The Second Commandment says, "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:4).  While taken on its own this is merely a prohibition on worshipping images of things from the creation, when taken together with the revelation of God in Jesus of Nazareth, it takes on new layers of significance.

We humans seem to naturally look around us to find things to worship.  When we are little children we will worship our parents.  Later we will worship the "cool" kids in school, or perhaps a teacher who inspires us.  Later yet, we will worship the objects of our romantic love, or perhaps famous people who are beautiful, or strong, or powerful, or rich.  Inevitably, because of its importance to life style, we also come to worship money.

People in pre-agricultural and agricultural societies, of course, also turned to nature.  They worshipped animals that seemed strong or powerful or were important to their economy.  They worshipped the forces of nature over which they had no control.  Of course they also would have looked to people in a worshipful way, more notably important ancestors and of course their kings, who really could seem like gods walking the earth.

The Second Commandment warns us about all this, and reminds us that no matter how powerful, important, or lovable and wonderful someone or something is in the physical universe, it is not God.  To worship it as though it were God would be to engage in the most dangerous kind of self-deception.  You see, people will do just about anything for the someone or something they treat as their god: they will even kill others or sacrifice themselves.

So it is crucially important for each of us to keep straight who God is, and what and who God is not.

Today is called Christ the King Sunday.  It is the last Sunday of the Church Year before we move into Advent and the beginning of the next cycle of festivals and readings.  The name "Christ the King" is an ironic and paradoxical name that plays very intentionally on our preconceived notions of kingship, and the way in which Christ is king.

The Gospel reading for today takes us back to Golgotha, the place of the skull, to the crucifixion, to the cross where Jesus hangs scoffed at and powerless.  This is the throne room of Christ, and his throne, and his court.  It is a place of punishment where an innocent man hangs, accused of treason against the Roman Empire and its puppet kings by having claimed to be "King of the Jews."

But he does not call down vengeance or punishment from his throne.  No, this is God's mercy seat.  Jesus calls down forgiveness, compassion, and understanding.  This is Christ the King, our ruler, our master, our teacher.  This is the right image of God.  To use the liturgical and theological language of Eastern Orthodox Christianity: When God said, "You shall not make an idol of anything in heaven or on earth to bow down and worship," it was because God was preparing to give us the image which we should worship, and on which we should pattern our lives: Christ the crucified king!

If you know anything of the history of Christianity, you will know immediately how often we, who claim the name of Jesus, missed this lesson.  There is something invigorating, especially for men raised in warrior societies -- like that of ancient Scandinavia, or Medieval Europe, or even more recently in the world of nation states locked in cold and hot wars with each other -- there is something invigorating about feeling yourself associated with a king or a nation that gives you the sense of being powerful or superior.  It is, as it were, an old Satanic plot which tempts us to look at God and make the same comparisons.  "If God is King, then it must mean that God wants us to fight!"

Indeed the Old Testament is full of examples of "the people of God" fighting their enemies, and God telling them to go to war.  I find it fascinating that while the Church was still a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, and for a little while after that, they insisted that these Old Testament passages were meant to be take spiritually, not literally.  They were meant to be understood as the battle against the enemies on the inside: hatred, gluttony, avarice, vainglory, greed, violent tendencies, and so on.  Even in the 300's, when Christianity was quickly on its way to becoming the exclusive religion of the Empire, many teachers of the Church still wrote entire treatises interpreting Psalms and other parts of the Old Testament in this way.

But power is tempting, and, in the ugly world of power politics, the needs of empire outweigh the truth which is Jesus Christ, the king who hangs on the cross, powerless, forgiving his persecutors.  And so, when kings and emperors claim Christ, and want their subjects to do the same... well, let's just say, it is a combination in which the king who hangs on the cross is quickly made into the king who reigns from his heavenly throne endorsing all manner of practices and customs which support the king or emperor who sits on the earthly throne.  Add nationalism to the mix, and soon every country where Christianity is widely represented is treated as though it were the new Israel, God's nation on earth, entitled to do whatever nations do, but now with God's blessing to boot.

But go back to the king who hangs on the cross.  Go back to that throne room called Golgotha, the skull place.  Go back to our king's proclamations: forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing; you will be with me in paradise.  It is the embodiment of God's power active in human weakness.  The Apostle Paul recognized it, so, as he write in I Corinthians, he "decided to know nothing... except Jesus Christ and him crucified."  he says that he "came in weakness and in fear and in much trembling... with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power so that [their] faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on the power of God" (I Corinthians 2:1-5).  Or as he says in a more famous passage a few lines earlier, "we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength" (I Corinthians 1:23-25).

We have to be careful then which idols we construct in our heads.  The image we have of God, the way we image God to be king, for instance, plays itself out in how we think we're supposed to live out our faith, and how we think the world around us is supposed to be.  It sets out what we expect of God, and what we think God is expecting of us.  Let your image of God be the image given to us by God: Jesus Christ, the king who rules as one who gives his life for the life of the world.  Amen.

As we approach the end of the Church Year, our lessons increasingly include end-time references such as those in today's Gospel reading.  Jesus warns that the Great Temple at Jerusalem, which had been under construction for over 40 years and was still not completely finished, would one day be a mere pile of rubble.  He warned that wars and disasters would come, and that somehow these would mark the approach of some end, but it would be the persecution of his followers that would be most notable.

As various scholars have pointed out since the rise of modern Biblical research in the 1800's, Jesus and the first few generations of his followers were convinced that God would bring about the final judgment any day.   There was an urgency about their proclamation because of this sense of the impending end.  The later layers of the New Testament preserve for us a phenomenon which scholars call "eschaton collapse."  In Biblical Greek, the word for "the end" is eschaton, so scholars speak of "the eschaton" and of "eschatology."  When the eschaton seemed much delayed, the early Christians had to rethink their purpose.  It was no longer to get ready for a quick end, but rather to endure for an unknown length of time, perhaps their entire lives, remaining faithful to their calling.  Already in II Peter 3:8, which is a paraphrase of Psalm 90:4, we find the words "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like one day," allowing for a multi-thousand year delay in the matter.

Nevertheless, many Christians over the centuries have recognized the urgency in the New Testament texts, and have believed that the eschaton was going to take place in their own life times.  Other Christians then stood by and watched as these end-time enthusiasts were disappointed and shamed when the end did not come.  Even today there are still many who have a sense of the closeness of the end.  One of the most popular fiction series on the United States today is a series which portrays the return of Christ, the cataclysmic eschaton, as taking place now.

Throughout the centuries, Christian teachers and scholars have tried to respond to the apparent disconnect between the urgency of Jesus and Paul's eschatology and the reality of our historical experience.  Gregory of Nyssa, who lived in the 300's, speculated that the end would not come until all humans had come into being, completing the human race.  He adopted a mystical view of the eschaton, as a completion of the corporate entity "humanity", because, as he pointed out, Jesus had come to redeem the entire human race, not just those who lived at or before his time.

In the heady days of the Great Awakening and the missionary movement of the 1800's, (and some today still hold to this) it was believed that every group of people had to be reached with the Gospel before Jesus would return.  Thus the urgency of Jesus and Paul was transferred into the missionary societies of the day.  It is interesting that this way of thinking has parallels in the Orthodox Jewish idea that God's Messiah will come on the Sabbath when every Jew keeps the Sabbath perfectly.  It is the idea of the need for human cooperation of some sort to bring about the end.

Other teachers, perhaps most, have either ignored the eschatological urgency, or tried to maintain a tension between the now and not yet of the breaking in of the Kingdom of God.  You'll notice that most classic Protestant statements of faith from the Reformation say very little or nothing about the end.  Perhaps for this reason the most notable and reputable early 20th century theologians took this tack as well.

Hans Küng, the famous Roman Catholic Swiss scholar who won notoriety in the 1970's and Œ80's when the Vatican tried to silence him (but being employed by the state run University of Tübingen in southern Germany continued to teach) makes an interesting distinction in his most well known work, "On Being a Christian."  He believes that Jesus was simply wrong about the end.  He made a mistake.  he says that the bible says that Jesus was without sin, not that he was infallible.  He says that if Jesus was truly human, then he had to be wrong sometimes, because that's part of being human.  Jesus even says, it is not for him to know when the end will come, but only for the Father.  He, Jesus, has rather come to restore the lost and proclaim the Kingdom of God.

Now for some, Küng's distinction will seem troubling, unnerving, even outrageous and anger-provoking, because it violates their deeply held view of Jesus as not only sinless, but completely flawless.  On the other hand, I find this view of Jesus rather freeing, and allows me to come back to the heart of his message, instead of being sidetracked by what has become a huge distraction for so many.

The heart of Jesus teaching was the kingdom of God breaking into our lives here and now, regardless of when the eschaton might be.  In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the Sermon on the Plain in Luke; in the parables, which surely form the core form of his teaching; in his lived examples of compassion, healing, forgiveness, as well as his harsh critique of anyone who divides, excludes, condemns, or puts on airs, what we are seeing is the Kingdom of God breaking into people's lives in the present.  God is at work, in Jesus, and in those who live as he lives, creating shalom, peace, sabbath, jubilee, one person at a time.

And yet even with Küng's rethinking of this matter, there is still an urgency in this picture, because each person is only on this earth for a limited time, and for all those who suffer from oppression, war, famine, violence, and other ills, their end, their personal eschaton, is near, merely decades away at the most.  Who will embody the Kingdom of God for them?  If the end is not near for the earth as a whole (and our current ecological situation makes one wonder) it is certainly just around the corner (so to speak) for each of us, and for every living human.

But beware not to hang your hopes on the earthly symbols of our faith, because they will all, like this church, like hope Lutheran's building, like the Temple in Jerusalem, fall to ruin and rubble; but the Kingdom of God knows no end, because it is itself the end of all things.  Amen.

One of the great debates during the time of Jesus was, whether there was a resurrection of the body or not.  The Sadducees believed that death was final, and that any "life after death" was carried on in one's descendants.  By contrast, the Pharisees believed that at the last judgment, God would raise the dead physically, and restore Israel.  In the reading today, Jesus seems to take up the basic idea of the Pharisees, but he expresses it in his own way, emphasizing that the "resurrection" is not merely a resurrection into this world, but into something different, something akin to the realm of angels.

This controversy continues today, not only among religious people of different stripes, both Christian and non-Christian, but also among people who are non-religious.  What happens after you die?  Is there a God or isn't there?  To me all this raises a larger issue, one that often gets overlooked because it is in the background of these debates, and not in the foreground.  The question for me is: Does something like a spiritual plane or realm exist, or is reality merely what we observe in the physical universe?  I think this is the background question to every debate about the existence of God, life after death, paranormal experiences and so on.  In all of those debates, each person holds, sometimes spoken, but usually unspoken, a set of assumptions about the nature of the universe we live in, and therefore the nature of our lives and our experiences.

Let's be clear from the outset that belief in God is an act of faith, and is not something arrived at through philosophical or scientific proofs.  By the same token, to say there is no God is also a statement of faith, of trust that, although it cannot be proven, God does not exist.  But underneath this is still the more subtle question: Is the universe only what we can observe with our eyes and ears and touch, and with our tools for measuring energy, or is it possible that there is something more, something of a nonphysical nature or dimension?  You could say that the debate over the existence of God is only the most crass version of this underlying question.

