It's Hard to Stay Awake. Light the Candle of Hope

Sermon by Pastor Joel Crouse

First Sunday of Advent

Sunday December 3, 2023

Gospel ~ Mark 13:24-37

We tend not to be the best sleepers, in this modern age. We live in a world where the lights never turn off. We go to sleep with our phones. We wake in the middle of the night to worries that seem large and overwhelming. We now have apps to teach us how to sleep – which really comes as natural as breathing – and podcasts to lull us to close our eyes. The use of sleeping medications is on the rise. This pattern hardly improves as the holidays approach, and the demands on our time grow, our anxiety about family rises, and the expectations we put on ourselves seem heavy. And so, in the gospel this morning, when Jesus urges us to “Stay awake,” we can be forgiven for thinking wearily: it is just one more thing to add to the list. Maybe we will stay awake next year.

And yet, we know what happens when we sleep through life. When we go through the motions. There are the big picture societal mistakes, when we fail to see evil as it is happening, or injustice when it occurs, and because of this, because we are all dozing at the wheel, evil creeps to power while our eyes are closed. These mistakes are real, especially now, in a world of distractions, polarization, and argument.

But today, I want to talk about what it means for us to stay awake as individuals guided by the gospel, especially as we take our first steps into Advent, and the daily countdown to Christmas, and all the potential joy and the real stress that it can bring.

We are all creatures of habit. Habits form from the time we are children, from interactions with our parents and siblings, the friends we have, the teachers we get. Those habits form who we are, and how we engage with one another. Over time, they become more entrenched.

Some of these habits – resilience in the face of hardship, for instance – are gifts. Others are clearly burdens we carry, both for ourselves and for those around us. And these are the ones we need to stay awake to. These are the ones that make it hard for the gospel to act through us.

It is not easy. Some days we feel it is, frankly, impossible. In fact, our behaviour and attitudes are extremely hard to change. Workplaces have been trying to do so by offering diversity training to CEOs and managers. By teaching them about unconscious bias – the ways they might exclude or fail to promote women or those from diverse backgrounds without even realizing they are doing so. In the same way, campuses are trying to teach bystander-training so that people will intervene when they see harassment or sexual assault.

And yet, what the research shows is that while these programs are effective as education, the changes they make in attitudes don’t often seem to last – and they have had even less success in changing actual behaviour. That is, people eventually go back to thinking the same way they always did. Our attitudes and behaviours are hard to change.

In other words, we constantly need to be hearing the lesson of the gospel. Jesus is a great teacher. It’s as if he understood cognitive science long before scientists could actually study the brain. He teaches us the same lessons – kindness, generosity, tolerance -- over and over again, with his parables and with accounts of his life in a way that tries to keep our brain interested. He is trying all sorts of ways to get through to us, so that we can try to truly incarnate the gospel.

In other words, he is trying to keep us awake.

So, what should we be especially awake to? This Advent, perhaps we could all think about the bad habits we have fallen into – thinking the worst of people, trying to control others, losing our temper. We need to stay awake to those moments – and have a plan to stop them when they happen. We also need to be careful of the expectations we have for what is to come, and of the narratives we write before they happen: the ones that say people will always behave a certain way, or this family gathering won’t go well. These are the kinds of moments we need to stay awake to.

Perhaps, we’ll want to say a prayer, or recall a parable that we have heard over the last few months. Maybe there is some other reminder we can put in place. I know someone who wears an elastic band that she snaps when she finds herself spiraling into negative thoughts.

When I was a young boy, my parents started an Advent practice where on first Advent we gathered as a family and chose a name out of a bowl. The name on the paper was known only to the recipient. That name became our Advent Secret Friend. And we spent the Season of Advent doing random acts of kindness for that person without their knowledge that we were doing them. At the end of the season, we would reveal who our secret friend was. The interesting thing about this exercise was that the true revelation was received in both directions. The giver of good deeds was awakened to the joy of giving as much as the receiver. The Season of Advent helped our family to wake up out of the sleepiness of our routines and habits.

Stay awake. For this, as our gospel says, is when and how we will see Jesus. Not only in those around us. But also, in ourselves. Amen.

Never mind counting sheep. Get to work doing good.

Sermon by Pastor Joel Crouse

Reign of Christ Sunday

Sunday November 26, 2023

Gospel ~ Mathew 25:31-46

The gospel this morning is as clear as it can be: it lays out for us what we have to do to get on God’s good side. Welcome the stranger, care for the prisoners, feed the hungry. The sheep gets a gold star; the goat gets left behind.

