Who is the greatest

Sermon, by Pastor Joel

Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

September 22, 2024

Jeremiah 11:18-20

Psalm 54

James 3:13—4:3, 7-8a

Mark 9:30-37

The context of this sermon is

100% written by a human

Humanity has a bad habit that we cannot seem to give up. It is a habit that we know is bad for us, for those around us, for the world we live in. This habit endangers our very future as a species, and yet we struggle to give it up. We struggle because it’s the way it has always been done. We struggle because it costs money and time and sacrifice to change it – which is the way of most insidious bad habits. What’s more, this bad habit will require the most fortunate to give up more than the least. To break our habit of consuming fossil fuels at the cost of the world, the greatest - as the disciples say in our gospel this morning - will have to sacrifice the most.

This weekend, some of our members participated in a rally for a treaty that hopes to address our use of fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and gas are responsible for 86% of all carbon emissions in the past decade. Scientists warn us that if we don’t change our ways, temperatures will continue to rise above what is liveable for human civilizations: our cities will become unbearably hot, the oceans will rise, and the forests will burn – even more than they already are.

Yet this treaty recognizes that we can’t just give up a habit cold turkey. We also can’t give up a habit just by talking about it. First, we have to stop making it worse – in this case, by not expanding the use of fossil fuels. We have to give and receive support, with nations with the capacity helping those without transition more smoothly into forms of green energy. And we need to ensure that this happens in a just way – with new green-energy jobs and opportunities – so that people, and countries, are not left unfairly behind.

And yet, how often, even when it comes to our bad habits, are we just like those disciples, bickering about who is the greatest? Let’s pause here for a moment, because what is this argument really about? The disciples on the walk between towns have to sheepishly admit to Jesus the nature of their argument. But what did they mean by “greatest”? Was it who had been a disciple the longest? Who was the most pious? Who was the best at crowd control? Who was the most generous? Who was the best healer? Or was it something smaller: who was the most loved by Jesus?

In the end, isn’t that what most of our “who’s the greatest” conversations come to? Praise and adoration. We want to feel secure and loved and safe. And we have translated that in our world to mean wealthy and ambitious and successful. That drive for wealth has led to larger houses that need more air conditioning and fancier cars that use more gas. It has led countries to measure value not by the happiness of their people, or by the functioning of the care their systems provide, but by the size of their economies, and how many Fortune 500 companies exist within their borders. The economy is important, and a healthy one drives innovation and creativity, but it must be balanced against care for humanity and the world – indeed, a fossil fuel treaty seeks to create that better, more sustainable balance.

If you think about it for us as disciples, arguing about who is the greatest is never sustainable: someone seemingly greater usually comes along. There’s a reason why the trophies we win usually have little meaning to our children and grandchildren: their value falls the minute they have been walked or driven off the lot by the receiver, so to speak. But then we also have to ask ourselves how we measure greatness. Surely the disciples ran into this problem. In fact, if you consider the list of qualities that define greatness, isn’t the joke on them? Didn’t the gospel require a helping of all those “great” qualities to come together?

Jesus settles the discussion once and for all. Whoever wants to be first of all must be the last of all. Because the gospel is not about awards and accolades; it is about service. And then Jesus placed a child among the disciples, and said, “Whoever welcomes this child, welcomes me.” Surely, he meant this lesson on several levels: A child requires selfless love and care. A child offers love purely. A child sees the world as it could be, and yet might be.

And is this not the place where we need to get to solve so many of the problems we face – not just our own individual problems, but the larger daunting ones we need to solve together. We cannot be clambering over one another as the disciples were, for fame and glory. We must break the habit of seeing “the greatest” as a goal unto itself. We must redefine what is great in acts of service, kindness, and generosity.

Whoever wants to be first must be last. After all, if we are all trying to make room and space for someone else, if we are all giving our space in line to another, and if we are all sharing what we have, then the result may be that no one is the greatest. But we will all be good. And that child placed among the disciples will know a better world.  Amen.

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.