Flip Flop Flip Flop

Sharon and Bram sang a song called “Ham and Eggs” when they were in Athabasca last week, and when I was struggling with my usual, “What am I going to preach on” pre-sermon writing session, I prayerfully asked God for help, and I got their song stuck in my head.

It’s a pretty straightforward song, “Ham and Eggs, Ham and Eggs, I like mine nice and brown, you like yours upside down, ham and eggs, ham and eggs, flip flop flip flop ham and eggs.”

Now when a song like that gets stuck in my head, and I have a lot of songs I have heard over the years that can get stuck in my head, I usually wonder, why that song and not something like Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” or even some hymn like “Amazing Grace”.  Especially a hymn, when I’m trying to come up with a sermon.  But no, I get ‘flip flop flip flop’ instead.  Hardly gratifying or useful.

Except that Jesus is talking about flip-flopping and so is Paul.  The flip-flopping of folks who want to hear God’s word as all fun and games or as all serious business.  The flip-flopping of souls who want to do what is right and follow all the rules that they think are important.  Even the flip-flopping of what we think God wants compared to what God actually wants.

We want easy answers that we can stick to and follow through on that are efficient, effective, simple and straightforward.  We want quick results.  We want a recipe that will help us connect with God that won’t require any painful work or change on our parts.  We want all this and when it is a convenient time for us.  “Not right now, God, can you come back later when I’m not so busy?”  Or “we don’t want to be bothered with this whole God stuff at all, too hard, too complicated, too much like work, I’m just a simple person, and I don’t want to deal with anything too intellectual.”

Paul got that.  He knew what it was like to search for the secret recipe, and he thought he had it down pat.  Follow the law, obey the commandments, do the sacrifices, listen to the temple authorities, and you will be in God’s good books.  He was part of the system that Jesus criticized.  Paul was a Pharisee, one of the children, in Jesus’ words, that was flip flopping about Jesus and John.  He would have been focussed on following all the purity laws to be holy, to be reconciled to God.  Follow the rules, be a good boy, and God will look after the rest.

His writing today then is about his attempt to lead that perfect life, and how inadequate it is to try to live by such rules.  He even went as far as to challenge the system, he says that the law is impossible to follow, it keeps tripping him up.  And it’s easy for the law to become more important than God.  I think that when he had his conversion experience, Paul experienced God in a powerful, personal and private moment that made his search, his striving for perfection unnecessary.  He figured out that he had been aiming the wrong way.  He had been aiming at the Law, not at God.  It goes back to the idea of scripture being a pointer to God, but if we get fixated on the pointer instead of what it is pointing to, we have lost the whole point of the scripture in the first place.

The Pharisees thought it was more about criticizing other people’s failures and scolding them than it was about God.  They got caught up in the shame and blame game, dismissing John, Paul and Jesus’ message.  They were more interested in looking smug and perfect than in letting God transform their lives.  They were more concerned about appearances than about transformations.

Not too different than today, when you think about it.  We live in a small town where everyone knows everybody.  Where people like to tell stories of their neighbors and make judgements about them.  Where we like to know who we can trust and who we can avoid.  We see each other behaving in all kinds of different places.  I know how my neighbor treats the waitress in the Green Spot, or how the store clerk treats new employees.  We know how the town council treats each other and how the teen center is going.  We like to feel like we’re better than the church up the hill or down the road or across the river.  We like to feel better than others and compare ourselves to those who are struggling to deal with issues of marital conflict or addictions or employability.  We like to feel that we have power and influence over others.  But Paul and Jesus would caution us.

It’s not about feeling superior to others, having better recycling practises or healthier lifestyles or fatter bank accounts.  It’s about whether we’re open to God’s grace in our lives.  About letting go of the tiring flip flop between feeling superior or feeling inferior to others as we compare ourselves to them.  Why do we do that?  Jesus says that such judgementalness gets in the way of the simple truth that God loves us all.  Paul reminds us that Jesus makes all things possible, even the healing of my contradictory, flip-flopping willpower.

It’s so simple that even a child can figure it out.  Rest and relax from the burden of being judged and judgemental, of attempting perfection and demanding it of others.  Instead, ask humbly for God to deal with the things that wear us down.  When we do that, we do find that the burden is light for we carry it with the love, the grace and the strength that God gives us when we humbly ask for the gentle sustaining help that Jesus has promised us.  Thanks be that God never flip flops but loves us, supports us, encourages us, and grows us as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus and Paul.

