Jesus knows it is their last supper together and he makes no secret of it. “This is my body,” he says, picking up the bread. He breaks it in two and gives it away to them – “take … eat …“ And then the wine. “This is my blood which is poured out,” he tells them, “Drink of it all of you,” and while the stain of it is still dark on their lips, he says, “I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

It is the great Messianic Feast to take place beyond time that he is speaking of, but he must have had a hard time believing in it there in that stuffy room full of frightened Jews.

When he first sent them out as disciples, he reminds them, he told them to take no purse or bag or sandals, nothing to arm themselves against the world, “but now let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag, and let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one.” This side of paradise there is to be no paradise, and this side of “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding” there is to be no peace that they are likely to understand. They are going to have to fight fire with fire, he tells these feckless men, and if it is to be a fire that lights the way to truth, it will also kindle the blaze of their own cruel martyrdom. He promises them no less.

And then they sing a hymn, the Gospels say. Their mouths spit dry, not one of them with heart enough to carry a tune. Their voices thin and quavering as they try to keep their spirits up, they belt out some crazy, holy song and leave for the Mount of Olives where Jesus says, “You will all fall away.” (Mark 14:27)

Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus

He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities;” “by his wounds we are healed”; “and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Every year during Lent and Holy Week we hear read aloud these and similar words from Isaiah’s songs of the suffering servant, but I wonder to what extent we actually contend with them. It is too easy to hear such words and without really thinking just take them to be words about Jesus Christ. He died for us, and that death atones for the sins of the world. As Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians, “through Christ God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

And yet it is impossible to know precisely what Isaiah had in view when he offered us these images. Perhaps it is Israel itself, broken and suffering in captivity in Babylon. And notice that Isaiah speaks not of death but of suffering. It is no doubt true to say that whatever else he understood his poetry to mean, just about the last thing he would have had in view was the idea of a dead Messiah.

How, too, can deep suffering reasonably be proclaimed as bringing about a good? We avoid suffering, and recoil when we see other humans caught in its grip. We recoil, or maybe in that emotional exhaustion called “compassion fatigue,” we reach for the remote and change the channel on the television.

Isaiah’s “poetry cannot be reduced to a rational formula,” says Walter Brueggemann. “It must remain poetry that glides over rational reservation. We are not told how hurt and guilt can be reassigned and redeployed from one to another. We are not told how the suffering of one makes healing possible for another. But it is so here; ‘we’ have thus been healed and made whole.”  And at this point Brueggemann notes that Isaiah offers no theory of atonement; nothing of the mechanics of how this might happen. “Instead, the poem offers a confession, an admission, a dazzlement, and an acknowledgement.” “And by his wounds, we are healed.”

We are healed, we are made whole, but is there any sense that we have been lifted beyond suffering and struggle? Perhaps ultimately—that is part of the deep mystery of Christ, whose blood shall give a final peace to the whole of heaven and earth—but in the mean time? No. There remains the suffering of grief over the death of a loved one, the physical and emotional pain experienced in our sometimes all too vulnerable selves, the suffering that comes with having cared enough to risk love. Paul even writes of how he wants “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,” (Phil 3:10) by which he seems to be saying that to follow Jesus is to be prepared to do as he did. That kind of “following,” though, can also do its own very particular kind of work.

During the opening years of the Second World War, a Polish Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941) provided shelter in his order’s friary to countless refugees, including some 2,000 Jews. For his efforts, on February 17, 1941 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and three months later was transferred to Auschwitz as prisoner #16670. Just two months later, a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, the consequence of which was for ten other prisoners to be starved to death in the camp’s notorious Block 13. One of these men selected at random was Franciszek Gajowniczek, who cried out in a kind of agonized protest that he had a family to whom he hoped to return. At this point Father Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place.

After three weeks in the starvation cell, Kolbe and three others were still alive, and so in the end he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid.

Of this portion of Isaiah’s song of the suffering servant, Brueggemann writes, “This is no cold, detached, reasonable statement. It is, rather, the voice of those who have been healed and are as bewildered as they are grateful.” As bewildered as they are grateful…

Franciszek Gajowniczek survived his imprisonment in Auschwitz, and later recalled:

“I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me—a stranger. Is this some dream?”

The voice of one who has been saved, and who is as bewildered as he is grateful.

“For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.”

“I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise.” Though tattooed as Auschwitz prisoner number #16670, it was the imprint of Christ deep on Kolbe’s soul that defined him that day. Beyond cold, detached, and reasonable ways of knowing, something so upside-down as suffering and dying for a total stranger became a powerfully restorative act.

And by Christ’s wounds we are healed. Healed, and perhaps made ready to follow.

Amen.

