"Who do you say that I am?"  With this question, Jesus cuts to the heart of the matter.  This is THE question, and how you answer it for yourself has all kinds of implications, ramifications, and consequences.  Who you say that Jesus is shapes how you relate to Jesus the historical figure, Jesus the wise teacher, Jesus the wonder worker, and Jesus the religious focal point.

Recently I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a series of lectures by Professor Bart Ehrman, an historian who teaches at a major university in the United States.  His 24 lectures cover the period from just after the crucifixion, to the time, about 300 years later, when the creeds of the church were set forth and the canon of scripture was defined.  Based on the titles of his lectures, he seems to be highlighting the great diversity of "Christianities" that existed before the rise of what we now call "Christian Orthodoxy," which is to say, before the Nicene Creed became the guiding document for Christianity, and the books of the Bible became a fixed list of books.  The main alternative Christianities that he deals with are (I am using his lecture titles here), "Christians who would be Jews," "Christians who refused to be Jews," "Early Gnostic Christianity," "Early Christian Gnosticism," and finally "Early Christian Orthodoxy."

Now for some Christians today, it comes as a surprise that Christianity was not a uniform movement even in the beginning.  But it shouldn't come as a surprise that from the start people who considered themselves Christians differed with each other over various issues, especially over who Jesus is.  I think it is for this reason that Jesus says earlier in Matthew's Gospel, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household" (Matthew 10:34-36).

Does this mean that Jesus preaches war?  No, not at all!  What it means is that Jesus is by nature such a controversial figure that inevitably disputes and divisions will arise over that nagging question that he poses to us: "Who do you say that I am?"  (Besides, Jesus also said that we should love our enemies!)

Most of you know that I am fairly strongly wedded to the understanding of Jesus as the Word made flesh, the incarnate Logos of God, God made flesh.  The idea that the infinite, eternal, unfathomable creator and sustainer of all that is, seen and unseen, would somehow take on a finite, temporal, concrete, historical, mortal form both boggles and inspires my mind.  To me it is the ultimate endorsement of the goodness of God's creation.  God does not stand aloof, but enters in, in the most tangible and visceral way.  So when I hear the words, "Jesus, Son of God," I understand something particular in that.  Jesus is son in the sense of going forth from, being somehow directly linked with the Father who begot him in a concrete continuity.

But I know, because I have had these discussions, that some of you don't see it that way.  For some of you the language of incarnation is metaphorical, not literal.  Jesus is the Son of God in the sense of having been chosen by God for a special purpose: born human, but elevated to a special status by the grace and power of God.

And you know what?  Both of these ways of seeing Jesus can be found in the New Testament.  Why?  Because even among the apostles, there were differences of understanding about Jesus.  They often used the same language, but meant different things.  For example, near the end of John's Gospel it says, "...these things have been written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31).  Meanwhile at the beginning of Paul's letter to the Romans, Paul writes, "...the gospel concerning [God's] son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead..."(Romans 1:3-4).

When John says, "Son of God," he means the divine Word, which existed in the beginning with God, and which was God, now become flesh in the human being Jesus of Nazareth.  When Paul says, "Son of God," he means the human Jesus, descended from David, who, when God raised him from the dead was elevated to the status of Son of God, and only then, as the risen Christ Jesus became something more than human.  That's one reason why Paul almost never mentions anything that Jesus said or taught.  He doesn't care about that, really.  He is interested in Christ crucified and risen.  John, by contrast is very interested in what Jesus said and did because from the start he was God made flesh, the light of the world, the life of all flesh.

Who you say Jesus is shapes how you see the world, and how you see the world shapes who you say Jesus is.  Most Bible scholars today think more like Paul than like John, in part because we live in a scientific age, which means a materialistic age, when things like "God made flesh" are hard to accept.  It's easier to think of a human who is raised to special status, than the other way around.  I can understand that, and I sympathize with it, even if I don't think the same way.

But someone who has a mystical understanding of the universe, in which God imbues all that is because God made all that is, and believes that God is manifest to us in direct and tangible ways in that universe, the step to imagining what John imagines is not so strange: in fact it becomes an almost logical conclusion, that at some point God might even become incarnate.

There are others, of course, who view Jesus more as a wise teacher or radical populist preacher who became deified by his followers much after the fact.  Again, this is easier to accept given the underlying mental framework of our culture.  Already in the 600's, the Mohammed recited teachings to this effect in the Qur'an.  Jesus, so the Qur'an says, was a prophet, an exceedingly great prophet, indeed the greatest of all of God's prophets.  But that's all he was.  The Christian worship of Jesus as a "divine man" is seen by Muslims as by many modern scholars, as a misappropriation of the man and his message.

By contrast Hindus have no problem with the idea of gods becoming human, so many Hindus accept Jesus as one of the many "avatars" or manifestations of God through history.  Many Buddhists see Jesus as a kind of western Buddha, and some today who have been strongly influenced by Buddhism, read many of Jesus' teachings as though Jesus meant them in a Buddhist way: being present in the now, not being attached to material things, and so on.  The most recent well known teacher of this line of thinking is Eckhart Tolle.

But who do you say Jesus is?  And what does that do for your worship, your following of him, your appropriation of his teachings, your daily living?  That is the question: Who do you say Jesus is?  Amen.

The Church has a lot to answer for; by which I mean, of course, that the people who claim the name of Jesus, through the centuries, have done things in that name that are diametrically opposed to what Jesus did and what Jesus taught.  So, when I say "the Church", I'm using that term in the broadest sense of corporate, communal identity, centered in the self-identification of people and groups of people as Christians.

So, I'll say it again: the Church has a lot to answer for.

Today we heard one of the most amazing encounters between Jesus and a Canaanite woman.  Now understand: the Canaanite woman, or Syro-Phoenician woman, as she is more correctly called in Mark's version of this story (Mark 7:24-30), is a pagan, a non-Jew, someone who would identify with the worship of the gods and spirit powers of the Phoenicians.  But she is also someone who believes that if anyone can help her, this prophet of the Jews, this holy man of a neighbouring people can.

She is pesky and persistent.  She has a daughter possessed by demons; she has heard about how Jesus can cast out demons.  She will do what it takes to help her child.  The disciples try to shoo her away.  They ask Jesus to send her away, and... well, he does, or he tries to by saying that it isn't right to give the children's food to the dogs!  Wow!  This is Jesus at one of his most human moments!  He sees his mission as being to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and this pagan woman doesn't fit into his plan.  How familiar, if a little unnerving to hear coming out of the mouth of Jesus.

But she is persistent, pesky, pushy, and bold: "Yes, Lord!" she agrees.  "But even the dogs eat the crumbs from their masters' table."  Even Jesus has to admit that her faith is surpassingly great, and he grants her request.  Now, he doesn't say, "Follow me."  He doesn't say, "I'll do it if you convert."  He just does it.

The Church has a lot to answer for.

There is a similar story earlier in Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 8:5-13; parallel in Luke 7:1-10) in which a Roman Centurion, an officer of the Roman army of occupation, asks Jesus to heal his servant who is paralyzed.  Jesus, quite in contrast to his initial response to the Phoenician woman's request, immediately offers to go and heal the boy, not asking for any sort of conversion or leaving behind of the officer's pagan Roman religion.  The Centurion, however, says, "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, Do this,' and the slave does it."  Jesus is so amazed at this pagan's faith in Jesus' power to heal, that he not only grants the man his request, but turns to the people around him and says, "Truly I tell you, not in all of Israel have I found such faith."

The Church has a lot to answer for.  We have taken the simple, powerful, message of and about Jesus who changes people's lives, and turned it into a system, a procedure, a set of official requirements.  Now, I suppose that's all to be expected of humans.  We do have a need to get organized, and getting organized means that some people just won't fit into the organization, so they'll either have to change, go somewhere else, or, at the extreme end of things, be eliminated.  It's that last one that's the scariest, and the one that people with high sameness needs often resort to.  (Some people seem to handle diversity more easily than others.)

