December 23, 2015

John’s Opportunity for You

I was listening to car horns honking yesterday.  There were a whole lot of them, and I figured that meant that there was a wedding going on, and sure enough, I watched out the window and caught a glimpse of a car covered with pompoms driving down the hill and honking merrily as it went.

That’s not a custom I’m used to hearing in December, probably because I tend to think that it’s just too cold to have much fun getting married with snow on the ground.  Yet I have family members who did just that, and I bet that their horns honked merrily too.

Can you imagine if your life right now amidst all the bustle and hustle of Christmas preparations would have you so filled with joy that you just had to honk your horn?  Imagine driving all the way back from Edmonton or Westlock or Fort MacMurray honking as you went to celebrate getting that last Christmas present or jumping into your car to drive around the block to let your neighbors know that the Christmas Cake was done, or the tree was trimmed.  No?

All too often we live timid lives that are afraid to let go, bust loose, shake a bell, bang on a pot or pan.  And I can’t say that John’s speech to his people is one that I would feel happy to hear.  I can just imagine the complaint if I stood here, shook my finger and called you a bunch of dirty rattlesnakes. Somehow, I can’t imagine it going down well.  Good thing it’s not my style!

John pulled no punches and yet his teaching was described as ‘good news’.  Go figure!  I think it was because he recognized that everyone had a feeling that something was not quite right with their lives.  That they were living with secret shames or guilts or burdens that weighed them down.  They knew that they were not living honest healthy lives, they had difficult relationships with others, and that they were caught up in the fear that they would go hungry if they didn’t hoard what they could at every opportunity.

John told them that there was no need to fear.  There was only the need to reconnect with God.  The sense of shame or brokenness was what they saw as sin, a word we find challenging in today’s society of positive thinking.  Yet hear what our Song of Faith says around sin:

Made in the image of God,

we yearn for the fulfillment that is life in God.

Yet we choose to turn away from God.

We surrender ourselves to sin,

    a disposition revealed in selfishness, cowardice, or apathy.

Becoming bound and complacent

    in a web of false desires and wrong choices,

    we bring harm to ourselves and others.

This brokenness in human life and community

    is an outcome of sin.

 

Yet evil does not—cannot—

    undermine or overcome the love of God.

We are all imperfect humans.  The good news as John saw it, was that there was an opportunity for us all to reconnect with God, to let go of our guilt and shame, and come into a dance with our creator.  The good news is that John saw it as an easy situation to remedy, and something that everyone could do.  Everyone, not just the religious people who know all the right answers and have memorized a bible verse for every occasion, or the people who are always doing great things for the world, like Mother Theresa or Ghandi.  The average people.  The people that no one expected.  The greedy misers who were accumulating stuff.  The hated collaborators who were seen as despicable traitors to their own people, and even the soldiers who were not part of the community, but part of the system that was oppressing people in daily annoyances and bullying.  The outsiders, the poor, the ones who had given up hope that they could ever measure up. 

The solution was simple:  Share what extra you have, even when it may seem insignificant.  Even if you only have two coats, that is something to rejoice about, and something you can be generous with.  Share that you need extra if you don’t have any coat at all.  If you don’t tell someone you need a coat, how will they know who to share that coat with?  Sharing who you are, what you need and what you have extra of.  Simple.  Don’t share if you don’t have abundance.  The person with one coat is not told to give it away.

Care.  Care about what your neighbor is going through.  Listen to their challenges, and don’t shame them for not having the ‘right’ faith or the ‘right’ solution to their problems.  Give them a prayer shawl, perhaps, or at least pray for them, but shovel their walks and bring them soup if that’s a need.  Be the shoulder they can cry on without judgement or advice.

Last but not least, be fair.  Don’t cheat your neighbor, your friend, or your community.  This seems easy at first but what about those of us who cheat on our income tax, for example, or the speed limit?  Maybe we aren’t all employees at Money Mart, but it could very well be that some of those extra rolls of tape follow us home from the office on a regular basis.  Or if someone undercharges us for groceries, we pocket the extra and sneer at the person who miscalculated.

Rejoice and be glad, for it is a very simple thing to let go of our shame and recognize God loves us even with our flaws.  That is certainly news worth honking our horns for!