Although numbers only tell a small part of the story, over 500 guests and 60 volunteers from 7 different churches joined together to share food, fun, music, conversation, and a few highly competitive games of Scrabble together. A HUGE thank you to everyone who prayed, volunteered, or has made a financial donation to help make this event possible.

It is also a privilege to pass along thanks from Agape Table and the guests who came out that day. I have received an overwhelming number of thanks you’s and kind comments in the last couple of days.

One of the key things we hope that people come away with after their experience at Agape Table is the simple fact that every person is unique and has something to offer. From a distance we often try to generalize and talk about “those people” but that kind of thinking is impossible when you’re sitting together at a table sharing a meal.

If you volunteered this year, I think you know what I mean. And if you didn’t volunteer this year, then there’s always next year!

In his book Bearing Fresh Olive Leaves, the philosopher of aesthetics Calvin Seerveld offers the following observations around what it might mean for an artist of faith to create a truly Christian art:

What really has given ‘christian art’ its bad name has been the cheap way that stock motifs such as conversions, happy endings or Bible phrases are popped in like vitamin pills to pep up one-dimensional, outdated material which is then sold as ‘Christian novels,’ ‘Christian plays,’ or ‘Christian songs.’ Using Christ in that way is, in my judgment, taking his Name in vain. You do not get the rare pearl of Christian art by dubbing in a few crosses or chalices, or by draping a good-old-days kind of atmosphere around a trite plot. Christian art in our days, I believe, will take suffering to produce.[1]

While that might sound as if Seerveld is drawing on the old stereotype of the so-called “tortured artist,” this is not at all the case. What he is pointing to is the reality that in our current social and cultural context for the Christian artist to do his or her art authentically is to risk rejection, marginalization, misunderstanding.

But why, really, should that surprise us? So many of the people we point to as heroes in this faith were rejected and misunderstood; people who suffered for the sake of their gospel vocations. Think, for instance, of 20^th century figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both of whom not only suffered, but actually died for the sake of that in which they believed.

And then think of Jesus, whose life was lived in such perfect accord with the Sermon on the Mount that the dominant powers of his own day seemed to see little option but to put him to death.

But for all that, suffering is a word we don’t much like. It is a dead end; we all want a comfortable life and a painless death.

We’re not the first ones to wish for such a path in life, which is why when the prophet Isaiah sings his strange songs of God’s suffering servant we should recall that his original audience found them all at least as baffling as we do… maybe even more so.

The great heroes of recent memory in Isaiah’s world were kings, particularly David and his son Solomon. Sure, David had paid his dues when he was forced to flee from King Saul and to earn his keep as a bandit and a mercenary. But even in the worst of days, David never ceased dreaming of establishing a proper kingdom, with a royal city, a palace, a holy temple (which, of course, he was never to build…). And in spite of his reputation for being a man of great wisdom, Solomon really defined himself by his building projects, his wealth, and the strength of his standing army. This is how God’s presence should be made manifest in a proper kingdom, right?

Which makes those songs of Isaiah all the more odd and enigmatic. In the brief passage we read aloud tonight—just three verses, which more or less set the course for all that will follow during these Lenten Wednesday evenings—we heard language of exaltation regarding this servant of the Lord, but also words that point to his humiliation, brokenness, and suffering: “so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals.”

Who is this servant of the Lord, who in and through his mortification, “shall startle many nations,” causing even kings—kings, of all people—to “shut their mouths because of him” in a kind of jaw-dropping silence? Who did the prophet Isaiah have in view when he first offered these songs? Frankly it is impossible to know; and maybe Isaiah himself didn’t really have a clue about the subject of his songs. Judaism has long seen the servant as being Israel itself—Israel broken and defeated by Babylon, and Israel rebuilt against all odds. The Christian tradition has read these songs as pointing to Jesus Christ—broken in his crucifixion, and radically vindicated in his resurrection. And maybe both are good and fair and true readings.  “The claim,” observes Walter Brueggemann, “is that both Jews and Christians have seen in their own history, in quite particular ways, the capacity and willingness of this God to do something new through suffering. [It is] a deeply inscrutable claim that speaks powerfully against common worldly insistences that suffering is a dead end with no future…”

We are tempted, in our sometimes numbingly comfortable society, to imagine that there is nothing worse than death—nothing worth dying for, in fact—and that suffering is to be avoided at all costs. Yet through the words of the prophet Isaiah we are challenged to recall that to God suffering is not necessarily a dead end, and death does not—cannot—have the final word. God’s “new thing” can and will break in, even when all seems to have ended in defeat.

