insurrection as he grew more and more oppressive. The nation broke in two after his death into North and South, and as the two dynasties of kings constantly fell into idolatry and injustice, God finally removed his presence of protection. 

Israel gets conquered again and again. First by the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, and then the Romans in the time of Jesus. Israel lived under the shadow of empires and emperors, in oppression and occupation. 

One hundred years before Jesus, the Jews revolt against the a Greek ruler named Antiochus Epiphanies. Antiochus bans Jewish worship and proclaims himself god. He nicknames himself the “Anti-messiah” the “Anti-Christ” in mockery of the Jewish God. The Jews are outraged and are rallied by their high priest, Matthias the Hasmonean. He gathers an army in the wilderness, and his five sons lead the army, headed by his firstborn, Judas the Maccabee. Maccabee means “the hammer” by the way: Judas the Hammer.

The Maccabees succeed in retaking Jerusalem. They come riding into Jerusalem on their warhorses. People cry out in adoration spreading their cloaks on the road. The people greet them by waving the symbol of their house. Can you guess what that is? The palm branch.

Now the Maccabean revolt was not particularly successful. Israel very quickly becomes a vessel kingdom to a larger empire, but the memory hangs on. People long for the good old days. They are nostalgic for the glory of the Maccabees. They long, you might say, to “Make Israel Great Again,” and so, the people greet Jesus with palm branches because they expected he was going to raise an army just like the Maccabees. He would be the next hammer. He would be a conqueror on a horse: Jesus the Maccabee, Jesus the Hammer.

The irony for us Christians is that we wave palm branches on a day like this, because that is what the passage describes. I have fond memories of holding palm branches in church when I was little. They seem so harmless (except I pocked my brother in the eye with the stem, whatever). But since we are removed from this history, we do not realize why they were holding them. The palm branch was a symbol of revolution. It was like the hammer and sickle.

Perhaps this might change your feelings about waving a palm branch on Palm Sunday ever again. Or perhaps, maybe it is a reminder that we too can still today expect God to be something other than what he truly is. 

In my experience, I know many people, Christians included, who expect God is like an invisible Santa Claus in the sky, existing to just give us stuff.

Other expectations are far less jolly. There is an expectation of God where God is so moralistic and angry, people live in constant fear and guilt. Their religion can be summarized in one line: “Don’t mess up or else.” This god claims to be loving, but only so long as you obey, never question, never stray.

Still others believe God is absent from their lives, absent in the same way perhaps their fathers are. Where was God when I needed him most? Somewhere else. 

Still others believe in a God that approves of their politics. God is American. God is western. God is white. God is male. God is on our side. Our nation is God’s nation. Our war is God’s war. God hates everyone I hate. 

What is it for you? What is your expectation of God? How have you put Jesus in a box of expectations the Gospel does not fit? 

This easter time, are you ready for God to surprise you? Are you prepared for Jesus to show up in unexpected ways?

The people in Jesus’ time weren’t ready. 

2.    Jesus gave an unexpected message

Israel expected Jesus to be a conqueror on a horse. They expected him to come in and rally the troops like Judas Maccabee did, to conqueror the nations like Alexander the Great. But Jesus, as we know from the Gospel of Matthew, did not come riding in on a Brucephalus. He did not come with an army, with golden armour or sword. He did something unexpected. 

He rode in on a donkey. Donkeys are work animals. They have stubby legs, best for carrying heavy loads, not for speed. If you have ever seen someone ride a donkey, you know it is not the most dignified of animals.

The people wave palm branches, hailing Jesus a warlord King. Jesus counters this with the prophecy of Zechariah, which Matthew quotes the first part of:  

Look, your king comes to you

Triumphant and victorious is he

Humble and riding on a donkey, 

On a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The next verse is important:

He will end the chariot from Ephraim

And the war-horse from Jerusalem;

And the battle bow shall be ended,

And he shall command peace to the nations

His dominion shall be from sea to sea, 

The donkey is not only the symbol of humility, but it is also the prophetic sign of non-violence. Jesus is not their warlord. Jesus is not there to start a war. Jesus is not against the Romans. Nor is he merely the king of the Jews. He is everyone’s king. His kingdom cannot be reduced to this nation or that land or that tribe and that tongue. He desires peace for everyone.

Jesus was a disruptor, a resistor, a revolutionary, just not the one they wanted him to be. His is a revolution of love, of justice, of peace, of reconciliation. 

The people wanted him to kill all their enemies. Jesus did something more profound and ultimately more dangerous.

St. Augustine once said, “It is arrogant to believe that our enemies can do more damage than our own hatred.”

He exposed the enemy within. He disarmed hatred itself.

The people were expecting Jesus to come into the temple and perhaps give one of those iconic speeches a general might give, like Mark Anthony’s “Friends, brothers, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

They expected him to preach a message that vindicated them and pronounced vengeance to their enemies. We are God’s people! They are not! Kill them, end this occupation, establish your kingdom, make us rich like in the days of Solomon! It says instead that he starts to overturn the tables. 

Now let me put to rest an old misconception about this passage: Jesus was not surprised and outraged because there was commerce occurring in the Temple. The priests of the temple were not just having bake sales and fundraisers. In fact, what we know of the temple is that it was very important to the city that it did carry on commerce: The temple contracted barbers, clothing makers, incense makers, goldsmiths, etc. The temple kept a lot of common people employed. This is not the issue. 

The issue was not commerce per se, but a certain kind of commerce. Jesus says that the practices turned the temple into a house of robbers. What was the robbery? The text says: Jesus overturned the money changers and dove sellers.

From what we know of temple practice, the temple refused to allow any goods or services to be purchased with Roman money. The Temple had its own currency that you had to buy it first at an increased rate just to go buy something else. Temple dollars: Sort of like if you want to Canadian Tire and they made you buy their Canadian Tire money just to buy stuff there. They were ripping people off.

The temple regarded Roman money as unclean money, and unfit to be used to buy sacrifices with, but conveniently the temple did not have a problem taking that money off a person’s hands and using it for very lavish salaries. Out of their hands and into the priests’ pockets, who conveniently were not defiled to have large sums of it. 

What sacrifice was being bough there? The text says doves. That is interesting because the law in the Old Testament allowed two options for a sin offering. If you sinned you could either sacrifice a goat or a dove. Goats obviously cost way more than doves, so if you were rich, you would obviously use a goat. Doves were the choice for the poor. 

What we know of temple practices of this day is that doves were being sold at an exorbitant price: two gold coins per pair of doves. The poor had to pay several months of income just to get a pair of birds to sacrifice to God. In other words, the temple was exploiting the poor. The Temple was selling forgiveness. They turned grace into a get rich quick scheme. 

So Jesus shows up, the liberator on a donkey, comes into the temple he is supposed to drive out the Roman occupation from, but instead, he starts driving out the hypocrisy from God’s people. That’s unexpected. 

Now we scowl and condemn those Pharisees, how do we do similar things?

How do we limit God’s grace to only those who we think are worthy? 

What walls of exclusion have we built for who can come into God’s houses and who do we try to keep out?

Where have we used God’s name to justify our agendas?

How have we invoked our faith to remain comfortable and privileged?

What excuses have we made, who have we blamed, so that things stay the way they are?

If Jesus came into our churches, our lives, while we shout “Hosanna!” what tables would he overturn today?

If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from our culture, full of unbelievers and doubters,” Jesus might come and clear the temple of our own faithlessness.

If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from all those corrupt politicians.” Jesus may come and clear out the temple of our own lust for power and control.

If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from covid-19,” Jesus may come and clear out the temple of our own refusal to care for the vulnerable.

If we shout out, “Hosanna, save us from all those fake Christians give us all a bad name.” Jesus may come and clear out the temple of our own hypocrisy.

As we shout out, “Hosanna,” are we prepared to have God work in us, break us open, overturn our expectations?

3.    Who do we expect Jesus to be?

You will notice in this narrative that Jesus had many people respond to him. Some good others not. Which ones are we like?

First, there are the crowds, who proclaimed hosanna with the palm branches, expecting Jesus to be the next military leader. These were the same fickle crowds that just as soon as Jesus was not going to do that, they turned to yell out, “Crucify, crucify!” 

When they didn’t get what they wanted out of Jesus, they turned on him. Will we do the same? Will we reject God just because he does not do what we expect him to do? Are we God’s fair-weather friends? Or will we trust God through thick and thin?

The second is the money changers and the Pharisees. These are people invested in the religious system staying the same. They have made their faith all about them and it works for them. These are people whose identities are built on the idea that they are right and others are wrong. Out of some misdirected sense of piety, they decide who is in and who is out. And of course, they and those like them are the ones who are in and would prefer to keep it that way. 

Are we like that? How are we invested in our churches staying the same? Is our faith about staying comfortable while others are excluded?

Then there is the last group: the sick and the children. The text says that Jesus, after clearing the temple immediately turned to the people society forgot and ignored.

Folks can I say that it is my firm belief that when we dwell with people society has forgotten and ignored, people religion has excluded, Jesus shows up in unexpected ways.

In ministering in Sudbury, Ontario, I came across a young man, who also lived in the low-income housing development. 

Early twenties, a poor kid, as I got to know him, he had endured the worst in this world: terrible abuse, such that just to talk with him, he was deeply erratic. It did not take long in his presence to know his soul was in deep chaos: that lethal mix of hatred and hurt. 

I would come by his apartment from time to time to check on him. He was on welfare, but there was a strong possibility that it would run out, so he was looking for a job. He was about the same height as me, so I gave him some of my dress clothes. We practiced interviews. He applied around all over the place. Each time, employers would just hear how he talked, how it was hard to hold down a conversation with him and go with someone else. Didn’t matter he was willing and able. As he applied here and there, the more downcast he got. 

One day, I did rounds around the apartments asking if anyone needed a ride to the food bank. I would take them as per my Tuesday noontime routine. I knocked on his door, and he answered, a bit dishevelled. I figured he was just getting up. He decided to come along to the food bank that day, even though he did not need anything. 