Since Einstein proposed his General Theory of Relativity in the early part of the 20th century, and Heisenberg the Theory of Quantum Mechanics at mid-century, the scientists who study the universe have tried to do two things: test the theories to see if they work, and adjust the theories to correspond to what is observed.  Today we are finding that as we probe deeper into the origins of the universe, while also probing deeper into the tiniest particles of matter and energy, that we are left with as many questions as answers, and that ever new theories have to be put forward to try to account for what we see.

Along the way some theories propose phenomena which we cannot observe, but which help to account for what is seen.  So we have the theory about "dark matter" and the theory about parallel universes and multiverses and so on.  It seems that even physics has to look to the unseen and the unmeasurable in order to make sense of the universe.

Of course, these physicists are not interested in the realm of the spirit.  They are merely interested in accounting for physical phenomena, even if they appeal to the invisible to do it.  I think our task is very different, but that we can take our cue from the physicists and their use of theories in order to understand.

What do I mean?  The experience of the spiritual or numinous seems to be a fairly universal human experience, going back to our stone age ancestors.  In every society we that we are able to study, there are always shamans, religious specialists, spiritual teachers, and people who sense some connexion to something beyond.  That doesn't mean that every individual in every society experiences the spiritual side of things, but rather that every society has individuals who experience something we would call the spiritual or the numinous, and this seems to go back to the beginnings of our species.

You can look at this phenomenon as either a merely psychological phenomenon, something that arises only because of some peculiarity of the human brain, or you can see at it as examples of human beings touching something that stands beyond ordinary experience.

When, not too many years ago, brain researches identified an area of the brain they dubbed the "God spot" where it seems religious and ecstatic experience is located in our brains, many saw this as a sign that religious experience is merely psychological.  My immediate reaction was to say, well, if God did create us in God's image, and of all creatures we are supposed to be some sort of  bridge between the physical and the spiritual realms (notice my underlying assumptions about the universe and the human creature), then of course there would be a structure in our brains designed to respond.  Interestingly, the "God spot" is right next to the music centre in our brains, music being another uniquely human phenomenon, and the one with which most people will associate something like religious experience, even if they are not religious people.

Nevertheless, as I listen to people and talk to my colleagues, it seems to me that we in our scientific and materialistic society, having been brought up in a world view which assumes that only the material world is real, and that everything else is "just in your head"; that we have largely abandoned the idea of the existence of a spiritual dimension or spiritual plane or world of the numinous.  Even those of us who believe in God will limit it to that, limit our acceptance of the beyond to God, and then struggle to reconcile our materialistic world view with the nonmaterial entity called God; or we may even carry an essentially material image of God in our minds, trying to figure out where God is in the universe, and how God can be everywhere all at once and ask questions like "who made God?" and so on.

I think this is a problem.  I think we need to go back to the blackboard, like the physicists, and revisit our working theories (by which I mean, the theories we carry in our heads to explain things to ourselves).  A lot of what I consider nonsensical arguments by religious people trying to use the Bible to insist on this or that understanding of the physical world and its origins, arise because underneath it all, they believe that only the physical dimensions are real, and so for the Bible to be meaningful, it has to be "right" about physics.

But I think the Bible is rather more concerned with the way the spiritual realm intersects the physical, and what that does to us as people.  My working definition of the Bible is, "One people's attempt to discern and understand the hand of God in their lives and in their history."  In other words, the Bible is the record of Israel's encounters with the Divine, and it bears the stamp of their attempts to attach meaning and purpose to those encounters.  I believe that the encounters with God and the numinous were very real, but that their interpretation or the meaning they attached to those encounters, were very much shaped by their culture, their historical circumstances, and their personal issues.  The creation account in Genesis 1 is not a piece of physics, but rather a highly stylized poem filled with insights into the way God meets us. The story of the Garden of Eden on Genesis 2 and 3 is a brilliant exploration of the human condition, told with the genius of a master story teller.  All through the Bible we are being offered glimpses onto the realm beyond, as it breaks into our realm here, and therefore shapes us as we live in this world.

But to begin to see beyond the physical letter of the Bible to encounter the spirit that lies beyond it requires a working theory which leaves room for this.   If what we see is all that there is, then indeed, the choice is only between the Sadduceeic view that death is it, even if there is a God, or the Pharisaic view that in the future God will or may set things right and bring us back.  But Jesus says that the dead are alive now to God, and that the resurrection is into something beyond the ordinary.  I think Jesus has some other framework operating here, one that I am curious about.

I would love to be able to have these discussions at this level: the level of underlying assumptions and framework, rather than at the level of particular conclusions or positions.  It would be interesting to see where our discussions would lead us, and how we might see many things, including the words of Scripture, in new ways.  That would be truly inspiring.  Amen.

      Who is rich and who is poor?  In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus pronounces blessing on the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are excluded, reviled, and defamed on account of Jesus.  Then Jesus pronounces woes on those who are rich, who are full, who laugh, and who are spoken well of.

It's a jarring passage, and taken on its own, without the larger context of Jesus' ministry, it could be misunderstood to be a general declaration about the state of the groups listed.  So, who is rich and who is poor?

Jesus, in this passage, is speaking specifically to his disciples.  This is not a general address to a random crowd, but is rather a set of teachings and exhortations directed at the people who are already his followers.  Contrary to the common image portrayed in Bible movies, Jesus seems to have travelled with a fairly large group of people most of the time.  If the sending of the 70 is any indication, there were at least 82, and possibly more who made up what Luke calls "the disciples".  The smaller group we usually think of as the disciples are generally referred to as "the twelve" or sometimes as "the apostles" in Luke's narrative.

Based on Jesus' comments in today's reading, the larger group of disciples may have consisted of quite a cross-section of society: wealthy and impoverished, influential and powerless, men and women, perhaps even slaves.  It would fit with the way Jesus reached out to all, that he should have all kinds in his entourage.  This also seems to have carried over into the life of the early Church in the decades following the crucifixion.

So who is rich and who is poor?  What does Jesus mean by these blessings and woes?  Jesus said on other occasions, that if anyone wanted to follow him, they would have to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow (Luke 9:23 and parallels in Matthew and Mark).  Luke gives a series of incidents when either Jesus calls someone to follow him, or someone asks to follow, but when they hear about the consequences of following Jesus, they apparently change their minds.  (Luke 9:57-62 parallel Matthew 8:18-22)  To one of these, Jesus warns that it will mean sleeping outdoors and always being on the move.  To two others who had unfinished family business, he tells them to leave it all behind and just come and follow him right now.  This is an interesting contrast to the stories we have of the "twelve" who do indeed leave everything behind at a moment's notice and follow Jesus.

The call to follow that Jesus issued to the people he met was a call to leave everything behind, take up the cross of discipleship, and follow.  Jesus can say that someone who is poor, or who has lost their loved ones, or who doesn't even have a morsel to eat is peculiarly blessed and well equipped to answer his call to follow.  Much of what would keep them from answering his call has already been taken away from them.  They are indeed free to respond.

By contrast, those who have property, family, and more than enough to eat, will have a harder time denying themselves and taking up that cross.  They have much more to lose.  They have to work harder to let go. In this way the poor are blessed, and the rich are at a distinct disadvantage.

But material wealth is only one piece of this picture.  Following Jesus is not only about the shedding of material goods.  It is also about a shedding of inner baggage.  That is where the second part of today's reading comes in.

To "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you," and "pray for those who abuse you," means to leave behind all hatred, resentment, desire for revenge, and any violent inclinations.  It may be that someone who has no material possessions, may harbour a great storehouse of bitterness and anger toward others, while someone who has many possessions may be of very loving and gentle disposition.  The call to follow Jesus is a call to the whole person, inside and out.  It is a challenge for the body, but it is also a challenge for the mind and the spirit.

So what do we do with all that today?  Jesus does not walk our country roads with his 80 or more hangers on in tow.  I think it is too much to assume that Jesus' call to shed everything was meant for everyone, when even in the time of his ministry he often told people to stay put and proclaim the kingdom of God in their own towns and villages.  How do you apply these words here and now?

First, I do believe that God still calls some people to leave everything behind and follow in the way of Jesus in the way that say a Mother Theresa or a Father Damian did.  Room must be left for that as a possibility.

Second, I think for those of us who do not feel the call to drop everything and embrace a life of total simplicity, we can still learn at the Master's feet.  We in Canada are among the wealthy in the world.  Even those who live in poverty in our society, can access a lifestyle which for hundreds of millions in this world would seem luxurious compared to the famine, violence, and displacement they experience.  And those of us who are "middle class" live like royalty compared to these same hundreds of millions.  We are always in danger of being possessed by our possessions.  Our things can run our lives.  Jesus' woes can be a stark reminder that real meaning and real purpose in life come from God, not from stuff.

Third, the call to abandon hatred, resentment, the desire for revenge, and violent inclinations, can be a reminder that these emotions contaminate our spirits.  All these tendencies, if acted on, produce evil.  It is not love that kills thousands every year in wars and bombings.  It is not love that drives the endless cycle of violence and revenge between Israel and the Palestinians.  It is not love that drives estranged lovers to kill each other.  All this comes from hatred, resentment, the desire for vengeance, and the readiness to perpetrate violence.  In our own ways, we have a tremendous influence on our circles of family, friends, neighbours, associates, and colleagues.  If we are able to shed these hateful tendencies and embrace the spirit of Christ, the kingdom of God, that will make a big difference for many whom we know.

So who is rich, and who is poor?  Those who are rich in the ways of God are truly rich, regardless of any other measure of wealth.  Amen.

      In today's reading from John, Jesus says, "...you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.Reformation  Later on in John's Gospel, Jesus and Pontius Pilate have a conversation in which Jesus says, "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world: to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth, listens to my voice," to which Pilate responds with the question, "What is truth?" (18:37-38).  In between these two, when Jesus is talking to his disciples over that last meal before he was arrested, he says to them, "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.  If you know me, you will know my Father also.  From now on, you do know him and have seen him," (14:6-7).

There a many kinds of truth, and each has its own benefits, uses, and advantages, as well as its own limitations.

The first kind that comes to mind is propositional truth, the truth we traditionally associate with theology and philosophy, but which is also used in political movements and other ideologies. This is the kind of truth based on statements or assertions. Propositional truth is perhaps the most dangerous kind of truth because it seeks to persuade and convince without much self-critique.  In theology, propositional truth leads to doctrines and dogmas.  It does the same in philosophy, so, just as we get rival church groups arguing with each other, we can get rival schools of philosophy competing for followers: Platonists and Neoplatonists, Aristotelians, Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, Cynics, Existentialists, Materialists, Atheists, and so on.  The main power and advantage of propositional truth is that it serves to give meaning, because the propositions usually have to do with the big questions of purpose: why are we here? what is the purpose of life? and so on.

