Circumcision and nudists?

Some days there is a word that jumps out from the scriptures and grabs my imagination. Rather reluctantly, I admit that this time it’s the word, wait for it, circumcision.  Sigh. It’s one of those squirmy words, right up there with money, to get people, including me, feeling rather uncomfortable. 

And how do I talk about something so personal, so intimate, and so outside of my own experience as a woman?  I can think of several men whom I know who, no, not the right time and place for that story.  And then there’s, nope, not my story.  So although I am going to preach to the scriptures, just take a deep breath and relax.  No surgery stories coming from this pulpit today.

Instead, I’m going to talk about some people in Vancouver.  They are part of an organization that has been around since the 60’s and that’s a pretty good track record for any group.  They are having a problem though.  They need to recruit new members, and they tried to have open houses, once a year, for that’s a tradition of theirs.  They went on CBC television, to lament that they are getting older and feeling that they can’t keep up with all the work.  They want some younger folks to join up and take over.  They really don’t understand why people aren’t flocking to their open houses.  Any guess as to what this group is?

Yup, it’s a nudist colony! That would be one group that wouldn’t be squeamish about discussing circumcision.  And I would have thought that it would be the last group to struggle to have new members.  I mean, surely their children and grandchildren would join?  I can understand why people aren’t joining churches, but a nudist colony? Wow.  Let’s face it, bowling leagues, The Legion, Lion’s Club, even the Chamber of Commerce are all hoping that some day the young people will come and get to work, keeping up the traditions that have kept those groups going.

Frankly, I remember coming to church as a 20something, and I wasn’t seeing myself as the person to take over all the work of the church.  I can’t imagine anyone saying to me ‘come to church so you can organize cleaning bees and roofing fundraisers, start a children’s choir’ and so on.  No, a friend of mine said to me, ‘I can see you are hurting, why don’t you try going to church?’  I thought he was crazy, but I was in a lot of pain, and thought that if it worked for him, maybe it would work for me, atheist though I was.

People are struggling.  They are in pain.  I see articles such as ‘sleep deprivation is a major crisis in North America,’ or ‘we are seeing an epidemic of the dis-ease of busyness which is causing all kinds of emotional and psychological trauma and we are inflicting this dis-ease on our children’, or the headline in last month’s United Church Observer, “All the Lonely People”, something like 6 million people live isolated, lonely lives. 

This epidemic affects 20 somethings and senior citizens, male and female, circumcised and uncircumcised alike.  It’s also an ancient epidemic.  Unlike the Nudist Colony, we’ve been building community for a long time.  2000 years or so of sending out folks to stay with people they don’t know, sharing hope and healing with whomever will listen.  But we often get it wrong.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is a stark example of that.  Rather than being a perfect little community since it was founded by people very close to Jesus, it has debates and conflicts tearing it apart.  One person is arrogantly sure he or she is right about what the rules are; after all, aren’t Christians really Jews? So shouldn’t all Christians look the same as Jews? The rest of the community are unsure how to address the situation; do they yell at the circumciser? Do they kick him or her out?

Do they pull out their extra nice manners in hopes that they will either get the person to change their mind or drop out? Or do they write to Paul for advice?

And Paul reminds them that Jesus didn’t come to tell everyone to get circumcised.  Jesus didn’t come to set up a bunch of rules and regulations on how to worship.  The Law was to be a finger pointing to God, not God alone.  When we start to worship our law, our tradition and forget that it is to be a pointer to God, we lose the focus of our Christian identity. 

Jesus wanted Christian identity to be about having a mission in their lives beyond the day to day struggles to eat, drink, and pay the bills.  He wanted them to know that there was more to life than an endless round of appointments and busy days, over scheduled tasks, meetings and social gatherings to keep to.  He wanted them to know that there was hope.  Like African Americans struggling with slavery, they gathered together to share stories and songs of hope.  They knew when they did their ring shouts that they were not alone in their suffering and that they found God’s healing love in the midst of the brutality they were forced to endure.  The promise of Paul and of Jesus that all people, regardless of what they looked like, were human beings worthy of respect, kept them singing about freedom and hope and following the Drinking Gourd to Canada where they would find a better life.  And if they couldn’t find Canada, they would remember that there was a better day coming, that on the other side of Jordan, they would be free once again.

Jesus said that if we want to build our community, if we want to reach out to others, we have to do it with vulnerability, humbleness and respect, and going out to where they are.  Last weekend I was with a group of new age people, the ‘spiritual but not religious’. 

They shared stories of their church childhood, and two came with memories of being United.  They were turned off from bullying, power struggles, and cliques that weren’t interested in hospitality.  But hearing my stories of the congregations that fed me and helped me and healed me got them curious. 