I turned to him in the car and gave him a Jesus Calling devotional. I had gotten a bulk order of these things, figuring this was an easy way for some of the people, who were not strong readers that I ministered to, could nevertheless hear an uplifting Scripture spoken over them on a daily basis. 

While the one guy went in, this young man turned to me and said, Spencer, I was sitting in my room thinking I got nothing to live for. I have no peace in my life. I was ready to end it when you knocked at the door. 

I prayed with him, and I suggested, let’s see what words of encouragement the devotional he had in his hand had to offer. Turns out that day, the topic was scriptures relating to finding peace in life. 

He did a stint in the hospital. After he got out I met up with him again. He seemed to be in a bad state of mind. I learned that previous to me meeting him, he had committed a crime, which he was going to be sentenced for. The possibility was weighing heavily on him. I asked him about what he believed in, whether he trusted God’s love and forgiveness in all this. 

He turned to me and said that he admitted his mind is so erratic, so faulty, he resolved at some point to just stop believing anything. He figured his brain is just so unreliable, there isn’t any point to believing in anything. He told me he felt ashamed about all the ideas that would get him worked up. So, one day he just decided he would stop believing in anything. 

I tried to offer some words of encouragement, but I was taken back. How do you get someone to believe in Jesus, when they don’t even think they are capable of believing anything?

I went home that day particularly distraught. I remember praying, “God how can a person like that be reached? How could a person like that be discipled? God you’ve got to reach this person, but if the Gospel means anything, it has to mean something to a person like that. The Gospel is good news to everyone, especially a desperate, troubled young man, who needs hope in his life.” 

My prayers for the next little while took on a tone of frustration and disappointment. 

A little while later, I came by his apartment. I found him in the apartment’s communal kitchen. He turned to me. “Spencer, I was sitting in my apartment. I was ready to end it all. I just felt so worthless. But then he showed up.”

“Who showed up?” I asked. He just pointed upward. In that dark moment, he heard a distinct voice say to him, “Your life is worth something to me.”

“Spencer, I don’t know what I am, but I know I ain’t an atheist anymore.

Jesus surprised me that day. Jesus showed up in a way I did not expect.

Billtown Baptist, are you ready for Jesus to show up in unexpected ways this easter? Are you ready step out in faith, to choose to be open, to stand with those who are alone?

May this prepare us for what lies ahead this week. 

As we think about Good Friday, may we trust even more the surprise of the cross: that when we were content to murder Jesus, Jesus was content to love us. Jesus has died our death to offer us his life.   

As we think about Easter Sunday, may we trust even more that surprise of the empty tomb, that all that has gone wrong in this world, God can put right. 

And if we know that Jesus is so unexpectedly patient, unexpectedly loving, unexpectedly gracious, may we be inspired to live that kind of grace out in our world a bit more too. 

In a world of ignorance, of greed, of arrogance, of worry and fear, may you be this week a witness for Christ that your neighbours did not expect. 

Resurrecting (the) Text: The Ending(s) of the Gospel of Mark and the Choices We Have to Make

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16 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

The Shorter Ending of Mark

[[And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.]]

The Long Ending of Mark

[[9 Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10 She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. 11 But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. 12 After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13 And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. 14 Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table, and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. 15 And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. 16 The one who believes and is baptized will be saved, but the one who does not believe will be condemned. 17 And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; 18 they will pick up snakes, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” 19 So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. 20 And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.]]

Gospel of Mark, Chapter 16:1-20 (NRSV)

Introduction: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novels?

The 1990s was a good decade to grow up in. The fashion, the TV sitcoms, the video games–it was a good time to be alive.

There is something about this golden age of humanity that also birthed the greatest literary innovation since ink was set to paper. The choose-your-own-adventure novel.

Sure, the high Middle Ages had the Divine Comedy. European modernity had Proust, and Russia its Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But none can compare to the literary genius of a novel where the reader actually gets to choose how the story is going to unfold. For instance:

You are camping in Connecticut, and as you hike through the woods, you stumble upon a magic orb. Do you (a) turn to page 5 and pick up the orb (causing you to be sucked through a portal into a world with mythical creatures? Do you (b) turn to page 10, leave the orb alone, and continue walking, all to find that you are captured by a dark lord who is looking for the orb? Or, do you (c) turn to page 25 and smash the orb, which, if you choose that course of action, causes the alternative dimension you would have been sucked into in Option (a) to apocalyptically appear around you in your dimension.

As the story goes on, choice after choice, by the end of the novel, you might end up (a) defeating the dark lord, becoming the hero of the universe, (b) joining the dark lord as his apprentice and enslaving the universe, or (c) stumbling upon another magic orb that resets everything back to what it was before, and you find yourself back walking along in the woods as if nothing happened.

If that isn’t literary brilliance, I don’t know what is!

Well, when it comes to today’s passage, let’s just say I have had a few adventures with it, but not the chosen kind.

I remember sitting there reading the Bible during youth group bible study when I was in high school. We were doing a study of the Gospels, and it was coming to an end. We were looking at the passages about the resurrection. Doing this, I could not help but notice that in the Gospel of Mark, there was a strange set of subtitles, marking the “Short ending” and the “longer ending” as well as a further footnote that marked, “Some manuscripts also include this in verse 14.”

I remember turning to my youth leader at the time and asking, “What is going on with these endings? Are there parts of the Gospel that aren’t original to it?” 

The youth leader looked at it, seemed puzzled (as if he had never noticed this before), and said, “Maybe Mark wrote two endings and couldn’t decide which one he liked best, so he put both in.”

“Really?” I asked, also puzzled. The leader wrote it off with a joke, “Ha! It is kinda like the end of the Gospel of Mark is a choose your own adventure novel!”

I admit that answer did not satisfy me. But like most awkward and somewhat traumatic instances of my childhood faith, they do end up, at the very least, serving as good sermon illustrations.

Likening the ending of the Gospel of Mark to a choose-your-own-adventure novel–despite my undying love for that under-appreciated genre–did not make sense of the multiple endings.

But there is a quintessential insight from the genre that is true about the life of faith and about our responsibility in reading the text: Faith is often about the choices you make. This text very pointedly compels you to make decisions.

Admittedly, some texts are fairly easy to interpret. We know and love these passages. Other passages are less so. There are biblical texts I have come across that, when we encounter them, we don’t know what to do with them. They do not fit our paradigm. In fact, we get a whiff intuitively that if they mean what we suspect they mean, that possibility is scary and potentially costly.  

What do you do? Do you (a) feel overwhelmed and so you turn the page, don’t think about it, try to forget about it, and go on to something more familiar, (b) go online to your favourite website that has all the answers neatly packaged and quickly find the pat answer that solves the problem (or least makes it feel solved for you), or (c) say to yourself, there is something here and “I care enough about God’s Word and the pursuit of truth to think about it and do the hard, boring, and risky work. And who knows? Maybe I may feel called to go on and do my MA at Acadia; I don’t know.”

That last part was a shameless plug, but the question is will we do the difficult work of questioning our assumptions when we are confronted by difficult texts?

And if I am going to be honest here, I chose path (a) for the longest time. You get busy with things. You only have so much time, and so you find yourself gravitating to the things you can handle, thinking about the topics that are manageable. And yet, certain watershed moments are inescapable. Eventually, you will have to make a choice.

“How am I going to preach this?”

Several years ago, I was serving as the pastor of First Baptist Church of Sudbury, but I was also the chaplain and a professor at Thorneloe University. I was asked to supervise a course in the undergrad on the Gospel of Mark that was in the academic calendar. So, I set out to read up on the subject, and I got a stack of commentaries out from the library. Seeing that life was quite busy, I thought the best thing to do was to double up on my teaching with my preaching schedule. So, from New Year’s to Easter, the winter semester, I taught that course, and I also preached the Gospel of Mark.

I admit I would never have preached on the Gospel of Mark. Like many throughout church history, I preferred Matthew and Luke because they were longer and fuller. If I can name it: There is something about the simplicity of Mark that always bothered me. It just wasn’t enough.

In the preaching schedule, I had the crucifixion and resurrection passages for Good Friday and Easter, obviously, but I figured I would deal with these final verses the week after. I remember thinking about these verses, unsure how I would tackle them, but figuring I would work it out like all the other weeks as I go.

Well, teaching and pastoring, as you can imagine, was very busy. Good Friday and Easter came, and then, I remember coming into my office, still exhausted from the weekend, sitting down at my desk, looking at this text with a stack of commentaries next to me, and asking myself, “How am I going to preach this?”

Do I (a) skip it and just start the next preaching series one week early? That transition from Easter to a new series makes sense. Do you think anyone would notice?

Do I (b) preach on just the definite ending, ending at verse 8, not treat the rest, and maybe if one of the more astute and inquisitive congregants asks me about it after, then I can have a conversation with them?

Do I (c) read the whole thing but ignore the tough issues of the text or say that we just don’t have time to get into all that this morning and instead just focus on some moral application to be drawn from the story?

I did not know what to choose. I immersed myself in the commentaries, hoping an answer would emerge. Writer’s block quickly set in as I kept wrestling through the different perspectives. I remember asking myself, “How do I preach a text I haven’t made up my mind on? How do I preach a text that I am not even sure should even be a text at all? How am I having this dilemma? I’m the pastor. I have a doctorate in theology from a prestigious university. I am supposed to know the answer. Isn’t that what my job is?

What if people get upset at this? We got some folks that started coming to our church from the fundamentalist church the next town over. Would they leave over this?

What about that person that seems really fragile in their faith, that person who comes to church needing encouragement and not more questions? Will this sermon burden them? Am I being unpastoral for preaching a sermon on this stuff? If I believe that, am I admitting that it is somehow a good thing to keep what is going on in the Bible from some people? Is that what good preaching is?