Consider the sad tale of how we treated the Jews from the time we, the Christians, had influence and power in the state: first the Jews were confined to ghettos, then they were made to listen to sermons, sometimes forced to be baptized.  What a relief it was for the Jews of the Middle East when the Arabs, spurred on by their new found religion of Islam, "liberated" them from Christian control in the 600's!  But how sad the tale of the Jews of Italy, who, under pressure from Popes and Bishops migrated north into the frontier region called Germany to try to find some space and peace.  A few centuries later, when Germany was firmly in Christian hands, when the crusades began, the first victims were the Jews of the Rhineland.  To give a concrete example, the mob in the city of Speyer turned on the Jews.  Fleeing for their lives, the Jews of the city sought shelter in the house of the Bishop of Speyer, located immediately next to the great two towered Romanesque church that still stands there.  Bless that bishop, he tried to calm the crowd and tell them that what they were doing was wrong, but they said if he didn't come away from the house, they'd kill him too.  He stepped out of the way and the Jews were burned alive in the house -- in the name of Jesus!

The Church has a lot to answer for.

Or do I need to tell the sad tale of the many men and women who, in a weird twist of history, were burned at the stake, either for heresy or for witchcraft.  I can't remember an incident where Jesus suggests this as a method for weeding out the unwanted.  Paul's worst suggested punishment is "Have nothing to do with them..."; the cold shoulder, not the hot fire.  I call this a weird twist of history because burning people who bring curses into a village was an ancient pagan practice long condemned by the Christian missionaries who converted Germany, England, and Scandinavia.  Somewhere along the line, some half-Christianized person who came into a position of authority decided to revive the old practice.  The sad irony is that we did it in the name of Jesus!

The Church has a lot to answer for.

So what do we do?  After acknowledging the evils of our corporate past; after admitting that what we Christians often did was diametrically opposed to the way of Jesus, the way of healing, liberation, embrace, feeding, compassion, forgiveness; after owning up to that, what do we do?

Well, here's our chance to create a present, and lay the foundations for a future in which we who claim the name of Jesus let go of all the human ugliness that loves to hate, that makes excuses for killing, that rationalizes abuse; let go of all that, intentionally, with purpose and resolve, and decide that we will embody Jesus.

What does that look like?  First of all we eat with everyone and anyone.  We have table fellowship, not only with people like us, people who agree with us, people who believe with us, but with everyone, and especially the ones who get pushed to the margins.  That was Jesus primary form of ministry: wide open table fellowship.  Personally I think that starts with the communion table and flows out from there.

Next we promote healing.  We help people identify their demons, and we help them get rid of those demons.  What do I mean by demons?  Addictions, fears, anxieties, traumas, mental and emotional struggles.  Those are the demons of today.  Again, I think we do this both ritually in our services, but also practically in other contexts; and when we have faith like the Canaanite woman or the Roman Centurion, those two domains might overlap.

Third, we learn and teach the art and gift of confession and forgiveness.  Owning up to shortcomings, transgressions against others, hateful or spiteful deeds, and all the rest, and working toward reconciliation between and among people.  Again, we do this both in our rituals, and in real life, and sometimes those two realms will overlap.

We have a lot to answer for, but just as important, we have a lot we can do about it.  God have mercy and heal us!  Christ have mercy and transform us.  Lord have mercy and guide us.  Amen.

Jesus walks on the water.  Peter walks on the water -- for a moment.  This image of Jesus walking on the water, and Peter briefly suspending his disbelief enough to be able to walk out toward his master has been the source of many sincere attempts to do the same.  I remember in my teens, when I was at the pool with my friends, and we were all deeply believing Christians, we would sometimes try to walk on the water.  We believed that if we only believed hard enough; trusted Jesus strongly and sincerely enough, that we would be able to walk out on that pool water to the other side.  I imagine that we each had images in our minds of how amazed our friends would be, and how our elders would look up to us a wise and advanced Christians -- maybe the problem wasn't our lack of faith, maybe it was our vainglory, our seeking after applause and praise.

Anyway, I'm sure we were not the only adolescent Christians to experiment in this way and somehow believe that by faith we could defy the realities of mass, gravitation, surface tension, and displacement.  So, did Jesus really walk on the water?  Did Peter really step out and do the same for a moment?

As often happens we are brought face to face with the questions about what the Bible is, what it reports, what it proclaims, what it's authors were doing, sources, underlying historicity and so on.  But we are also brought face to face with questions of perception, expectation, and the power of the human mind to shape reality.  So let's look at some of the issues in this story and see what we come up with.

If you are a product of the scientific age, and we all are, then you will harbour a certain suspicion of anything that does not seem to coincide with the normal course of things.  Jesus, and especially Peter walking on the water becomes problematic because, well, that's just not what happens -- or at least, within the scientific framework we believe very strongly that things like this do not happen.  People simply do not walk on water unaided by either floatation devices or by a powerboat pulling them at high speed.

Since the 1700's, people -- first learned people, and later ordinary folks too -- have wondered about and questioned the stories in the Bible that defy the "Laws of Nature".  Before the 1700's and the intellectual movement called the Enlightenment, people inhabited a mental world full of spirits, demons, angels, Divine intervention, and therefore miraculous occurrences.  Things that defied ordinary experience were not seen as problematic, but rather as omens or signs, messages from the spiritual world to the physical world.  So Jesus and Peter walking on water were not a problem for people to believe, but rather a sign of Jesus' power and of the power of trusting or believing in Jesus.  You could say that before the 1700's, western European humanity lived in a sort of mental childhood where anything was possible.

From the 1700's until the mid 1900's western Europeans, and thus also North Americans, and anyone else who bought into the scientific framework lived in a sort of adolescence of the mind in which we believed that we had bested our elders, surpassed their inferior way of thinking and doing things, and were set to take over the world.  In the last few decades we could say that we have moved into the young adulthood of our thinking.  The cracks and arrogance of our adolescent phase are becoming apparent.  Our excesses are backfiring on us (in other words, we have come to realize that our technology creates as many problems as it solves).  We are being humbled.  But we are also learning that the "Laws of Nature" are not as solid as we thought they were, and that there's a lot of weird stuff that happens in the universe.  Rather than the certainty of Newtonian "Laws of Nature", today physicists deal in probabilities and chaos as an organizing principle of the universe.  The more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually know.  That is the beginning of adult thinking.

So did Jesus walk on the water?  Did Peter really manage to copy his master's deed for a moment?  Certainly everyone from the earliest Christians until not too long ago thought so.  But just because you think it doesn't make it so.  On the other hand, while we say that seeing is believing, modern psychological studies and brain research have also shown that for us humans, believing is sometimes a prerequisite for seeing.  We are as likely to miss noticing something because we don't believe it can happen, as we are to miss something because we don't know what to look for.  For example, if a house has peculiar noises, and strange things seem to happen all the time, and there is a feeling of someone being present when no one appears to be, is the house haunted, or is it just that the house evokes certain associations?  The one who does not believe that such things as spirits or ghosts exist will exclude that possibility and look to other explanations.  The one who does believe that such phenomena exist in some fashion, whether as the residual energy of someone who once lived there, or as something more spectacular, will have no trouble assembling the details into the picture of something we would call a haunted house.  For the one, the other is superstitious.  For the other, the one is blind.

But let me ask a very scientific question about our text for today: Is it possible that in the transmission of the story in oral form, something got either exaggerated, or modified, or transposed, so that what really happened was not exactly what we read?  Is it possible to make a "rational, scientific" explanation of what we read, and that what really happened was then somehow rendered in more spectacular fashion by "superstitious" and overzealous followers?  Bear with me a moment as I speculate on this possibility, as many Biblical scholars have done over the last 200 years.