Another kind of truth is factual truth, which is to say, the truth of facts.  Here a little caution is necessary.  Most of what people think are facts, are actually assumptions, theories, hypotheses, or hunches.  You will  notice that careful scientists, interested in sorting out fact from other kinds of knowledge, will often be hesitant to make big categorical statements about things.  They will often preface their remarks with phrases like, "the evidence points to," or " our research seems to suggest" or "this theory accounts for most variables to date."  The scientists who are more aggressive in their assertions, the ones who usually get on TV and the Radio, tend to overstate things, which makes them great celebrities, but sloppy scientists.  The discipline of history, which is my own academic background, is notorious for people portraying interpretation as fact.  Usually this kind of history is used to promote the kinds of political ideologies I mentioned under propositional truth.  For them, historical research takes a back seat to the needs of their ideology or nationalism.

Another kind of truth is the truth of experience: experiential truth.  Each of us carries a huge amount of truth in us out of the simple "fact" that we live and have experiences.  We know experiential truth, not so much in our heads as in our beings.   Now, here again, a word of caution.  Because we humans have such an amazing, creative brain, we also bring all kinds of interpretation to our experiences, so that, although there is always truth to our experiences, there is also a certain amount of falsehood or self-deception to our interpretation of these experiences.  Notice how four different people, in the same place, having the same experience, will later describe that experience in four unique ways.  This is because each brings his or her own prior experiences, prejudices, interests, and assumptions to the experience, filtering the experience accordingly, and then recalling it under further, usually unintentional, editing.

Finally, there is revealed truth, revelation.  Revealed truth is a kind of knowledge, sometimes more in the heart or gut than in the head, that seems to come from somewhere outside of one's own range of knowledge, theory, or experience.  Traditionally, as Christians, we believe that the foundations of our faith are revealed, and not derived from logic or research, though they are in some way always experienced.  Because revealed truth has so much potential to be faked or misunderstood, the Church has decided that the collection of writings we call the Bible will be the rule and norm for revealed truth, and therefore the reality check.  Here, in response to the explosive thing called revelation, propositional truth, factual truth, and experiential truth come together to form theology.  People don't make theology to be malicious, but to put boundaries around revelation.

Jesus says that the truth will set you free.  He says that he has come to bear witness to the truth, and that he is himself the truth.  He says that to see him is to see God, whom he calls "the Father."  He implies that this is truth.

I find this intriguing, because so much debate and rhetoric that Christians get involved in, either with each other over finer theological disputes, or with those outside of the Christian tradition, about the "truth" of Christianity, are about propositions or facts.  We keep looking for truth in propositions, facts, experiences, or we use revelation as though it were bringing propositional, factual, or experiential truth.  But I think there is something more subtle behind Jesus' words.

All the other truths (propositional, factual, experiential, and the way we usually treat revealed truth) are about our control of the world and universe around us.  We use our perceived grasp on "truth" to claim our place in the debate; and, as a species, to assert our presence in the universe.

Jesus is talking about something different.  Today's Psalm has the famous verse, "Be still, and know that I am God."  I think Jesus is communicating something about himself and God which is not about us asserting our control of anything or anyone, but rather about us stopping to see and be.  Jesus is saying that if you want to see how God is, look at him.  If you want to see what truth is, look at him.  Everything you really need to know to be the human which God created you to be, you will know by stopping, seeing, taking in, and processing internally, Jesus.

For lack of a better term, I think Jesus is talking about transformative truth.  The more I immerse myself in Jesus, in his life, his words, his presence with me now, the more I am transformed.  In some way it is deeply experiential, but if you were to say, "Well, describe your experience," I would have to respond, "You had to be there."  It is a kind of experiential truth that must be experienced.  It is not the kind where I can say, "Because this and such happened to me, I can now with confidence tell everyone what they should do."  Rather, all I can say is, like the first disciples at the beginning of John's Gospel, "Come and see."  I can only become a kind of symbol, pointing to the reality, the truth, that I have come to represent, but I can't contain it, package it, market it, and certainly I can't control or explain it. Once you have tasted the truth of who Jesus is, this transformative truth, you begin to see how all the other kinds of truth are prisons of the mind and of the senses.  They can each be useful in their own ways, but their impact on our lives range from deceptive to indifferent.  A propositional truth can lead you astray, and a fact is just a fact.  The transformative truth of Jesus, however, puts your experiences into a new, clearer light, and frees you from self-deception and blame.  Yes, the truth will set you free, but you must see and meet that truth yourself.  No one can do it for you.  Amen.

      One little verse in our second reading, verse 16, is at the centre of a lot of debate about the nature of Holy Scripture, and how we are supposed to treat it and use it.  The verse says that "All scripture (is) God-inspired and (is) useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and leading in righteousness..." (my own literal translation).  But this verse belongs very much with what follows, namely the words, "...so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped in every good work."

While the Bible has always been important to Christianity, as the central source of revelation and inspiration, the obsession with "inerrancy" and "infallibility" is a relatively recent phenomenon -- in the last 500 years out of a 2000 year history.  This obsession with the "inerrancy" and "infallibility" of the Bible coincides with the rise of modern science, and the rise of a materialistic worldview that accompanied the rise of science.  By materialistic, I don't mean consumerism, rather I mean the notion that the material universe is the only real universe, and that anything that might be thought of as spiritual is "just a way of talking" about material realities.

Simply put, as science got to the bottom of physical reality, defenders of the Bible bought into this mindset and felt as though the Bible should also stand up to scientific standards.  That's too bad, because it hollowed out the Bible, leaving its form for people to argue over, but robbing it of its heart, which is that it is a window on spiritual things.  But of course, if you don't think spiritual things are really real, but are just "ways of talking about" certain physical phenomena, then for you such a spiritual heart won't seem to exist in the Bible.

So the debate over this little verse is about what is meant by "God-inspired" and "useful".  Those who seem to be shouting the loudest have been saying that this verse means that the Bible can't be wrong, and that in some way God dictated the Bible to the people who wrote it.  But you know, that's not what the verse says.  In fact, asking the question, "Is the Bible right or wrong?" is asking the wrong question of this verse.  This little verse is merely asking, "Is the Bible useful, and can God be found in it?"

For the first many centuries of the Christian Church, the dominant school of Bible interpretation insisted that the literal meaning of scripture was merely a vehicle for conveying a deeper spiritual reality.  The Bible's main role was to lift people's hearts to prayer, to guide them in their living, and to proclaim Jesus Christ, God incarnate, Lord and Saviour.  Certainly, for lack of any other history, most people treated the Bible as historical fact, and yet they usually added that the history really wasn't the point, rather, the teaching and guidance for living was the point, the history was largely incidental.  But the contradictions and apparent impossibilities in the Bible were already apparent to these early Bible interpreters.

In the early 200's, the great Origen, Christianity's first top notch scholar and philosopher, put it this way:
What person of intelligence will believe that the first, second, and third days and evenings and mornings existed without the sun, moon, and stars?... And who is so silly as to believe that God... planted a paradise eastward in Eden, and set in it a visible and palpable tree of life such that anyone who tasted its fruit would gain life; and again that a person could partake of good and evil by chewing the fruit taken from the tree of the same name?  And when God is said to walk in the cool of the day and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think that anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events... Even the gospels are full of passages of this kind, as when the devil takes Jesus up to a high mountain in order to show him from there the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them... Our contention with regard to the whole of divine scripture is, that it all has a spiritual meaning, but it does not all have a bodily meaning; for the bodily meaning is often proved to be an impossibility.  Consequently, the person who reads the divine books reverently, believing them to be divine writings, must exercise great care.... Truths have been concealed in narratives, for the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which, when a person finds it, hides it, and out of joy at finding it, goes and sells all and buys the field... These treasures require for their discovery the help of God, who alone is able to break into pieces the gates... that conceal them... (On First Principles, Book IV, Chapter III)

Morton Kelsey, in his 1970's book "The Other Side of Silence" develops extensively the use of Biblical images as tools for meditation and inner healing.  It is not the historical "fact" which Kelsey finds important, but rather the deep archetypal images and metaphors of the stories to put us in touch with the inner spiritual reality of ourselves, and out of this to inspire us to live lives of love for others; a love arising out of the love of God which we experience internally from reflecting and meditating on these scriptural images.

Both Morton Kelsey and Origen take/took the inspired nature of the Bible very seriously, even though both come from different theoretical frameworks.  Morton Kelsey finds tremendous overlap between the Bible and the work of the great clinical psychologist Carl Jung.  Origen found his inspiration in the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy.  And yet the two of them have more in common with each other in their symbolic and metaphorical use of scripture, than either of them would have in common with the school of thought that finds itself forced to try to "prove" the Bible "right".  Once you stop trying to make the Bible into a scientific text book or historical chronicle in the modern sense, and allow it to function on a spiritual level, it is amazing how the Bible becomes a universal set of texts, touching the human experience at every level, resonating with many different disciplines and spiritual traditions.

I would go so far as to say that the Bible is neither right nor wrong, because the question, "Is the Bible right"" is again the wrong question.  Rather, the Bible is a powerful, transformative source of God's inspiration for those who, as Origen said, "read the divine books reverently, believing them to be divine writings."  Faith, and an attitude of inner engagement with the texts, is what opens their power -- their spiritual power -- to us.  I think this is what our little verse from II Timothy is getting at as well.

Hear it again: "All scripture (is) God-inspired and (is) useful for teaching, reproof, correction, and leading in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped in every good work."  The emphasis is not on right or wrong, but on the usefulness of scripture to teach, correct, and guide us so that we become equipped for the good.  In other words, it's about the power of scripture to help us become what God wants us to be.  Amen.

      There are two attitudes toward life which stand in opposition to each other.  The one is an attitude of "not enough".  It is a mindset which is forever dissatisfied with what is, and is always looking for something more.  The other is an attitude of thanksgiving.  This is a mindset which receives all things as gift.

The attitude of "not enough" is the attitude which is promoted in the marketplace and in advertisement.  It is, sadly, the attitude on which our economy is based.  "Not enough" is a meditation on inadequacy.  It is a meditation which produces the inner sensation that somehow life would better if something more or newer or fancier could be had, be it a car, a house, an entertainment centre, a game, clothes, experiences, a church, a job, etc.; or someone else could be found rather than the people who are currently in one's life: a different spouse, a different main squeeze, a different set of parents, a different set of kids, a different set of acquaintances, and so on.

The "not enough" meditation generates a restless and unsettled feeling.  It also blinds a person to the goodness of what is.  So often we are looking for something, but we can't figure out what.  We carry in us a general sense of dissatisfaction and yearn for something better, though we're unclear what that "better" looks like.

"Not enough" has an impact on the people around us.  Often we project our sense of "not enough" on our friends, our colleagues, our children, our parents, our siblings.  "If only he or she would do a better job, or be nicer to me, or leave me alone, I would be happier."  "Not enough" expects the other person to change, but is reluctant to change itself.

Ultimately, "not enough" is the soul's yearning to be filled by God, but our consciousness mistakes this yearning for a need to have something or someone here in the material world.  "Not enough" is looking for God in all the wrong places.

The attitude of thanksgiving is an island of calm in the troubled sea of "not enough".  A mind which has been trained to give thanks receives everything as a gift and discovers undiscovered beauty.  Thanksgiving is a meditation on the goodness and the sufficiency of what is.