Well, as some of you may have found in your pastoral ministry, Saturday night has a way of sneaking up, and I tried desperately to piece together something to say. I resolved an option (d): perhaps the best approach was not to tell the congregation what I thought was the answer (because, in truth, I was not sure myself) and just lay out the options in bare honesty and let the congregation decide for themselves.

Well, as I did that Sunday morning, I announced that it looks like there are three sets of options: There is the question of how to interpret the original ending; the question of the longer and shorter ending; and the question of what to do with them, overall.

The Original Ending: Incomplete or Cliffhanger?

All agree that the earliest manuscripts have the announcement by the angel at the empty tomb that Jesus is risen, and the women leave afraid, ending in verse 8. Then what?

Option (a): some commentators believe perhaps Mark did not finish his Gospel or the manuscript was broken, torn, or lost and, either way, it was circulated in its incomplete form.

One reason given for this is that the last line, which in most translations reads, “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” the last word of the last phrase there is “gar,” the Greek word for “for” or “because.” Some have suggested that it is very unlikely the Greek would end that way, implying a break in the language, literally reading something like, “They were afraid because….” and here the manuscript breaks off or Mark was not able to finish.

Well, that’s possible, but then there is Option (b): other commentators say that while it is unlikely to have the line end on gar, it is not impossible, and perhaps the Gospel of Mark intentionally ends here. After all, there is a consistent theme of people being amazed and fear-struck by Jesus’ miracles. There is also the theme of secrecy in Mark, where Jesus tells people not to tell anyone, and yet, lo and behold, in the last irony of the Gospel of Mark, the witnesses leave, commanded to tell the other disciples, and they are speechless.   

In other words, Mark ends his Gospel with a kind of ironic cliffhanger ending, but the very fact that Mark is writing what he is writing to churches decades later attests to the obvious fact that the women did not remain silent, telling others the Gospel.

So, you are left with the options of either (a) the original was broken off or (b) it intentionally ends with a cliffhanger ending.

Either one leaves us with some discomfort: either the text we have is incomplete or damaged, or it is quite minimal: no actual post-resurrection appearance, only a promise to the women that when they go and tell others, they will meet the resurrected Jesus on the way.

The Added Endings: Shorter or Longer?

Well, whatever you think about how the original ending, there are more choices to make: What do we do with the added Short and Longer endings? Again, here are the options:

Option (a): Well, the shorter ending is actually the more recent ending, and the first time it pops up in the manuscripts is in the fourth century: “And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.”

Actually, the “Amen” is not in the earliest version of this addition. Apparently, one copyist really loved his ending and couldn’t help by writing “Amen” at the end, which might have been an ancient way of hitting the like button.

Why was the shorter ending put in? Some speculate as to its theology: It mentions the importance of Peter and the Gospel reaching east to west. This sounds like a description of the emerging Christendom in Europe in the fourth century, with Rome consolidating its power around its claim to the office of Peter.

As one commentator notes, it seems like more than a coincidence that we see neater, more definitive, even triumphal, endings getting placed on the bare, bewildering, response-begging ending of the original and that this happened around the time Christians moved from a marginalized, powerless community to the community in power.

If the original does end at verse 8, is the Shorter ending an imperial rewrite trying to stabilize Christian readers with certainty where Mark wanted to destabilize in order to provoke a response? That is up to you to decide.

Let’s move on to Option (b): The longer ending is actually older. It dates to the late second century (and even then, there are different versions of that one). If you look at the more common version, it appears to be a set of summary statements gleaned from the end of the Gospel of Luke. And so, we can speculate, possibly one well-intended copyist tried to paste an abbreviated version of Luke onto the end of Mark to make sure anyone reading Mark would know there is more to the story. Perhaps they were trying to be pastoral, trying not to burden the readers with too much disruption.  

Well, whatever the case, this version over the other ending becomes the dominant version used in Western Bible translations. And thus, it is assumed as the original ending in the King James Version and others during the time of the Reformation. It was not until the 1800s that manuscript comparisons made it obvious it was not original and that there were more than one ending.

Take Them Out or Leave Them In?

Well, here is the next set of choices. Knowing all that we now know, what should we do with these endings? Again, options put us between a rock and a hard place:

Do we, Option (a), take them out of the Bible?

Well, take it out, and we have the uncomfortable admission that the text we have had in hand, the text we have had and used for about 1800 years, that Christians have read, preached, and claimed to have heard God speak through, was corrupt, so much so that it is in need of fixing, on a passage of no lesser importance than the conclusion of the first Gospel. That’s kind of important.

Do we take it out? Is it our obligation to take it out? Evidently, most translations still leave it in. Many try to minimize the multiple versions and try to present the ending as smoothly as possible. Why? Probably because of marketing. Most Bible translations still cling closely to the KJV because that is the wording that so many have an attachment to.

Do we take it out? If we choose to take this out, should we do that with other passages or even books of the Bible? Should we take the story of the woman caught in adultery out? Should we take the possibly inserted line in 1 Cor. 14 about women being silent out? Should we take out the books some scholars think the Apostles did not actually write? Why stop there? Or maybe we should add back in some stuff, like the books of Enoch or the Gospel of Thomas or the Apocalypse of Peter or, or, or… Well, good luck with that.

Certainly, some of these examples are more extreme than others, but the question is, in the interest of trying to get back to just what the original authors wrote, where do you draw the line? Can you draw it in some circumstances?

And does trying to fix the text ironically send us down the same path that motivated some well-intended folk to put an extra ending on the Gospel of Mark in the first place?

Perhaps we have to confess that we are left with a text in hand that doesn’t really fit our perceived expectations of what the Bible ought to look like and perhaps was never meant to.

So, there is Option (b): leave the endings in.

If that is your choice, you are presented with some other challenges (not least of which is the question of which ending to leave in or possibly both).

How do you see inspiration working between the text and its author (or, in this case, authors)? Is only what Mark wrote inspired? Are we compelled to believe that the writers of those other endings, whoever they are, were inspired as well?

Can we say that we trust that God has indeed spoken through these words and continues to speak through them? Have believers legitimately heard the voice of the Spirit speaking through these other endings for 1800 years?

Does that commit us to the theology of these passages? Some have invoked the other ending for their practice of snake handling under the promise of divine apostolic protection (Look that up on Youtube¾as if there isn’t enough emotionally scaring material on the internet already). And if ever tempted to think this conversation does not matter or is too heady to think about, say while watching a pastor shouting these verses while twirling a cobra around, all to have that cobra bite him in the face. Let’s just say it puts things in perspective.

But that means we are left with uncomfortable options: Did human error and human fallibility adulterate the ending of Mark, or did God, for some reason, allow this to happen, superintending it? But why would God do that?

“The Medium is the Message”

Well, whatever you decide on that, you are faced with questions about the text in hand: Can a text speak beyond what has been said, how it was said, what has been done to it? Can God speak through a text that we have doubts about? Can God speak through a text that we might not even think should be the biblical text at all? What does that say about the nature of God’s word? What does that say about faith?

In high school, we had to do a unit on media. One Canadian philosopher named Marshall McLuhan said something that got repeated over and over. Let’s see if you remember his famous line: The medium is the ______ (message). Flashback to grade 12 English class.

If the medium is the message, this text, its many endings, and its evidence of additions say something about what faith is and what we have faith in.

We sang a song in Sunday School: “The B-I-B-L-E, yes that is the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E.” I love that song. Well, to be a Christian is to trust what the Bible says. But what if the Bible, whether by incident or perhaps even by design, does not, in some cases like this case, give us an easy place to stand?

If you feel like these options do not give you an obvious decision, maybe that is where God’s Word wants you to be. What if the faith that the Bible demands is much riskier? What if the Bible intends us to do something more like take a leap rather than stand still?

Because if it was perfectly black and white, seamlessly clear, unquestionable and certain, would it be faith? It certainly wouldn’t be a relationship where honesty and vulnerability are integral.

There is something about the Bible that beckon us to be responsible interpreters, free and active participants in conversation with God rather than fearful and passive recipients. Good Baptists might call this soul competency or soul liberty. And if this is the case, the options of this text remind faith–by that, your faith, my faith, yours and no one else’s, mine and no one else’s, not how we were raised, not the beliefs of our community, not what you were taught in seminary–that faith in order for it to be yours has to responsible. It must contend with open ended-ness, ambiguity, even brokenness, to choose to walk with God in and through these rather than using faith to somehow insulate us from the obvious fact that we are human, finite and frail, and there is no thought we have, whether read off the page of sacred texts, given by an ecstatic vision, decided by magisterial proclamation, or deduced with all the prowess of academic evidence and reason that escapes this permanent fallibility. And if that causes discomfort or decentres you, perhaps that is the kind of effect Mark’s ending is trying to produce (whether by the intention of the human author or divine author). Its purpose is not to harm faith but to deepen it.

Does a text like this cause us to doubt the Bible, or does it remind us in its own way where the Bible truly gets its authority from? Does it provoke worry or wonder?

The Bible is not ultimately a choose-your-own-adventure novel, at least not the kitschy ones of my own childhood. But it is a story that finds its highest truth in the choices of its true main character, God, to whom we are invited to respond to. It is the story of God’s Yes to sinful humanity in Jesus Christ. The resurrection is the story in which all other stories find themselves, including our stories of brokenness, if we choose to trust it.

It is the truth that our God is the God who transforms tragedy into opportunity; the God who turns betrayal into forgiveness; the God who turns execution into liberation; and the God who turns death into eternal life.  

How do we know this reality? In one way, these endings reiterate our need to trust the resurrection all the more. The juxtaposition is perhaps providential.

As if to say there can be no knowledge of the resurrection without a risky choice. You just don’t know it just by hearing about it, reading it, or arguing about it. It can’t be just an idea in your head. You must choose to follow it, follow it to the point of giving up all you know, follow it to the point of becoming last in this world, follow it despite feelings of fear and uncertainty, follow it to the point of taking up your own cross. The text presents us with this choice:

The choice to live life in the midst of death.