Some have suggested that one little word got changed, changing the whole story.  Where it says that Jesus was walking "on" the water, the story might originally have said that Jesus was walking "along" the water, in other words, on the shore.  The issue in the story seems to be a storm or strong wind that is keeping the disciples from making progress, so Jesus is actually passing them (in Mark's Gospel, this aspect is brought out more strongly, cf. Mark 6:45-52).  But then why are they terrified?  Why does Jesus need to reassure them?  Clearly, Jesus may be walking along the shore, but given the poor visibility, he appears to be doing something that spooks them: he appears to be walking on the water, not along it.  Matthew's Gospel is the only one that has the part about Peter stepping out, so Matthew deviates most notably from the versions in Mark and John (Luke does not have this story at all).  Peter shouts to Jesus to command him to come out of the boat, and Jesus does so.  Peter steps out, takes a few steps, gets unnerved by the wind, and begins to sink.  Jesus pulls him up, and the next thing we know, everyone is in the boat and the storm has stopped.

It is interesting to compare John's version here, because in John the following is described: "...they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified.  But he said to them, 'I AM, do not be afraid.'  Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going."  What's so interesting about this is the role of perception.  The disciples may have thought they were far out in the water, when in fact they were quite close to shore.  Transpose this back onto Matthew's version and we have the possibility that what Peter is doing is stepping out into relatively shallow water, but that there is an unevenness of rocks and sand and that at one point he slips into a hollow under the surface.  In other words, the other disciples see what looks like Jesus and Peter walking on water, when in fact they are walking on rocks just below the surface.

So it is possible to read between the lines and imagine circumstances that suit the need to materially predictable parameters.  But doing so is also a very speculative interpretation or reconstruction whose main purpose is to satisfy the scientific need for explaining things in terms that are reproducible in the laboratory.  So it begs the question if we are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  The stories were written by pre-scientific people, who saw the world with pre-scientific eyes, and therefore will have seen things we perhaps cannot see because we don't believe them to be possible.

Another tack that some scholars have taken is to suggest that these stories are not originally from the time of Jesus' earthly ministry, but rather are stories of encounters with the risen Jesus.  This might explain both Jesus walking on the water, as well as explain the details about the disciples thinking that they were seeing a ghost.  It doesn't explain Peter's brief walk on the water, but again, perhaps the water was fairly shallow and it was the waves that dove him in.  But for whatever reason, the three Gospel writers who include versions of this story place it in the pre-crucifixion phase of Jesus' ministry.  So while this explanation open some tantalizing possibilities, we are again moving into an area of speculation whose main purpose is to make these pre-scientific stories fit our parameters.

I think we can go on speculating like this for a long time and come up with numerous variations and combinations.  But as we become more open to mystery and the realization that the universe is more complex, more subtle, more unpredictable, and more chaotic than we thought, we also have to entertain the possibility that the Gospel narratives might not be so impossible.  So I come back to the question that I have often asked before: what is the purpose of the story?  Why is it there?  What are we supposed to take from it?  I have often said that an answer is only as good as the question, and if the question has erroneous assumptions, then the answer will be unsatisfying or misleading.  So we have to think about the questions we ask of a text as much as we think about the text of which we are asking the question.  A question can back someone into a corner where they have to answer in a way that does not do justice to who they are or what they are doing.

So what are the Gospel writers doing?  The Gospel writers are preaching their respective sermons based on stories from the life of Jesus.  They are preserving the stories, yes, but not as neutral, detached accounts, but as stories of faith from people of faith.  While you can sort out the mechanics of what happened for yourself and live with your favourite theory, if you have not been moved to marvel and wonder at Jesus; if you have not had an impulse of the heart awakened toward loving Jesus and wishing to follow him, then you have not heard the story, you have not let the story sink into your inner being.  You are not meeting the text on its own terms.

The message of the New Testament is that in Jesus, God was doing something outrageous, something amazing, something unique, and those who saw him and knew him and learned from him were changed forever.  This is the message because the testimony we read is written by the very people who were changed forever, and they want to share what happened to them.  The New Testament is a testimony to how Jesus changed people's lives.  I think that what we often do is to use our technical questions about how this or that could have happened to create distance between us and the text so that it can't touch us anymore.  We tame it.  We cage it.  We put it on a leash.  But the Bible is a wild animal, and if you really want to know the nature of the beast, you have to meet it on it's own terms.

So, while you can ask the question, "Did Jesus and Peter really walk on water?", if you're willing to let the words of scripture touch you and move you, the better and more appropriate lead up to reading the text is, "Holy Spirit, speak to me through these words."  In other words, it is the stance of prayer, which is automatically the stance of assuming that God is there and listening -- in other words, a stance of faith -- which opens the text to you in the most immediate and powerful way.  Rather than create distance, this creates closeness, even intimacy with the text and with God.  These words were written for your benefit.  Let God speak to you through them.  Amen.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..." (Romans 8:28).  That's an interesting statement.  It could have many meanings, and probably has different meanings to different people at different stages of their lives.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..."  I think for most, what I would call traditional Christians', that is, people who grew up within a mainline or evangelical Christian church, and accepted the general teachings of their childhood denomination, this statement means that if you love God, then it'll all work out, because God will sort it our for you.  People who are able to hold this way of understanding these words exhibit a deep trusting faith in God, especially in God as the one who, like a heavenly parent, looks out for you and catches you when you fall.  Indeed, a lot of literature, as well as wall plaques, greeting cards, and Christian nicknacks bear messages that say approximately this: the one that especially comes to mind is Footprints in the Sand' where the teller comes to understand that it was in the hard times that Jesus carried him or her.

But this is not the only way to understand these words.  In fact, some people, some faithful or faith seeking Christians stumble on the idea that loving God means an automatic smooth ride thanks to God's intervention.  I'm one of those people, maybe because I've read Ecclesiastes too often, or considered the cost of following for Jesus and the apostles, not to mention a lot of other people in the Bible.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..."  You could understand these words to refer to a state of consciousness that changes the way you see things.  In other words, once you come to love God, you start seeing the world differently, and you start acting differently in that world.  So two things happen.  Your choices change, but just as importantly, and maybe even more importantly for this topic today, you receive the world and your circumstances differently.  But it's not just that you go from being a pessimist ("the glass is half empty") to becoming an optimist ("the glass is half full").  Rather, it is beginning to live in hope and the inescapable presence of God.  The circumstances don't get better, but you live in them better.

What do I mean?  I can't talk about this without coming back to the practice of Centering Prayer, the particular discipline of prayer/meditation which I practice.  This prayer practice is the prayer of permission.  I allow God in.  I open myself to God in my prayer and my life.  I bring no agendas other than to be available for God.  To be there.  To rest in God's presence.  To let God take the lead.  I stop searching, yearning, longing, driving the interaction between me and God.  I let God set the agenda.  Usually nothing happens.  You sit in silence, letting go of thoughts, and nothing happens.  However, something does happen, but not necessarily in the prayer time, and certainly what happens in the prayer time, the "practice" time, is the least important.  The thing that happens is that you become habituated to waiting on God, to being receptive, to reinterpreting, first a few things, and then more things, and eventually everything in light of entrusting everything to God.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..."  Or to rephrase it in light of Centering Prayer, "When I love God, things start looking different, not as bad, not as threatening, not as consuming.  When I love God, and turn things over to God, I live in them differently."  It's not that I expect God to solve my problem.  Usually God doesn't (Maybe God never does -- who knows?).  It is simply that as my relationship to God changes, my relationship to everything else changes too.

Maybe when Paul wrote, "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..." he really meant, "My experience has been that all things work together for good when I love God..."