So artists of vision will create truth-telling pieces of art or music, without any guarantee that they will be recognized, much less able to make a living; Martin Luther King will challenge a movement to resist returning hatred with more hate, Bonhoeffer will utter his defining “no” to the killing spirit of Naziism, and both will end up being killed for their efforts; and from an executioner’s cross Jesus will utter those jaw-dropping words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And in the midst of what at times can seem to be only loss and defeat, God’s new thing will again have broken through. We are to be a people trained to look upon a cross of wood, and to dare to see in it not merely a death, but also what Frederick Buechner called “the magnificent defeat.”

Amen.

Greetings from Dunedin, New Zealand! I trust all is well at saint ben’s and that friends old and new are thriving there. I recall with tremendous affection the six months I spent with you as Deacon. The music, the liturgy, and the fine preaching were seriously refreshing. Anyhow, I have written another book. It is called Ethics in the Presence of Christ (London & New York: T&T Clark). It explores the contemporary ministry of Jesus Christ–what he can be said to be doing–and what difference this makes for ethics. I certainly enjoyed writing it, and would hope that you would be nourished in the faithfulness of Christ by reading it. Blessings and keep in touch.

Yours, Chris Holmes

Of Chris’s book, John Webster of the University of Aberdeen wrote, “This is an elegant and absorbing essay in moral theology, the fruit of sustained reflection on the presence of Jesus Christ as the principle of human life before God.” Joseph Mangina of Wycliffe College observed that while “much of what passes for ‘Christian ethics’ today fails to rise above the level of asking ‘what would Jesus do?’, Chris’s book “constitutes a frontal assault on this way of thinking. Taking John’s gospel as his point of departure, Holmes would instead have us ask ‘who is Jesus and what is he doing?’

We’ve also got a couple of podcasts  of really solid lectures Chris gave as part of our ideaExchange series. His first session with us was The One Who Threw a Spoke into the Wheel: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Resistance to Hitler. In what amounted to something of a sequel, we also offer Christianity is basically amoral: Bonhoeffer on ethics.

Although I really don’t enjoy waiting for many things in life (who does?), the ‘waiting’ aspect of Advent is something I anticipate each year. Advent waiting doesn’t focus alone on Jesus Christ’s return at the end of time, but also entails a time of waiting and watching for Christ to appear in my own life today. And He does, at times in astonishing ways if I have eyes to see it.  In Frederick Buechner’s words, “I look at what there is to be seen in the world and in myself and hope, trust, believe against all evidence to the contrary that beneath the surface I see there is vastly more that I cannot see.”

Seven years ago during Advent, I began a two month wait for brain biopsy results, and with each day of waiting the fear grew that I wouldn’t live to see another Christmas with Len and the kids. They were critical weeks for me, my mortality crashing into my consciousness every day, and many nights.

Fear

Wells up from below…

Fear of the unknown ….

Fear of the known.

Gag to quell it.

Gulps of tears to drown the fears.

The key of release from the stifling cage … Breathe.

 

 

But through the days of Christmas and through to mid February, a peculiar peace settled in my heart, and our home, and at times the memory of it brings me tears. Seven years later the crisis of having to consider tumours and cancer is long past, but the peace has not passed. The peace that carried me through crisis seven years ago, has carried me through chronic illness in the ensuing years providing a ‘chronic’ wellness … a steady presence that permeates all areas of my life, so that my physical decline doesn’t define who I am. That presence, the Spirit of Christ, is powerful and paves my way with a peaceful perspective that colours everything. Lewis’s words in The Weight of Glory ring true for me. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

I’ve recently read a book, The Gift of Pain by Dr. Paul Brand, world renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist, that served to counter encroaching self-pity. The book is the fruit of Brand’s many years of working with people who suffered from pain and people who suffered from the lack of it. He worked closely with people groups from England, America, and India and their diverse responses to pain informed his thoughts over many years. Though not a pain expert, Dr. Brand’s vast experience allows him to write about managing pain across the board, not just the pain associated with leprosy. He chose the form of a memoir for his book, “with all its loops and detours because that is how I learned about pain: not systematically but experientially. Pain does not occur in the abstract – no sensation is more personal, or more importunate.” Dr. Brand’s book came out of the conviction that, in his words, “Most of us will one day face severe pain… and the attitude we cultivate in advance may well determine how suffering will affect us when it does strike.” The book was a tonic for me, and reading it refreshed my perspectives on several fronts, and perhaps most importantly made me grateful that I’m challenged by Multiple Sclerosis  rather than by a much harsher neurological disease like leprosy.

Living with MS, I experience pain in my feet, hands, legs, arms, face and eyes and parts of my back. Besides the surface, or skin pain, my neuropathy also manifests itself at a muscular level, causing weakness and cramp-like pain deep in my muscles, mainly my legs and arms. My legs, more so the left, feel like logs and a slight limp at times seems to be how my body is dealing with this. And yet I’m still running, without a limp, I’ve not fallen recently, and for this joy in my life I give God thanks! My chief grievance is the fact that my neuropathic pain is without respite.