Rather than seeking something other, thanksgiving studies all the advantages of what is: the little old house is a cozy home; the rattly car is transportation; the TV and stereo bring entertainment and music; the games at hand bring diversion; these clothes are comfortable and enough; the people I am with are good and on the twisting path of life with me; my place of worship feeds me in this and that way; my work provides for my material needs.

The mind of thanksgiving spills over into our relationships.   As we are able to give thanks for little things, we become more at ease and at peace within ourselves, and have more room for others to be flawed, to make mistakes, and to receive our compassion and love.  Thanksgiving looks to God and looks within itself to find happiness.  It adapts itself rather than waiting for others to change.   In this, it is not unlike Paul's definition of love in the famous "love chapter": patient, kind, not envious, not insisting on its own way, and so on.

Ultimately, thanksgiving arises when the soul has begun to make a connection with God.  Consciously or subconsciously, the soul has begun to discover that there is something deeper than what we see or experience on the surface.  That something, of course, is God.  The mind of thanksgiving really begins to be activated as one pursues that connection to God actively and intentionally.

But is there a time when "not enough" is good and useful, or is "not enough" always to be avoided?  Can "not enough" also be received with thanksgiving?

The restlessness of "not enough", of the misguided search for fulfillment in material things, has given us the technological shangri-la we live in today.  The striving after more and better has created the hyper-affluent societies of the northern hemisphere, societies in which ordinary people have more of everything at their disposal than even the kings and queens of centuries past.  Certainly the mind of thanksgiving for those of us who live here and now can also receive the goodness of this; but will receive it with a certain amount of humility, because the mind of thanksgiving also knows that when one person has, someone, somewhere else in the world does not.  Today, the mind of thanksgiving would also be aware that this very prosperity, arrived at through the impulse of "not enough" has brought about the ecological crisis which we now face -- a humbling fact indeed!

The mind of "not enough" can also be a great help to those who are in dangerous or destructive relationships.  At some point, abuse and violence must be countered with a sense that this simply is not good enough, and the one who suffers must find a better place and better way to live.  Here too, the mind of thanksgiving can see the wisdom and the goodness when "not enough" rescues someone in trouble.

But while the mind of thanksgiving can give thanks for the goodness and wisdom that is even in "not enough", this relationship will not work the other way around.  "Not enough" is inherently dissatisfied, and when we allow ourselves to be run by "not enough" we will see the attitude of thanksgiving as being weak or trite -- in short, not enough.  When "not enough" is the dominant way of thinking and feeling, there is never any peace.  But when thanksgiving is the dominant way of thinking and feeling, there is room even for "not enough" to be applied in a useful way in the right situations.

The reason for this is that God can contain humanity, but humanity cannot contain God.  Our restlessness and dissatisfaction can be absorbed and transformed by God for the good, but God's goodness cannot be contained by our narrow, turned-in-on-self impulses.

So strive to have about you always the mind of thanksgiving.  Let your soul make the connection to God's Spirit within you.  Always be looking for the good, for the gift aspect of all things and all people.  If you do this you will find that slowly many of the situations and people who fell short in your eyes, will be beautiful and good in their own way.  And, if you still need to apply the wisdom of "not enough" in some situations or relationships, you can do so in a kind, patient, and thoughtful way, giving thanks that you are able to do so, for your sake and for theirs.  Amen.

      Today we offer again the Rite of Healing in our Sunday morning worship, so I would like to make a few more observations on the topic of healing and wholeness.  Since our first healing service in April, I have touched on various aspects of healing and wholeness.  Today I will focus on the inner illness that arises from dissatisfaction.

In the reading from I Timothy, Paul commends contentment, and warns Timothy about covetousness and its destructive effect on people.  "...if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these," writes Paul, "But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires."

It seems that one of the things that make us inwardly sick as humans is the sense of dissatisfaction, the hankering for something more.  While it is fair to say that the ability to see a better way to do something has helped our species reach amazing technological, scientific, and cultural achievements, for most people that yearning for something more takes a less helpful form.

In the Ten Commandments it is called "coveting," wanting something that is not yours.  There are several issues with coveting.  One issue is, of course, that it can lead to other sorts of destructive behaviours, such as theft, adultery, making untrue statements about others, and even, in extreme cases, murder.  In other words, when acted upon, the desire to have something that belongs to someone else, can be the impetus for unethical or even criminal acts.

But more generally, for the majority of people, wanting to have something that you do not have, especially when you already have what you need for basic living (in our society most of us have food, clothing, shelter, income, and health care), creates an inner feeling of dissatisfaction, a sort of low grade unhappiness about life.

This low grade unhappiness sends most of us seeking for something better.  "Maybe if I moved to another place, I'd be happier.  Maybe if I had a romantic relationship, I'd be happier.  Maybe if I got out of this relationship, I'd be happier.  Maybe if I had a different job, or different friends, or...or...or...."

This is a kind of sickness of the soul.  It begins to poison everything in our lives.  Often people who feel stuck and can't see a way out, or can't generate enough rationalizations to change things, turn to distractions to deal with this: alcohol, partying, and drugs for some, in order to numb out; busyness and work for others in order to avoid the inner issues.

While the first set of choices has its obvious self-destructive down side, the second set of choices will often seem to go along well for a while, until the emotional absence of the person in question causes problems at home, or the person burns out from becoming overextended.  Either way, it is a sickness in the soul, an inner sickness that is the root cause of these behaviours and attempts at compensating.

The thing we call prayer, what I define very broadly as "coming intentionally into God's presence," or "becoming aware of God's presence in an intentional way,"  is a channel that God uses to seep into our souls and begin to still this hunger, this yearning for something more.  When we say that God gives us inner peace, part of what God does is to bring us to a place of stopping, of resting, of inner sabbath, and find that all we really need God has already provided.  In other words, we can experience a slice of eternity right now, through our encounter with God in prayer.

Most people, of course, use prayer as another way to vent their inner dissatisfaction.  We've all done it: "God, please let me win the lottery and I'll be happier.  I'll give 10% to the church.  God, please get my younger brother to see how wrong he is (implying that I'd be happier if this were to happen)... and so on"  But this is a very superficial kind of prayer that is simply a projection of our inner unhappiness onto God.  It is a prayer of impatience and restlessness.

The deeper prayer of simply becoming present to God, simply being in God's presence and receiving that presence with thanksgiving is a healing kind of prayer.  Through it, God begins to open the eyes of our soul to see the goodness of God at work in unexpected ways.  This is a prayer of patient thanksgiving and peace.

When this part of us can be brought to a place of peace, when our dissatisfaction can be turned to contentment, and our inner restlessness to inner stillness, then we will experience a notable improvement in our sense of well-being, even if in our bodies there is some specific physical ailment or challenge that we are dealing with.  To come to that place of resting in God can help to make the burden of a physical illness seem a little lighter, a little more bearable.

Let us open ourselves to God's stilling presence within us.  Amen.

         I want to tackle this text from I Timothy, which for most of us today would be considered a difficult or controversial or even offensive text -- not the first part of the text (verses 1-7), of course, because it gives voice to the underlying universalism of Paul's preaching about Christ crucified and risen, rather, the second half of today's text (verses 8-17), which seems to somehow turn around and contradict that underlying universalism and simply affirm the status quo of Paul's social world, especially the part that says, "Let a woman (wife) learn in silence with full submission.  I permit no woman (wife) to teach or have authority over a man (husband); she is to keep silent" (verses 11-12).

Verses like these and others found in Paul's letters have been used for centuries to keep women in a position of subservience, and therefore in a position of dependence and vulnerability.  It has only been in the last century, in the western world, that women have been at long last freed from this kind of oppressive regime, and sadly, most of the time, the Church has dragged its feet, kicking and screaming, to try to stop this drift toward the equality of the genders.

So what does one do with such passages as these?  How do you read them?  Are they useful and informative, or are they just an unpleasant irritant?  Do we throw them out and just keep our favourite parts?  But if you throw one passage out, then don't you have to throw all of the Bible out?

I think there are basically three approaches that can be taken toward a passage like I Timothy 2:11-15.

1) To take it literally and equally with other parts of scripture, in which case we either have to obey Paul's instructions or reject the whole package from Genesis to Revelation...
2) To write these sections off as non-Pauline, that is, as not coming from the Apostle, but from the pen of some later author writing in the style of Paul, and therefore not to be taken as seriously as Paul...or
3) To try to understand the passage in its context, and then to look at our own context and see what we can take from it that might be a useful insight for us today.

As you know from my record of preaching and teaching, I do not subscribe to the first line of Biblical interpretation at all.  I think such a black and white way of reading scripture misses the whole point of the Bible, misses the spirit and genius of it, and takes one of, if not the most profound of spiritual textual collections in the world, and reduces it to the banality of a tabloid newspaper or the badly translated instruction manual for the latest "Made in China" electronic gizmo that you just bought.

As to the second approach, the approach which tries to rank the weight or importance of a text by whether it was really from the person it is reputed to be, the one huge problem I see with this is that we then cannot take the Gospels very seriously at all, at least in what they say about Jesus, because they are not by Jesus, but are the retelling of the things Jesus did and said by other people, one of them (Luke) not even an eye witness.  No, I think we have to take all scripture seriously, without taking it all literally, or rather, without using it today as it might have been used a generation or two after it was written.

The third approach makes the most sense to me.  It takes the Bible seriously, as well as taking its roots and origins seriously.  It takes its authors seriously, and tries to understand their place in life and their intentions and motivations.  In other words, this is an approach to scripture which is parallel to the way we have friendships and intimate relationships: we want to get to know the person and everything about them.  We want to understand the person and where they are coming from.

How different it is to hear a trusted friend say, "I don't think you should do that," than to hear a stranger who perhaps holds some office of authority.  When the friend speaks, we think about what our friend has said, but we also know where our friend is coming from.  You can say, "I really trust Kelly, but I think she's wrong on this one."  With a stranger you are only left with being offended for the intrusion.

As I have studied the writings of Paul, and I do think that I Timothy is from Paul (there is a debate about this in scholarly circles), I see Paul doing two things.  First he is proclaiming the transformative power of knowing Christ.  From this perspective he seems to be writing mostly out of his own conversion experience and the ecstatic and mystical experiences of the risen Christ which he has had.  Paul is so blown away by what he has experienced that the world is changed.  He wants people to forget the old Law and embrace a new Law, which is a Law that arises from within, from the presence of the Spirit of God now dwelling in everyone who is in Christ.  It is a spontaneous Law which brings about fruits of love, compassion, self-control, humility, and so on, all from within.  That is one side of Paul.

The other side of Paul is someone who abhors innovation for the sake of innovation.  Paul is convinced that the end is near, and that it is pointless to do a lot of social engineering or societal revolution.  Rather, he believes strongly that each person should live this new spontaneous Law of love in the place where they are.  So, if people aren't married yet, they should stay unmarried, if they can.  If they are married, they should stay married, but show restraint because it doesn't make a lot of sense to have children when the end is so near.  By the same token, the old social relationships should be maintained, but always imbued with this new, spontaneous Law of love.  Slaves should be better slaves.  Masters should be better masters.  Husbands should be better husbands.  Wives should be better wives, as Paul and his society understood wives to be.

