There is no point in gaining the world, if you lose yourself in the end

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost

September 15, 2024

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Psalm 116:1-9

James 3:1-12

Mark 8:27-38

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

A couple weeks ago, my Facebook feed offered up a particularly poignant thought exercise. Perhaps you have also seen it. The video showed a shaky black and white film of people, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, walking on the street, standing in front of their houses, doing regular things. The words reminded me of this reality. I’ll paraphrase: In one hundred years, strangers will be living in your house. In one hundred years, that car you coveted will be metal scrap. In one hundred years, no one will really remember you. Do you remember your great-grandfather? How much do you even know about him? The fact is that a lot of this will happen much sooner than one hundred years. More likely there will be no house at all, let alone a strange family. But the point landed home: the things we chase today, the stuff we so value, will mean nothing, to anybody we know, sooner than we can image. Storing up treasure on earth is a fool’s errand. 

And yet, don’t we love our treasure? The average house size in Canada was about 1,200 square feet in 1971. Today, the average house size is 2,200 square feet – even though families have gotten smaller not larger. According to an article in PIRG, Americans buy an average of 53 pieces of clothing each year – four times more than in 2000. (I doubt Canadians are far behind.) More than 100-billion items of clothing are produced in the world every year, according to the BBC – and as much as 65 per cent of that ends up in a landfill in 12 months. Meanwhile, gallons upon gallons of water are wasted, and farmland is lost, to create shirts we don’t need. The examples could fill this sermon. But to paraphrase the words of the gospel: what does it profit us to gather this treasure, but forfeit the world? Certainly, if we have in mind our legacy to our children, we risk leaving an impoverished one.

It’s a thought-provoking line in the gospel, spoken by Jesus. He says: Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel, will gain it. For what will profit them to gain the whole world, and forfeit their life?

Jesus says this line after a devastating exchange with Peter, who is arguably his closest friend. Peter is struggling with hearing Jesus talk of his terrible death. We can imagine that he must have heard Jesus explain the prophecy many times, to each new crowd. Who wouldn’t be conflicted about hearing how your dearest friend and ally was predicting for himself great suffering, betrayal and the most brutal of deaths on a cross. (The rising again would sound like a footnote, under those circumstances.) Peter, we are told, takes Jesus aside, and rebukes him. We can assume he said something like: Stop this downer talk, this isn’t going to happen on my watch. This cannot be the way our story ends.

Now Jesus has had plenty of people challenge his words – Pharisees, tax collectors, the woman with the sick child in last week’s gospel. He typically responded calmly. In this case, with Peter, his reaction is so vicious, so out of character, we might ask ourselves why.

We forget sometimes that Jesus was also human. And humans, by our nature, want to live. So I imagine having your close friend throw up doubts also highlighted your own doubts about the difficult path ahead. What was Satan to Jesus, but temptation? Temptation to make a different choice, a more self –serving choice. And so Peter, while expressing his concern out of love, was also tempting Jesus away from what he saw as his duty: to continue to spread the gospel, even at great risk to himself, even until he made the authorities so angry they would plot his death. And so Jesus says: there is no point in gaining the world, if you lose yourself in the end. 

Of course, we all, in the end, lose our lives. But this passage in the gospel speaks to what we do in the time we have, and the choices we make. That message on Facebook reminded us that most of what we do for material gain serves us in the moment. It’s not even fair to say it won’t matter in 100 years.  In 100 years, the choices we make about the environment and for the social good will likely matter very much. In fact, doing right for 100 years from now, will require gaining less today. We can’t continue to consume whatever we want, and live in houses too large for our families and trample over forests and farmland, without creating loss for our children and grandchildren.

Whoever loses their life for the sake of the gospel will gain it. Jesus is describing a selfless choice. His own – to face the cross. And ours – to live for sake of people we don’t know and future generations we can only imagine. Can we resist temptation, live meaningfully, exist in moderation, and deny our own wants for what the natural world needs? One hundred years from now, our names may be a mysterious line in a family tree. Our houses may be gone, our cars will be scrap, our clothes living long in a garbage heap. Our great-grandchildren may not know us when they see our faces in an old picture. But they will know the future created by our choices.  Amen.

