Here is my preliminary draft of my story and sermon for Sunday, Oct 28.  It is one of my longest.

October 28, 2012: Truth and Peace (Job)

Story: John Newton

As we live, we gather mistakes and lies about the world. Some of these are our own work; some are taught to us by our families, community, teachers, the media, and institutions. The mistakes are accumulated through bad information, lack of information, and guesses. The lies are created to serve particular purposes. Some of these purposes are to help us live better in some way, to fit in with a group or gain the motivation we need to do something important. Some purposes are to manipulate us to serve the purposes of other people. Jesus saw through the lies and mistakes of his time, and offered people another way of seeing the world, God, and themselves, and another way of living in the world.

One big lie that has been around for a long time is that the people who are like us are the most human, and are the best people. People less like us are less human, less good, less wise, less smart, and so on. This lie has been used in many ways over thousands of years. One of them has been to justify doing bad things to other people: they are less human than me so we can kill them, rape them, take their land, or use them as slaves. One outcome of this lie was the creation of plantations in the Caribbean Islands and the Southern United States by killing or working the original residents to death, taking their land, and bringing in slaves from Africa. This was the way to reduce labour costs so the Spanish and English conquerors could make a good profit off of their plantations. To get the slaves from Africa, traders were needed to buy captured inland Africans from coastal African communities and transport them by ship to the Americas. The traders operated under the big lie, and the plantation owners, including people like Thomas Jefferson, operated under that big lie – Blacks were regarded as having little more value or rights than livestock. One day a trader by the name of John Newton looked into the eyes of a slave and saw a human being. In that encounter he knew the wrongness of what he had done, repented and changed his life. His experience was so painful, yet beautiful that he wrote “Amazing Grace”. In the words of that hymn we meet ourselves: “was blind but now I see”. The truth that we are all God’s children, equally human, equally worthy of respect is a necessary truth to accept the need of ditching arrogance and assuming humility in our relationships with others. It is only in this way that genuine peace can be found.

Message:

Story of sons of the sheikh: The Sufi master told them to ride their brother’s horse.

The brothers were in distress because they believed a mistake: they thought they had to ride their own horses since that is what they would normally do. The Sufi master helped them see the truth and resolved the problem for them. Once on a canoeing trip, the coil wire was stolen from my parked truck and probably thrown into the nearby river. At first I thought my problem was that I needed a new coil wire. After getting something to eat from the back of my truck where I had tools and camping stuff, I realized I needed a way to get electricity from the coil to the distributor: I had copper wire, aluminum foil, and electrical tape, so I made a substitute coil wire and went on my way. Seeing the truth in a situation helps solve problems.

The Book of Job deals with a problem for many people of dealing with bad events. A big lie told for a long time is that God makes good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This is a lie that is repeated a few times in the Bible. If this were true, how can we explain when terrible things happen to people who seem to be good? The lie is repeated by all of Job’s friends and by the arrogant young know-it-all Elihu. Believing the lie harms in many ways. People experiencing tragedy believe they must have done something wrong and beat themselves up instead of moving forward with dealing with the tragedy. People experiencing success and good things believe they must be well-liked by God, and feel no sense of generosity towards those in need. “I am such a good person, I deserve this. If they are hungry or homeless or sick, they probably deserved that too.”

The lie of a commercial God who does to us as we do to God harms our relationships with each other and with God, and proves a barrier to building real peace in our selves, in our relationships with others, and with God. Combined with the big lie in the story of John Newton we have a recipe for a lack of peace on many different levels. Wars between nations are often justified on the basis of “God is on our side,” and our citizens are more important than those people, and “we know better than they do.” The role of the United Church and other churches in residential schools was based on the attitude that we know better than those Indians what is good for them. Our religion is better than their religion; our language is better than their language, and our culture is better than their culture. We see the same attitude in business leaders and civil servants who want to tell poor people how they should live, in childless experts telling parents how to raise children, and so on.

The arrogance in the attitude that we are smarter, wiser, and more worthy than others is a barrier to peace, and that attitude needs to be pierced by the truth that we cannot be sure that what we believe is correct.

While I could say more about global peace issues, what I believe is most important for me at this time is to examine what I believe to be the truth about us. I am here as a transition minister. That leaves me with two sets of responsibilities. The first set is to carry out most of the regular work of ministry: worship, pastoral care, administration, contributing to the website, education. The second set is part of shepherding this congregation from where you are to where God’s work needs you to be.

Where we are includes many things. You are in the process of saying good bye to Clint after his 22-year relationship with you. The ending of that relationship comes with grief in many forms, anxiety about what is coming next, hopes to advance personal goals, and a kind of emptiness. My role includes making it clear that there is a change in relationship, to make Clint’s ending of his relationship as minister here real so the change can be properly faced, and to support the work of the leaders of the congregation in celebrating his ministry and helping members as needed in working through their grief.

We are a congregation with an exceptional music program, and a sanctuary with excellent accoustics.

We have a building with many challenges including the cost of maintenance and operation, and accessibility.

Part of this congregation is elderly, and some members lack confidence in how many will be here in a few years time.

The church has being drawing on its financial reserves for a few years, and this cannot go on indefinitely. This creates anxiety for some people.

The organ is probably on its last legs, and a replacement will be costly.

Some believe there is a shortage of people willing to take on leadership roles.

Many members live in other parts of the city. The community around the church has had a major change in the past few years, and it does not feel as though we are connecting with the newcomers.

The members of this congregation are very good at welcoming visitors. I suspect we also need to learn how to help newcomers find their way into being fully involved in the congregation.

There are many people who work hard for this church, often behind the scenes so it is hard to know who they are and what they do.

This is part of where we are, and I discover more from time to time, such as the Prayer Shawl ministry.

As where we are going, there are a variety of possible destinations. An easy path would be to do nothing extraordinary and close when the money runs out. Almost as easy would be to just say we don’t like the not knowing so we will just close now.

Some people are interested in amalgamation, but that process is difficult and hazardous. For many people here, the experience of past amalgamations is not one they want to repeat.

We could reduce our ministry, but that would probably just accelerate the path to closure.

We could leave this building and search for something more affordable to maintain, while retaining our identity as a congregation. We could even go without a building of our own.

We could dramatically change our style of ministry.

We could expand the kinds of ministry we are doing.

We could change how we function and are as a congregation.

We could make a concerted effort to encourage more people to join us.

And there are possibilities I left out or have not yet imagined.

What we do depends on discovering other truths. How does each person here feel about the future of St. Matthew’s? What does each of us appreciate now? What would each of us like to see happen? What is each of us prepared to contribute to whatever new thing we might become?

What does the Spirit want of us at this time and in this place? What are the needs and desires of the people in the communities we naturally serve? What resources are waiting for our requests?

What are our options for changes to this building to make it more accessible and more economical to use?

Where can we safely talk to each other about our hopes and fears, our needs and our suggestions?

On the surface, this is a pretty peaceful place. However there is an undercurrent of anxiety and frustration which undermines our ability to express the peace of abundance and community that is possible for us.

The story of Job finishes with Job’s acknowledgement of the unimaginable power and mystery of God, and his decision to give himself to that mystery, and the resulting abundance in his life. I don’t like the last part of Job where he has more children and wealth, and wish the story finished in that final conversation between him and God.. This is the place I would like us to be: in conversation with God through each other, prayer, worship and the embrace of life lived in God’s grace.

With God, all things are possible. May we dream boldly and lovingly as we join in the conversation seeking to discover where we really need to go. May the Spirit bless us, and, through us, this world. Amen.