The key piece here is that Paul could not have envisioned that the Church would go on to become a 2000 year old institution which through much of that history also held significant influence or power over kings and emperors.  His letters were to small, scattered communities of outsiders, people who were going against the grain, and who had no power to enforce anything on anyone, not even on their own people.

To use passages like I Timothy 2:11-17 to impose a regimen of subservient conduct on women is a bit like taking Jesus' statement about plucking out the eye or chopping of the hand when they cause you to sin literally.  Jesus was emphasizing how much more important God's dominion is than even our own bodies.  Paul was emphasizing that people should be the best they can be in whatever circumstance they may find themselves.

Now, there is a certain wisdom here.  It is the insight that all spiritual traditions emphasize in some way, namely, that we don't have to go off to be holy men sitting on mountains or Mother Teresa's living in the slums in order to serve God.  As Luther so aptly emphasized in his Large Catechism, if you want a spiritual calling, you need look no further than the people in your life right now: your parents, your children, your spouse, your neighbours, your employers or employees, and so on.  It is a high and holy calling, says Luther, to love all these people and serve them.  This is a spirituality that is earthy, simple, and practical.

Now I must also emphasize about this passage, that it has usually been used by men in positions of power over women, to keep women in their subservient or dependent positions.  Or it has been picked up by older women to get younger women to assume the same sort of social position they had.  But one of my underlying principles in reading Scripture is, that if I am reading the Bible, and I hear a statement that sounds like Law, that sounds like, "You should," then it is intended for me the hearer, and is not meant for me to use against someone else.  My only proper attitude toward others is love and compassion, even people whose behaviour strikes me as being unethical or unjust.  God's transformation of others from dishonest slime bags to people of grace doesn't happen by me quoting scripture at them.  But it might happen by me entering into relationship with them like Jesus did with Zacchaeus, to become a different kind of presence in their lives: a leaven for the loaf, salt for the earth.

At any rate, this passage from I Timothy made a certain sense in its original context, but the context has changed so we have to reassess what to do with the passage.  I think Paul never fully grasped the long range trajectory of who Jesus was and is, and what Christ was and is about in the world.  Paul didn't see much past the imminent return of Christ in the clouds; a return he thought was coming in his lifetime, but one that we now either have to understand as something pertaining to our earthly deaths and subsequent resurrection, or as something of a symbolic nature, or a return put off, to paraphrase Gregory of Nyssa, the 4th century theologian, until the full number of the human race should come to be.

So, from our new, longer perspective on the history of the world, we have to rethink Paul's ideas.  Does it make sense to leave everything the same if things are going on so long?  No, it doesn't.  Rather, it makes sense to shift things in our society, or at least in the way we as Christians live in that society, toward a way of living that embodies the radical levelling implied by Jesus' message of universal love.  Paul caught some of this in his passages about all being one in Christ, including slave and free, including men and women, but his short horizon of sight stopped him from thinking the ramifications through.  We are not so hamstrung.

So, yes, be what God has called you to be where you are, but at the same time, think through what it means that all are one in Christ, and having thought through the ramifications of this, live it.  Amen.

      In today's Gospel reading, Jesus tells two parables of searching for the lost.  The implication of these parables is 1) that Jesus has gone looking for the lost "sheep" or "coins" of the house of Israel; and 2) that God is searching for the lost to restore them or bring them back.

In Lutheran theology, it is not we who find God, but God who finds us.  In fact, Lutheran theology insists that on our own, although we might have a sense that there is something like God, were we to read the Bible or hear the story of Jesus, we would be more likely to think of it as a silly fable or some old superstition.  Our own human reason, left to its own devices, will discount the revelation of God in Christ.

When someone hears the story of Jesus and believes it, so Lutheran theology asserts, it is a pure gift of God: the gift of faith in Christ.  Any of us who believe have nothing to boast about.  Our faith is a pure gift, to be received with thanksgiving, and we have no right to judge or condemn anyone who does not believe, because it is not their own doing, but the mysterious choice of God to awaken faith in some and not in others.  Whatever may happen in regards to faith in Christ, either later in this life or the next, is completely in God's hands.  God chooses the time and place in a person's life, if at all or ever.

There are, of course, certain ramifications to this line of reasoning.  It is for this reason that the Lutheran tradition has not had a strong understanding of, or programs for, missionary activity aimed at converting people.  Missionary movements did arise within Lutheran circles in the late 1700's and into the 1800's, under the influence of missionary organizations from England and the United States, but they generally operated as para-church organizations, and not directly under the control of the official Lutheran institutions.  And as you can imagine, since that time there have been uncomfortable tensions between members of the Lutheran church committed to the English and American type of evangelistic missionary activity, and those more committed to straight Lutheran teaching: a tension which has caused much misunderstanding and even splits in church bodies and congregations.

The response to classic Lutheran teaching is usually, "But you have to do something, right?  You have to accept Christ, don't you?"  As I often say, an answer is only as good as the question, so I'm not going to answer that question directly, but rather, like Jesus, reframe it to give it a different set of assumptions.  The more helpful question is, "And what about our response?"

Lutheran theology asserts that once faith has been awakened, a number of other things happen within us as well, one of them being the desire to do something, the desire to respond to God.  Think about it: Once you believe that God is revealed in Jesus, and you hear and read the message of and about Jesus, well, then you have the sense that if this is all true, then you really should do something.  The danger, says Lutheran theology, is that we confuse our response of whatever good we may do, such as prayer, worship, charitable deeds, self-denial, or even a decision for Jesus, and so on, with a way of ingratiating ourselves to God.  It is a mistake that zillions of Christians have made over the millennia, thinking that they had to do something so that God wouldn't get mad, when that isn't the issue at all.  This way of thinking is actually our old self, our pre-faith self, which coexists alongside our new faith self, missing the Good News and turning it into bad news.

The Good News is: God loves you (period).  In fact, one of the best analogies for God's Good News in Christ is the image of an old fashioned young man kneeling down before his beloved and saying: "My darling, I love you so much!  I want to stay with you forever.  Will you marry me?"  The young woman doesn't have to do anything to make him love her.  He already loves her.  His offer is made, not because she made herself worthy, but because he has fallen in love with her, probably for all kinds of reasons she doesn't really understand.  The only question now is, will she say yes?  Her "yes" does not make her acceptable.  Even if she says "no," he still loves her.  Of course, a "yes" will mean some changes, but if she loves him too, well, then she probably wants many of those changes already.  Our response to God in good works is just the "yes" in response to God's statement of abiding love.  It is the change that arises naturally from the faith which God has awakened in us.

I think this is such an important distinction, that I am going to make a huge overstatement to emphasize to you how important I think it is.  When you believe that you have done something to earn God's love, that you have earned your faith, that you have made yourself worthy, then the logical next step is to look at others who don't believe and first to feel sorry for them, maybe feel pity, and eventually to sort of look down at them, like the Pharisees did in Jesus' time.  You will create an in group of the holy believers who have made the right choices, and an out group of unholy people who are resisting, rebelling, and obviously making God mad.  You will likely believe that God will reward the good and punish the bad, certainly in the next life, but maybe even in this life.  The next logical step is for you to believe that, since Jesus said he would answer all prayers prayed in his name, you will get whatever you want, because you are, after all, a holy and faithful person.  God is on your side, and your ego and God have nearly become one.

Everything I have just described is called the Theology of Glory.  Here comes the overstatement: Every evil of which the Church has ever been accused has arisen because of the Theology of Glory.  When the Emperor Constantine in the early 300's approached the leadership of the persecuted Church and offered to give them a special status of influence in the affairs of the empire, he was like Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness with all the riches and power in the world to carry out the Gospel mission.  Jesus rejected the offer, but the leadership of the Church forgot their master's example and accepted it.  From then on, the Theology of Glory fixed itself in the psyche of the Church.  What followed were all the attempts to assert Christianity's earthly victory over others: persecution of the Jews, forced conversions imposed on ordinary folk by kings and chieftains who had accepted Christianity, crusades, religious wars, missionary activity backed by colonial powers, and all the rest.  The image of the servant Christ was replaced with an imperial Christ, even if he increasingly hung on a cross in the Church's iconography.  Only the odd teacher and leader seemed to have remembered, most notably among the monks and nuns of the following centuries.

One of those monks was Martin Luther, much influenced by his confessor and spiritual director, who reminded the Church again of the alternative to the Theology of Glory: the Theology of the Cross.  While the Theology of Glory merely dresses up the accepted power structures of each age and culture in Christian garb, the Theology of the Cross turns everything on its head: the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  There is nothing we bring, but God does it all.  Everything is a gift and no one has any right to boast.  Pride, arrogance, the desire for power and control over others, all fall away and are replaced by honest humility and one simple word: love.  We love because God has loved us.  Nothing else matters.  God seeks us.  We do not find God.  God finds us.  It is all God's doing, and all we can do is return that love in a life of love and thanksgiving.  We proclaim the Gospel and announce it as an act of thanksgiving, because, by God's grace, it has become meaningful to us.  The Holy Spirit will use it as God sees fit.   Anything else and everyone else is in God's hands.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

      When we come into the world, we are completely dependent on the adults around us.  We come into the world with basic needs: food and water, warmth and comfort, and most profoundly, the need for love and human contact.  As we grow our needs become more complex, and our ways of getting those needs met become more sophisticated.  If, along the way, there was any sense that certain basic needs were not met, we get stuck there at that developmental stage, and we begin to construct what some have called "emotional programs for happiness."  These are the projections of unmet needs from an early stage of our development onto our current situation in life.   As we enter adolescence and adulthood, these emotional programs for happiness can take on such extreme forms as an exaggerated fear of rejection, an exaggerated need to accumulate stuff, the confusion of uniformity or sameness or sexuality with intimacy, and so on.  Most of us have moderate forms of these emotional programs for happiness, and it is out of these emotional programs for happiness that most of our relationship troubles and most of our inner dissonance arise.

Today's reading from Jeremiah contrasts the image of a fountain of living water with that of a cracked cistern.  The fountain of living water is the relationship which God offers to Israel, an unending source of life and spiritual nourishment.  The cistern is the image of the ersatz-relationships which the people of ancient Israel chose for themselves, namely worshipping false gods, gods of their own devising, and preferring personal profit to justice or compassion, especially justice and compassion toward the vulnerable in the society, which at that time were primarily the widows, the orphans, and the landless.

We have to understand the images of the fountain or spring and the cistern in the context of a climate in which there are two main seasons: a wet season and a dry season.  In such a climate, a spring which always flows is a very valuable asset.  It means there is always a supply of clean, refreshing water.  Where no such spring exists, and where wells run dry in the dry season, people have to build cisterns to catch rain water during the rainy season and stretch the water through the dry season.  God calls the spiritual cisterns that the people have built for themselves "cracked cisterns that hold no water."