Healing Happens in an Ecosystem

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost

September 8, 2024

Isaiah 35:4-7a

Psalm 146

James 2:1-10, 14-17

Mark 7:24-37

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

This summer, the week before returning home, I witnessed faith at work. A small boat club hosted a sailing regatta. Nearly two dozen sailors came from across the country and raced for four days around the islands of Mahone Bay. A winner was declared. The band played. But this was a special regatta called the Mobility Cup. To get ready, the members of the boat club had to pull off extensive renovations - replace the deck, the doors, the washrooms, the ramp to the wharf – all to make the club accessible for this very special regatta. They had to be ready to hoist and lift and serve as valets for the visiting athletes. The sailors, of course, arrived with their own stories. Many of them were in wheelchairs. A few would sail with “sip and puff technology” to control the trim of their sails. Among them was Tracy Schmitt, who goes by the nickname Unstoppable Tracy. She was born without fully-developed arms and legs. I met her in the parking lot when she wheeled up to shake my hand. Watch for me on the water, she said. Her sailboat was called “Silver Linings.”

Now the ocean is an unpredictable place to go on a small boat when you can easily jump off. I consider it a high octane sail on the rare occasion the toe rail gets a little close to the water on our creaky 50-year-old sailboat. But these people – many of whom learned to sail after they suffered injuries or became ill – were truly fearless. You could go out on the sea like this only if you had faith: faith in your support circle and the strangers volunteering to help you, faith in yourself, faith in the sea and the world around you. So yes, what else could this be but the gospel at work?

I thought of these people when I pondered our reading this week. We hear of the healings of Jesus. A man who cannot hear receives hearing. A child suffering from an unspecified illness is made well. These are the promised acts of a loving God. One who, our first lesson says, sets the captive free, opens the eyes of the blind and loves the righteous. For it is, as the gospel tells us: Jesus has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.”

Perhaps we hear those words for ourselves and think of our wounds and sufferings. But it is equally important – as our second lesson so pointedly reminds us – to consider what happened around those healing moments. Who had been deaf and was given hearing? Who was mute and yet emboldened to speak?

The family of the man who had been deaf could not contain themselves: they would be heard, proclaiming what had been done. And in the case of the daughter, we know the speaker to be her mother, who bravely confronted Jesus, when he might otherwise have turned away. “Am I not also fit for a place at your table?” she asks him, with humility. “Do not discount me so quickly,” she says to him. And he is altered by this exchange and heals her daughter. And so we see how the healing did not just restore health only to those who received it directly. It changed irrevocably the people who witnessed it. They now heard and saw the world in a new way – as a place connected by purpose and meaning and beauty.

If I think about the scene of that regatta, I see this all at play, the many pieces that need to come together for healing to happen. Had the volunteers said “Come and use my wharf” but not stepped up to help, what good would a wharf have done? Had the sailors not been resilient in the face of adversity who would there have been to savour that beautiful ocean? It was not enough to extend an invitation; work had to follow it, or else that invitation would have withered. Healing happened in an ecosystem—a pulling together of many parts, and many configurations. We are healed by caring. And we are cared for into healing. My youngest son, Samson, who managed the front-of- house staff at the restaurant, later told me that this regatta – more than any others at the club – was the most joyful one he’d worked. It was full of people being healed as they both offered and provided care - sailors and volunteers both.

Of course, we cannot forget the main player on this wonderfully human scene, so easily admired, and then so often neglected -- the ocean. When we consider what it means to be alive with faith through works, surely the environment is the perfect example. We can write odes to the sea, but it’s nothing if we don’t look after it. We can give thanks for the forest, but it will be lost if we don’t care for it. This kind of empty faith is not just dead, but it also causes death. “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith, but do not have works?” Faith that works beyond prayers, that includes an offering of ourselves, our time and resources, that are not only alive: it is the definition of hope.

And hope is what I saw on that shining, sunny sea last week in Nova Scotia. It did not mean that every wrong was made right, and every injustice fixed. It was the hope of people coming together to enjoy one another and the bounty of the ocean. The hope that comes from innovation, resilience, and courage. The hope when people find their voices and open their eyes. The world is not made perfect, but it becomes a step or two better. Surely that is the healing power of the gospel at work -- alive and doing everything well. Amen.

In Reflection, We Find Change

Sermon, by Pastor Ronald Nelson

Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

September 1, 2024

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9 

Psalm 15

James 1:17-27 

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Twenty-Second Sunday in ordinary time.