What are you thirsting for?

Yesterday we had a great, world-wide celebration of this little land of ours that some call Canada.  Or maybe more accurately, a celebration of the political system that has been in place for 150 years, because as we are all aware, there were people here far before John A. Macdonald ever came up with the idea to create our system of territories, provinces, power and legislation.

I sat in the basement yesterday and was approached by Lorna who asked the most important question of the day.  Tea or Coffee?  In other words, what are you thirsty for?

I also noticed that there was water and juice available for the folks who wanted a caffeine free alternative.  That’s hospitality and welcome.  And of course, there was the beer garden down at the river front, and peach smoothies, and there were all kinds of pop and soda available.  For those who wanted something else, Buylow was open as well as the tavern and various liquor stores.  We know how to quench our thirst.

But Jesus isn’t giving us a lesson on how to be a good server or bar tender.  Jesus is talking about a different thirst.  The thirst of the soul.  The thirst for something that we may not even be able to put into words. The thirst for ‘living water’.

Nursing homes talk about the three plagues of aging: loneliness, helplessness and hopelessness.  Those three are confined to the elderly.  We all struggle with them and that struggle can lead us into trouble.

Loneliness is easy to fix, right?  Just hang out with a crowd.  Go down to the riverside and watch the fireworks explode and hear Doug and the Slugs sing “Day by Day” and “Making it work”.  Look around and see who else is singing along, and you have a friend for life, right? 

Not so much.  There are times when the loneliest place to be is in a crowd.  Imagine a new immigrant to Athabasca who doesn’t speak the language, know the music or understand the references to people like Stompin’ Tom.  Who wonder why everyone is jumping up and down singing, “It’s a Heave Ho coming down the plains, stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains”.

Or someone who is caught in depression, or fearing the family bully that they will see at the evening barbecue.  Loneliness is difficult one to fix because when we try too hard, when we collect people like they are beads on a necklace or notches on a gun, we alienate them.  We also find people who can be manipulative despite our best efforts, who can be abusive, controlling or just having the wrong opinion because they are the only folks in the world who believe blackberries are better than apples or vice versa.

Helplessness is vicious.  We grew up with toxic family systems, we got used to being bullied, abused, or controlled by people or culture or politics.  We feel like we have no power.  Often our response is to grab on to it as hard as we can, which can also become toxic.  We try to get on every board in town, we control every inch of our house, we organize the cans on our shelves like soldiers, we still have hospital corners on our beds, we tell our children and friends how to behave where and when.  This can be fine, but it can also get out of control and the next thing we discover our adult children challenge us on our own attempts to control and fix them.  How many stories have we heard of countries who rise up to defeat a political system like apartheid or communism, only to hear that chaos is still erupting as people scramble to replace them with something just as ruthless?

Then there’s hopelessness.  We ask, “is that all there is?” and think that if we keep dancing, we can ignore the hole we feel at that thought. 

We give up on life and don’t try anything new.  Or we put our hope in money or stuff or politics or our autograph collection or our house or our stocks and bonds.  I read about Eldon Foote on CBC yesterday.  He was born and raised in Hanna Alberta, and went to the University of Alberta.  He also became a multimillionaire, and on his death gave most of his money to charities, and only a token amount to his third wife or his numerous children.  Money doesn’t quench our thirst for hope.

These three plagues, loneliness, helplessness and hopelessness are rampant and we search for a new Garden of Eden to cure them.  Canada is not the Garden of Eden.  Hopefully it is evolving in that general direction, by such historic events as the Truth and Reconciliation commission and future opportunities to listen to each other.  But even the most naïve optimists will never claim that Canada is a Garden of Eden.  We can get angry at that, and there are times when we must stand on guard for that, but I think we miss an important opportunity.

We are called to be in reconciliation not just with each other, but with the very heart of creation, the giant mystery that we put a tiny label on, God.  When we work to reconcile ourselves with God, we find our thirst finally quenched.  We find real community.  We find a shared voice that speaks loudly and strongly for equality.  We find the ability to practise radical hospitality. And we find an amazing picture of hope for the future, one that we build together with others who share in our thirst to seek justice, love kindness and walk humbly in this beautiful land the Creator has given us.  When we serve living water to our thirsty neighbors, through our kind looks, our careful listening and our willingness to support them in our journey, we are making a great legacy, on earth as it is in heaven. May it be so.