What the people of ancient Israel were doing is what people everywhere do all the time: we ignore the spring of living water that is there for us, and instead we dig cisterns, hoping to catch enough spiritual water from the positive strokes and the personal successes we experience now and then to get us through the dry times in our lives.  We do this because we have built up these emotional programs for happiness to compensate for the short comings of our parents or our friends or our culture when we were children.  The problem is that the emotional programs for happiness generally can't see us through the most difficult times, that is, the driest times, and the result is that we often have to grab for more extreme stuff, such as drugs or alcohol to numb us out, or extreme experiences to distract us from the pain.

The spiritual path, the spiritual journey that God wants to lead us on is the narrow path of faith in God, of trust in God, that strips away these emotional programs for happiness, these cracked cisterns, and helps us discover that there is actually a spring of living water bubbling up eternally right here, right now.  But our patterning into these emotional programs for happiness and the habits we build around them are so deep that it is a struggle with ourselves to let them go.  This is the hard work of the spiritual path.  It is not a struggle with God, or even really with a demon, if there really are such things, but with the demon of ourselves and our emotional habits.

The Hebrews reading and the Luke reading for today, touch on what that struggle can look like from the outside.  Mutual love, which is to love our neighbour as ourselves, and hospitality to strangers, are for many of us battles with ourselves against either the fragile ego that has trouble drawing the circle of inclusion very wide, or of inner fears.  Remembering prisoners or those being tortured as though you or I were one of them is a struggle to extend compassion to those who either live in ways we disapprove of, or whose pain is to frightening to contemplate.  For some people keeping their vows of fidelity to their spouses, or helping others to remain faithful is a huge battle with their own wounded and confused need for an intimacy of pursuit and novelty.  The love of money touches on our perceptions around success and security, always a kind of denial of God's ability to look out for us.   For many, showing honour to those in positions of spiritual leadership would mean a battle against emotional programs for happiness that confuse independence with freedom or that dwell on old hurts, blinding them to the larger picture and to reality.

As I have summarized in other sermons, all these things can be sorted into three main categories: issues of gluttony, gluttony being the exaggerated perceived need for pleasurable stimuli, one of the roots of physical addictions; issues of avarice, avarice being the exaggerated perceived need for material security, one of the roots of the material exploitation of others; and issues of vainglory, vainglory being the exaggerated perceived need for affirmation or recognition, one of the roots of ego trips, hubris, megalomania, or alternately an exaggerated sense of responsibility leading to neurotic self-deprecation and inappropriate feelings of guilt.

In the Gospel reading, Jesus addresses especially the area of vainglory.  He says, don't puff yourself up to win kudos: you may discover that your emotional program for happiness lets you down.  Instead, be one of the masses, and see what happens.  Now our usual emotional program for a happiness way of thinking would say, "Well that's great if the person tells us to go to the seat of honour, but what if that doesn't happen?"

If that doesn't happen, and there's a good chance it won't, God can begin to use our disappointment, if we're open to this, to strip away the emotional program for happiness, the cracked cistern from which the water leaks, and reveal the wonderful freeing truth, the endless spring of refreshing water: It is not the opinion of others that matters; it is what God is wanting to do in our lives that matters.  That is some of the significance of the last part of that reading: Do things for people who can't pay you back.  Don't do the right thing to get something out of it, do it because it's the right thing.  Then watch what happens to you.  Watch what God does with you.

Forget the cistern.  Go to the spring of living water.  Amen.

      How appropriate that on the Sunday when we have a healing service we should also have this reading from Luke's Gospel.  Jesus is teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath when he heals a woman of a long standing ailment.  The man who oversees the synagogue is indignant that Jesus should do this on the Day of Rest, and maybe also that Jesus did this in his synagogue, but Jesus puts him and the other detractors to shame when he points out that they show more mercy for their livestock than for the woman, whom he calls "a daughter of Abraham."

Today as we revisit the topic of healing, I would like to skip over the question of why there is illness or brokenness, which would take many sermons to explore, and look rather at the gifts that God has given us to facilitate healing and wholeness.

God has given to humans tremendous resources of many different kinds to promote healing and wholeness.  First of all, God has given us the  most powerful brains on the planet.  With these brains, we can figure out the nature and causes of disease, and we can strategize solutions or responses.  Next, God has given us a pair of hands that can do very fine and precise work, as well as heavier work.  Brains and hands working together can mend broken bones, cut out foreign objects and seal up the wound, make bone adjustments, massage sore muscles, and apply soothing forms of touch and other curative applications.  With these brains and hands, we humans also have access to the next great gift for healing: God's global pharmacy of plants.  Through the millennia, humans have identified plants in their regions which have medicinal value to help cure or minimize the effects of disease.  With our brains and hands we are now also able to synthesize substances that mimic the ones which God gives us in the plants.

Until recently, the thing we call modern medicine has focused almost exclusively on brains, hands, and medicines to intervene and cure or minimize the effects of disease.   It was the brain understood only as an organ in the head for purposes of learning and analysis.  But as it turns out, brain and body are much more intimately intertwined than we thought.  The brain, nervous system, endocrine system, and other systems of the body are so intimately intertwined that what goes on in the mind plays itself out in the rest of the body, and what goes on in the rest of the body plays itself out in the brain.

As we look at this feedback system between brain and the rest of the body, it turns out that God has given us other tools beyond just the brain, hands, and plants.  God has also given us something that exists within and among the parts of our body called impulses, thoughts, and dispositions.  When we give names to these impulses, thoughts, and dispositions, we call them things like love, hate, hope, despair, generosity, stinginess, kindness, cruelty, compassion, indifference, and so on.  And God gives us a powerful tool to channel and harness these impulses, thoughts, and dispositions called prayer.

Now when I say prayer, I mean much more than what we usually think of as prayer.  The simplest definition of prayer, for the way I think of it is:  Our relationship to God.  In other words, prayer in its broadest sense is not just "talking to God" or "talking with God."  Rather, it is the whole way that we relate to God.  It is everything we think or do that is consciously a part of our relationship to God.  Whenever we have consciously brought God into what we are doing or thinking we have engaged in the phenomenon called prayer.  The fabric of prayer is the thing we call faith.  Faith means trust, and the more we place our trust and hope in God, the more we will find ourselves engaged in prayer in that broadest sense of prayer, which is simply being aware of God's presence in every moment and every place.

The impact of this in terms of healing and wholeness is that when we are unwell and we seek out various avenues for getting better, we can bring God into all our choices.  Because our bodies are not merely biological machines, but are also infused with impulses, thoughts, and dispositions, whatever course of wellness we pursue will be helped or hindered by those impulses, thoughts, and dispositions.  Again, in the thing we call prayer, God has given us a powerful tool to channel these impulses, thoughts, and dispositions, and to focus them positively in faith.

So far I have only been speaking in terms of prayer as something that happens within each of us and influences how we as individuals respond to courses of treatment.  But prayer also seems to have an impact on others when we focus our prayers on them.  Why is this?  How does this work?  Is God at work?  Do the prayers have their own power?  Is it the faith of the prayer that works?  Who knows!  But it does seem to work.  So here God has given us a tool, not only to help ourselves, but to help each other.  We can channel our impulses, thoughts, and dispositions through our faith to help others.

Those prayers can work at a distance, but when done in the presence of the person they take on an added level of intensity because of the immediate human contact.  You see, God has also given us the gift of love and compassion manifested in human community.  Physical contact is important for our well being, and loneliness is one of the great stressors in life which can drag the rest of the body/mind/spirit down.  When we do laying on of hands and anointing, or use such modalities as Reiki or Healing Touch, we add the peculiar energetic aspect of human contact to the effects of our prayers channeled through faith.

But this is true in many ways.  Consider the difference between a five minute visit to the doctor which seems to be largely about deciding which pill to prescribe, and a twenty minute visit which seems to be about the doctor seeking to understand and appreciate the situation of the patient.  The sense of concern and the time of contact of the longer visit will go a long way toward making whatever actual treatment the doctor prescribes work better.  A relationship of trust and understanding between doctor and patient makes the patient more receptive to the doctor's course of treatment.  Unfortunately in our system we have sacrificed the deeper kind of human relationships of trust for efficiency and the bottom line; but this is not only true in the medical world, it is true in most aspects of our modern post-industrial society.

I think that the importance of contact between humans is why Jesus almost always touched those whom he healed, why Jesus told his disciples to practice healing by "laying on of hands," and why throughout the Bible God called people into community.  We are healthier when we are in touch with each other, emotionally and physically.  Humans were created to have contact and relationships of trust with each other, as a mirror of the relationship of trust we were created to have with God.

Having said all this about what we can do, there is one more gift which must be mentioned.  From the beginning, healing ministry which is specifically Christian has been understood as God's work.  In other words, we do not heal.  God heals.  The one who engages in any form of Christian healing ministry is at most an agent or vehicle or channel for a power that is God's, not ours.  Anyone engaged in Christian healing ministry who claims the power for themselves is either a charlatan or a fool.  The greatest inner struggle of those who feel called to healing ministry is the struggle against their own egos.  The impulse, thought, and disposition which is most essential for those involved in healing ministry, besides faith, is humility.  The person involved in Christian healing ministry has one primary job: get out of the way so God can work.

But here again we see the wisdom of how God gives gifts.  Those who are called to healing ministry by God come as servants.  They become symbols of how God comes to us in Jesus: as the one who washes his disciples feet.  How different it is to seek help from someone who seems to have your best interest in mind, who wants to help and serve you, as opposed to someone who acts as though they know your body better than you, and does not listen to what you are saying.

So God has given us many, many gifts to promote our healing and wholeness.  In the Church we are, of course, concerned mostly with the wholeness of the spirit, which touches primarily on those impulses, thoughts, and dispositions that course through our bodies and brains.  But when these are whole and in balance; when they are focused positively in a relationship to God, the impact on our physical selves cannot be underestimated.  Amen.

      My formal journey within Christianity began, when I was twelve years old, with an experience of fear.  I was at a retreat for young people where, one evening, a preacher portrayed the torments of hell to us, and then said that if we did not want to suffer these eternal torments we would have to accept Jesus into our hearts as our personal Lord and Saviour.  Not wanting to be punished by God, I did as the preacher instructed us.  For many years I called this "my conversion experience," but I now refer to it as "my first faith crisis."  It wasn't that I didn't believe in God before the preacher's provocative presentation, I just didn't think that God was the punishing type.

It has become commonplace for many hundreds of years now to think of hell as a place of punishment and eternal torment.  The road to this image is long and complex, bringing together all kinds of influences and ideas.  It is interesting to me, however, that the image of fire in the Bible and for several centuries afterward was not of punishment, but of purification.  While we tend to read passages like the first verse of today's Gospel reading as passages about punishment, they are actually passages about purification.

I believe that the image of fire as it is used here by Jesus is only one of several metaphors which talk about this idea of purification.  Other ones are the sifting of the wheat from the chaff, the casting out of demons, faithful and unfaithful slaves or servants, and also the image of conflict within a household in today's Gospel reading.  They are different ways of talking about the same process.

What is this process of purification?  First of all, I think that the emphasis needs to be on the purification of each person, and not on the purification of a society or country; in other words, this is about an inner process with external ramifications, and not about purging our society of "undesirables."  But this process necessarily involves the external stressors of real life, relationships, survival, struggle, and so on.