This has a strong relationship to what Jesus taught about the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew's language) or the Kingdom of God (Mark and Luke's language). It is that little seed that gets planted and grows into an enormous plant (Matthew 13:31-32).  It is the little bit of yeast that infuses the entire lump of dough and causes it to be transformed (Matthew 13:33).  And this little thing, this little bit of faith, this tiny step of love toward God, is such a precious and valuable thing, so life changing, eye opening, consciousness reorienting, that some are prepared to sell everything to get it (Matthew 13:44-46).  And it's true, some people pay a lot of money in their spiritual quest on books, retreats, teachers and gurus, because deep down they know that the treasure, the pearl, is priceless.  But it doesn't have to cost a lot.  As Jesus says elsewhere, "Ask, and it will b given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you..." (Matthew 7:7).  It's right there, just waiting to be taken hold of -- this little bit of faith, this tiny step of love toward God that changes the world I experience, even if the world goes on as before.

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God..."  An interesting statement if ever there was one; a statement alive with possibilities.  Amen.

The passage from Genesis for today, the one about Abraham being told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, is one of the most disturbing passages of the Bible.  At least it is disturbing for us today, reading it from our cultural sensitivities.  For someone living 2500 or 3000 years ago, it might have been more of a transformative and encouraging passage.

In this story, God tells Abraham to do what Abraham might have done for any other one of the many gods of the time: to offer his son as a sacrifice.  Human sacrifice, especially of a son, was a not uncommon practice of the day, so Abraham may not have been so very surprised when the invisible God who had led him out of Mesopotamia asked for the same.

From God's perspective, this may have been a case of testing Abraham to see if he would be willing to sacrifice to this invisible God what he might well have sacrificed to one of the many gods whose statues stood in the temples and ziggurats of that region.  The implied test of Abraham is the question, "Are you truly faithful to me, or do you follow me because of what I promise?  Do you follow me to get things from me, or is there some deeper devotion or connexion arising from within you?"

 Today we are uncomfortable with the idea that God tests us.  Why we are so uncomfortable with that idea, I'm not exactly sure, but the discomfort is there.  We would rather imagine a God who is, above all, nice, easy going, and permissive.  And yet, from rearing children and from our own challenging life experiences, we know that testing and challenges are what help us to grow, to mature, and to become wise.  So really, God ought to be testing us all the time.

In the Lord's Prayer, where we pray "Save us from the time of trial," or in the old version, "Lead us not into temptation," the word being translated as "trial" or "temptation" (peirasmós)  has to do with testing.  You could translate this literally as, "lead us not into the testing."  There has, from the beginning, been a lot of debate about what Jesus meant by that.  I see it in the same spirit as the ancient prayer "Kyrie eleison" or "Lord have mercy."  It is not a denial of hardship, nor is it pretending that a person's life could ever be without challenges.  Rather, it is simply a prayer for mercy.  In other words, it is nice not to have to be challenged even though we know that ultimately it is more beneficial to be challenged and tested.

The ancient ascetics recognized this and so they often advised their younger apprentice monks to learn to receive difficulties as hidden gifts, because it is in the difficulties that growth happens.  The good times are obvious gifts, they said, like sabbaths rests along the spiritual journey, so to speak; but they are not times of growth, just times of refreshment.  Receive them also as gifts, but know what you're dealing with, these ancient masters taught.

Another way to understand this in light of what Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Let this cup pass from me, yet not my will be done, but your will be done."

If we were to try to translate the test given to Abraham into today's standards, it would be something that has to do with giving up or surrendering to God the one most important thing in our lives.  For Abraham it was his son, his beloved, the child of his old age.  But what is it for you or for me? If for some of us it is also our children, then how would that sacrifice look today when we no longer offer literal sacrifices to statues of gods?  In other words, in Abraham's day, sacrificing offspring to gods happened.  It doesn't anymore.  Instead, we offer up our children to other powers: pop culture, peer culture, economic needs, and in time of war, to the battle field.  Reluctantly we are able to rationalize to ourselves that we must or ought to sacrifice our children to all these things.  So if God were to put us to the test, what might that look like?  How would God say to one of us today, "You surrender your most precious ones to all those things, now surrender them to me.  You pay for and allow so much for the sake of the gods of this world, will you offer the same for me?"

But this is not only about parents and children.  This is about anything that is most dear to us.  We sacrifice our time for all these things and causes and entertainments.  How will we sacrifice that time to God?  We sacrifice our integrity to so many expediencies.  How will we offer up our integrity to God?  What will the testing look like?  Abraham went, prepared to surrender up his dearest.  I think most of us usually do not go and do not offer up what we cling to.  Rather we just stay in our habitual patterns of living, hoping that the test will never come.  But maybe the test has already come, and we have missed it, or even failed it.

On the other hand, perhaps you know of times when you have been tested, and you have passed the test. If that is the case, then you also know that each time you come through a time of testing, something in you becomes stronger, more resilient.  Your integrity increases.  Your ability to face down challenging circumstances and decisions improves.  You become ever more a strong presence for the support of others in this world.

Although we may not wish times of testing on ourselves, we might do well to receive them when they come with the awareness that through such times God can help us to move toward greater inner strength, greater maturity, and greater wisdom.  Our time of testing becomes, in the long run, a gift to us and to those around us.  Amen.  May it be so.  Amen.

God calls Abram to go from his home in Mesopotamia and live as a nomad in a strange land.  God promises the 75 year old Abram that he will be the father of a great nation.  Sarai, Abram's wife, is 65.  Hardly a promising age to begin having offspring.  It wouldn't be until 25 years later that God's promise would begin to take shape when 90 year old Sarah finally bears Isaac for her 100 year old husband.  In between the initial call and promise, and the birth of Isaac, both Abraham and Sarah find themselves impatient and uncomprehending about this promise from God.  Sarah offers her Egyptian slave girl Hagar in her place so that her husband can have offspring.  But when Hagar gets pregnant, she begins taunting Sarah, who in turn takes her ire out on the slave girl.  Hagar runs away, but a messenger of God sends her back with the promise that her son will also be the father of a great nation.  Ishmael is born, but God is still promising a son for Sarah and Abraham.  At last 13 years after Ishmael was born, Sarah gives birth to Isaac.  As we heard in today's first lesson, it bothers Sarah to see her son playing with Hagar's son, so she convinces Abraham to send them away.

The story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac, is a story full of the complexity of human relations, family dynamics, slave and owner dynamics, inheritance dynamics.

At the same time it is also a story that covers the full range of human emotions.  Hope and longing, impatience, plotting, jealousy, anger, arrogance, resentment, revenge, joy, laughter, gratitude, fear: the list goes on and on.

At the same time the story is full of all the elements of human society and culture.  There are social and cultural expectations about having children, about marital relations, about slave and owner relations.  There are issues of wealth, and all the other baggage we carry around with us in a culture.

If this were all, we would say that the Bible, and here in particular the book of Genesis, is a brilliant and extraordinary piece of ancient literature.  Unlike most ancient literature, the characters are human sized, real life people, with human sized real life problems that don't easily resolve themselves.  These are not merely archetypes, these are also flesh and blood human beings.

But none of this was or is the primary concern of the Bible.  All of these other bits of genius are really incidental to the main thread of this story: What God did for these people; how God was involved in their lives, and how they were changed by that, even when at some level they were not changed at all.

Even here, you see the genius and the realism of the story.  Contact with God, and God's provision or intervention, does not magically change people, but subtly, people cannot help be be different.

This makes me think about us, and our experiences of God in our lives.  One of the things I love to do is get people to talk honestly about their experiences of God and of the numinous in their lives.  It's a topic that is a little off limits in our time because we live in a scientific age when the only acceptable reality is the one that can be scientifically studied, measured, quantified, assessed and so on.  So when it comes to talk of God's presence, and that sense of God nudging you toward something or stopping you from doing something, we have learned to wonder if this is not a sign of some form of mild insanity.  But as I talk with people and we share with each other in safe settings our experiences of the Divine, it is clear that a lot of people have had moments, encounters that have perhaps changed them, or led them onto a new path, or sometimes just left them confused because they didn't have a context for the experience.

I think the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, is a good one for reflecting on these kinds of experiences.  Notice that 25 years elapsed between God calling Abram, and Isaac finally being born.  And even then, the complex, sometimes troubling story wasn't over.

