Change has to start somewhere. Be the positive tipping point for the world

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Third Sunday in Lent

March 3, 2024

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

John 2:13-22

Mother Nature has certainly been having her say this week. A thunderstorm in Ottawa in February, followed by a flash freeze. A raging, dangerous fire in Texas, that sent smoke all the way up to us.

Scientists give us the news so often these days that all those studies blur together: the ice is melting, the ocean is rising, the world is burning. We can brace ourselves for another hot summer, with all the risks that brings to a human world. We may give thanks, jokingly, for a mild winter – even as skating rinks close early. We may, come August, soak in a warmer ocean. But these are all harbingers of an environment reaching its tipping point, our point of no return. If that hasn’t happened already.

Can we blame young people for being angry? I don’t think so. They are looking at a much different timeline than their parents. That will affect their choices, their futures, their families. Their anger is justified.

This problem, like so many of our issues, is something that just seemed to creep up on us; like the privatization of water, and our toxic air – we never meant for those to happen. It is the consequence of many small and large decisions, and one disconnected, self-serving behaviour piled on top of the other. Until those actions result in one big push, and we fall off the cliff.

I suspect that this is what happened to our merchants in the temple in Jerusalem. They hadn’t meant for things to get so out of hand. They hadn’t planned to stink up the temple with flocks of animals, to shatter the peace with their shouts of haggling, or at least that was just an unfortunate side- effect of their original goal – to make some cash. After all, they were providing a needed service. During Passover, the population of the city more than tripled. People came from Persia to Rome and all points in between. They needed animals to sacrifice – and, even the poor, who could only afford doves – couldn’t carry their animals all that way from home. They had to pay their temple tax – and they needed to exchange their currency to do it. You can just see it starting, with one enterprising farmer setting up a stall near the temple doors, with a few animals for sale. He mentions it to his banker cousin at a family dinner, and the next thing you know, the first money-mart opens for business. Another farmer. Another banker. And so on, until you need food vendors to feed the shoppers and clothing stores to dress them, and suddenly the tipping point: the temple—a place meant for worship—has been turned into a mall.

In our lives, isn’t this how it works most of the time? We don’t plan out our sins; they just happen. In our first lesson, we hear the Ten Commandments spelled out for us, as they were declared to the Jewish people by Moses when he came down from the mount. Most of us would never intentionally break any of them. When it happens, we are often surprised to look back and consider the small, harmless-seeming decisions or patterns that led to it. We don’t see it coming, however, because we choose what we want to see. We fall into ruts; or we convince ourselves that we aren’t doing anything wrong – that we are just “borrowing” the money, that we are just “protecting” someone with a lie, that we are just “comforting” a flirty coworker. But those actions, if we don’t catch them, can reach a tipping point - a lie becomes a betrayal, an intimate lunch becomes an affair, a borrowing becomes a theft. And suddenly, we are like the merchants stinking up the temple, and we cannot clean up the mess because we wouldn’t know where to start.

Jesus, as we know from the Gospel, reaches his own kind of tipping-point where this temple business is concerned. He flies into a rage. He whips the animals out of the temple. He dumps out money and flips over tables and yells at the top of his voice. This is the human side of Jesus – the Jesus who is so angry he doesn’t waste time with conciliation or prayerful reflection. He wants to make sure everyone is paying attention.

Now, there is some debate among New Testament scholars about the reason why Jesus was so ticked off. Was it because the shopkeepers were cheating people, turning the temple into “a den of thieves” as he is quoted saying in the other gospels? Or was it simply because the temple had been turned into “a marketplace” as this morning’s gospel tells it? I personally side with the first interpretation: what else besides corruption could get Jesus so angry? But either way, many religious scholars believe the storming of the temple was that tipping-point moment in Jesus’s ministry – when he could no longer turn back from his fate on the cross, when he committed to the path that God had set for him. After all, his behaviour was a direct attack on the powers that be, and it hit them in their pocketbooks, where people are most likely to feel the pinch. According to three of the four gospels, the purging of the temple was one of the last acts of Jesus’s ministry, before his arrest. He had become too much of a threat to ignore.