I believe that God is always at work in us, leading us to something which is the fullness of what God envisions for us, but we are mostly too busy trying to get somewhere else.  So there is always a tension between the gracious guidance of God's Holy Spirit, and our will.  In that tension is fire, is sifting, is the casting out of the "demons" or the "powers" that control us, the struggle between faithfulness and self-indulgence, the wrangling with our deep patterns established in our families of origin.

There was a time when I disparaged that preacher of my preteen years.  I thought, when I had become an "enlightened" and "liberal" theologian, that he was just so wrong, and how dare he say such things to children.  But now I look back and see that even that experience was part of the fire and tension and sifting of who I have become.  I can look back on it and receive his enthusiastic passion for "winning souls" even if I wouldn't do the same myself.  Rather than hang on to some grudge against him, I receive him as a human being, struggling in his own way to be faithful.  I come to the place where I can begin to love him.

The movement toward love is the heart of this fire of purification.  Thomas Keating, in his well known work, "Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation," describes this spiritual process in psychological and developmental terms.  He writes, "Every movement of human growth precipitates a crisis appropriate to the level of physical, emotional, or spiritual development at which we find ourselves.  Each major crisis of growth requires letting go of the physical or spiritual food that has been nourishing us up to then and moving into more mature relationships.  In such a crisis we tend to seek the feeling of security... [We] react to frustration by choosing the line of least resistance, or whatever seems to be the easiest security blanket in which to wrap ourselves.  The capacity to go forward into personal responsibility is continually challenged by the temptation to revert to lower levels of consciousness and behaviour.  Human growth is not the denial or rejection of any level, but the integration of the lower into the more evolved levels of consciousness." (1982 edition, pp. 30-31)

The most "evolved" level is of course the level of love, because it is the one which is most like God, most reflects the image of the Creator.

Here is another way to talk about the process: to use classic Lutheran language, this is the movement from the second to the third uses of the law.  We move from recognizing who we are before God, to becoming who God wants us to be.  The second use of the law is as a tool for self-reflection and recognition.  We look at the Ten Commandments and see where we fall short.  Then we surrender ourselves to God and let God begin to shape us so that our lives reflect the Ten Commandments, which are summed up by Jesus as, "Love God with all your being; love your neighbour as yourself."

This language is also similar to the language of modern self-help language, with one major difference:  in the self-help movement, we try to become something of our own making, while the Christian desire is to become who God wants us to be; and since it is God who is doing the shaping, when we are on the Christian spiritual path this is done by turning ourselves over to God.  We become utterly passive before the powerful transformative presence of Christ in our lives.  The fire of God's love in Christ burns away everything that is not love.  It is a painful and life long process, but it is not for punishment, it is to bring us to the fullness of who we were meant to be.  Amen.

      To be a Christian begins with three foundational assumptions.  The first is that God is.  This cannot be proved, and it cannot be disproved.  The Bible itself, the collection of ancient texts we consider sacred and normative, never tries to prove that God is.  The Bible simply assumes God, and goes from there.  So we assume that God is.

The second assumption is Faith.  Faith means trust.  To be a Christian is not merely to believe that God is, but more than that, it is to trust God with our lives.  The Bible verse that sent Martin Luther on a collision course with the religious establishment of his day was, "The righteous will live by faith" (Romans 1:17 quoting Habakkuk 2:4).  The life of a Christian is assumed to be a life of faith, that is, a life of trusting God, or striving to trust God more and more.

The third assumption is righteousness.  Righteousness, as it is understood in the Bible, is to be in the right relationship to God, to people, and to God's creation.  Righteousness is assumed, that is, we assume that God intends for us to live a particular way, whatever the reasons behind that may be.  Righteousness is the practical application, the practical living out of assuming the existence of God and of having faith or trust in God.

In today's reading from Luke, the landowner in the parable that Jesus tells seems to leave all three of these very basic assumptions out of his life.  The man never thinks of or talks to God.  God is simply not part of his life.  Instead he talks to himself.  He is his only counsellor and advisor.  He also gives no indication of having any thought for others.  The righteousness of the Old Testament, the Bible of Jesus' time, stressed the need to share with the needy, to protect the defenseless, to leave some of the harvest for the poor of the land to glean, and for the birds of the air and the wild animals to eat.  The man in the parable does none of this.

When he is then called from this life, while he has set his material "ducks" in a row, he has made no spiritual investment and he is left with nothing.  Thus God's question in the parable, "And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"

The troubling thing for me is that today most people are this man.  Even those of us who assume the existence of God, are weak when it comes to the second assumption: trusting God with our lives.  We prefer to trust ourselves and our possessions and investments.  I look at myself and I say, "Guilty!"  And our righteousness toward people, and especially now toward the creation is shaky at best.

But this is not new.  Jesus tells this parable to a man in the crowd who tries to triangle Jesus into an inheritance dispute.  What is Jesus' message to this man?  Well, it's the message none of us want to hear: let go of it.  Place your trust in God and let others bicker over money.  Of course this is reminiscent of other statements that Jesus made along these lines:

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  (Matthew 6:19-21)

No one can serve two masters... You cannot serve God and wealth. (Matthew 6:24)

Therefore do not worry, saying What will we eat?' or What will we drink?' or What will we wear?'... But strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:31,33 parallel in Luke 12:22-31)

Give us this day our daily bread...(Matthew 6:11 parallel in Luke 11:3)

For some reason we tend to think of religious righteousness as having to do primarily with matters of sexual morality and similar things.  Many of us who were raised in the Church remember the prohibitions on "all the fun stuff" that teenagers like to do.  But I bet few if any of us remember prohibitions on becoming wealthy.  I bet none of our parents or grandparents ever said, "When you grow up, be sure to give all your money to the poor and live as though you were poor even if you aren't really."  No, of course not.  Why?  Well there are probably a thousand reasons, from the parents' own desire for their children's financial security, to the social pressure to succeed, to the counterintuitive nature of telling your children to be poor.  And of course we know that real poverty is a drag and has all sorts of negative ramifications for the people who are forced to live in it.  Who would want their children to be poor?

But I think there's another piece too, one we don't like to acknowledge.  We have a hard time trusting God to look after us, and we'd rather do that ourselves.  So, like the man in the parable, we would rather consult with ourselves, or maybe with a financial advisor, than to turn to God and say, "Creator God, I have more than I need to feed and cloth myself and my family, and keep a roof over our heads.  What should I do with all this money you've given me, God?  Who should I share it with?  Do you want me to give it away?  Do you want me to hang on to some of it for later when you'll show me where it's needed?"

The same could be said for matters of relationship as well.  When we have trouble with someone, when our intimate relationships go sour, we tend to spin our wheels, dwell on hurts and wrongs, instead of turning to God and saying, "God who loves and saves us, how do I love this person?  You show honour to me, how do I honour this person?  You are faithful to me, how do I live loyally in this relationship?"

And again, the same could be said for our relationship to the plants and animals and natural systems of the world.  "God you have given us so much beauty, a world full of abundance and diversity.  How do you want me to care for it?"

May we not leave God out of those conversations, but rather more than merely thinking about God, begin to trust God in our life choices.  May we let the righteousness of right relationship to God, to others, to God's creation, become our way.  Amen.

      Be careful what you pray for, you might get it; or, you might not get it, or get it in a form you hadn't expected, or it may turn out to be less desirable than you imagined, and you may wish you hadn't wanted it.

These are some statements that come to mind when I read today's Gospel text from Luke.  Jesus is asked to teach his disciples to pray, as John had taught his disciples: a venerable tradition of masters teaching their apprentices how to do things.  Jesus, however, gives them a prayer that is both simple and highly challenging.

Each statement in this little prayer we recognize as a predecessor form of what we call the Lord's Prayer, challenges to one praying to move beyond their personal desires, their ordinary aspirations, to something more subtle, something more simple, something more... well, challenging.

It begins with the juxtaposition: Father, hallowed be your name.  The familiar, intimate form which Jesus promoted, of thinking of God as a Father, as opposed to a lofty, distant God, is set along side the concept of holy.  Something holy is something that is recognized and experienced as being more than ordinary, something standing above or apart from common life.  The holy is always approached with reverence and deference.  So Jesus tells his followers to address God as a father, but at the same time to express in their prayer the recognition of God's holiness.

Then there is the prayer for God's kingdom to come.  Again, this means the one praying this prayer is prepared to let go of our kingdoms, our ways of doing things, and embrace something over which they have no control.  This must be especially anxiety provoking for us today who are nurtured in a democratic understanding of things, and expect to have our say in how things go.  But if you are really praying "your kingdom come" with your intention as well as with your mouth, then you are essentially inviting God to take control of your life and your world.

When the disciples are taught to pray only for their daily bread, and not for a guaranteed supply of their needs, not for financial security, again they are being challenged to trust God in a way most of us never do.  Give us today what we need.  No more, and only what we need, not what we'd like.

  Then Jesus puts into the words of his disciples a piece of powerful, soul searching prayer: And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us!  Who can honestly pray this prayer?  We forgive everyone indebted to us?  Do we?  Well, it's clear that Jesus thinks we should, and so build into the prayer this bombshell of self-recognition.

Finally, Jesus adds an interesting, softening piece.  "Do not bring us to the time of trial."  In other words, do not test us.  At first it seems to undo all the previous petitions, because each of the previous petitions is like a test.  But think again, here Jesus had put into the mouths of his disciples an admission: we are not able to pass the test.  Please do not test us.  It is a piece of prayer to wipe away spiritual arrogance.

Clearly what Jesus would have us pray for is quite different from what we usually pray for.  This little prayer of Jesus is a prayer that changes a person's view of themselves and of the world.  It reorients, reprioritizes, rearranges one's sense of self and place in the world.

On the other hand, in the last section of today's Gospel reading, Jesus insists that the act of praying is essential and productive.  "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened."

It is the problem that we so often fail to ask, fail to search, fail to knock.  While we ought always to be spiritual seekers, wanting to move ever closer to the place in ourselves where we recognize and commune with God, we mostly just putter our way through life, asking, and searching, and knocking for everything except God.  Yes, god is always there, but we tend to dwell in the part of ourselves, that part of our consciousness or awareness, that skates over the presence of God, or even ignores it.  It is not a question of getting closer to God.  Rather it is a question of finding the part of ourselves, within ourselves, where we become acutely aware of that presence.

Jesus' little prayer is a prayer that moves a person toward that spot, if the person bothers to use it to ask and search and knock.  I believe that the primary power of prayer, though certainly not its only power, is to change the person who prays.  It may be that God is moved by our prayers, but God is moved by our lives with or without our prayers.  We, however, are only changed by prayer when we bother to pray, or when people are praying for us.  But again, when someone is praying for someone else, they also are changed, slowly, gradually, the way water changes a rock as it constantly flows over it.

So, be careful what you pray for, you might get it; or, you might not get it, or get it in a form you hadn't expected, or it may turn out to be less desirable than you imagined, and you may wish you hadn't wanted it.  But along the way, something will begin to happen in you.  Amen.