Are you feeling a little nervous? Cause I am. I suspect that was what Jesus intended with his sorting metaphor. How better to spur people to action than to make a little competition, a fear of failure in the mix: Am I a sheep or a goat? Which one are you? I, for one, would like to be a sheep – the good people who get to the good place – but I worry I might actually be a goat, when the final score is tallied.

In fact, the whole situation is really problematic. I mean, why pick on the goats? Do we really want to be sheep – passively trotting along, lacking independence, maybe just a bit dumb? Goats may be willful, and stubborn, but they also have personality. They have their own ideas of what’s what. The sheep sticks with the pack. The goat is a rebel – and in these modern times, that’s what gets celebrated: work hard, play hard, climb the ladder, collect a pile of toys.

And hey, if we are sorting people, we should do it right. Really keep score. At least I am still a better sheep than that goat over there. That guy has way more goat in him than I do.

You see where all this earthly sorting gets us? First, we get nervous about not measuring up. Then we get defensive rather than insightful about our mistakes and how we can do better. Finally, we take the easy way out – and throw judgement around to distract from our failings. Judging other people has gotten humanity in a lot of trouble for more than 2,000 years. And yet, we cannot help ourselves - we can’t seem to resist, whether we are deciding pass and fail by gender, or birthplace, or skin colour, or how you practice your faith, or your choice in the person you love. We even like to judge whether a person’s good deeds are truly good enough.

But guess who actually decides the goat and sheep question? The individual and God. The gospel makes this clear: it’s not about the other person. It’s about our own actions.

We know this because, while we live in a finite word, God is infinite. Too often, we act as though there is only so much space in heaven, which is just another way of thinking that there is only so much love. But you’ll notice the gospel doesn’t say there is room only for a set number of sheep; there are only two groups – sheep, and goats. We are to understand that every sheep has a place, and every sheep is loved. Once we think of it that way, we can stop worrying about who is in and who is out, and then start figuring out who we are.

That is the real question of the gospel. The hard challenge is to look inside and decide: who will we be? I will go first: I’d say I am not a terrible sheep, some of the time. But I am also a pretty good goat, too much of the time. It really depends on the day. I don’t always measure up to that long list of good works that Jesus offers us this morning. In fact, I rarely do. That is a very high bar. What we really need to know is how many sheep deeds we need to do, to avoid being a goat?

This is always the problem, as I have said before, with reading the gospel as if it were a collection of short stories, not a novel. In that novel, the character of the human– that is, you and me – is complex in our imperfections: we care for one another, we betray one another; we are greedy, we are charitable; we follow Jesus, we torture Jesus. The whole of the gospel doesn’t judge us, it embraces us. At the end of it all, neither Jesus, nor God is focused on shame for the days when we were goats. The gospel is about pride for the times when we were sheep.

And to Jesus, that means one thing: Go forth and get to work. Don’t worry about goats and sheep, look for those in need. Feed those who hunger, soothe those who are in pain. Every time you help one of those people, it is as if you are helping me. When you don’t help them, it’s as if you have passed me by.

Because, in the end, we have the sheep all wrong, anyway. They aren’t passive, and they aren’t dull. What does that flock that Jesus calls us to join actually do in the world? They break all the rules. They reject being ambitious for the sake of ambition. They focus on relationships and charity and all the qualities that drive good in the world. The sheep are lucky: when they have a goat-kind of day, they are forgiven because they have created a world where kindness is infinite.

That’s the message in our gospel for Reign of Christ Sunday. Never mind counting the sheep and the goats. Invest your energy in justice, not judgement. Get to work doing good. And let God be God. Amen.

Faith is not about knowing every answer, it’s about asking the right kinds of questions

Sermon by Pastor Joel Crouse

Sunday November 19, 2023

Gospel ~ Mathew 25:14-30

This morning, we are presented with another challenging parable from Jesus. Let’s recap: a wealthy boss who is headed out of town distributes wealth among three employees and tells them to look after it while he’s gone. And these aren’t small amounts of wealth. In the time of Jesus, a talent was worth a fortune – about 20 years of a day-labourer’s wage. That’s big, lottery-winning kind of money. In this parable, Jesus is obviously trying to get the attention of his audience.

So, what happens?