That's how life goes, and one of the principles one learns in spiritual direction is that the realness of a call from God can only be discerned over a long period of time, and by the fruit that the call produces in a person's life.  Anyone who is in a hurry with God has missed a key element in most Biblical encounters: they play themselves out over time, and sometimes over a very long time, such as with Moses, with David, with Mary, and of course with Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac.

Another key element is that the call leads in the direction of serving God, of waiting for God, of having to practice patience and learn to live in hope, even if human impatience sometimes gets in the way, as when Sarah offered Hagar to Abraham.  But even then, God is able to use our impatience to bring about good, to turn our mess into a blessing.

And that is the final and maybe most crucial layer of this and all Biblical stories: God's grace.  God's overriding grace that transforms our evil into good, our shortsightedness into something enduring.  In the end, this is a story of God active in the lives of ordinary people, like you and me.

  While Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar were people who lived a long time ago in a land far away, their story is also our story, their struggles are our struggles, and their hopes are our hopes.  Maybe we're not so concerned in becoming the progenitors of great nations, but we do want to leave a positive legacy behind.  Maybe we're not nomads with slaves, but we do have our culture and our economy that drive us to do things that will seem odd to people 3000 years from now.  And in the midst of all our concerns, God is also at work, calling people, nudging people, comforting people.  God is working something out in your life, something that stretches over many years, the end of which can only be grasped in hope and patience.  Amen.

One of the most intriguing statements that Jesus makes is in today's Gospel reading: "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves."  While he originally said this to his disciples as he sent them out, I think these words  are as useful for us today as they were then.

But what does it mean for us to be sent out "like sheep into the midst of wolves" and to be "as wise as serpents and innocent as doves?"

If you haven't noticed yet, there are many people in our society today who have an ax to grind against Christianity and Christians.  Some of them have good reason to be angry against the institutional Church, as for example those who were abused and mistreated in the church run residential schools, as well as all the parents who had their children wrenched away from them without explanation, often dishonestly, and often against their will.

Some have less reason, but are no less angry or critical of Christianity.  I note this in my own extended family where the unkind words of a nun or a pastor at a time of personal crisis became the basis for a lifelong grudge against the Church, and sometimes even against God.  Whatever the root cause, however legitimate or illegitimate their anger or mistrust may be, their vitriol is real and trying to be your honest Christian self in their company can be a challenge.

Then there are those who philosophically have come to the conclusion that religion in general, or perhaps Christianity in particular, is evil.  They look at the checkered history of the Church and its involvement in such things as the Crusades, witch and heretic burnings, the religious wars of the 1500's and 1600's, the heavy handed methods of some missionaries during the 1800's, and so on, and based on these things they pass their judgment against us; or more precisely, they pass their judgment against the thing we associate ourselves with (I'll come back to that distinction later).

Beyond all these people, are the great number of people who are really quite indifferent to religion or Christianity.  They have no particular ax to grind, but unfortunately what little they know about us is shaped by extreme images, such as the hell fire and brimstone preacher, the aggressive born again saver of souls, extreme expressions of piety like self flagellation, and so on.  When they actually meet a real life Christian, they bring all these prejudices with them into the conversation, and it can be a lot of hard work getting past the skewed images.

Being a Christian today can be a little like belonging to a family or clan with an infamous history, such as say the Campbell's, so that people will pass judgment on you, not by who you are or what you do, but by what you call yourself or who you associate with.

So if we take seriously Jesus' call to go out into the world proclaiming the Kingdom of God, living the Jesus life, bearing witness to God's activity on the world, we are likely to run into some of this bitterness or negative energy.  The temptation, at a purely human level, is to become defensive; to put up barriers, to circle the wagons, to think tribally, and even to become a little bit paranoid.  When Christians do this, we generate the worst kind reactive religiosity.  If you're on the internet you may sometimes get some of this in the forwarded e-mails that circulate: E-mails that reminisce about a bygone time of school prayer, and widespread church attendance, and that criticize the way things are now.  It may feel good to some to grumble in this way, but in the end it is not helpful.  It only reinforces all the negative stereotypes about Christianity and Christians: that we are reactive, stuck in the past, and that we love to tell people where to get off.

No, Jesus said to his disciples that they were being sent out like sheep among wolves, and that they needed to be as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves.  This holds true for us today too.  To be as innocent as doves, means to have simple integrity.  To live the Jesus life simply because you believe that it is the right life to live, simply because you feel called to live it: love; compassion, especially for the weak, the exploited, the oppressed, but also for the strong, the exploiters, and the oppressors; forgiveness (we have been forgiven, therefore we ought to forgive); patience; in short, everything that Jesus was and is.  To do this out of love for God and love for humanity, whatever the consequences may be.  Innocent as doves.

But also wise as serpents.  This means to know what's going on.  To understand the social trends, to understand where people are coming from, and to think about how best to respond to each one.  Jesus said "Wise as serpents," using the image of the animal that was associated with ancient wisdom traditions.  Wisdom is a kind of knowledge that comes from life experience joined with thoughtful reflection.  This is not about deception, but rather about being smart about human relationships.

As The Church, as a church organization, as a congregation, and as individuals, we need to be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents if we want to break through the layers of hurt, prejudice, and ignorance that threaten to inoculate people to the message of and about Jesus, the message of God's love and embrace of all.  We have to think about what we're doing, how it's perceived and received; but also maintain simplicity and integrity to our thinking, our devotion, and our behaviour.

We help, not to win people over, but because it's the right thing to do.  We give, not to get something back, but because it's the right thing to do.  We tell the story of God's love in Jesus, not to convince anyone of anything, but simply because it is the story that has meaning to us.

See, Jesus sends us out as sheep among wolves.  Let us be as wise as serpents, and as innocent as doves.  Amen.

The First, Second, and Gospel readings for today are all in some way about conversion.  Abram is called by God to leave his home, his extended family, the familiarity of upper Mesopotamia, and go to some land in the west.  The voice is so powerful that he does as it bids him, and his life is changed forever.  Matthew is called by Jesus to follow him.  Again, the man, the presence, the voice of Jesus has such a powerful pull that Matthew leaves his work, his source of income as a tax collector, and follows Jesus to live as an itinerant.  Paul, of course, had a similar, and in some ways more dramatic experience of the voice of Jesus calling him to leave behind all his former certainty and to follow.  His life too, was forever changed, and many were changed through it.  In today's reading from Romans, Paul reflects on Abraham's trust in the one who called him, and how his faithfulness was in itself counted by God as righteousness.  This is of course the heart of Luther's insight that led to the Reformation: that God seeks our hearts, and not our slavish adherence to rules, laws, and rituals.  And so this became one of the Bible passages that led to Martin Luther's own conversion experience; an experience which, like Paul's, changed his life, and the lives of many others irreversibly.

Conversion, the experience of leaving something old behind, and embracing something new, is a phenomenon that fascinates me; maybe because I had my own conversion experience as an adolescent, and have since then had many more.  What is this conversion, that causes someone to go from mild mannered run of the mill follower of what everyone else is doing, to become an avid advocate of the thing they have found?  What is it that clicks for a person and awakens the intense desire to share their new found world view with everyone?

I think at our core we humans are always asking questions of the universe.  Sometimes the questions are fairly mundane: What should I eat?  What should I wear?  Why is it raining again?  Sometimes the questions are more probing: What should I do with my life?  Where do I fit in?  Why do bad things happen to me?  And sometimes they go to the next level: Why am I here?  What is my purpose in life?  Why is there a universe?

I think that most of the time we are asking these questions, all jumbled up with each other, with little awareness of them, especially of the "big" questions.  Then, when a crisis strikes, the big questions of life often come to the fore.  When chaos invades our ordered world, we wonder why this is happening to us.  But these times in themselves are not the times when conversions happen.  Rather, they are simply times when we become more aware that the questions are there, and at some level we are asking them.