      Today's Gospel reading is the famous incident with Mary and Martha.  This little story has long been a sort of icon of the difference between people who are practical, hands on, task oriented; and people who are more interested in study, learning, prayer, and other such interior disciplines.  But I think this little story is about more than this simple dichotomy, and that the key to the story lies not in the differences between the active Martha and the studious Mary, but rather in one word: distracted.

The Mary and Martha in this story seem to be the same Mary and Martha who are the sisters of Lazarus, whom we meet in John's Gospel.  I think it is enlightening to compare the incident here in Luke's Gospel, with the incident in John's Gospel in which Lazarus has died, and the two sisters each greet Jesus upon his arrival in notably different ways.

Here in Luke we have a simple domestic scene.  Jesus has come to visit.  Mary sits at his feet, listening to his teaching.  Martha looks after the details of hosting their honoured guest.  Martha complains that her sister is not pulling her weight, to which Jesus says, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."  Here, Martha is distracted, scattered, worried, preoccupied, while Mary is focused, composed, concentrated.

Now lets look at John's Gospel.  As you may remember, in the middle of John's Gospel (chapter 11), serving as a kind of turning point in the story, Jesus learns that his friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, is dying.  Jesus allows the death to take place, and then makes his way to the home of his friends.   When he arrives, Martha runs out to greet him.  She says, "Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died, but even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of God."  Out of this, Martha is able to receive some of Jesus' teaching on the resurrection, and to recognize Jesus as God's Anointed One ("Messiah").  Martha then fetches Mary, who comes out and says, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."  Period.  While Martha could still see hope beyond the death of her brother, Mary, now utterly distracted by her grief, cannot see the forest for the trees.  She has fallen into despair.  Out of this Jesus is first "disturbed in spirit and deeply moved," and then he weeps.  The people around him think he is weeping for Lazarus, but it seems to me that, since he knows God is about to raise Lazarus form the dead, it is for Mary that he weeps.

John's Gospel is, among other themes, all about spiritual sight and spiritual blindness.  At the death of their brother, Martha can still "see" but Mary has become "blind."

The situation described in Luke's Gospel has the two women in reversed circumstances.  Mary sees, while Martha has become blind through her worry and distraction.

I think that when we praise the studious and chide the practical based on this little story from Luke's Gospel about Mary and Martha, we are being both unfair and missing the point.  It is not the work or hosting that is at issue, it is the distraction, the worry, the preoccupation, just as in John's Gospel, it is not the grief that is at issue (both sisters are grieving) but the degree to which the grief has distracted one of them from seeing.

The ability to focus or concentrate is one of the most important skills or gifts we can possess.  Today, concentration difficulties in children and adults have reached epidemic proportions.  Some blame the explosion of electronic distractions (TV, computer games, video games, chat rooms, cell phones, etc.) which seem to train our young people to function in only the briefest snippets of attention.  Others blame diet, preservatives and contaminants in our foods, the increased incidence of allergies and reactions to food and environmental irritants, all disrupting the normal functioning of our brains.  Others look to the changed circumstances of how we raise our children, the family pulled apart by conflicting hobbies, interests, entertainments, and other substitutes for family interaction, thus creating skewed and troubled attachment needs, disrupting the normal maturation processes of the brain.  Those are the ones I'm aware of.  I'm sure there are other possibilities as well.  Whatever the cause, the result is that we have an increasingly distracted population, just when we as a human species need to be most intently focused.

But lets come back into this room, and those of us who are here.  The lesson from Mary and Martha for us is, I think, the importance and centrality of our focus on the one thing that Mary got in the Luke story, and Martha got in the John story: that God stands both above every disruption and distraction and worry, and is also present in the midst of every disruption and distraction and worry; that there is something more than whatever we may be distracted into thinking is important, and that more is Jesus Christ, son of God.

Things go awry in the church, in this and every congregation of sincere Christians, when we become distracted from the centre, the core, the only thing that is needful: Jesus Christ, son of God.  What we do when we get distracted is one or more of the following:

1) We focus on something that someone else is or isn't doing that bothers us.

2) We focus on some aspect of the church or congregation that bothers us.

3) We focus on an issue, taking sides.

4) We focus on everything in our lives except God/Jesus.

We all do these things in various combinations, and at various levels of intensity.  I do them too, so I am not excluding myself from this list.  However, I have noticed for myself, that whenever I am able to come back to centre, to focus myself in my prayer, in my thinking, in my awareness as I go through the day on Jesus, on God around me and with me and within me, that most of that other stuff usually falls away, lessens, weakens in intensity, and I am able to be present to others in a different, more calm and loving way.

The key is focus, lack of distraction.  Now, research into the functions of the brain has shown that the process of focusing is made up only about 10% to 15% of actual focusing.  The rest is made up of blocking out, of editing out.  The plague of distractedness in our society is, speaking mechanically, an epidemic in the malfunctioning of the blocking out faculties in the brain.  That's useful information for us as well.  If we want to keep our focus as a church on the centre, on Jesus Christ, son of God, then we have to train ourselves to block out the things that distract.  We have to develop habits of changing our thinking.

I recently suggested to someone known to me, not here in Nanaimo, who lamented that they get sucked into all sorts of untoward stuff on the internet, that they begin to change their focusing habits by inserting into their usual or habitual thought process a piece that brings them back to centre.  I suggested that they insert a prayer at a point in the thought process just as they sense themselves getting sucked in.  The idea is that this prayer becomes the beginning of a new thought process, gradually rewiring the brain to develop a new habit, centred on the centre, instead of on the distraction.

We can also adopt something like this, and some already have.  When we are together as the people of God, followers or would be followers of Jesus, and I find myself begin to move down the mental path which leads to distraction from Jesus Christ, son of God, then I insert at that point a prayer to God: Jesus Christ, son of God, to you I lift up my soul... (or something like that) repeating it to myself as much as I need to.  In doing so I shift my awareness from distraction to the centre.  I rediscover in that moment the one thing that is necessary.  I recognize and make myself aware that the rest is just distraction.  Remember, only one thing is necessary: Jesus Christ, son of God.  Amen.

      The Gospel reading for today contains one of the most famous of Jesus' parables, the one usually given the title, "The Good Samaritan."  One of the Pastors in our Synod has made it his practice not to use the traditional titles for the parables, but instead to refer to them simply by their first lines.  That would make this the parable "A Man Was Going Down From Jerusalem to Jericho."  I think he is quite right to do this because the titles we have come to associate with the parables often rob them of their power to surprise us, and put an interpretive lens on the stories which can keep us from discovering their deeper and more complex layers of meaning.  Today's parable is a particularly good example of this because the phrase "Good Samaritan" has become a euphemism or code phrase in our culture for someone who does a good deed.  So we tend to hear the parable primarily as a nice story about someone who lent a helping hand when others wouldn't.  This misses all of the complex social layers and disturbing implications that Jesus built into his story.

So let's look again at the parable "A Man Was Going Down From Jerusalem to Jericho."  The main impact of the story on the original hearers, namely the lawyer who asked Jesus the question, and the disciples and other members of the crowd who were there, all of whom were likely to have been Jewish, would have been the stark disconnect between Jesus' use of a Samaritan as the hero of the story and their own cultural, religious, and political attitude toward the Samaritans.

The Samaritans were the descendants and remnants of the old northern kingdom of Israel, from the time of the kings, some 600 or more years before the time of Jesus.  When you hear the phrase "The Lost Ten Tribes of Israel," the reference is to all the people of the northern kingdom who were led off into exile when they were conquered by the Assyrian Empire.  The Samaritans were and are the descendants of the ones who were left mixed with the settlers brought in by the conquering Assyrians from other parts of their empire.

The Jews, by contrast, were the heirs of the traditions of the southern kingdom of Judah, which had outlasted the northern kingdom by about 100 years.  In fact the word "Jew" is a derivative of the word "Judahite" (Hebrew Yehudi; Greek Ioudaios; Latin Iudaeus; leading to the modern forms in various languages).

The peculiar differences between the two groups were these:

1) an ancient dispute over the place where God's name was said to dwell -- Mt. Gerizim for the Samaritans, Jerusalem for the Jews.
2) the status of the Davidic dynasty as "chosen" rulers of God's people (a southern view)
3) the mixed ethnic nature of the Samaritans due to the deportation policies of their original conquerors the Assyrians, vs. the allegedly pure blood status of the Judeans due to the different policy of their first conquerors, the Babylonians.  While the Assyrians pursued a policy of mixing their conquered peoples up in forced deportations, the Babylonians merely brought the upper layer of the conquered people to Babylon.  While the Lost Ten Tribes never returned, many of the descendants of the Babylonian exiles did return to take control of Jerusalem again.  There were even efforts by the returned southerners to force their ways on the Samaritans, but these were violently resisted.

These differences led to a deep and emotionally charged hatred and distrust between the two groups.  Therefore for Jesus the Jew to tell a story whose hero is a Samaritan, and in which the Jewish leadership fails, was for him to tell a religiously, socially, and politically dangerous story.  It was a choice that could both open some people to be more accepting, but incite others to want to undo him.

It is one thing to talk about all this in an analytical way, but a very different matter to convey the emotion of it (sort of like trying to explain a joke: a joke isn't funny anymore when it has to be explained).  The best way to convey the power and emotion is for you and me to retell the story to ourselves, filling in the blanks of the characters in a way the recreates for each of us the same or a similar emotional dynamic.

Let's look at the characters.  The main character, the man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho, would have been understood to be a Jew, because no Samaritan had yet been mentioned in the story, and the origin of the journey suggests someone who is Jewish.  Besides, a Jewish lawyer just asked a Jewish teacher a question about neighbours, so all the hearers will expect the main character to be Jewish.  For us this main character would need to be one of us, one of whatever we consider ourselves to be: Canadian; Lutheran; based on our dominant congregational profile probably Caucasian; middle class; perhaps retired or working in a profession; and travelling from a place we consider a good and respectable place, perhaps a place of spiritual significance, to another respected and historic city, in this case associated with the political leadership of our country, because Jericho was the site of one of Herod's palaces -- so maybe from Winnipeg to Ottawa.

Next, let's look at the characters of the Priest and the Levite.  The Priesthood in the old Temple system was, of course, hereditary.  People were born into Priestly and Levitical families, each family inheriting specific duties in the Temple which they took turns carrying out with other members of their branch of the clan.   Jesus has the Priest "going down the road," which implies he was leaving Jerusalem, because the road drops from the highlands of Jerusalem down to the valley where Jericho is.  Whatever Jesus may or may not have been implying, his hearers would have been inferred that this character was on his way home from serving in the Temple. The Levite's direction of travel is not specified in any way, so he could have been going to or from his duties.  At any rate, these highly respected members of the religious establishment fail to help the man who has been mugged and robbed.  For us, we would have to identify people whom we regard highly, and insert them into the story here, and have them fail to help the person in need.  Who could this be for us?  Doctors?  Nurses?  Paramedics?  Fire fighters?  Veterinarians?  Financial Advisors?  Coaches?  Teachers?  Mechanics?  Plumbers?  Farmers?  Maybe even our clergy?  It's difficult to choose because we no longer have a particular group charged with the same intensely concentrated cultural, religious, political,