Turtle Island

Well, this is it.  Labour day is tomorrow, and everything will be back to normal?  Eh! Programs in the community, in school, and in the church will be back to the usual routines.  And above all, Pastor Joel will be back.

A cartoon recently depicted a woman saying, “my desire to remain well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”  I would think the above is shared by many of us as we deal with politics, AI, wars, creation, and climate, among many others. Our first reading from Deuteronomy basically says, “Israel, if you follow the laws of God, all of life will fall into place.”  We Lutherans prided ourselves in the fact that we lived by grace and not by law. But now we have to get serious about James’s teachings. So let us see if our lessons today give us a few clues on how even staid Lutherans can progress.

I have to admit I wish I could do this a few more weeks because James is now the second lesson for five weeks. The letter of James got Luther’s “knickers in a bind.”  Martin said James was “an epistle of straw.”  In Luther’s day, the need was to lift up the broad and sweeping themes of “justification by faith alone.”  But now, James’s very ability to hold a magnifying glass to the ethics of everyday life. His capacity to urge us toward such deeds; as making peace in close and sometimes strained personal relationships, caring “for widows and orphans in their distress”, all as a life well worth living, seeking in family and vocation to live in such gentle ways that we reap a “harvest of righteousness” – comes as a deep and cooling refreshment.

James is looking at the big picture. What does a faithful person look like, act like, be like? James is sharing the importance of public faith, of being an example for others. For James, faith is life, and so a faithful life is one lived out, not hidden.  Do not forget who you are.  Whether you are stranded on a desert island or in downtown Toronto, faith is about what God sees and what the world sees.  Hear the word, do the word, follow the word, alone or on a crowded bus. The journey is ours, but others may notice.  Today, and for four more weeks, the writer of James will be one of the mentors we will hear from. The letter probably was not written by the person Paul met in Jerusalem, or the brother of Jesus. In fact, the author probably used the name James to counter Paul’s exaggerated ideas about “faith versus works.”  It is interesting that the letter of James uses a variety of expressions for the gospel, “perfect law,” “law of liberty,” and even “royal law.”  Scholars tell us it was written in perfect Greek, thus not the language used by followers of Jesus. It also has no personal references and no allusions whatever to the Jewish and Gentile conflicts in which either of the above James would have been involved.  Therefore, this book was probably written by a Greek Jewish Christian in the late first or early second century. In fact, James was only accepted into the Christian canon in the fourth century, C.E., A.D.  Practical advice, giving in tone and substance, James reads more like a treatise or sermon rather than a letter.  It was aimed at averting an abstract and therefore an inauthentic expression of the Christian faith.  As the author states in today’s second reading, those who have been privileged to hear God’s word are to let its power take root and then live and act by virtue of that power.

V. 22. “but be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

V. 23-24 “for if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror, and immediately forget what they were like.”   Is that not what we should all be about?

To only listen to God’s word and not act upon it, is to deceive oneself. Like Moses, James is encouraging us to allow God’s word to continually bring us to be alive to life.  While we listen to the word of God, we are challenged to see who we are and who we ought to be. God plants a seed in us and we need to cultivate it. To see what is wrong and do nothing to become better is to hear the word and yet not let it be a transforming power in our life.  So, the word should have a dual emphasis on hearing and doing.  For the month of September, we will be hearing much about doing and living in creation. For me, James is an ever-practical letter that reminds us that what we hear in worship must then be lived in our every-day life.   Now as soon as I say all of the above, I have to put in a dis-claimer.  Because I find many Lutherans today becoming followers of James and ignoring Paul.  Can we be both followers and practisers of faith and works?  Jewish readers of this text would have identified the word of God as the Torah, live the law and we have faith. Christian readers can take it to mean we have accepted the saving power of God. Which can mean we are back to where we started.  Seeing ourselves in a mirror should help us recognize who we are and to do what is necessary to become all that God intends us to be. James calls us back to integrity and asks us as the community of believers to demonstrate what James called the true religion.

V. 27 “religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

The author of James tells his community to just zero in on the above. Now that sounds kind of innocent, but “keeping oneself unstained” can become complicated.  Now that I have basically repeated myself, let us turn to Mark.