December 10, 2015

How to Pet A Porcupine

Phillipians 1: 3-11 I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.
It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God's grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.
And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
One of my friends posted a video on Facebook the other day that I found just fascinating.  It was a woman petting a porcupine.  A real live porcupine, the prickly kind that we usually see as road kill in the spring and that if we do happen to meet up with them on a hike, we will back away from slowly and carefully.  The kind of animal that if your dog ever met, you would end up taking a trip to the vet to get a muzzle full of quills removed from your poor pooch.
I thought about porcupines being all prickly, and how they are a good animal to reflect on for Peace Sunday.  Truth be told, I bet on any one given day, people will meet up with someone who will make them feel like they’ve been hit with a facefull of quills.  A neighbor, a friend, a co-worker, who throws out barbed comments, or takes a swack at you emotionally, or takes the simplest comment and see it as an attack.  They are prickly.  And we wish we could avoid them or de-barb them or do something, anything, to keep them from hurting us.
Such is the stuff of warfare.  Whenever we take another human being and assume that we know they are less than us, less friendly, less righteous, less blameless or pure than us, whenever we label them as a porcupine or a terrorist or a, well, you fill in the blank, somehow that dehumanizes them enough that it is okay to discriminate against them.  “He’s a bully, she’s a communist, that’s a porcupine” and we use the label to determine how we will treat them.  Take the Syrians in France and Lebanon and Greece and Turkey.  Are they refugees or are they terrorists?  The political pundits are busy trying to convince us to label human beings that will help determine our policies, our politics and our personal reactions to the newcomers who will be coming to Athabasca.
I know what it’s like to be labelled.  In 1981, I went to the University of Alberta to learn how to become an engineer.  While I was there, people would react in several different ways to my course of study.  Sometimes they would assume that I was a butch tomboy, someone that Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam” referred to as ‘women in comfortable shoes’.  Sometimes they would assume that I was just looking for my ‘MRS’ degree, only there to catch a husband.  But generally when people found out that I was in that faculty, they talked to me like I actually had intelligence, and really saw me for a human being and not just a cute young female.  Although people scoff that I had experienced such labelling, it was only eight years later that a man walked into a Canadian school for engineers, separated the men from the women, and executed 14 women for their audacity.  The label he applied to all the women he found was ‘feminist’, and he used that label to scapegoat and kill them.
The latest shooting in the states is only one of many.  According to one newspaper, there have been over 12 thousand deaths in 2015 in the US to date due to gun violence, 309 were from mass shootings like the one this week. 2 ½%.  In 2012, the most recent report on gun violence, Stats Can reported that our rate of gun murders was 7 times lower than that of Americans and had been steadily dropping over all since 1972. 
When we label others, it gives us permission to think that they are less than human.  Oh, those violent Americans who can’t control their guns.  Oh those terrorists or those mentally ill people or whatever label we use.  Those who we don’t like, those bullies, those immigrants, those other people that look or sound or smell different than us. Oh those porcupines
This is not the way to peace.  Labels and blaming don’t work.  Martin Luther King, Jr., a champion for Christian non-violence, wrote,
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Paul met the Philippians with love.  He remembered them with love.  He encouraged them with love, and he hoped they would do the same with the people they met.  They were different than him, but that didn’t stop him sharing the good news that there is an alternative to the cycle of violence.  “It is right for me to think of you in this way, because you reflect back the love to me.” If you get a chance to see the video of someone petting the porcupine, you will see that they do it with love.  Protection, so they won’t get the point the hard way, but love.  Even porcupines can respond to love.  The reality is that we all have moments when we are anything but pure and blameless, without offence.  We are all porcupines.
I’ll never forget the day that a young man said to me, “did you know that once a month, we have a fight and it coincides with your hormonal cycle?” I instantly transformed into a vicious porcupine, spewing angry denials. It takes a lot of patience and honesty to learn to function without spewing blame as fast as porcupines spread quills when feeling scared or angry.  And interestingly, the word Paul uses for ‘blameless’ can be translated as ‘without bumps’.  Without quills, perhaps.  And what if we rethought blameless to not be the picture of innocence and perfection but instead thought of it as someone who chooses not to blame others.  How do you pet a porcupine? By treating them with love, by being trustworthy and patient, and by being well-protected with thick leather clothing just in case.  When we do that, porcupines tend to react to being petted like this:
 
Don’t take their barbs personally, remember that some porcupines need professional handling, and be honest with yourself when you are feeling prickly to remember that none of us will be perfect, at least not until the Day of Christ comes and will make all blameless.  Thanks be to God that the Day of Christ will be a day of great love, and that Christ will love us regardless of how much like a porcupine we might be.  Then we too will dance like a happy, petted and loved porcupine!