The first employee goes out with his five talents and comes back with ten to present to the boss. The second turns her two into two more. The third, apparently out of concern for the boss’s ethics, decides to risk nothing, and buries it. So, at the end, she can present only the same amount. For this, she is the only one punished: tossed out where there is gnashing of teeth. It’s all very grim.

This parable has been interpreted in many ways. There are actually three versions: we have heard the one in Matthew, with the most money and only three servants. In Luke, the money is significantly less and distributed among ten, though only three matter. And there is a third version in the Gospel of the Hebrews, in which the whole situation is turned on its head, and no one who saves the money is deemed the most worthy. The Gospel of the Hebrews was a text studied by early church thinkers but was destroyed because of an invasion in the 7th Century and never made it into what we now know as the Bible.

But in what we now know as the New Testament, the most common interpretation of this text is this: when we put the talents and other gifts that God has given us to good works, we reap the rewards. When we bury our talent under a bushel, we gain nothing. This is a good lesson, and certainly one for us to pay attention to.

Another interpretation of this parable, however, is that not everyone is equal, but we can all make contributions. The employee who doubled two talents was rewarded in similar fashion to the one who doubled five. And also, this parable could be seen as a push not to play it safe. To be out there with our talents and treasure. To take risks to make a real difference. These, then, would be three challenges of this parable: to make the most of our talent, to not get caught up in who is better than who, and to take risks in the world.

But what if we consider it from yet another perspective?

First, there is context to think about. Today, we can read the parable, ponder the words, go back and read it again. But that is not how it would have first been heard by the people. Jesus preached in an oral society, and he would have offered these parables to large, noisy crowds or groups. He was, in that society, deliberately provocative. His message was not mainstream. And surely, he would have encountered his critics in the crowd. Surely, he would have engaged in debate or been asked to clarify his message and repeat what he was saying. What would have been the goal of Jesus’s telling this kind of story to that kind of crowd?

We should also consider that this crowd would have just heard the parable we heard last week: the story of the ten bridesmaids who go out to meet the bridegroom; five bring extra oil and are able to meet him, and five forget and show up too late. God is in the background in that parable, asking: Have you stayed awake? Are you prepared for what is to come?

In the parable that follows, we might assume the landowner is God, but let’s take another angle: what if the landowner is just a rich man, and what matters is how the employees behave? This man is not just a little rich, he is very, very rich – he is travelling, for one thing, and he has staff that he can entrust with his money. He goes away for a long time; and while he is gone the first two servants get busy making their boss money, presumably on the labour and interest of others, and at the end turning a hefty profit.

How might the crowd have interpreted this with their own experience -- as people with much less money and much less power, more likely to be the workers many rungs down on the wealth ladder? As William Herzog observes, in his book on these parables: What did those servants accomplish, but to concentrate more wealth in the hands of an already wealthy man? And who might now be in debt to those servants because of it?

The third servant, then, takes the wealthy landowner to task: I knew you were someone who reaped what you did not sow – who, in other words, benefited from the labour of others – and I call you out on it. Seeing it from that point of view, what did the third servant do but refuse to exploit anyone to make more money for the corporation. But he didn’t steal it: he just put it aside and went on with his life. Who knows what he then did with his time? Perhaps, he worked on behalf of others, rather than exploiting them. Perhaps, as in the case of our five wise bridesmaids, this servant was the one who stayed awake to the gospel. The one who refused to work for the sake of achieving earthly riches. Perhaps he is calling out the system as corrupt, as creating inequality. Might that not also resonate with a mixed crowd gathered to hear the words of Jesus?

But what happens to that third servant? The cost is great: this servant is stripped of money, cast out into poverty. What did this person do? They called the wealthy boss to account, or as Herzog proposes, served as the whistle-blower in the story, the one who challenges society’s notions of class and labour – just as the gospel calls us to do. Was it fair what happened to him at the hands of the landowner?

So, what does the parable seek to teach? What did Jesus want us to take from it? That is for us to ponder. And in fact, isn’t that the challenge in a challenging parable? To get us thinking, and debating. Not to discern simple truths, but to consider the story against our own perceptions and assumptions? Who is right and who is wrong? What if what we always assumed was right is actually wrong? Faith, after all, is not about knowing every answer. In the days when Jesus told parables, as in our day, it’s about asking the right kinds of questions.

This is a great gift that our faith gives us—that sacred text gives us. The freedom to step back and consider all the angles, the call to put ourselves in the shoes of others. And the promise that when we wade patiently through the complexity of life to find truths centered on love and grace, we find God waiting for us with a fortune beyond earthy measure.

Amen