C.S. Lewis was no stranger to pain, directly and vicariously, to both physical and emotional pain and I appreciate his perspective from A Grief Observed:

What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bomb each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.   (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)

 

I thought Lewis’s trench analogy characteristically incisive; and true and tender his perspective on God’s apparent silence when Lewis questions Him about suffering.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace child; you don’t understand.”

There certainly are fragile days when God seems silent, and dangerously distant from my plight, but the sense of well-being remains even so and I am grateful that His peace keeps pace with the challenge of living with the chronic as it did with the challenge of facing the critical.

 “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”  – Luke 1:78-79

In the Joy of the Season,

Colleen Peters

Colleen Peters is married to Len, and is a mother of two girls and twin boys. She taught at Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute before beginning to raise a family, and as her children grew she returned to teaching on a part-time basis. Neurological anomalies surfaced in 2004, and she was eventually diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis, the condition with which she continues to live.

A note from Jamie Howison: This sermon includes something of a landmark quote from the final speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. Audio of that speech is included in this post, and I’d highly recommend you  give it a listen… please do scroll down.

S

ince the middle of August, the lectionary has had us chipping our way through the story of Moses and the Israelites, as told in the Book of Exodus. In case you were counting, we’ve been ten Sundays in these texts, which might seem like a fairly long run until you realize how much we actually left out. It is a forty year story of life in the Sinai wilderness, and that doesn’t even include all the years from Moses’ birth to the point where he leads the Hebrew slaves out of captivity in Egypt and into their long desert sojourn. And we did it in ten weeks?

So last Sunday we had a story in which Moses asks God, “Show me your glory, I pray,” (Ex 33:18), and quite stubbornly presses God to be openly and obviously present to the people… and particularly to Moses himself. And now this week we read of his death and burial. There’s a lot of material in between these two episodes… the books of Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Such a leap leaves my friend, the Old Testament scholar Walter Deller, shaking his head at the amount we don’t read. Sure, if you’ve ever tried to read the bible through from beginning to end, you’ll be well aware that these three books have what feel like endless lists of laws, and that Numbers includes chapter after chapter of census data. It is in these books that people often bog down and throw in the towel on their lofty bible reading goals. But these books also include a good deal of rich narrative, and in fact even the list of laws and standards—which can sometimes seem arbitrary, sometimes harsh, and often just plain weird—remind us that for this people what they did with their time, money, bodies, neighbours, and even pots and pans were all caught up in their identity as the people of God.

• To listen to the sermon, simply click the arrow

We heard a reading tonight from the Gospel according to Matthew, in which Jesus tells a lawyer that the most important law is the call to, “[L]ove the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” “This is the greatest and first commandment,” Jesus says, “And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40) We shouldn’t, however, imagine that Jesus is the first or only teacher in Israel to have offered such a perspective, and in fact in the century before the birth of Christ the great Rabbi Hillel famously made the exact same move. I suppose that most of you are grateful that rather than reading aloud the entire torah with its 600+ laws, long lists and detailed census counts, we proclaimed this great summary of the law; fair enough. Just be aware of how much we’ve skipped past!

And so we are given this picture of Moses, standing in the presence of God on Mount Nebo, looking across the River Jordan toward the land of promise that will be home to God’s people.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, “I will give it to your descendants”; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.’ Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. (Deut 34:4-5)

Hold on a minute here; he died, then and there, at the Lord’s command? The leader whom the text will go on to describe as a prophet unlike any other in the story of Israel, “whom the Lord knew face to face,” doesn’t get to lead the people into their new home? Forty years in the wilderness, and it ends here? And you know, the writer is quite clear that Moses still had a good deal of life left in him; that while he was “one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigour had not abated.”

Earlier in the book of Deuteronomy (32:48-52), Moses was told by God that he would not be allowed to enter the promised land because years prior he had failed to respect and uphold the holiness of God before the people at the waters of Meribah (Numbers 20:1-13). That’s the incident where, when the people are in desperate need of water, God gives it to them through a spring flowing out of the rocks of Meribah. Moses is told by God to take his staff and stand before the rock, calling water to come forth, but for whatever reason Moses also struck the rock twice. A bit of dramatic flair, perhaps? Given what a pain in the neck the people often were, who can blame Moses for flexing his leadership muscle a bit, and putting on a show? And for this he is told he will not be allowed to lead the people out of the desert and into the promised land? Seems a bit heavy handed on the part of God, doesn’t it?