The choice to live in hope in the midst of despair.

The choice to live out love and forgiveness in the midst of hate and violence.

The choice to live in honesty and mercy in a world that is content with lies and arrogance.

The choice to live in trust and humility in the midst of a world that desires power and control.

The choice to keep your life set on the light that shines in the darkness trusting the darkness will not overcome it. As the women found as they left the empty tomb, it is here on this way–if we choose to walk it–walking in Jesus’ way, we encounter what this text is truly about: the resurrection, because he is risen.

You see, if the medium is the message, we must ask: Can God continue to speak through these words? Put another way: Can God resurrect the text? I choose–I am led to believe that the same Spirit that brought breath back to the corpse of Christ breaths through these pages and is breathing on us today: Does God use imperfect believers to be members of the body of Christ? Can God resurrect a broken church? These questions are one and the same, finding their answer in the God scripture witnesses to and we witness to, with the very letters of our lives.

Now it is your turn: as you go from here, what will your choice be?

Let’s pray:

God of the resurrection and the life, we trust you. In all of life’s uncertainty, in all the doubts and questions we have, we trust you. Lead us in the life of resurrection, but remind us that this path is always through taking up our crosses. Remind us that the journey will include dark valleys. Jesus, we know that you never leave us or forsake us. Walk with us today and always. You are our hope, you and no other. Renew us, Holy Spirit, speak to us afresh and breathe life into us when we become exhausted. For your Good News, may we never be silent. For your faithfulness, may we never stop praising you. Amen.

Systems of Slavery and Our True Exodus

Preached at Billtown Baptist Church, January 15, 2023.

The Israelites, a people descending from a man named Abraham, came to live in a land called Egypt due to God working mysteriously and powerfully in the life of Abraham’s great-grandson, Joseph. Joseph was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, but what they meant for harm, God meant for good, it says, and through these tragic circumstances, God uses Joseph, raising him up to second in command in the nation, and saves Egypt from seven years of famine. In doing so, he is able to provide for his family, who come to live there. Hundreds of years go by, and a Pharaoh arises who knows nothing of what the Israelite hero, Joseph, did, and he decides to enslave the people of Israel, making them work, making mud bricks. He is so threatened by how numerous they are he orders the destruction of newly born boys. One boy, however, is hidden by his mother and sister in a basket, a basket in the water that Pharaoh’s own daughter finds and raises Moses as her own. When Moses grows up and learns of his true heritage, he murders, in his rage, an Egyptian taskmaster and flees in Exile to Midian.

There it seems, he consigns himself to a modest life. He makes peace with the injustices he cannot change. He gets married. He tends sheep. But one day, he sees a spectacle: a burning bush, the divine presence appearing to him. And this divine presence speaks and reveals the name of God, “The I am who I am.” This God, who made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob long ago, has heard the cries of the oppressed. This living God commissions Moses¾against his choice at first¾to go and tell Pharaoh to let God’s people be God.

Moses goes and talks to Pharaoh. He tells him God is ordering him to release the Hebrew people. Pharaoh’s response? “Who is this God that I should listen to him?”

And so, Moses warns that ten plagues will come upon Egypt, each showing God’s sovereignty over the gods of Egypt, each stripping Pharaoh of his credibility and, with it, the Egyptian resolve.

Finally, after the most formidable of plagues, the death of the firstborn, Pharaoh, relents. The people assemble to leave, and they march out into the wilderness. And this is where our scripture reading for today picks up. I am going to read the whole chapter, Chapter 14, and the first part of 15:

14 Then the Lord said to Moses, 2 “Tell the Israelites to turn back and camp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall camp opposite it, by the sea. 3 Pharaoh will say of the Israelites, ‘They are wandering aimlessly in the land; the wilderness has closed in on them.’ 4 I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them, so that I will gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.” And they did so.

5 When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the minds of Pharaoh and his officials were changed toward the people, and they said, “What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?” 6 So he had his chariot made ready and took his army with him; 7 he took six hundred elite chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them. 8 The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out boldly. 9 The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots, his chariot drivers and his army; they overtook them camped by the sea, by Pi-hahiroth, in front of Baal-zephon.

10 As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord. 11 They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? 12 Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone so that we can serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” 13 But Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today, for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.”

15 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Why do you cry out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. 16 But you lift up your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the Israelites may go into the sea on dry ground. 17 Then I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they will go in after them, and so I will gain glory for myself over Pharaoh and all his army, his chariots, and his chariot drivers. 18 Then the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I have gained glory for myself over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his chariot drivers.”

19 The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. 20 It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.

21 Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and turned the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided. 22 The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left. 23 The Egyptians pursued and went into the sea after them, all of Pharaoh’s horses, chariots, and chariot drivers. 24 At the morning watch the Lord, in the pillar of fire and cloud, looked down on the Egyptian army and threw the Egyptian army into a panic. 25 He clogged their chariot wheels so that they turned with difficulty. The Egyptians said, “Let us flee from the Israelites, for the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt.”

26 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, so that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots and chariot drivers.” 27 So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at dawn the sea returned to its normal depth. As the Egyptians fled before it, the Lord tossed the Egyptians into the sea. 28 The waters returned and covered the chariots and the chariot drivers, the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not one of them remained. 29 But the Israelites walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters forming a wall for them on their right and on their left.

30 Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. 31 Israel saw the great work that the Lord did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the Lord and believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.

15 Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
    horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lord is my strength and my might,[a]
    and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him;
    my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3 The Lord is a warrior;
    the Lord is his name.

Exodus 14:1-15:3 NRSV

We can see in history moments of liberation, moments that seem exodus-like: where those things that we see as truly oppressive to people get dismantled or a higher moment of dignity for people is achieved.

In 1945, the allied forces finally overpowered the German forces. Germany surrendered with the tyrant Hitler dead and Berlin surrounded, ending perhaps the most brutal conflict in modern history. War was finally over. People did not need to be afraid anymore. The troops could come home. The nations Germany had taken over were free. News of the victory caused people to dance in the streets.

In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr crossed the bridge at Selma, peacefully confronting a small army of police who had brutalized the protesters days earlier. Walking prayerfully in a line, the protestors were resolute, and in a moment that came to be described as divine providence, the police relented. The protestors continued their march to Montgomery to advocate for voting rights for African Americans. The people on the march sang and praised God. What began as a few protestors swelled to tens of thousands, joining in the work of justice. Within several months they achieved what they were seeking.

In 1989, the Berlin wall was torn down: A wall set up by the Soviet Union to control their chuck of Germany after World War 2, separating families overnight for years. Finally, the wall came down. Many in North America watched their television screens as one segment smashed through, and the people on the other side stuck their hands through. Family members could see each other, touch each other, and, as the segments came down, were reunited in moments of pure joy.

There are many other events that we might describe as exodus-like: like the abolition of slavery, the day women got the right to vote, a country gaining independence, or, most recently for us, the day a vaccine was discovered. If you remember that day, the day you got tangible hope finally that the pandemic would end. These are moments of hope.

Just a few weeks ago, I read in the news that the hole in the O-Zone Layer is shrinking due to the global reduction of the chemicals that caused the hole. It will still take several more decades for the hole to be repaired fully, but with all the bad news on global warming, it was just so encouraging to hear about this little victory.  

Each of these moments, no matter how small or even how secular, are pin-pricks of light showing through the shroud that enfolds us, glimmers of what God desires in human history: God wants to establish his kingdom on earth. God wants his will, as the Lord’s prayer says, to be done on earth as it is in heaven. God wants his goodness to heal every facet of this world, setting all that has gone wrong right again without remainder.

That is what this story in Exodus is pointing to. Martin Luther King correctly describes this story when he said this:

“The meaning of this story is not found in the drowning of Egyptian soldiers, for no one should rejoice at the death or defeat of a human being. Rather, this story symbolizes the death of evil and of inhuman oppression and of unjust exploitation” (King, Strength to Love, 78).

Martin Luther King went on to say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

It is so easy to forget this when we look out at the world we live in. It is so easy to be disenchanted with the notion that God wills the hope of liberation for our world when we are inundated with messages of the world growing darker.

History does not feel like it is bending toward God’s justice. It feels more like one step forward and two steps back (or, in some cases, three or four or even a leap back).

I felt it in 2020 when we were scared in our homes from a pandemic that would come to claim more than 3.3 million people. The globalized world we live in all of a sudden felt so precarious.

At the same time, we in Nova Scotia witnessed a stand-off between indigenous fishermen and settler fishermen in St. Mary’s bay, a stand-off sparked by decades of neglect by the federal government to properly regulate, a clash fuelled by underlying resentment that explored into a racial conflict. And we say the pictures of violent mobs and fires. And I remember saying to myself: “We haven’t come as far as we think we have.” The injustices of the past linger in the present. As soon as people feel their livelihood threatened, good folk turn back to old hate.

We inhabit a world warped by a colonialist past and a present that still has so much exploitation and inequity in it. So many of our luxuries as Canadians, sold in our stores to us, which we thoughtlessly buy, are products made from exploited work or exploited resources from other countries.

When we think about it, we feel caught in this system of the world that simply is not the way things ought to be, and we don’t know what to do about that.

While these systems of greed and exploitation have afforded us westerners comforts that most of the rest of the world can only dream of having, we feel a strange sense that we are powerless in our own way. We feel enslaved to these economic and cultural forces (the “powers and principalities,” as Paul called them) that say to us: “You can’t do anything about this; this is just the way the world works. Get used to it. There is no changing it.”

When we know God’s will is goodness, truth, beauty, life and hope, then we look at the world and see that it has radical, systemic, and cosmic evil: that the world is not as it should be. We feel powerless against this. We feel trapped.

Why can’t we humans get our act together?

When we say there is something wrong with the world out there, scriptures push us to turn our attention from the evil out there to the evil in here, in our hearts. The inexcusable evil we do.