But for us, Jesus tips things in the other direction – away from sin and toward salvation. And Jesus sets an example for us; Jesus reminds us of the good that can come from living with intention and conviction -- that acts of kindness and courage, piled one of top of the other – can actually change the world for the better. We often forget this. Recently, my social media feed presented the story of a note a hairdresser received. An elderly lady had come into the salon, suffering from dementia. She was confused, asking the same questions again and again. But the hairdresser, the note said, had treated her like anyone else, with the care of any other client, and given her a lovely haircut. She died not long afterwards. But her husband, who penned the note, described how she had admired herself in the mirror for days. It was the happiest he had seen her in a long while. A small act of kindness that had a big impact. Just like our environmental decisions which collectively become so much larger. Our small negative actions have consequences, too. They gather power without our even knowing it - the driver we yell at for cutting us off, losing patience with a colleague, that colleague’s going home grumpy to his family, and so on. But this is also how our collective social behaviour works: it begins with one person, spreads to two, and so on, until it is felt by people we never know about.

This proves how powerful we can be in small groups. Like the examples we have right here in our communities of faith throughout this season of Lent -- with carbon fasts, food bank support, education, and activism around God’s good creation. Change has to start somewhere. Certainly it is our mission as a church community to start the chain of kindness and social responsibility.

But this is the question: Do we, through our welcoming and openness and interest in others, spread the message we want? Jesus’s anger in the temple was outlier behaviour. His ministry was built by going from town to town, speaking to fishermen by the lake and women by the wells – taking care not just to meet them, but to be someone who could inspire them to change.

For Jesus to be that tipping point in our lives and in the world depends on two things: first we must be deliberate about the kind of change we want to bring about, finding the personal integrity in ourselves by virtue of our faith to make the change. And second, we need to be the kind of people whose examples will catch on with others.

There may indeed be space for anger in the temple. Righteous anger burns like fire in the belly. But the example that Jesus sets is in the power of individual actions and choice. In the end, it was not the overturned table that defined the ministry of Jesus. It was the table he deliberately set and shared, around which everyone was welcome.

Amen.

Drown out the voice of temptation with something positive

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

Second Sunday in Lent

February 25th, 2024

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

Romans 4:13-25

Mark 8:31-38

Has there ever been a society so full of temptations and so well-designed to help us slip into them? Judging from the current debt load in Canada, we can see how consumerism has tempted us. Walk down any street, and there’s the temptation to buy something – and easy credit to buy it now and figure out how to pay later. We are easily tempted to work longer, to worry more about the wrong things. It feels as if at every step, temptations are thrown in our paths. Some temptations we recognize; some we fall prey to without even realizing it.

For the last two weeks, our gospel lessons have been all about temptation, cast in literal form as Satan, the devil on our shoulder. Last week, we had a brief reference to the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, to which Satan paid a visit. Today, we have Jesus himself invoking Satan, when Peter objects to his describing the journey to the Cross as inevitable.

These are two very different kinds of temptation: the first is self-serving; the second is an act of love. But both are really about the inward questions we all ask ourselves.

Up until this point, the people making life tricky for Jesus were earthly ones – religious leaders, questioning disciples. He did pretty well with them. The criticisms of the religious leaders he turned back upon themselves. The questions from the disciples became teaching moments for his ministry.

But those were external forces. In the wilderness, he was battling with himself. We can imagine it as a literal confrontation with Satan, who, if you recall, promises him wealth, and, when that fails, demands Jesus prove his own greatness. But ultimately, those really sound like internal questions: Do I deserve more? Am I doing the right thing? Can I handle this responsibility? Those are very human questions, questions posed by someone wrestling with inner temptations.

It is the same with Peter. Jesus responds so sternly - calling one of his closest disciples by the name Satan - that it suggests we should look for the subtext. Jesus, facing a difficult choice, could not handle any doubters, lest his own doubts creep in. Peter was trying to show his support for Jesus, but he did it in a way that only gave voice to the temptations Jesus was dealing with the ones beckoning to him to give up. Who hasn’t had a loved one, truly well-meaning, do the same?

This is the potential power of our own 40-day journey through Lent. We, too, are called to wrestle with those questions – to identify our own temptations, to determine a plan to resist them, and to define who we are with a better response to them. And we are tasked with seeing the times when, however good our intentions, we have been like Peter, unsupportively supporting, giving them an excuse when they didn’t want to take the easy way out.