Century after century, both the Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions have tried to make sense of this piece of the story; have tried to make it seem somehow more fair or more just. In the end, though, all we have is the story. And in the story I hear this unspoken subtext that reads, “Moses, you can’t do everything.” Similar to when the great King David is told that the Jerusalem temple is not going to be his to build, here Moses finds that he will not lead the people across the river, he will not plant his feet in the new land, he cannot do it all. Time to let go, to pass along his mantle, and to lie down in peace and die.

It is a hard thing to contemplate, this business of not being able to do it all; of having to release our hold on our own lives, work, vocations and dreams, and to admit that it might be time for someone or something else. We’d like to keep steering things, of course, for who better than me? What if someone else changes it all, or worse, screws it all up? And I wonder if in the back of his mind Moses might have been thinking that while Joshua was pretty solid material, he might not be up to the task?

But maybe not. Maybe Moses was grateful that it was time to die, and that he didn’t have to do it all. Maybe for all that he was a gifted and transformational leader, in the end he knew it was not about him, but rather about a people together under God.

The image of Moses on Mount Nebo looking across into the land of promise was evoked in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people will get to the promised land.

• To hear the audio of King’s speech, click the arrow

The speech seems almost eerily prescient, in that less than twenty-four hours later King was shot dead by an assassin. Yet maybe it was less a case of foreknowledge, and more one of being both deeply aware of the violence of the times, and at the same time of being schooled in the wisdom and insight of this text from Deuteronomy. No less than Moses, King could not do it all. And no less than Moses, King was part of something much bigger than his own self, his own personal vision and abilities.

And so with us. We are not called to do it all. We are called, each of us, to be faithful in the context of a people together, whose identity is forged in God. And if we get to climb Mount Nebo and to look across the river toward that place to which God is leading this people—to catch a glimpse of God’s vision for humanity or to hear the strains of what Bruce Cockburn calls “rumours of glory”—that will be enough. For now, and forever; we can’t do it all. But in God, it can be done.

Amen.

Jamie Howison

I

n our cultural context, conversations about money tend often to be awkward, and even more so when that “conversation” comes in the shape of a sermon. Money is a hot button topic, but this isn’t just a modern phenomenon.

It is with a question of money that a group of Pharisees along with some “Herodians”—Jews who favoured collaboration with the Romans—sought to corner Jesus. Their question of whether or not it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor is a classic “catch 22,” in that no matter what Jesus answers they can accuse him of being allied with a particular camp. If he says “no,” then he can be discredited as a zealot and a revolutionary, while if he says “yes” then he is as good as a Roman collaborator. Either way, his reputation will be compromised in the eyes of his public.

• To listen to the sermon, click on the arrow

But Jesus backs them up with another question: Whose head is this, and whose title is it on the Roman coin? Well, there is only one answer; it is the emperor’s image. “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” It is a statement that beats them at their own game, and so Matthew tells us, “When they heard this, they were amazed; and they left him and went away.” To which Stanley Hauerwas adds, “Unfortunately, through much of Christian history, Christians have not been amazed by this answer. Rather, they have assumed that they know what Jesus meant…”

In different ways and at different times we have assumed that it meant an absolute divide between the sacred and the secular; between the things of faith and the things of the world of politics and economics. Tragically, it has at times led good Christian people to remain tolerant of corrupt or compromised rulers, and mute in the face of unjust and violent governments.  We have too often divided the things of earth from the things of heaven—the ethics of God’s reign from the ethics of this “real world” in which we live—and in doing so have allowed the emperor to co-opt us into doing unspeakable things.

Quite clearly this confrontation between Jesus and his questioners is not merely about money. It is tangled in with what that particular coin symbolized. It was imprinted with the image of Caesar, and as such was actually in violation of the commandment against graven images; according to the strictest reading of the law, those Pharisees shouldn’t have even been carrying those coins. And so Jesus effectively turns the question into one of loyalties and of faithfulness. And in doing so, he turns it right back on those who would have cornered him.

But frankly, conversations about money are always loaded, because money is inevitably laden with meaning. It can represent power, success, comfort… or lack thereof. It is always a symbol. The other night we gathered a group of our music leaders for a workshop, to which Larry brought this wonderful array of fresh baked goods from Tall Grass Bakery. He handed me a paper receipt for something like $25, which I will put through our financial books and then sometime next week I will hand him a green twenty dollar bill and a blue five dollar bill, and it all be square. But what possible relationship do these pieces of paper have to the flour, sugar, chocolate, butter and human labour that went into the making of those cookies and squares? Surely I got the better deal… after all, you can’t eat the paper. But it is not just paper, any more than the coin that Jesus used to make his point was just metal. It is money, the agreed upon symbol for goods, time, work.