Otherwise, we do something sometimes even more terrible: we convince ourselves we are the righteous few, better than everyone else, the pure ones, God’s favourites among the damnable masses. When we delude ourselves into that kind of self-righteousness, we see history scared with those that felt they could take God’s wrath into their own hands rather than let God fight for us.

It is an old saying that when we point fingers, we have three fingers pointing right back at us.

Society has made advances and progress in many wonderful ways. Yet, it still has not changed the human heart: the same evil capacities remain in human beings that in light of all our education and knowledge, all our collective wisdom and arts and religion, and all our power and technology, we will still choose the path of annihilation, knowing full-well what it is.

When we know the vast waste and depravity of violence, we still go to war.

When we know that more is accomplished in unity, we still choose division, petty feuds and tribalism.

When we know the benefits of facing hard realities, we still choose to cling to our delusions and our comforts.

In this story of Israel and Egypt, if we are really honest, we must realize that we are more often Egypt than Israel. We are God’s people, and yet we live all too happy as people of Pharaoh.

We, as Christians, know that while our faith pushes us to love more and pursue truth more and justice more, we also are aware that our hearts can also contort our religion into instruments of apathy and self-righteousness.

We do this when we offer prayers that we don’t intend to act on.

We do this when we know the beauty of the Gospel and don’t share it.

We do this when we talk about salvation as a way of escaping all our problems rather than confronting them, a strictly spiritual reality that never offends, confronts, or transforms.

We do this every time we settle for an anemic, easy gospel that refuses to look at all the ways sin has its grip on us and, more tragically, all the ways we ignore the offer of eternal life, the fullness of life, the invitation into God’s kingdom because we are content with so much less.

We look out at the world, and we condemn its evil; we look at our country, and we realize we are living in a modern-day Egypt. And then we look at ourselves, and we have to realize we are no better.

We choose our chains.

C. S. Lewis once said it is our perennial tendency to be content playing in filth when God has shown us the path to the most beautiful beach right around the corner.

One ongoing detail of the Book of Exodus is just how much the people gripe and complain. Moses comes and says that God has sent him to rescue them from oppression, and the people don’t believe it. God literally shows them the answer to their prayers, and they shrink back and say they don’t want it. God ransoms them out of Egypt, and they immediately turn, wanting to go back rather than step out in faith, trusting where God is leading them.

It is here in the story that they find themselves pinned against the sea, with nowhere to go, and so they finally resort to calling on God because they have nothing left to do.

They always had nothing from God, but it is finally here that we realize it.

Corrie Ten Boom once said that so often, we treat God as our spare tire rather than our steering wheel.

Despite all the progress of history, there is a problem in the human heart: We resist God’s new way and so often only call on him when we have exhausted all our own strength.  

And yet, God, in his mercy, delivers them. Because, says Paul, even if we are faithless, he is faithful, for he cannot deny himself.  

God delivered them not because they were worthy but because God has made promises based on his character of love and mercy that he will see done, despite empires and armies, despite sin and death, and despite our stubbornness too.

And so, the exodus story points to something greater than itself: a final and definitive exodus, a moment when sin, death, disobedience, despair, and the devil are shown to be finally defeated.  

In the New Testament, Jesus comes, God’s own son, God Immanuel, the True Moses. Jesus comes and heals and helps people. He preaches the coming kingdom of God imminent to us. He enters Jerusalem, and it seems people are ready for him to be king. And on the night of the Passover, celebrating the Exodus, Jesus says that through him is a new covenant. Through his body and blood, we will have a new relationship with God, a definitive display of salvation from our sins: a new and true exodus.

As the Gospels show, Jesus’ promises are met with some of the worst displays of human faithlessness. This is important because for the exodus story to apply to us, we need to place ourselves in the seats of the disciples. And what did the disciples do? They failed just as we failed. The Gospels show the full extent of our enslavement to sin.

Judas betrayed. Peter denied. The others fled in fear, afraid of soldiers such that they deserted the one that could raise the dead. The law of God was manipulated to execute their own deliverer. The people of God were complicit in the murder of their messiah. Jesus was handed over to the Roman legions to be executed on a Roman execution cross.

And in these dark moments of the very worse of human unfaithfulness, Jesus shows us the true Exodus.

Jesus prays in the midst of all this for us: “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” His body, which we broke, was broken for us. The blood the people of God shed, he counted as a sacrifice for their sins. By his wounds, we are healed.

No vast sea was split the day Jesus was nailed on the cross, but the veil was torn, and a greater cosmic event occurred: The gulf between God and the sinner was bridged. God embraced death so that we could have life. God chose to suffer as one cursed so that all who cry out forsaken would know God is on their side.

And as the Gospels say, here the Scripture was fulfilled. To read Exodus through the cross is to know that Jesus died for Pharaoh just as much as Moses. Just as Jesus died for Peter, who denied him, he died for you and me, that failed to follow him.

To read this narrative of Pharaoh being thrown into the sea with his soldiers through Christ is to realize that Jesus fulfilled this by accepting that punishment for evil on himself, not visiting it back on those that deserve it, ending the spiral vortex of hate and violence we so often get trapped in.

To read Exodus through the cross is to know that God’s way of dealing with evil is not by bringing disaster on the perpetrators but by bringing healing, with waters not of the Red Sea’s destruction but of baptism’s cleansing. God’s way is not repaying evil with evil but overcoming evil with good.

To read the Exodus Passover through Jesus shows us a God that does not want to kill his enemies, but rather a God who loves his enemies and overcomes them not with force but with forgiveness.

At the cross, the great evils of this world that nailed Jesus to a Roman execution pike did not prevent our Savior from being fully obedient to the Father and fully willing to forgive us. That is how evil was defeated.

And three days later, the Father raised Jesus from the dead, overturning history’s judgment and injustice.

The resurrection was the overturning of death itself. Death, all the drives towards death that sin causes, whether hate, greed, idolatry, deception, or cowardliness – death in all its forms was overcome that day. Humanity’s deepest slavery, the slavery within our very hearts, in the very being of things, was defeated.  

“Both horse and driver / he has hurled into the sea,” the text says.

Or, as the early church prayed, “Hell reigns, but not forever.”

Oppression still exists, but its days are numbered.

Death reigns, but it realizes now it is the one that is mortal.

Sin still inflects us, you might say, but there is a vaccine.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

So, as Moses says, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today.”

The question for us today is what will it take for us to fully trust God’s Exodus in our lives?

What will it take for us to open all the windows of our souls to let God’s resurrection light in?

What will it take for us to finally say, “I’m done living in Egypt. I am done living Pharaoh’s way here in Canada. I am done with the status quo, this system of slavery that does not work. I am ready to walk with God to his promised land”?

Let’s pray…

God of Exodus hope and liberation.

We look out at our world, and we see that it does not reflect your kingdom. We see such inequality. We see wars and famines and poverty and cruelty. God, it is so overwhelming to think about. So often, we just go along with it out of a sense of defeat and hopelessness.

God, forgiveness our own complicity in the injustices of this world. Wake us up to all the ways we are privileged at the expense of others. Convict us of all the ways to choose the slavery we are in. God forgive us and deliver us.

God, heal our hearts of sin. Renew us with your Spirit so that we will have the freedom to break free from the cycles of sin we are caught in. Empower your church to be a glimpse of your coming kingdom, where hate is overcome with understanding, where anger is overcome with peace and forgiveness, and where pride and privilege are overcome with service and humility. God, show us the liberation of your love.

We long for what your word promises: the restoration of all things. We long for your kingdom to come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We long for a place where righteousness is at home. God gives us the courage to embrace these realities today, to step into the Exodus of new creation now.

These things we pray, amen.

Stories of War and the Victory of Love

The word that Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

In days to come
    the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
    and shall be raised above the hills;
All the nations shall stream to it.
     Many peoples shall come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the house of the God of Jacob;
That he may teach us his ways
    And that we may walk in his paths.’
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
    And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
 He shall judge between the nations,
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    Neither shall they learn war anymore.

Isaiah 2:1-4 (NRSV)

Last Saturday, 33 missiles and drone strikes rained down on the people of Ukraine, destroying essential infrastructure, and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power as the weather starts to go cold.

This is just one more moment in a conflict that officially began several years ago with the annexing of Crimea by Russia in 2014, and since then, the conflict has simply not stopped, leading up to the invasion by Russia in February.

Up until the invasion, it was reported that 14 000 people had died in the conflict, but now the explosion of fighting with the invasion is seeing a death toll exponentially higher. The numbers are difficult to determine as both Ukraine and Russia are doctoring their numbers for the purposes of morale, but the best estimates suggest that somewhere between 7 000- 30 000 Ukrainian civilians have died, 60 000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, and possibly 90 000 Russian soldiers have been killed. So somewhere near 200 000 people have died and several times that injured, not to mention 13 million people have lost their homes. Those numbers, when I read them, left me speechless.

And sadly, this war does not seem to have an end in sight. Canada and other western powers have been sending resources, whether financial or military, to Ukraine, as well as imposing sanctions on Russia, which seems to be helping¾and I firmly believe these are good things, just as I deeply sympathize with Ukrainians who are simply defending their homes against a force that seeks their personal and cultural destruction.

And yet, an important detail in this conflict is often ignored by the secular west: this is a war being done by Russia, which believes it is a Christian nation, perhaps even a restored Christian empire, and it believes that the church and the state are one, its culture and its faith are one, and that these things ought to be defended and advanced using military force if threatened. The Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow has called this a holy war, sanctified by God to advance the ways of Orthodoxy in a world that has embraced the evils of western tolerance. And so, as we lament a death toll that nears 200 000 lives, this is met with a unique anguish for us Christians that those who are doing this claim Jesus on their side.

Whether this is the defence of the innocent or the justification of invasion, the world feels pulled towards war; its seductive allure to total war, whose end is destruction, whether the annihilation of the Russian forces, the annihilation of the Ukrainian forces and people, and in the end, perhaps, the termination of both. There is something about these numbers that make us long: Is another way possible?