Now, I would not presume to know what your temptations are. I do know my own. And that’s probably the easy step in the Lenten journey. Because I bet pretty much all of us can name, with just a little thought, the parts of ourselves that are so easily tempted to leap off the gospel’s path. Maybe you’re a critic when you should be a cheerleader. Maybe you make promises and don’t keep them – even when you know you should. Maybe you give up on people too easily. Maybe you give up on yourself too easily. This part is important: we have to be able to name it to fix it. We all have to do our own time in the wilderness. So, take some time, take a hard look, and don’t flinch.

In the end, though, for many of us, I imagine the most painful temptation is going to be the voice we have been hearing all our lives, the one that says you aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t smart enough, you aren’t good enough. Ultimately that’s the voice Satan falls back on with Jesus, raising doubt about his character, his true value. Satan basically asks Jesus, are you really worth all this fuss? And Peter, in his own moment of panic, was like that same internal voice, questioning the value of the choice facing Jesus. Often that internal voice - our own creation - is not very kind to us. So, what do we do with it? What is next for the rest of the time in our Lenten wilderness, after our temptations have been laid out to taunt us, our weaknesses outlined in front of us? Well, it wouldn’t be long before we all felt pretty lousy; there’s nothing more depressing – and more dysfunctional - than stewing in our own imperfections and failings, whether true or not.

So, our next step, then, is to enter into the conversation: we have to be like Jesus in the wilderness. He didn’t ignore the questions posed by Satan. He answered them. And each time he did, he learned a truth about himself. But the framing of his answers is important. When Satan, if you recall, offered a partnership, Jesus defined himself by the relationship to God that he already had. When Satan challenged him to prove his power, he said, God already knows what I can do; I have nothing to prove. When Satan promised him riches, he said, actually, I need more than money to live well.

One of the best forms of counseling that we learn about in seminary is the one that moves past ruminating about all the stuff that goes wrong and focuses on changing the conversation, finding an answer when that voice shouts at us about being unworthy. Just this week, I read about a researcher suggesting that the best way to change a bad habit was to focus on overlapping it with a good habit. If you want to stop eating chocolate cake, create the good habit of eating more vegetables.

In our house, when we focused on what we would do for the next 40 days, it became clear that the best goals were the “I will try to,” or “I will do more of.” Those were the goals that added something to our lives, rather than focusing on dodging temptation.

Jesus shows us how to deal with temptation. We do not need to waste time focusing on what we are already getting wrong. We are invited to create a better plan, to drown out that voice with something positive. And be that voice for others. Amen.

In the Wilderness...to see who we are.

Sermon by Rev. Joel Crouse

First Sunday in Lent

February 18th, 2024

Genesis 9:8-17

1 Peter 3: 18-22

Mark 1: 9-15

The “I’m busier than you” conversation is probably the modern equivalent of “my dad is bigger than your dad” – and it’s just as ridiculous. But it’s also pretty human: we spend too much of our time, often unconsciously, sizing up our lives against the lives of others. And now it’s not cars and homes – now we want to have as little time for ourselves as anyone else does. That’s just crazy – and a recipe, sociologists say, for unhappiness. Because we become like the hamster on the treadmill, always chasing something we cannot catch. If we see ourselves only in the reflection of others, we never see who we truly are.

This is the first Sunday in Lent – and as much as Lent is a time for quiet contemplation, I imagine that for most of us, the real world isn’t going to clear away our schedules so we can wander off into the wilderness for 40 days and wrestle with our inner selves. The kids will still get homework, the boss will still lay down deadlines, whoever needs our attention is still going to need it.

But if any society needed to put the brake on, I think it’s ours. Those forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, winning riddles with the Devil and thinking hard about the days ahead and his connection with God, were key to setting him on the right path again. Before he went off into the wilderness, he was living a superstar’s life, thronged by crowds wanting his autograph, or to touch his cloak. I doubt he ever had to cook a meal. That’s a heady experience – and I imagine the human part of Jesus struggled with the temptation of fame. I suspect that like us, he occasionally felt overwhelmed by all the work that needed to be done, and the people clamoring to get his attention.