Which is why we easily get nervous when the conversation turns to money, and particularly when the preacher begins to speak about it. If you imagine that at any moment this preacher is going to make some sort of an appeal that involves money, you’re right. Not just any money, either. Your money, which means the symbol of your goods, your time, your work, maybe your good fortune or even your freedom. And you know, it is quite true that money does symbolize those things. All the more reason to not hold it too, too tightly. Because it symbolizes so much, it can convince us that it is the one thing most worth having.

When I was in New York last January on my study leave, I worshipped four times with black congregations in Harlem. Now I was quite obviously a visitor, but I wasn’t there as a tourist or spectator. I was in New York to work on my proposed book on the intersection of theology with jazz music, and had been told by the black liberation theologian James Cone that if I were to understand jazz I would need to go to church. “Not one of the big congregations that draws the tour buses,” he told me. “Find smaller local churches, that are truly part of the community and join in the worship there.”

Twice I ended up at Kelly Temple Church of God in Christ—a church in the Pentecostal tradition—once with a predominantly black Anglican congregation, and on my last Sunday in New York I joined with the community at Greater Hood Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Along with the music, the preaching and the hospitality, one of the things that was really striking at both Greater Hood and Kelly Temple was their practice around offerings. I hardly have to tell you how understated we are here in terms of offerings, with the baskets sitting on the table at the back, and that little note on the song-sheet informing you that “If you feel a connection here (or maybe just like what we’re doing), we’d welcome your support.” I will stand by our practice of not passing an offering plate, as I think that what a passed plate does is to make our guests and visitors feel pressured to contribute toward our ministry. But it can create a bit of an illusion that gifts and offerings are little more than a footnote, which in turn can create an illusion that what we do personally with our money is not all that important.

Apparently in many churches in Harlem, there are no such illusions. It is not even that a plate was passed; instead the collection plates were set on a table at the front of the church, and we got up from our seats, went down the side aisle to drop our offerings at that table, and then returned up the centre aisle. Congregational elders sat at the table, and actually sorted the cheques and cash right then and there.

Through the whole process, we sang. I have this vivid image in my mind of this one woman all but dancing in the aisle at Kelly Temple, as she waited her turn to make her gift. Have you ever seen anyone dance up to baskets on the table at the back of our church? Of course, for all I know there was someone sitting in the congregation that morning thinking, “Oh there she goes with her dancing again…” What’s more, when I was searching online for churches to attend, I came across a blog in which someone had posted a photograph of a very expensive car sitting in front of a very run-down building, with a caption suggesting that this car belonged to a pastor who was getting rich on the offerings of his poor parishioners. And maybe that was true. Money has a funny way of getting distorted, and of distorting us.

We had a bishop in this diocese some twenty-five years ago, who was very keen about promoting tithing. He even ordered bumper stickers for all of the clergy, which read “If you love Jesus, TITHE… anyone can honk.” The challenge to think of stewardship in terms of percentage giving was by no means a bad thing, yet mixed into some of the literature around this approach was this suggestion that if we learned to give 10% of our income, we would reap even greater financial benefits, almost as if it was a pure investment scheme. Money does have a funny way of getting distorted.

So, let me say that we are not going to start passing a plate, nor are we going to be ordering any bumper stickers. And while the people who keep an eye on our finances might suggest I’m a bit crazy here, I’m also not going to press the point that we are currently running a deficit in our finances. You see, to simply push the idea that we need to “break even” on the budget misses what is really at stake here. And I’m not even going to tell you about all of the exciting ways in which we could put increased congregational income into action. We can talk about our dreams, goals and vision another time. No, today I want us to think about the biblical challenge to cultivate a set of habits and disciplines that will help to keep us from getting distorted in how we hold our money.  That could well be by adopting the idea of a tithe or of percentage giving—simply look at your income, and set aside that 5% or even 10% right off the top—or it might be by setting yourself some other goal or standard. That is not for anyone else to determine other than you. Yet underlying our decisions about money and givings is a critical question.

“Whom do we belong to?” asks Clayton Schmit in his comments on today’s Gospel reading, and then he wonders if sometimes it does feel as if we belong to Caesar, or to our job, or to our material possessions. Schmit continues:

But to whom do we really belong? Take a look at any person. Whose inscription is on him or her? Each is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). There can be no doubt, then, what Jesus means here. Give yourselves to God because it is to him that you belong.

All else is commentary.

Amen.

I

’m not sure if you arrived here tonight expecting a Thanksgiving service, with scripture readings emphasizing the bounty of the harvest, God’s goodness, and a general spirit of thankfulness; if you did, the two readings we’ve just heard read aloud might have given you pause. We listened to the story from Exodus, of how at the very time Moses had gone up the mountain to receive the covenant law from God, the Israelites fashioned a golden calf and gave it credit for freeing them from slavery in Egypt. Talk about a story that embodies the opposite of thankfulness… and this act of making a golden idol causes God’s wrath to “burn hot against them.” The text even suggests that the only reason they aren’t obliterated is that Moses pleads for God to, “Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel…” Happy thanksgiving.