Martin Luther King, Jr. once reflected on this possibility:

“War, as horrible as it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But I now believe that the potential destructiveness of modern weapons totally rules out the possibility of war ever again achieving a negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., from “Pilgrimage into Non-Violence,” in Strength to Love, pg. 161

So, how are Christians to think about war? We can’t ignore this question as we live safely in Canada. With tensions mounting between the Western powers and Russia as well as China, many are saying we could be seeing the stirrings of what will be another global conflict within our lifetime.

We do not know what will happen, but one way or another, we have to ask some simple but difficult questions: Whose side is Jesus on? What is Jesus’ way? What hope do we have?

1. A Different Allegiance

The narrative of the Bible is not a story where God’s redemption drops out of the sky unaffected by time but meets us in the midst of things within our complex web of relationships and histories, stirring us little by little towards God’s kingdom.

And so, it should not surprise us to find that when we look at the pages of Scripture, we find war, but not only that, God’s people going to war by God’s command.

And if you have ever read through the Bible, you will come to some passages that might shock you. There are passages in the Old Testament that command the killing of the Canaanites, the nation that lived in the land before Israel. The reasons for these passages in the Bible (passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua) sound frighteningly similar to the reasons the leaders of the church in Russia are saying they invaded Ukraine: the war is to punish the sin of those in the land, the war is to make sure God’s people are secure, the war is to stop the advancement of evil ways and keep God’s people pure, and so on and so forth.

These passages have been cited in our own history as well. Centuries ago, European settlers believed they were a new Israel coming to America, a new promised land, and because of that, its inhabitants, the indigenous peoples with their perceived pagan ways, needed to be exterminated if they did not convert.

Reading these passages should, hopefully, causes us to ask: is this all there is to this story? To read these passages as straightforwardly pertaining to today, as if that is where God wanted to leave our perception of him, where God leaves us in the drama of salvation, is to miss what we might call a long arc toward peacemaking in the biblical narrative.

It began with God meeting a desperate people in an ancient world that believed in things like tribal holy war, and these laws reflect a gentle push towards something better than the status quo.

We see this in all kinds of issues: the treatment of women, marriage, slaves, children, wealth, etc. If you have ever thought a certain passage of the Bible on these topics taught things that seemed regressive, potentially harmful, even oppressive, ask yourself what this look law looks like in comparison to what was being practiced in its time, and you will see what my Bible professors call, “a redemptive-movement,” glimpses of how God is nudging God’s people little by little towards the ends that God desires.

The whole of the biblical narrative is a travail moving from the subservience of women to equality, from slavery to emancipation, from exclusion to solidarity, from brutality to charity, and so also, from war to peacemaking.

And it seems that while God is gentle in instructing this redemption, we see little break-outs, seed moments, and events where the kingdom of God shines through with particular clarity.

It can look like Deborah in the book of Judges, a woman called by the Spirit of God in a time when women were seen with little worth to be a prophet and judge over all of Israel.

It might look like the love poetry in Song of Songs, where the bride and groom are described with a mutuality in marriage that defies the curse of Eve: “I am my beloved’s, and he is mine.”

It can look like laws in the Old Testament, like the laws of Jubilee, where every 50 years, all debts would be forgiven, all slaves would be set free, and all land wealth would be redistributed.

Or it can be a moment like when the commander of Israel, Joshua, is sitting ready with his armies in invade Jericho, and he sees a mysterious angelic man, and he asks him, “whose side are you on? Are you one ours or theirs?” And this man says, “I am the commander of the armies of heaven, but I am on neither side” (Josh. 5:14).

This is but one moment that plants a seed that suggests God is beyond our earthly allegiances, whether they are political, ethnic, financial, or even religious, what we label as Christian allegiance. Whose side is God on? When we seek to pull God onto our side to justify our community, our causes, and our conflicts, God is quick to say, “I am on no one’s side.”

Isaiah’s vision is another moment, written in a time of mounting tension between the superpowers, and it envisions many nations coming to Jerusalem to the house of God. They come to a God that seems like the God of a different nation, a God not of their nation, and yet, they assemble in Jerusalem, welcomed as if they are not strangers as if this nation is the place of the gathering of many nations, a people out of many peoples, and here they unlearn the ways of war.

Whose side is God on? God is on everyone’s side. God is not the God of one nation but all nations, not one people but all people.  

This calls us to a fundamentally different allegiance as the people of God, who know and trust this truth. We are citizens of heaven, first and foremost.

This did not stop the early Christians from still being Romans or Greeks or anything like that, nor does it stop us from being Canadians, but it does orient us to say we do not participate in these earthly allegiances if they are set against our allegiance to the kingdom of heaven.

And when we realize this, we have to ask ourselves, whose side are we on? Are we on the side of the powerful, the rich, the apathetic, the status quo or are we on the side whom God has declared his special favour: the weak, the oppressed, the poor, the widow, the orphan, the lowly, the captive? Whose side will we choose to be on?

Whose side are we on when our nation says we need to invade these people in order to keep us safe and secure? But perhaps that question is not for us in Canada today: Maybe it might look like this: Whose side are we on when innocent people are being killed and need our help, millions of refugees have lost their homes and are showing up at our doorstep? Will we turn a blind eye and say, “Sorry, but helping will cost us too much. We have to look after ourselves”? Whose side will we be on?

But let’s go further: what if our nation says we need to forget about the rights of indigenous people or the rights of foreign workers because it means too much for Canadian prosperity to treat them fairly? Whose side will we be on, then?

Whose side are we on when our nation uses its military presence to protect its grip over the economies of the Caribbean, its mining interests over the inhabitants of South America or the Congo? Canada has a very respectable military, but it is not perfect. And those things don’t tend to make the news because it so readily goes against the narrative that we Canadians tell ourselves, we are the peacemakers, the good guys, and our nation does not oppress anyone. That is not quite true. When it comes to confronting the truth about ourselves, again, whose side are we on?

2. A Different Way

What our allegiance is will determine a different way. Isaiah says that “For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” What is this way, this word, God is instructing us toward?

As we have been seeing, there is a process that is working itself out in the biblical narrative, where God meets humanity where they are at, in the midst of tension and conflict, and slowly teaches them redemption, wooing them towards reconciliation, little by little.

And yet, this narrative comes to a kind of summit or apex moment in the coming of Jesus Christ, who came proclaiming what God’s kingdom is about: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called Children of God.” Where Joshua and David came and defeated Israel’s enemies, this new Joshua, this new Son of David, this Messiah came and gave a different teaching:

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:43-45

This Messiah waged a war of a different sort, not against people but against sin, fought not with weapons but with grace. And as the story of the Gospels show, the world, even God’s own people, did not want peace.

One writer said that we simply cannot have peace until we understand that peace will always feel like it costs us more than war. And Jesus’ preaching started costing a few people some things: their power and reputation. And so, religious leaders orchestrated the murder of the Messiah.

On the night Jesus was betrayed, soldiers came with Judas to get him in the Garden, where he was praying. One disciple, eager to defend the Messiah, a worthy reason for violence if there ever was one, takes a blade and strikes one of the soldiers. Yet, Jesus turns to heal the soldier on the spot of his own arrest and rebukes the disciple: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword.”

Then, Jesus was taken, tried, tortured, and hung on a cross to be executed. And it is here, in the darkness of the cross, that the word of God shines most clear. Jesus prays, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.”

The heart of the Bible is the message that at this moment when we treated God as our enemy, when we killed God’s very son, God was saving us.

The cross is how God treats his enemies. Thank God!

3. A Different Hope

Yet, if the cross is how God treats his enemies, if we are saved by the cross, if we are called to take up the cross as well, the cross is also how we treat our enemies.

And so, if this is our allegiance, if this is our way, we will have a very different hope. Isaiah names this hope. One that day…

 He shall judge between the nations,
    and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    Neither shall they learn war anymore.

There is an old joke that, despite being a joke, names how we so often misunderstand Christian hope. It goes like this:

One day a man feels troubled and goes to church. He comes in and hears the preacher proclaim, “Step aside, and let the good Lord fight your battles.” He finds this inspiring. Just then, a gust of wind blows, pushing open the preacher’s coat to expose that he had a pistol holstered in his coat. The man is taken aback by it. After the service, he goes up to the preacher, “Pastor, you said step aside and let God fight our battles.”

“Yes,” said the preacher.

“Well, then, why are you carrying a gun?” the man asked.

The preacher looked at him like he had said something silly, “Of course, I carry a gun! That’s to hold them off until he gets here!”

I think that is actually a lot of people’s view of Christian hope: “God will fix that one day; until then, we can’t do anything about it. God will bring peace one day; until then, we are stuck killing each other. Oh, well.”

Put another way: our drive to annihilate our enemy is driven by a kind of worldly hopelessness. I have no hope left for my enemy, no hope for their redemption, so I need to take history into my hands as its judge.

That is not how we understand Christian hope. If God promises the restoration of all things, our hope is that God invites us to participate in this reality in a fuller way every moment, in anticipation of what God will one day do.  

In fact, this is how the early church understood Isaiah chapter 2. Here is what Justin Martyr said,

“And that this [he is referring to Isaiah chapter 2 here] did so come to pass, we can convince you. For from Jerusalem there went out into the world, men, twelve in number, and these illiterate, of no ability in speaking: but by the power of God, they proclaimed to every race of people that they were sent by Christ to teach to all the world about God; and we who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie or deceive our examiners, and willingly die confessing Christ.” 

Justin Martyr, First Apology, 1:175-6

If our allegiance is that God loves all people, this fundamentally prevents us from quickly saying I am on your side and dead set against them, much less choosing the sides of power and privilege.

If our way is shown in Jesus’ loving for his enemies, our way has to see in our enemy someone God has died for, with love that matches the love that saves us.  

And if our hope is that God will judge all people and restore all things, this also prevents me from needing to repay evil with evil. As Romans 12 says, hope frees us to overcome evil with good. We do this because we trust that this is how the story of human history, God’s story with us, will end.