In fact, when he does meet the devil in the desert, many of the temptations are playing on the hubris of Jesus – asking him to prove that he is as great as his followers say, that he ranks in comparison. It was the Devil’s version of the busy conversation. And Jesus wasn’t having any of it. He knew who he was. He didn’t need to prove it – least of all to the Devil, who was never going to see his side of things anyway.

Now, I want to get back to that. But first let’s return to the wilderness. We aren’t winning the Lenten sweepstakes and getting our 40-day sojourn, so we must find the time to wrestle with our temptations in the here and now. That makes sense anyway, because the things that tempt us away from the good things that God wants for us, exist in the here and now.

Usually, they happen over and over again – and often we react in the same way. But Lent is the church’s changeover season: and our chance to change. Lent is meant to be a time for us to contemplate our connection with God. But these next 40-odd days create for us 40 opportunities to be deliberate in our actions, to defeat our temptations, and to break bad habits. A bad habit, according to science, takes about 14 days to break – so God has kindly given us some wiggle room. And this is not about giving up chocolate or movies or some other pleasure. This is our time, in the wilderness, to see who we are, to decide who we want to be and find the path between those two points. That was what the 40 days meant for Jesus. In the silence – in the quiet space he had – I imagine that he spent a lot of time on those three questions: Who am I? Who do I want to be? And what is the path in between?

I think that as Lenten resolutions go – that would be the first one I would propose to you. To ask yourself those three questions every day, for these forty days. I have no doubt that you will find that God is working through each one of those questions – and he has some pretty clear instructions for the third one in particular.

But today I am going to stick with just one: a variation on how Jesus responded to the Devil, and the core of what’s dysfunctional about that whole “I am busier than you are argument.”

Too much of our understanding of how people behave is about us, and not them. If our partner snaps at us, we often take it personally – rather than assuming first that they had a bad day at work. A friend runs late or cancels at the last minute – they must not want to be with us, we may find ourselves thinking – when the truth is that other parts of their life have swamped them. People do inconsiderate things without ever meaning to be inconsiderate – and we often forget that.

This week, I read some advice on how to handle this reaction. Every time someone’s behaviour irritates you, or insults you, the writers suggested, say to yourself: “That person is giving the best they can in this particular moment.” Even if you are justified in being irritated – especially if you are justified in being irritated -- you say: “That person is giving the best they can in this particular moment.”

As Lenten resolutions go, I think that’s a good one. And here’s why: first of all, thinking those words requires that we remove our own selfish wants from the exchange – and force ourselves to consider the other person. For just a moment, what flashes through our mind may be a charitable thought about where they could be in life right now, that goes a long way to defuse the tension. In that instance, we have stepped away into the quiet wilderness, however briefly. We say: “That person is giving the best they can in this moment.” Now let me be clear, this is not about being above someone else—that gets us right back to ‘who is busier.’ This is about assuming the best of that person—and that their intentions are good. The funny thing is, that’s exactly what God promises to say about us, every time we make a mess of things: “They are doing their best. I forgive them.”

But what makes this self-help step perfect for Lent is how it helps bring us to a better understanding of ourselves. We can see ourselves more clearly, standing outside the fray, than when we are wrestling with everyone else in the middle of it. When we refuse to be baited we are defining ourselves as patient. When we forgive even when we shouldn’t have to, we define ourselves as compassionate. We stop wasting our time – the little free time we feel we have – quibbling over who’s busiest. And even better, it focuses our energy not on the problem, but on the solution. Those actions – compassion, patience, service – they bring us closer to God.

Every time Jesus said no to the Devil, he set himself apart from the Devil: he defined himself as someone outside the fray. Each time, he came to understand himself a little better. And in this way, the path for his life became clear to him.

This is the opportunity we also have in Lent: to identify our temptations, to learn from them, resist them, and define who we are by a better response to them.

We have just about 40 days. More than enough time to change those bad habits, to decide who we want to be and make a path to get there. So set forth into the busy wilderness of life. And to get things started, the next time you meet with a conflict, think these words: “This person is giving me the best they can at this moment. I forgive them.” Who knows? Maybe they are thinking the same of you—maybe they are giving you the same wiggle room, erring on the side of grace. Wouldn’t that be a relationship, worthy of God? Amen.