While Mark frames his story as an incident in conflict between Jesus and the pharisees and the scribes, what is really at stake is the question at the heart of religion, to be specific, what we call Christianity.  In contrast to traditions that may or may not bring people closer to God.  In every society, from worship to families, once-beneficial practices easily became rigid customs, such as washing our hands.  For instance, the sprinkling of some water on the servers’ hands before they distribute communion, has no sanitary value. Yet using some kind of disinfectant on the servers’ hands needs to be mandatory in the world we now live in. The bottom line is that the pharisees and scribes made doctrines of their preferences while ignoring the intent of God’s commandments.  When Jesus talked about what was truly impure, He mentioned not one single infringement of ritual laws.  Instead, he gave his listeners a list of actions that harm others, behaviours that defile the perpetrator even as they denigrate others.  Our politicians could learn from that one.  Jesus knew that it is a lot easier to wash one’s hands or follow the rubrics than it is to live in reverence for all of God’s creation.  Jesus also demonstrated which one of these two options brings joy.  Jesus minced no words.  He challenged/challenges all of us to stop deluding ourselves by accepting compliance with regulations as a substitute for the kind of relationship with God that frees us to act out of love and nothing else. So, we look at the author of Deuteronomy one more time.  Deuteronomy and Jesus provides us with the best reason for keeping God’s laws, for honouring creation, namely life itself.  We are created with an interior longing for love and the source of love.  When we are deeply aware, we know that love is our deepest desire.  Remember in Deuteronomy’s time they knew nothing about an afterlife.  But the writer was certain that keepers of Yahweh’s rules and decrees will have a better quality of life right here and now than those who disregard those regulations.  The writer of James was saying the same thing. So rather than grumble about keeping some law, we should be grateful for the life we experience by obeying the rules - driving drunk and too fast instead of following the rules can kill you and others. It is that simple.

I have only touched the surface of these readings today, as is true every Sunday.  But these readings especially, are calling us to an ever deeper, and broader integrity.  Do we admit our own need for conversion and help, in order to grow in grace?  The critiques of others that we heard and read about today, put our own values and integrity on show, and reveal whether our priorities come from God touching our lives or, just because we have a desire to look pious?  When we discuss what “should” be done, our remembrance of Moses and Jesus and others in scripture demands that we question whether our interpretation of God’s will is life-giving or self-serving?  Jesus did not convert many of his adversaries.  What he did do was invite everyone to explore the depths and meaning of humanity.  Most of them did not take him up on it.  Even more interesting those who did listen and did something, were by and large outsiders.  Religion is caring for others and freedom from false values of society. 

So again today, we are challenged to balance God’s laws with our love of others.  Remember Hebrews 4:12 reminds us that “the word of God, is like a two-edged sword.” Sometimes, like the pharisees, we place rules and conditions on how we share our love and who is worthy of receiving the gifts and the love we have to offer.  Looking at Jesus we find an example of a hearer- and a doer – of God’s word.  Today we are called to be – and do - the same.  Finding and following our deepest desires will free us to follow Jesus who was accused of many things, but he was never accused of failing to love.  God through Jesus understands we struggle in our human weakness.  We live in a secular world that measures our worth by what we accomplish and possess.  But God wants to draw us closer into a loving relationship with him.  The good news of these texts today is that we are called to examine ourselves, revealing our hidden shortcomings, and that will draw us into a closer relationship with God and humankind.  Yes, we are called today to reflect and introspect and in so doing we will find repentance that is [metanoia] change and forgiveness.  When we do that, then we discover the joy of our truest selves, by transforming our hearts to love, seek peace, and walk in companionship with the poor and the marginalized.

Finally, I believe, as a new school year begins, we share with Moses a hope that our children will have the blessings of life.  We pray they will enter into a place where we no longer have to carry them but that they will enter and claim the inheritance, that God has for them.  May our worship and life show our children the wisdom and justice of God’s teaching, so they may trust in God’s promises and receive abundant life.

Let us never forget;

This is my father’s world, and to my listening ears

All nature sings and round me rings

The music of the spheres.

This is my father’s world; i rest me in the thought

Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas.

His hand the wonders wrought.

[ELW 824 v. 1]

And so;

We lift our voices, we lift our hands,

We lift our lives up to you:

We are an offering.

Lord, use our voices, lord, use our hands,

Lord use our lives, they are yours:

We are an offering.

All we have, all we are,

All that we hope to be,

We give to you; we give to you.

We lift our voices, we lift our hands,

We lift our lives up to you:

We are an offering.

 we are an offering.

[ELW 692]

Amen