Walter Wink, the biblical scholar the worked to overcome racial segregation in the apartheid in Africa, once said that being a Christian was the art of resisting evil without becoming evil ourselves.

This does not mean we give up helping those that need help and opposing those who harm the innocent; it does not mean we jump to easy conclusions and give up that moral wrestling that has to negotiate those difficult moments where self-defence and protecting others, where force and harm are in play, where the tragedies of violence still happen. But it does change how, why, where, and for whom we act.

What does this look like? I am not going to offer a quick answer here. There isn’t one. However, let me conclude with this: The El Salvadorian archbishop and martyr, Oscar Romero, was told by some he needed to embrace violence and revolution if the people of his nation would be liberated from their oppressive and corrupt government. Violence was the only way to bring peace. Romero, a message he died for, said this, echoing Isaiah 2:

“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.“

Oscar Romero, from The Violence of Love

While we live in a complicated world where militaries and police forces surely have their role to play in maintaining order when an enemy threatens us, however, do we get pulled into that seductive spiral towards total war, the grim realities of which history repeats over and over, or do we see a different possibility–light breaking in, by which, however that might look, we are inspired to do the hard work of “unlearning the ways of war”?

Let’s pray…

Listening to Listen: Abortion and Becoming “Pro-Voice”

Happy Belated Canada Day, everyone. When I originally signed up to speak with you a few weeks back, my obvious thought for a sermon was to speak on faith and our nation, seeing that it was right after Canada Day. I had that sermon ready to go.

But the events of this week south of the border have been on my heart and mind. It is an oddly Canadian thing to feel connected to the controversies in the United States. Some days Canadians follow politics in the States closer than our own, perhaps because our politics are just so much more respectful, we feel bored listening to it.

The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that has us Canadians talking about it, even though it does not directly affect us. It has been all over CBC Radio, which I listen to on the way to work. For many of us, we feel connected to these events. Many of us have American family members. Many of my friends are American Baptist pastors. Many of us wonder whether something like this could happen here. Others of us hear the toxic rhetoric from our own circles.

Over social media, I have seen a disturbing mix of gloating on the part of conservatives and rage on the part of liberals, finger-pointing memes that attempt cute but all too simplistic “gotcha moments” like it is all one big game.

For conservatives, the gloating justifies why they supported Donald Trump, finally coming to fruition. Supporting an immoral man so that republicans could control the Supreme Court was worth it. For others, this marks a terrible victory for bigotry that is taking over the public discourse, where people have climbed into places of power using lies and demagoguery, pushing the United States closer to something like Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, Gilead.

For us, north of the border, I am very thankful that we have a completely independent judiciary, can I just say. I also feel like we are watching our neighbours, our closest ally in the world, pull themselves apart. The rage is palpable as the protests by both sides edge closer and closer to violence. I wonder if the US is on a collision course for another civil war.

And so, I told the organizers of the service this week that I would speak on the topic of abortion today. But let’s be clear about something up front:

This is not a liberal versus conservative issue.

This is a scriptural discernment issue.

This is a truth and compassion issue.

This is an issue that involves people.

When the world wants to shout, I think that is a good indication for us, Christians, that we need to stop and listen, but not to the shouting. We need to listen to the whispers of God’s voice in Scripture; we need to listen to the advice of our Baptist forebearers, but also, we need to listen to each other, especially to the cries of the lives affected, the voices of women.

So, I have entitled this sermon “Learning to Listen: Abortion and Becoming ‘Pro-Voice.’” The term Pro-Voice is based on an excellent book by Aspen Baker that I will reference later.

1.   Listening to Scripture

So, first, can we listen to what God might have to tell us in Scripture? I say that knowing that this is a debate where people love citing the Bible as if it is obvious and clear on the matter. However, let me survey some of the Scriptures people cite in these debates, and let me suggest that perhaps the voice of God might not be saying what people try to make it say.

This is a topic that cannot be discussed by just one Scripture. As I thought about it, there is really no other way to handle this than by going through a couple¾there are about half a dozen of them–that people bring up (there are others, but these are the most pertinent ones). So, that is what we are going to do.

Now, there are several scriptures that don’t say much at all about this issue that constantly get quoted. So, let’s start with those:

A.    Psalm 139

For instance, Psalm 139:13 says, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” There are similar ones in the books of Job and Jeremiah. I saw this on a billboard driving through the South one time, but it really has nothing to say about the legal status of a fetus. Technically, God knits all life together. So, already, one of the most commonly cited passages in this debate says actually very little.

B.     Luke 1

There are other Scriptures that are not as convincing but have some weight to them. One of these is how in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, sees Mary, who is pregnant with Jesus, and it says that the “child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.” You see this one often around Christmas time. Some have taken this to imply that, obviously then, all fetuses are children. Well, I don’t think that is really Luke’s point in this passage, but be that as it may, we also don’t know how far along Elizabeth was. To feel a baby leaping is something that would happen well into the second trimester, so if this text does speak to this issue, it does not seem to say anything about the condition of the unborn in the first trimester. In Canada, 90% of abortions happen in the first trimester before movements can be felt. So, this text doesn’t say enough.

C.     Genesis 1

A much more important text in this debate is Genesis chapter one, verse 27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

This term “image” is used later in the book of Genesis to speak about how Adam’s son, Seth, is like him in his image. It is a parental term. If you were to look at my sons, you might say they are chips off the old block. They look like me. They are in my image. Genesis 1 is saying that all humans are God’s children; God sees himself in them and them in him. Genesis 1 teaches that human life has inherent dignity and worth in God’s eyes, no matter the gender, the health, the mental ability, which should say something when we are placed in a position to decide what kind of human life is worth living.

However, as important as this passage is, this passage does not tell us when a human person, in the legal sense, begins. It tells us the worth of human life, but not its origin. So, it is important, but it is only one piece of the puzzle.

D.    Exodus 21

The only passage in the Bible that deals with the destruction of a fetus is Exodus, chapter 21. It reads as follows:

22 “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. 23 If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

The laws of the Old Testament are made up of different types. You have some, like the ten commandments, that are direct: Do not commit adultery, do not lie, etc. Others, like this one, is a case law that work as applications: if this happens, you should do that.

This situation is a fight where a pregnant woman is struck, and a miscarriage happens, and if the woman is harmed permanently, the offender is harmed in retribution. It is not the case when a woman seeks an abortion. For in the Hebrew mindset, birth control of any kind was just not on their radar because the ideal was to have as many children as you could.

This is the only case where the destruction of a fetus occurs, and according to this passage, a fine is paid. It is paid to the husband because he, in that culture, was considered the patriarch and lord over his wife, who has his property. So, one quickly feels that this is a text written for its own time and place.

Nevertheless, the most important detail of this text is that a fine is paid. According to Old Testament laws, if you murdered a person, you got the death penalty, life for a life. The implication here is that if a miscarriage happens, and we are not told anything about how far along the pregnant woman is, the offender pays a fine. Thus, it implies a legal person has not been killed.

Some more conservative commentators have tried to argue that this is merely referring to a premature birth, that the word for miscarriage could mean something else, but that is not how it was understood in its own time or in later Rabbinical and Christian commentaries.

However, some later Jewish commentators argue that this case only refers to when it happens to a woman in the first half of her pregnancy, before the fetus is formed sufficiently. In the second half, it could be considered murder.

And so, some have argued that just as Scripture pushes God’s people toward equality between men and women as the biblical narrative progresses, so also does Christian tradition become more sensitive with regard to the unborn.

But the question remains, when does a fetus become a person? When does it become a legal person? When should the government protect what it can discern to be human life?

Some have argued, based on this passage, that a person is a person when they take their first breath after birth. When the first human in the Bible, Adam, was made a living soul, this occurs in Genesis 2 when God breathed into him the breath of life. With the first breath after birth, the human person is identifiable. This was the view of Palestinian Jews in ancient times, and in modern times, this argument was made by the Baptist ethicist Paul Simmons.

However, is breath the real mark of life with dignity? After all, there are lots of creatures out there that are alive but don’t have lungs and acquire oxygen in other ways, and we believe in animal rights. A fetus gets oxygen through the blood in the umbilical cord. Does that count?

If the first breath is the mark of personhood, can a pregnant woman have an abortion right up until labour starts? Late-term abortions are very rare, and in Canada, they are really only done when the life of the mother is at stake. In Canada, abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy account for 0.59% of all abortions.

On the other side of the spectrum is the view that a human person begins at conception. This is probably the one we are most familiar with, often called “life at conception,” but that is a misnomer in the debate. No one is debating whether life begins at conception. In fact, the sperm and ovum are also alive before conception. The question is rather does a fertilized zygote, a set of multiplying cells, which does not have thought, a nervous system, or a heart, so small it could fit on the end of a pin, growing to about the size of a lentil as an embryo–should this be considered a legal person? Baptist ethicists like David Gushee and the late Glenn Stassen hold that the sanctity of human life compels them to refuse abortion even at this early stage.

Early Christian writers like Clement and others support a similar view. They held this view because they assumed the philosophy of Plato. What does that mean? Plato believed that humans have souls in the sense that what made the person truly a person was not based on their bodies or brains but was based on an eternal substance of the mind that could be divorced from the body and brain. That is a bit different from the earlier Jewish belief in the soul that would say that while we have a spiritual dimension to ourselves, it is always in connection to our bodies. One writer put it that we don’t so much have a soul. We are a soul, a holistic unity of spirit and flesh. We are enspirited bodies.

So, several early Christian writers adopted this more Platonic notion that separates mind and body, soul and flesh, and by this, a zygote from the beginning of conception has a full soul, the same as a fully developed human. And this position became Catholic dogma and, by extension, the default setting of most of Christianity, including the modern pro-life movement.

Now, as I said, the early church and Judaism had two wings in the spectrum of their views: one was personhood beginning at first breath, the other, beginning at conception. However, there was a diversity in the early church and Judaism.