And this parable from the gospel according to Matthew? At the very least, we might have read the version that is related by Luke (14:16-24), which is considerably understated compared to what we just heard. In Luke, “‘Someone gave a great dinner and invited many,” in Matthew’s version it is a king, and the event is “a wedding banquet for his son.” In Luke, the servants head out with invitations to the feast, but are met with all sorts of pretty lame excuses as to why the invited guests can’t attend. In Matthew, those who receive invitations “made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them.” That is so over the top as to be almost cartoonish, but Jesus is just getting started. With the broadest brush possible, he adds the next scene: “The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.” Happy Thanksgiving.

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At this point, the versions in Luke and Matthew become quite similar. There is an empty banquet hall needing to be filled, so the host instructs his slaves to go out and find new guests. “Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet,” though in a verse unique to Matthew, Jesus comments that “Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.”

Well, there finally is something for which we might all be thankful. It would seem that admission to the kingdom of heaven is based on one thing, and one thing only; a willingness to accept the invitation. It isn’t about good behavior or about living the upright religious life, but rather about a willingness to come in, sit down, and share the feast. You see, in spite of those vivid and even violent images in the version from Matthew’s gospel, it is a parable of grace after all… or is it?

In Matthew there is this odd second part to the parable, in which the king comes into his feast and notices that one character is not wearing a wedding robe.

“Friend,” the king asks, “how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” Well, I find myself answering on the poor guy’s behalf: “I didn’t even know I was coming to a wedding until one of your slaves handed me an invitation out there on the street.” But Jesus says that this particular guest “was speechless,” which leads the king to order the attendants to “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Oh? And then the concluding statement to the whole works—“For many are called, but few are chosen”—which seems to cut directly against the grain of that picture of the banquet being filled by anyone and everyone willing to accept the invitation.

Are we dealing here with a parable of grace or a picture of judgment? And how is it even remotely fair that this poor schmuck gets tossed into the outer darkness, simply because he wasn’t wearing the right clothes?

Biblical interpreters have often bent over backwards to try to reconcile parts one and two of this story. I once read the suggestion that it was a common practice in those times for wealthy hosts to issue wedding garments at the banquet door, and the problem here is that this guy didn’t put his on. Thing is, I can’t seem to find that interpretation taken in any of the standard commentaries.  Some biblical critics have suggested that the two parts of the parable didn’t originally belong together, and that it was Matthew who connected them. That, however, is a bit of a blind alley, because that just leaves us cherry-picking the bits we like and ignoring what we don’t. Besides, Jesus had a habit of playing hardball, particularly when he was engaging the religious elite of his day. He didn’t shy away from saying things that pressed every button and raised every eyebrow.

But maybe the issue isn’t so much about the guy’s clothes as it is about his silence. I’m with Robert Farrar Capon on this one:

“If he had said anything, anything at all—if he had, even for the worst and most stupid of reasons, put himself in relationship with the king—he would have been alright… But because the man said nothing—because he would not bring himself to relate to the king in any way—all the reassurances the king might have given him remain unheard.” (Capon, The Parables of Judgment)

He needs to speak in order to be in relationship with the king, but he won’t. He won’t trust the fact that he has been invited, and that this king might just dig out an extra robe for him to wear. He just sits in mute silence, out of relationship with the king. And so yes, with those great broad story-telling strokes, Jesus has him tossed out.

As Jesus draws his parable to its close with that saying “For many are called, but few are chosen,” I see him looking straight into the eyes the chief priests and Pharisees. This invitation is open… but they won’t trust it, and they certainly won’t place themselves in any real relationship with Jesus. They’d much rather trust the familiar path than think about a banquet in which they’ll sit down with the blind and the lame, the losers and the lost. Alright then, but you need to know that this is the only banquet in town.

Which brings us back to the story of the golden calf. The Israelites couldn’t muster the courage or the imagination to trust a God who could not be fashioned out of gold and carried around as a visible symbol for their religion (Exodus 4:20). They didn’t know what it might mean to trust a God upon whose name they weren’t to invoke for their own power (Exodus 20:7). So they convinced Aaron—who apparently had a bit of a weakness as a people-pleaser—to engineer the construction of their kind of god; solid, golden, tangible. Not a pretty sight in the eyes of the Lord.

Which brings us back to us. In our own religious constructions, we too can manufacture our own golden calves and try to set the terms of our own attendance at the great wedding feast. Which is why it is good to face head on the parables of Jesus, including those that are rather tough and broadly drawn. In fact, we should give thanks for these stories that rattle and unsettle us, because they are part of what keep us in relationship with the king who desires us to be at his feast.