Interestingly, conversion often comes quietly, and in very unexpected moments or experiences.  The writer Ann Lamott recounts her conversion to Christianity in her book "Travelling Mercies."  She had struggled for many years with addictions to alcohol and drugs, as well as to affairs with married men.  One Sunday, while she was rummaging around at the flea market, she heard singing coming from an African-American Presbyterian church located right by the flea market.  The singing drew her in and she began to sit in the entry way of the church listening, but always leaving before the sermon.  One evening, after having had an abortion, and trying to numb her emotional pain with alcohol, she found herself bleeding heavily.  Feeling too ashamed to go to the doctor in her intoxicated condition, she dealt with the emergency as best she could in her state, and after a few hours the bleeding stopped and she went to bed weak and sober.  She picks up the story:

"After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was [my departed] father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone.  The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure that no one was there -- of course, there wasn't.  But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond a doubt that it was Jesus.  I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.
"And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not happen.  I turned to the wall and said out loud, I would rather die.'
 "I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing him with.
"Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone.
"This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood.  But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.  But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever.  So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.
"And one week later, when I came back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn't stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I thought was just so ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure I could not escape.  It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling -- and it washed over me.
"I began to cry and left after the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down to the dock... and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, **** it: I quit.'  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, all right.  You can come in.' "So this was my beautiful moment of conversion."
(Ann Lamott, "Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith" © 1999; Anchor Books edition 2000, pp.49-50)

Coming from a very different set of life experiences, Sara Miles, the journalist, one time chef, and sometimes social activist, recounts her conversion in her book "Take This Bread" like this:

"Early one morning, when [my daughter] was sleeping at her father's house, I walked into St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco.  I had no earthly reason to be there.  I'd never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord's Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian -- or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut.  But on other long walks I'd passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and pain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter's habitual curiosity.
"The rotunda was flooded with slanted morning light.  A table at the centre of the open, empty space was tinged high above by a huge neo-Byzantine mural of unlikely saint figures with gold halos, dancing... Past the rotunda, and a forest of standing silver crosses, there was a spare, spacious area with chairs instead of pews, where about twenty people were sitting.
"Later I'd learn much about the mission of St. Gregory's... But that morning, I didn't even know what Episcopal meant... I didn't realize St. Gregory's was unusual.  I assumed that everything I saw was just plain church' and that I was there to be a spectator.
"I walked in, took a chair, and tried not to catch anyone's eye... Then a man and a woman in long tie-dyed robes stood and began chanting in harmony.  There was no organ, no choir, no pulpit: just the unadorned voices of the people, and long silences framed by the ringing of deep Tibetan bowls.  I sang, too.  It crossed my mind that this was ridiculous.
"We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting.  Jesus invites everyone to his table,' the woman announced, and we started moving up in a stately dance to the table in the rotunda.  It had some dishes on it, and a pottery goblet.
"And then we gathered around the table.  And there was more singing and standing, and someone put a piece of fresh, crumbly bread in my hands, saying the body of Christ,' and handed me the goblet of sweet wine, saying the blood of Christ,' and then something outrageous and terrifying happened.  Jesus happened to me.
"I still can't explain my first communion.  It made no sense.  I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind.  The disconnect between what I thought was happening -- I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happening -- the piece of bread was the body' of Christ,' a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening -- God, named Christ' or Jesus,' was real, and in my mouth -- utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry.
   "All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations.  Maybe I was hypersuggestible, and being surrounded by believers had been enough to push me, momentarily, into accepting their superstitions... Probably my tears were just pent-up sadness, accumulated over a long, hard decade, and spilling out, unsurprisingly, because I was in a place where I could cry anonymously...
"Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb.  I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand.  I had no idea what it meant; I didn't know what to do with it.  But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine.  And the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I'd swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh....
"I couldn't reconcile the experience with anything I knew or had been told.  But neither could I go away: For some inexplicable reason, I wanted that bread again.  I wanted it all the next day after my first communion, and the next week, and the next.  It was a sensation as urgent as physical hunger, pulling me back to the table at St. Gregory's through my fear and confusion."
[Sara Miles, "Take This Bread" © 2007 Random House, pp. 57-60]

In all these examples -- Abram, Matthew, Paul, Martin Luther, Ann Lamott, Sara Miles -- the one common element is that they did not seek an experience of God breaking into their lives, and the experience they had was the cause of radical change for them.  Abram became a nomad who worhsipped an invisible God in a world where every God had an image; Matthew an itinerant next to people like Peter or Judas who would normally detest him for being a traitor; Paul the founder of congregations for a movement he had persecuted; Martin Luther the friar and academic became the reluctant leader of a movement that rocked the western church; Ann Lamott went from agnostic writer for writers to being an inspiration for millions of Christians; Sara Miles went from being an atheistic social critic to organizing and running a church food pantry and providing impromptu spiritual guidance to hundreds of needy people through that program.

I think that you can analyze conversion experiences until you're head can't hold any more information, but you won't really appreciate them unless you take into consideration the one element outside of our ability to study and analyze: God.  Clearly, God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, breaks through to people at unexpected times, in unexpected ways, and things start happening.  It is a slightly scary, and very exhilarating thought.  God is still breaking into our world and our lives in concrete and tangible ways.    Perhaps one day soon, God will also come crashing into your life and change the course of it leading you to God knows what and God knows where.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Our First Lesson for today is made up of excerpts from the long narrative about the Great Flood, Noah and his family, and the ark.  Although we often use it as a theme for children's books, for the decor of children's rooms, and for soft toys for infants, the story of the Flood, if you really think about it, is a story full of terror.  While a handful of people and a menagerie of animals survive, all the rest of the people and animals drown -- at least if you take the narrative as literal history.

Listen to these interesting thoughts about the flood from I Peter (3:18-22) in the New Testament: "For Christ...  was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is eight persons, were saved through water.  And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you..."

Here, the Flood is understood through the ministry of Christ, and especially as a prefiguring of baptism -- in other words, as a kind of symbolic foreshadowing of Christian baptism.

In his letter to the Galatians (4:22-26), Paul does a similar sort of thing with the story of Hagar and Sarah.  He writes: "For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman.  One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise.  Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants.  One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mt. Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children.  But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother..." and it continues in this vein for several more verses.

Again, in I Corinthians (9:9-12) Paul refers to a passage from the Old Testament Law in this way: "For it is written in the Law of Moses, you shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.'  Is it for oxen that God is concerned?  Or does he not speak entirely for our sake?  It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever ploughs should plough in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop.  If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?  If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we still more?"

And finally in Romans (15:4), Paul says: "For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope."

The New Testament is a series of glosses or interpretations on the Old Testament, and as you heard, the apostles often took what we would consider history from the Old Testament, and reworked it as symbol or allegory.   As I have said before, the purpose of history, or what appears to be history, in the Bible as in the ancient world in general, was to instruct.  Later interpreters always believed that a wisdom or message was coded into the story.  By the same token, I think it is reasonable to assume that the authors of the stories or histories wrote them accordingly as well.

The story of the Flood is in chapters 6-9 of Genesis.  Genesis chapters 1-11 function like as grand prologue to not only the rest of Genesis, but of the whole Bible.  They are the prehistory, drawn from shadowy traditions and legends which the people of the Late Monarchy period, the Babylonian Exile period, and the early Second Temple period set down in writing, but which they cannot have seen or experienced.  But these traditions and legends have been reworked and crafted into a sophisticated series of accounts which lay out all the main themes of the rest of Scripture.  One gets at those themes by asking, not, did this really happen or happen in this way?' but rather, what is the function of this story here in this text, and in the life of Israel, and subsequently in the life of the Church?'

