Who are you?

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Scripture: 1 John 3:1-3: See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. 3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

When you meet someone you don’t know, how do you tell them who you are?  Dogs have it easy, they sniff each other and figure it out through smell.  Cats study each other, goldfish don’t care as long as they can get to their food pellets, and lobsters are too territorial to want to get friendly.  We humans use words.

Hi, I’m Monica and I’m…  And we fill in the blanks and look for something we have in common.  I’m a big Abba fan, a small Star Trek fan or whatever.  What can we talk about together, what are our shared joys and passions?

We may often say, I am an electrician, a teacher, a doctor, a dancer, a retiree.  That describes what we do, but not who we are.  We might say, I’m a daughter, a grandfather, a kokum, a niece, but that describes how we are connected to others but not who we are.  We could say, I’m a drunk, a cancer victim, a video game addict, a workaholic, a busybody, and so on, but that describes what we are struggling with, but still not necessarily who we are.

First John says something quite strange and ground-breaking.  We are children of God.  That is an odd point of view.  If you look at Greek or Roman mythology, humans are toys and playthings of the Gods.  Zeus is always looking for a cute young human to flirt with, and the Trojan War was seen as the equivalent of a chess game between Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo and Athena, who each had their favorite hero to side with.  Egypt’s gods were to be served by humans and they would judge and sort them out for the afterlife. 

The Babylonian Gods saw humans as created from the blood of a murdered God, and as a source of nourishment.  The burnt offerings the humans made in their worship was food for Marduk and the others.  The flood, according to the Babylonians, occurred because one of the goddesses wanted her beauty sleep and thought the humans were too noisy.

What a radical idea, being children of God.  It’s still today a radical idea.  People sometimes believe that they are a product of their dna, or as I heard at a funeral this week, we are all star dust that has been a part of the universe for millions of years.  I remember people involved in the New Age movement claiming that they were God in their own right, and that when they remembered who they were, prosperity and health were sure to follow, because they were creators of their own lives.  That was before the economic downturn of 2008.

What does it mean to be children of God?  Elsewhere in the scriptures, it talks about how we are adopted to be God’s children, to become like Jesus.  Adoption in the ancient world was a very different thing than it is now.  Often adoption is done for the sake of providing children with a healthy family life that we hope is stable and nurturing, with the assumption that their birth family may not be so healthy.  It is a private thing that is not necessarily a part of changing a child’s identity, but adding to it.  The ancient world saw it more as a transaction, between unequal people.  A rich roman citizen would adopt a suitable young person to be the heir to their property.  It was a legal tool for providing childless couples with healthcare and protection for their aging years.  Often the young person’s family would be given a large sum of money and encouraged to sever all ties with the child.  It was a purchase, and a step up in the world.

If God has adopted us, then, First John wants us to consider the implications of such a situation.  We are no longer part of a human family but a community of saints, elders, disciples and messengers.  We are also works in progress.  Remember the t-shirt that said, “be patient with me, God isn’t finished with me yet”  1 John says, “what we will be is not yet revealed, what we do know is this, when he is revealed, we will be like him.”  This is a reminder that while we can and should do our best to work on who we are and how we are to others, this is a partnership.  Just as the rich citizen teaches his new child, so too God is in the process of shaping us into heirs as well.  We can work ourselves into frenzies trying to become perfect, but this is really saying that we are Gods, and not the children of God.  There’s also the added challenge of how the world sees us.  When we truly take this seriously, people don’t get it.  “Why are you so nice,” they ask.  “How come you care about people like that?”

There’s a fellow who is selling pizza in Philadelphia.  One day a customer came in and asked if he could pay it forward, buy a pizza for someone who couldn’t afford it.  The store owner grabbed a sticky note, wrote a voucher and stuck it on the wall.  Then, he asked his customers if they would like to pay it forward.  Everyone who goes to the restaurant and donates $1.25 when they buy a pizza, gets a sticky note.  They can write whatever they want on the note, encouragement, hope or whatever they feel like.  The wall of the restaurant is covered with notes.  People come in, pick a sticky note to take with them to encourage them as well as a slice of food that doesn’t taste mass produced.  Customers have given away ten thousand pizzas!  Some are coming back, saying that they got free pizza and now have a job and want to buy pizza for others. 