The most common view was a middle-ground view. Thinkers like the Alexandrian Jewish writers but also important Christian writers like Tertullian, Origen and Augustine (if you don’t recognize these names, let’s just say they are heavy hitters in theology). They believed that a fetus was a person somewhere in the second trimester, corresponding to the degree of the formation of the fetus.

Now, we know today that a fetus’s heart is discernable at six weeks. But does a heartbeat define a human person?

We know that somewhere around the 12th week, the fetus has a formed nervous system and thus, probably can feel pain. Does the ability to feel pain indicate to us that this is a life we need to protect? 80% of abortions in Canada occur before the 12th week.

We know that the fetus becomes viable around the 24th week, which means if it was born then, it’s probable that it would live. Is this the point where the government has the prerogative to say an abortion should not take place unless the life of the mother is at risk? As I said before, late-term abortions are very rare in Canada.

2.   Listening to Our Baptist Principles

As you can see, this topic is one that leads to more and more questions. What do we do with that? I have learned that the principles of our Baptist tradition were devised in many ways to aid the believer in walking these difficult paths, where the road ahead comes to a blind crest. So, what might our Baptist principles tell us?

While I don’t think Baptists are automatically the “best” Christians, much less the “only” Christians, I do think our Baptist principles can be virtuous practices that can help us navigate this complex post-Christian, post-modern world we live in.

A.    Humans have Rights and Freedoms

One principle that all Christians share is that we believe that because we are all made in God’s image, all human life has dignity and has been bestowed rights and freedoms. Baptists have particularly emphasized rights and freedoms.

Now, someone might pipe up and say then what about the rights of the unborn? Here is a tension between the rights of the pregnant woman and potentially the rights of the unborn.

B.     Separation of Church and State

In this case, I believe it is important to keep in mind the second Baptist principle: separation of church and state.

That is to say that if we believe that life begins at conception, and by that a full person because a full soul is imparted at conception if this is a premise based on the beliefs of Christianity, a particular belief about the soul, my Baptist faith cautions me from imposing this view on others who might not share it.

Again, someone might say that imposing this view is necessary when human life is in danger. Many would insist that a fertilized zygote is a potential human being, and by the sanctity of human life in any form, it ought to be protected.

But this conversation must admit that what it means to be a person and when a person begins legally is not clear, both in public discourse and in Jewish and Christian theology. As we have been asking: Is it at conception? An established heartbeat? The development of a nervous system? Fetal viability? Or at first breath after birth? Arguments can and have been made for all of these with no clear winner.

If we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that one option is the obvious standout, we ought not to be insisting that the government enforce one view, particularly not the earlier ones that impose so much on a woman against her will.

C.     Liberty of Conscience

In this case, another Baptist principle is important to keep in mind: we believe in the liberty of all people to decide matters based on their conscience.

Now, this is not an absolute liberty. This does not mean we ought to be free to do anything we want. I did not have the right, as we have seen in the pandemic, to jeopardize the health of my neighbours or co-workers or people I interact with in public spaces but refuse to wear a mask or show vaccination information. Governments and organizations do have the right to regulate spaces based on health and safety.  

And if the nature of the unborn was obvious, as some think it is, I can see a better case to say why it ought not to be left up to choice.

While it is not a person’s decision that makes a fetus into a person, it is up to people to recognize another person, and the question is, who has this power? Who has the right to pronounce when a zygote, an embryo, or a fetus becomes a person when the matters are not clear?

If these matters are not obvious, it is appropriate then that the power of this decision lay neither in the hands of the state nor the church nor the biological father, who simply does not have the same bodily risk in the matter, but rather the power of this decision should reside in the hands of the person who will be most affected by that decision, namely the pregnant woman herself.

This does not mean that we have to view a decision always as the right decision. There are lots of bad reasons to have an abortion, but at the end of the day, the responsibility falls on the woman herself to make this difficult choice.

3.   Listening to Each Other, especially Women

If we can understand these things, this issue takes on a different character. It is quite possible for Christians to occupy a muddy middle ground that sees abortions as a tragedy but is not interested in imposing our convictions on another person using the laws of our nation.  

We can ¾in fact, we must¾resist the either-or of our polarized culture and its toxic, corrosive effects on honesty, decency, and thoughtfulness. We can be profoundly and fervently committed to the dignity of all human life but admit that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about that.

A.    Accepting the Diversity of Voices

In the midst of a world that is divided and diverse and even a church that is as well, I know people who take their views and live them out graciously. I know people who are pro-life that have chosen to adopt the babies of unwanted pregnancies. On the other end of the spectrum, I know Christian social workers who are pro-choose that have worked at deep personal expense to help women out of abuse and poverty through education and empowerment. I think the church would be impoverished if we refused to see the good character of either of these people.

I think of the conviction of former US president and evangelical Baptist Jimmy Carter. He writes in his important book, Our Endangered Values, that during his presidency, he believed that the Bible taught the sanctity of all life, so he was and still is, personally, against abortion. However, he also believed in the separation of church and state. He believed it was the right of a nation to choose its values democratically. So, instead, he funded programs to help young women and mothers–things like sex education, birth control, free contraception, testing, funded daycares programs, work programs, etc.–so that if a woman truly wanted to keep her baby, she could feel supported. The result was that abortions were lower doing his presidency than during the two Republican pro-life/anti-abortion presidents that came before him and him after.

The right way to go about this issue involves giving people the space to work out for themselves what quite possibly could be the most difficult, life-altering, haunting decision a woman could make in her life.

The right way is to listen to and support people medically, financially, and emotionally–people who are vulnerable and scared and only then do people feel empowered to make an informed decision because they know they are not alone.

B.     Listening and Walking with Women

Aspen Baker formed an organization that is devoted to doing just that. Her philosophy, the title of this sermon, is called “pro-voice.” Look up her Ted Talk on this subject. Her organization is a helpline devoted to listening to the needs of women who have had abortions. She believes that one of the most important things we can do in this debate is to listen to the experiences and needs of women without judgment.

And this does not mean all women will think the same way. What she found was that there were many on the pro-choice side that valorized abortion as liberating. Feminists that when they got pregnant, just could not bring themselves to have an abortion or when they did have one, they found themselves experiencing regret, guilt, and anguish.

On the other side, she handled calls by women, fathers, husbands, and pastors who were adamantly pro-life before, but because of certain complicated circumstances, they ended up considering that abortion might be the necessary path, and they felt deeply unprepared to consider these things.  

Aspen Baker, in her book, speaks about navigating life in the areas that are gray, where the questions do not lead to clear and definite answers. The question we have been asking (although there are many other questions in this debate) is when does the fetus become a human person, a person in the legally definable sense? How do we live this out? And when we have surveyed the most pertinent Scriptures, we come up short of complete answers.

Now, I am sure you all want me to solve this issue for you. I could tell you where I feel most comfortable drawing that line. But I am a man that has never experienced anything a pregnant woman might face. It is not my decision, nor is it an obvious decision. Let me just tell you that some issues are not easily solved. In fact, they shouldn’t.

Can I tell you I have so badly wanted these questions to have an easy answer? When I was in my first year of Bible college, I had a friend that knew me as a Christian and as a Christian that always had an answer for things. She came to me quite troubled. She was pregnant. She was pregnant with twins. However, one twin died and became what is called a molar pregnancy, essentially becoming something like a tumour that kept growing. Doctors said it should be removed as it could cause serious health risks (infertility, even cancer, later on), but to do this, the other baby–that is the term she used¾had to be aborted and removed.

What would you do if that were you? What would you say to her if you were me? If you can believe it, in Bible College, I was a member of the pro-life club, and my answer as the plucky and ultra-pious, know-it-all Bible college student was: “Don’t do it. Abortion is wrong. Pray and have faith.”

This woman–fortunately–did not listen to me. She went ahead with the procedure, and because of it, she is healthy today and has gone on to have a family.

That experience impressed me that life and faith might be more complicated than I want them to be. Anyone who says the solution is obviously this or that is usually someone who has not really come to grips with the complexities of life and the intricacies of the Bible. Life and morality are not always an obvious thing.

It can be frighting thinking about just how messy and grey the world can be.

It can feel scary not knowing what to think, especially if you believe that your salvation depends on believing and doing the right things.

This can cause many of us to retreat into easy answers, black and white thinking that permits neither questions nor alternatives.

But it is here in reality, in this messy thing called life, that our humanity is found.

And it is here that God’s grace finds us: not despite our humanity but in it.

C.     The Character of Grace

If we can realize this, we must know that to become a mature follower of Christ in this complicated world involves moving from partisan politics and obsessing over having the right position or policy (although these have their place) to simply dwelling with people, hearing their stories, and being a gracious presence there in their midst.

I have learned the difficult lesson as a theologian, who has devoted my life to reading Scripture and the great works of theology, all to strive to synthesize the best answers on doctrinal topics in our pursuit of truth (which I believe is a pursuit we all must do). I have learned that some issues don’t have clear answers–that’s the truth–and sometimes in life, the point of things is not having the answer, but meeting these difficult situations with a certain character, that difficult balance of honesty and empathy, conviction and compassion, and that this is the only way to live with a clear conscience in this corrupted world.

If this is the case, we might listen and hear the voice of God from Scripture say something else beyond the Scriptures we just surveyed. In all the ambiguity of life, the Word of God might simply be saying something like this:

“Let everyone,” says the Apostle James, “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry” (James 1:19).

Or it might be what Paul simply advises, that in all the fragmentation and division in this world, he simply says, “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Eph. 4:32)

Or it might be what the Prophet Micah said, “What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). When life gets complex, sometimes the only thing we can do is be fair and forgiving and admit that in all of life’s moments, whether moments of success or failure, joy or tragedy, we need God. We need the grace revealed in Jesus Christ. We need the one who has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you” (Deut. 31:6).

No matter what our views on anything, all we can do, all we must do, from beginning to end, is to trust that.