“W

e’re turning this place into a camp!”  Those words started it all.

As a family we enjoy many sports including climbing and mountain biking.  So when we moved to the country a number of years ago, a network of bike trails all around the bush on our property, and a number of bike bridges and stunts soon became part of the landscape.  One summer evening, we stood in the backyard, looking over the way things were developing there, and those “We’re turning this place into a camp” words were spoken.  An idea was spawned.

Maybe we could run a day camp – we could have a group of kids here for a week for a great time, and also give our own older kids some valuable and practical leadership experience.  In some ways this just felt like returning to our roots, as we directed a camp for over a decade.

One night, sitting around the campfire in our backyard with Jamie Howison, the camp idea came up in conversation.  Jamie said, “Hey, maybe we could run that as part of saint benedict’s table.”

A year later the first ever saint ben’s day camp became a reality.

And now, 3 years later, we have wrapped up the 4^th summer of running the week-long camp.  Over the years the camp has expanded to include 17 campers – kids from the st. benedict’s table community, kids from the area where we live, and 6 kids coming from an EAL classroom of African immigrants that our family volunteers with during the school year (their participation in the week made possible due to campership donations).  Our dream has always been to have a mix of ages of kids involved, and our campers were ages 8-15.

Our camp mornings begin with a Bible time of imagining Bible stories together, and then are spent in skill development in the areas of biking and bouldering.  After lunch, comes “Silly Stories” – crazy skits! Two of the skits allow campers to participate in them and they ALL wanted to be part of these, which kept me up late the night before writing in parts to accommodate them all!  Activities such as Capture the Flag, photo scavenger hunts, group bike rides at Birds Hill Park, a drum circle, a massive water fight, the trampoline, and a water slide down the slope of our backyard fill our afternoons.  The campers leave at 4pm, and then the preparations for the next day fill our evening.

Why do we do it?

As spring approaches, the real work starts.  Advertising, administrative tasks, registration forms and waivers.  New bike trails to build, free wood to find for building bridging on the trails, bridge construction, three days of weed-whacking said trails to get them in shape for riding again.  First aid materials to gather, the bouldering wall to tweak, change rooms to put up, the water slide to get ready.  We provide bikes for about half of the kids, and those bikes need to be kept tuned up and in good working order.  So, bike maintenance.  Trips to Value Village in search of  hideous dresses and wigs for our skits, creative, interactive Bible times to put together, skill classes to prepare so kids are challenged and learn, skits to write and practice and practice so that they bring great laughter and participation from the kids, games to research and work out that will be full of teamwork and fun.  And believe it or not, the list does go on!

Those that know us well see the amount of time and work and effort that goes into this, and the natural question they tend to ask is, “Why do you do it?

Yes indeed – why do we do it? We do it because we believe it matters.

It matters.  The kids who come matter.

It matters that they have unforgettable experience – not because we “wow-ed” them with entertainment, but because of their experience of an environment where they are free to be themselves, to not have to look around them and wonder what others are thinking of them or if they are acting in the culturally expected manner.  It matters to be part of a group that welcomes them to be part of shaping the experience.

It matters that they are in a place where they can work hard to be all they can be at whatever they are doing, to challenge themselves and push themselves to see what they can accomplish in the various skill areas offered.

It matters for us to, despite huge diversity of age and culture, form unique communities where we can connect, laugh together, create together, care for one another, help each other, and share from our hearts.  Rich community experiences shape and form us and create a hunger for more of this good thing called community – of something that feels like spending the week with a big family.

It matters to be nurtured spiritually through experiences that touch upon the deep integration of body and spirit – ways of relating, living, playing in creation and sharing community that bring together our activities and our spiritual formation.

And it matters to be nurtured spiritually in ways that are intentional and deliberate,  where time is set aside to encounter Christ in new and fresh ways as we together move into stories from the Bible, imagine them together, and open our hearts to what God what might want us to hear through those stories.  It matters that they can share their insights as they imagine these stories – imagine themselves in these stories of a shining man rolling a huge stone away from a tomb, imagine the face of Jesus and the life-giving words of hope and healing he offers  a woman as the powerful scent of perfume fills the room, imagine the thoughts and feelings of the crowd that is fed so very much from so very little, imagine what Jesus might be able to do and the good he might bring if we just offer him what we have – our hands, our mouths, our hearts.

“This was the best week of my life.”  “Can I come back again next year?”  With sweat pouring down his face during a bike ride: “That was SO much fun!  Can we ride some more?”  “This has been the most incredible week ever!”  After an interactive Bible story time: “I think Jesus is telling us that no matter how bad things seem, he will always be with me.”

Yes, it matters.

Corinne Plett