There were people who angrily attacked the idea as silly, as enabling, as supporting people in their laziness, as allowing welfare bums to not take responsibility for their lives.  They don’t get it.  They don’t understand that as children of God, we are called to a bigger picture.  As children of God, we trust in an Easter resurrection, even when it seems crazy and irrational.  We remember who we are and who we belong to, which gives us the power and the courage to see Jesus alive and living in ways that the cynics can’t understand.  Life is crazy, but we’re not alone and thank goodness God isn’t finished with us yet.  That is worth saying halleluiah for.

Walking in the light - John 20:19-31, 1 John 1:1-2:2

 Today is the second Sunday of Easter, sometimes known as "little Easter" and every year we read this story of Thomas who is late to understand what has happened with Jesus. It would be easy to point a finger at him as being a good example of how not to be a follower of Jesus Christ, but that is not where I want to go. Instead, I thought I would talk about nudist colonies.

Well, now that I have your attention, I had better explain that I happened to see an interview on the internet or else CBC TV one day where the topic was a congregation in the states somewhere that was part of a nudist colony, and everyone went to worship in their birthday suits, which they thought was perfectly natural. They went on and on about it in an attempt to justify their activities. I couldn't help but notice that the camera blurred out some parts of the participants. Yup, you guessed it, these brave souls would bare everything but their faces. They didn't want their families or colleagues know how they celebrated their Sunday worship.  They weren't going to let the world know what they were doing.  Even though they believed in what they were doing, they didn't believe enough to be open and honest about it.  

One might say that they were hiding behind closed doors, feeling unsure what kind of reaction they would get if they revealed their true selves.  Or that they were walking in darkness while they said that they walked in the light.

The same can be said about the disciples. According to John, they were hiding behind closed doors. Despite the experience of Easter Sunday, they are wanting to play it safe, to keep the message to themselves. They are not even sure what the message is.  

They certainly are not going out to tell every one of the event of the past few days. So the question this raises is "who really counts in this story?  Maybe Thomas is just saying out loud what everyone else was thinking, he is just a few days later than the rest of them.  And the most honest person, too.

Honesty is a hallmark of followers of the Way, according to the first letter of John. The resurrection is not some crazy p.r. scheme or mass conspiracy, on the contrary, it leads to a bold declaration of faith, that despite our faults and failings, our errors and flaws, we are washed clean. In baptism, as one United Church theologian said, "we are bathed in God's love, we enter into a community that hopes to live in the light, we walk together in a pilgrim journey, we are anointed and recruited by God to heal a broken world, we respond to God by choosing to enter into a relationship where we might have to risk getting wet, drowning to our small secret selves for a partnership in building a new and just world.

Our Song of Faith says that “Before conscious thought or action on our part, we are born into the brokenness of this world. Before conscious thought or action on our part, we are surrounded by God’s redeeming love. Baptism by water in the name of the Holy Trinity   is the means by which we are received, at any age, into the covenanted community of the church. It is the ritual that signifies our rebirth in faith and cleansing by the power of God. Baptism signifies the nurturing, sustaining, and transforming power of God’s love and our grateful response to that grace.

 

You see, baptism is when we all recognize that we are living naked in a locked room, trying to stay safe and rational.  Despite our best efforts, our deepest questions and fears, Jesus comes into our lives, turning our understanding of life upside down and asking us to trust that there is a better way, that we can live in the bold light of day.  And Jesus comes to community; Jesus didn’t come to Thomas in a private moment like Mary Magdalene experienced in the garden that first Easter; Jesus came when he was with his friends.  And the community he was with wasn’t perfect, or else they wouldn’t have been hiding behind closed doors. 

Thomas, despite his questions, was the first of the disciples to boldly proclaim that Jesus was the anointed one, the messenger, the example, the bringer of hope and love. Despite our flaws, our doubts and our questions, Easter keeps happening in our midst. Let us remember and be grateful for the amazing love and grace that didn’t come only once centuries ago, but continues to come to us in simple things like the breaking of bread, the sharing of wine, and the boldness of our public witness.  May we all experience Jesus breaking into our naked places and helping us walk boldly in the light.

No Such Thing as Closure

Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015

&Scripture Readings:  Mark 16:1–8, 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Psalm 118  (VU p 837, parts 1, 2,and 3 Responsively), John 20:11-18
 

Any of you remember an old radio show called “The Rest of the Story”?  Paul Harvey would have some nugget of information with a surprise twist in it, and it would always be left hanging until after the commercial, when Paul would bring in a punch line that would make us go, “wow, I didn’t know that!”