As to the Flood story, it is clear that the people at the time of the Exile, who saw their whole world flooded' and destroyed by the armies of Babylon, saw in this ancient legend drawn from the prehistory of the Middle East, a sign that God would not completely abandon them.  The Flood story sets out the theme of the remnant which God chooses, guides, and protects, and with whom God makes a new convenant.  As it says in Isaiah (65:8), "Thus says the LORD: As the wine is found in the cluster and they say, do not destroy it for there is a blessing in it,' so I will do for my servants' sake, and not destroy them all."

For Jews and Christians both, this theme of a remnant preserved by God became important again when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, sending both groups into exile from the place that had once been the focal point for both.  But among the Christians, there was a strong shift in how all these passages were read, as already seen in Paul's treatment of some of them.  Increasingly they were seen as pictures of the spiritual struggle that goes on within the believer.  The Church Fathers and other interpreters of the period A.D. 200-700 saw in all the cataclysms, floods, plagues, punishments, wars and battles, not historical events, but references to the inner battle and the spiritual purging that goes on as a person strives to surrender themselves increasingly to God's guidance and direction.  The Flood, because of the I and II Peter references to it, was seen as a sign of what God does in baptism, washing away all the previous sins and giving a person a new beginning.

But since the Reformation and the scientific revolution, poetry, metaphor, and symbol have fallen our of favour and we make truth thin and malnourished by limiting her to a diet of facts.  Truth has no more meaning, only utility, and when we turn our impoverished notions of truth on the Bible we are left with the false dichotomy many imagine: either it's all true, i.e. factual, or none if it is.  The Bible is all very true, but factual?  The factuality is always subservient to the meaning, to the larger and deeper and more mysterious truth of what it means to have God acting in one's life and in our world.

The story of the Flood is a story of terror for those who imagine it as a literal flood over all the world.  More likely, however, is that the flood behind the Flood story was either one of the many floods that beset Mesopotamia in ancient times, or (and this is my favourite theory) the great and sudden flooding of the Black Sea basin in about 10,000 B.C., at the end of the last Ice Age, when rising ocean levels overwhelmed a thin natural dam in a narrow valley we now call the Bosporus.

Whatever the roots of the story, the truth lies not in the details of this or that flood, but in the telling, in the images, in the way in which the words speak, evoke, move, comfort, or discomfort us when we receive them as words from God.  Amen.

Today's Gospel reading puts us right in the middle of what is usually called The Sermon on the Mount.  While most of the rest of what Jesus teaches in his parables and in his encounters with the scribes and Pharisees has a strong reassuring quality for ordinary folks who may not be as "holy" or "perfect" as those religious leaders imagined themselves to be, the Sermon on the Mount is more challenging.

Listen to some of the other things Jesus says here:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of falsehoods against you on my account...

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt looses its saltiness, it's not good for anything anymore, so it's thrown out and trampled under foot...

Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven...

If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment...

If anyone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give him your cloak also; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile...

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you...

When you give, give in secret, and God who sees in secret will reward you...

If you forgive others, God will forgive you; if you do not forgive others, God will not forgive you...

These are some of the teachings that lead up to today's reading.  They are all challenging, hard to live up to, practices and traits that require great and intentional self-discipline to develop.

So I'm left with the question: If we are saved by grace through faith, what exactly are we supposed to do with these teachings of Jesus?  Are they simply another indication of how we fall short, and how much we need God's grace?  Or can it be that they yet have some practical place in the lives of Christians?  Or, to ask the question differently: Are these teachings encouragements for the life of faith, or are they a new law that replaces the Old Law, or are they something different from either of these?

This is the tension that we always live with in Christianity: the tension between what we do and what God does.  In fact there have been many heated theological and doctrinal debates over the last 2000 years centered exactly on this tension.  At one extreme are those who say that we have to act and do and obey, otherwise God will reject us; and on the other extreme are those who say that God does it all, and we can merely receive it.  Most Christians and most Christian denominations, however, find themselves at various points along the spectrum that runs between these extremes.  Lutheranism has tended to be more on the "God does it all" side than on the "we have to do it" side.

But what do we do with these difficult injunctions of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?  Do we try to live them?  Do we read them and despair?  Do we choose some people from among us to be specially tasked with doing these things on our behalf?  What do we do?

I think the answer to these questions lies somewhere in Jesus' words, "You cannot serve two masters."  I think that the apparent tension between what we do and what God does is only a tension as long as we are serving multiple masters.  When you are serving only one master, and that master is God, then the difference between what I strive to do and what God does for me comes close to disappearing.

I see this at play in myself.  When I am serving multiple masters: when I am trying to suit myself, find my happiness, do my thing, it's hard to do these things that Jesus talks about.  They seem so different from how I operate spontaneously.  When I am trying to please people, keep them happy, do all the right things as others see them, then again, I can feel resentment.  Why do I have to do all this?  I can feel sorry for myself.

  But in those rare moments when I am only about serving God, somehow everything else falls into place.  Briefly, what Jesus describes becomes its own kind of second nature.  The ancient Christian ascetics insisted that what Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount is in fact our true human nature, our true reflection of the one in whose image we are made, but that it has become obscured and tarnished and needs to be polished clean.  Well, the little bit of polishing I manage in those fleeting moments quickly retarnishes and I again become my second master, and I cannot do what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, and like Paul I lament: I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate (Romans 7:15).

In today's reading, Jesus tells his hearers to stop worrying.  God's got it all under control.  Seek first God's kingdom, and all the rest will fall into place.  But for most of us who still serve two or more masters, this seems impossible, silly, preposterous, pie-in-the-sky.  Yet I think when we can let go of those other masters, including our own egos, and let God be the sole master in our lives, then we will hear these words of Jesus and even do them, as Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock: the rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on rock (Matthew 7:24-25).

Unfortunately, we usually obey the calls of many masters: social expectations, personal likes and dislikes (that's the ego), money, old tapes in our heads, and so we are more like the second person in Jesus' closing words where he says: Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.  The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew beat on that house, and it fell -- and great was its fall! (Matthew 7:26-27)

The fall that I understand here is not the one in which bad people go to a bad place called hell after they die.  Rather, the fall I see here is the failure to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world because we dissipated our energies serving too many masters.    The fall is that we had the chance to make a positive difference in the world reconciling enemies (not just far away, but right in our own personal circles), alleviating poverty (not just somewhere else, but right here where we live), and bringing peace to all places; the fall is that we missed the opportunity to do all this because we were too busy worrying about tomorrow.  Not a spectacular cataclysmic fall like Atlantis collapsing into the sea; just a failure of the roof to hold and a slow caving in of the house, like an old neglected barn.  Yeah, I think that's what we the house built of living stones are sometimes like: an old neglected barn.

"No one can serve two masters; a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and..." Fill in the blank.  Amen.

The first chapter of the Bible is certainly one of the most intriguing and thought provoking chapters in the whole Bible.  For us today in our age of amazing scientific and technological advances, this chapter raises a lot of questions about the relationship between the Bible and scientific inquiry, about the status of scientific research in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the status of religion in the world of science.

First, let me say that I am of the school of thought that uses the slogan, "the Bible is true, and some of it happened."  What that means is that when we turn to Scripture, we encounter truth in many forms.  Some of it is truth of a uniquely spiritual nature, some of a psychological or relational nature, some is wisdom, some is profoundly mysterious, and some is even historical.  One of the really huge mistakes that people make is to assume that the Bible is history first, even though the historical portions are not straight history either, but are written with spiritual or pedagogical or sermonic and inspirational goals in mind.

Second, let me say that I believe that there exist both a physical realm and a spiritual realm, and that the physical realm has come into being out of the spiritual realm.  The proper subject matter of modern sciences is the physical universe, and anything that does not have physical existence cannot be accounted for in the framework of modern science except by way of speculation.  Jesus said that God is spirit and that those who worship God rightly, worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:24).  Spirit has always been understood to be a non-physical reality, so modern science can neither affirm the existence of God, nor deny the existence of God.  I think it is unfair of Christians to demand of scientists that they assume God's existence in terms of their research, and it is beyond the scope of science to assert the non-existence of God.  And yet, as I will get to later, some of the cutting edge theories of modern physics may undergird the idea of a spiritual realm in an unexpected way.