They felt surprise that we weren’t as stuffy and rule bound as they remembered, and felt curious that religion might still have something to offer them.  I hope that one day, they may find a thriving congregation who are not just a nudist colony searching for new workers, but a fellowship helping each other along the way as we follow in the footsteps of the 70, going out into the world to listen, to share, to give hope and to build God-centered communities.  May it be so for us all.

Rocks in His head?

Luke 8:26-39

Jesus must have had rocks in his head.  I can just imagine that his disciples thinking that when they set out from Galilea by boat to the Gerasene countryside.  What was he doing over there?  From all accounts, he ended up in a scary place.   Tombstones, graveyards, and a person who sounded like he was right off his rocker.  And Jesus was caught between a rock and a hard place. Should he help the man and risk being shunned by his good, faithful Jewish followers, or should he ignore the man in all his suffering, but let the legion have its way with the man?

Legion is an interesting name, by the way.  It’s a military word, a word with Latin origins, not Greek.  It is a unit of the Roman army, and refers to between three and six thousand soldiers.  That is a lot of tormenting voices to have in one’s head.  It must have been terrifying to witness the man’s ravings and violence.

It’s a fascinating thing that there is a variation on this scripture in all three gospels.  It came right after the story of Jesus sleeping in a storm while the disciples are trying to sail across the sea of Galilea, which, by the way, is only 8 miles wide by 13 miles long.  They may not have wanted to rock the boat, but the storm certainly was.  And Jesus quieted the storm, allowing them to get to the other side of the sea.  The Gentile side.  The non-Jewish side.  Perhaps even the side where Romans were completely in charge, unlike the Jewish side where an uneasy truce of sorts was trying to keep the tensions at bay.  But it was not a place where a nice Jewish rabbi and his followers should spend time, especially when it was a stone’s throw from where a herd of pigs were.  Pigs, as you may know were unclean animals according to the law of Moses, and if gentiles who wanted to make friends with Jews happened to accidently serve pork chops, well let’s just say that relationship would be off to a rocky start, and probably the Jews would greet that dish with a stony silence.

So you don’t have to be stone cold sober to guess that the poor fellow with all the demons was quite likely not Jewish.  Jesus as a good rabbi, would probably never have left the Galilea neighborhood.  Jesus as an excellent rabbi would remember the stories of Elijah and the teachings of prophets like Isaiah that would extol the virtues of taking care of foreigners, and even living with them day by day.  But Jesus, if we can trust our gospels, and I find more and more that they are something I do trust to grow my faith, did more than an excellent rabbi.  He reached out and did the unthinkable.  He healed the man!

We all know how easy it is to feel intimidated by people who today have hit rock bottom.  Whether it is from addictions, mental illness, abuse and scam artists, or betrayal by family members, we would rather stay on our side of the lake and not have to deal with such situations.  We don’t want to go near the folks who seem out of control, who are violent, and who are desperately looking for ways to ease their pain.  Yet on this 1^st anniversary of the shootings in a Methodist church in Charleston South Carolina, or 5 days after our own beloved church was broken into, we know that there are times when we don’t have to cross the sea to meet people that scare us.  Sometimes they come to us.  Sometimes they live only a stone’s throw from our homes.  Sometimes their rocky roads through life intersect ours in devastating ways.

Jesus was not afraid to meet them where they were.  Jesus reached out in love and understanding.  He asked the man what his name was.  He listened to the man’s voices, not trying to deny or ignore or pretend they weren’t there.  He acted decisively and compassionately.

 On this Father’s day, I would invite us all to wonder what it would be like to have the demonic voices that encourage us to see violence as an option to be silenced.  To have those addictive and seductive negative thoughts be brought out of our secret places and plunged into a public place like the demons ending up in a raging stampede of sows and piglets.  To chose to practise radical hospitality to everyone we meet, for we just don’t know when Jesus might show up on their doorstep and heal their minds.

Paul’s reminder that we are all one in Christ, is hard to swallow.  Some might say it is crazy. But it was that commitment to seeing everyone as a child of God that was at the heart of Jesus’ healing ministry.  We don’t know what Jesus did to cause such a dramatic healing, but it left a deep impression on his disciples.  Jesus didn’t divide people into those worthy of socializing with and those who should be shunned.  He didn’t judge that some were to be worthy of his time and others not.  He went where he was needed, and responded to their hurts with compassion.

We need more men like Jesus, men who chose not to shoot up men in a club in Orlando just because they are attracted to other men.  We need men like the young fellow who wandered into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the South, a few weeks after the shooting, to sit and listen about why people kept coming back for bible study on Wednesday nights despite the deaths that occurred.  He keeps coming back.  That bible study has more than doubled its attendance and now attracts both black and white folks to learn about the bible.  And this last Wednesday, there were 150 people in attendance.  I pray that they continue to testify to their faith with such brave boldness, and that we too may follow in their footsteps, with Jesus the rock beneath our feet.