In some ways, our gospel readings could be seen a little like that.  We have Mark’s gospel, where the three ladies go running out without telling anyone.  End of story, end of Mark’s gospel.  What a cliff-hanger. And then we have the gospel of John, where there is a much more detailed encounter, and Mary goes to get more witnesses to figure out what happened.  John gives us the ‘rest of the story’, all tidied up, and leading on to greater things.

We also had a third reading, Paul’s retelling of his Easter experience, in which he, who wasn’t even one of the original band of followers.  this is the oldest written account of Easter, written before Mark and John ever got out their pens and tried to get it down on paper.  Paul says, “You know this, you have heard it, you know the people who have told you what they saw”.

Three different reactions, three different views, three different tellings.  We dislike that, we modern scientific people.  We want our stories to come in nice packages, starting with “once upon a time” and ending with “and they lived happily ever after”.  We want closure, completeness, sensible and rational, logical progression.  Modern people would ask, “which version is right?” and if they couldn’t pick one, they might conclude, “these are all nonsense.”

We are hung up on closure.  We think that things should have tidy endings, that our emotions can be boxed up like Easter decorations once the chocolates are all eaten, that we have an expiry date on traumatic experiences, and that we only need to deal once with bad situations before we move on. We want the easy answers and living with an open-ended story only causes us stress.    Tell us which of the stories is right, Mark, Paul or John, and let us get on with things.

I think that it is possible to have a variety of stories that all are true witnesses to the first Easter.  I remember one Easter when I thought I would surprise everyone at my kid’s school.  I had a gig as the Easter Bunny to give out chocolates at a mall.  So I talked to the teachers and they thought it would be fine if I showed up at recess.  Everything went as planned, kids were coming over and getting hugs, and I was having a grand time.  A teacher came rushing up to me and told me I had to leave right away.  One of the children was having a panic attack!  It was full blown, hyperventilation, tears, beet red face, and crying!

If you had asked the kids on the playground what they had experienced when they saw a 6 foot tall bunny on the playground, most of them would have said, “the Easter Bunny, of course”.  If you had asked the teachers, they would have said, “a parent volunteer”.  But for one little child, they would have said, “a big tall thing with huge scary eyes that was staring at me.”

Our scriptures are like that.  John’s gospel says that the first Easter was a private, beautiful thing that turned sadness into joy, lonely heartbreak into comfort and reconciliation.  It was the gospel that inspired the hymn, “I Come to the Garden Alone”, a retelling of Mary Magdalene’s experience with Jesus by the empty tomb.  Paul’s story says that it came to an ever widening community, that many people still remember that experience, meeting and seeing Jesus in a way that profoundly transformed them into saints and leaders.  Mark’s gospel tells that it was so surprising that it shocked the three women who experienced it, shocked them so much that they didn’t speak of it.  Terror and amazement.  Terror perhaps in the fact that if this reversal of what is natural, what does it mean?  What would it mean to us today if we really believed that there was a God? What if there was the potential of you and me having an actual experience where we came in contact with the Living God? With Christ?

I may never put my hands in the nail wounds of Jesus, but I have heard stories of encounters with the sacred that have profoundly changed people.  I have witnessed folks get their courage back, find the ability to walk in dark times, face their addictions and heal their hurts.  I have seen sinners strive to be saints, and have heard stories that would make you weep, of people who were locked in dark tombs of their own, who have heard the message of the angels, “do not be afraid, you will find what you are looking for!”

We gather together on Sunday mornings to share that good news, to hear each other’s stories, and to help each other along the way as best we can.  We gather to heal, to talk, to pray and to watch for signs of the Easter story in our lives.  We gather because for us the story of Jesus has no closure, but is a story that continues to inspire, challenge and transform us.  We gather because Jesus keeps appearing, keeps breaking open our tombs and letting light in, pulls off the darkness and gloom, and accompanies us on our journey.  We gather, as I did four years after that recess fiasco, with my bunny head in my hand, to show the now 12-year old that it was just a big fancy kind of hat that I wore, and that it was still the same person under the hat.  I wasn’t just a parent volunteer, I also happened to be this child’s Sunday School teacher, and while it didn’t quite take away the terrors, it was a comfort to know that the big staring eyes had a caring person behind them.  They faced their fears and so they too became transformed by something hidden, something surprising, and something that at the heart of things was about love.  Maybe that is the key, behind the big staring eyes of our understanding of God is a caring love that risks all, even fleshy life to witness to the Covenant of Love. And now you know that the rest of the story is your story, your witness, your journey.  May you be saints for others and share your joyful halleluiahs as others have been saints for you.  Amen.