Third, I believe that modern science is an immensely important tool for us to understand the way the universe is put together and how it works.  I believe that if we are asking the right questions of science and of the Bible, we will come to the same conclusions.  If science and the Bible come to very different conclusions, then we are asking the wrong questions of either the one or the other or both.  For example, if I ask of the Bible, "How was the universe created?" and I come up with a six day creation approximately 6000 years ago, and I ask of science the same question and discover a coming into existence of our universe some 15 billion years ago in a process called the Big Bang, then somewhere I am asking the wrong question.  I think in this case, because the scientific evidence is very strong, I'm probably asking the wrong question of the Bible.  I am, perhaps, asking it a question it was not meant to answer.  Perhaps the right question of the Bible is "Who created the universe?" a question which science, on the other hand, cannot really answer, and therefore a question which would be the wrong question to ask of science.

So let's look at this text from the beginning of Genesis.  Whenever I read the first chapter of Genesis, this amazing, beautiful telling of God bringing the world into being, the first thing that really leaps out at me is that it is a highly schematized piece.  The structure of the days of creation lines up very neatly into two parallel columns of three days each, with the seventh day as the unifying completion of the whole process.

On days 1, 2, and 3, God creates the categories.  On days 4, 5, and 6, God fills the categories.  This piece is so highly schematically structured that I believe that not even its original authors intended it to be understood literally.  From the beginning I think it was a piece setting out to communicate that God both orders the universe with its underlying structures, and fills those structures with the content we observe.  Genesis 1, possibly composed during the Babylonian Exile, may have been meant as a counter to the Babylonian myths which confronted the exiled leaders of Israel: myths in which there are preexistent primordial beings who are slain by the gods, and out of whose remains the universe is made.  To the myths of their Babylonian conquerors, the sages, scribes, and prophets of the God of Israel say, "No!  All was brought into being by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, both the foreground and the background of the picture."

So this opening section of the Bible tells us: who made the universe and what it was that God created or creates, and it does so in a highly schematized fashion, almost begging us to read this poetically or perhaps symbolically.

 I like to muse on the findings of the cutting edge of science, especially theoretical physics and cosmology, because I think it is here where we find some of the strongest resonance between faith and science.  But first let me jump back to an ancient scientist and theologian.  In the early 400's St. Augustine, in one of the later chapters of his Confessions, struggled to understand how God can know and see all without predetermining the course of our choices.  Using the best science of his day, which was a combination of observation, philosophy, logic, and imagination, he came up with the picture of a physical universe of space and time existing like a bubble surrounded by "eternity".  In this model, eternity exists outside of time and space, and therefore the language of here and there, up and down, large and small, as well as the language of before and after is meaningless.  In other words, God sees from and is in an eternal here and now.

This image has amazing similarities to the image proposed by Albert Einstein in the early 1900's -- 1,500 years after Augustine!  In the original Einsteinian model, space and time exist as a closed universe, perhaps as a sort of bubble beyond which is that which we cannot know or measure because it is outside of time and space.  In an article about Albert Einstein written a few years ago (National Geographic, May 2005, "Beyond the Big Bang: Einstein's Evolving Universe, by Marcia Bartusiak), the author commented that Einstein's genius was not so much in his use of mathematics as in his ability to visualize and imagine.  He imagined what things might look like and then set out to see if that could be expressed mathematically.  In this way he was not only a scientist, but also an artist, a poet, and something of a prophet.

Today we have some of these artistic poet-prophet-scientists studying the universe at its tiniest level, the level of subatomic particles.  They have observed some strange and intriguing phenomena.  One of those odd phenomena is the inexplicable and seemingly random coming into existence and going out of existence of subatomic particles.  It is not that these smallest components of our existence coagulate and disperse randomly.  The energy of them completely disappears.  They literally come into and go out of existence in an apparently random fashion.  Given that everything is made up of these tinniest of particles, these scientists are forced think of the existence of the universe not as a certainty, but as a set of probabilities.  In other words, it is conceivable that all these particles could suddenly disappear in concert, and everything would simply vanish.  Or, by the same token, there could suddenly come into existence a vast mass of them, completely disrupting the universe we know.  The saying that there are no guarantees in life may be truer than we realize.

Out of this work and the work of the cosmologists (those who study the largest structures of the universe), a number of theories of parallel universes have been put forward, to try to explain or account for the many odd phenomena they are finding -- as, for example, where these subatomic particles go when they disappear, and where they come from when they appear.  Increasingly many of these scientists are speculating about planes of existence which are completely other from our plane of existence, in a remarkable echo to the notion I expressed near the beginning of this sermon, that there exists a spiritual realm in parallel to this physical realm.  There are several parallel universe theories, but the one which I find most helpful is the one which imagines that because these parallel universes exist in forms and are governed by laws completely different from those of our space-time universe, they exist, so to speak, right here, right now, but cannot be perceived by us.  You see how this has a strong resonance to the idea that God is here and everywhere at all times.  God is both completely other, but imminent and intimately in touch with and connected to all of us and all of creation at all times.  Heaven is not up there or out there.  Heaven is brushing up against us all the time.  Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you and among you.  It has come near indeed! (cf. Luke 10:9 and 17:20-21)

So here scientific speculation and religious speculation seem to come close again.  Perhaps the random appearing and disappearing of the smallest particles that make up all that we see is not random at all, but a probability driven by the intention of God.  Perhaps we are actually seeing what it looks like for God to be, not only the creator, but also the sustainer of the universe.  Perhaps.

The writers of the first chapter of Genesis were, in their own right, inspired observers and imaginers of the universe.  They set down a very stylized hymn about God's creation of all that is.  Within the schematized framework of this great preamble to the Bible, they also wove in enough detail to open up many other areas of insight.  For example, by having light and dark without physical sources of light and dark, they imply that there is a type of light that is not physical.  Jesus said of himself that he is the light of the world.  We understand that he did not mean that he was some sort of cosmic street lamp, but that he was speaking of spiritual light.  By the same token there can also be spiritual darkness.

Some have seen in the structure of this chapter an endorsement of an evolutionary understanding of the universe because God does not bring everything into existence in one blow, but has the universe unfold in a process.  And yet others have seen here in the stages from light to firmament to land to the motion of heavenly bodies to animals to humans and the Sabbath the portrayal of a logical progression which walks through the basic components of our existence: energy to matter to gravitation to time to life to consciousness to worship and thanksgiving.

I imagine that this amazing poem of creation will continue to yield abundant fruit to inspire us, and perhaps to trouble us, for generations to come.  Thanks be to God for speaking the Word to us through this text.  Amen.

"If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" (Jn 20:23).  What did Jesus mean by this?  Who was he saying this to?  Does this have anything to say to us today?

These words can be understood many different ways, and have therefore been used at different times to bolster various positions.  Most notably they became a bone of contention between the Papal theologians and the Reformation theologians.  While the Papacy wished to affirm and assert the role of the Church in forgiving and retaining sins, the Reformers believed that ultimately the forgiving and retaining of sins were a matter which God decides with each believer or nonbeliever.  So for the one party these words from today's reading were more ammunition for the Church's control of the Keys of the Kingdom, while for the other they were to be understood more broadly.

But these are not the only ways to understand these words.  I think there are some further questions we ought to ask about this passage, and some further possibilities we ought to entertain when trying to understand what is meant by, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

First of all, Jesus often came into conflict with the religious authorities of his time because he would declare to the people he healed that their sins were forgiven.  The religious authorities found this to be blasphemous, because only God can forgive sins.  Now, we could say that, as Jesus was the incarnation of God in human form, then certainly they were right that only God forgives sins, they just didn't know who it was that was forgiving sins.

On the other hand, Jesus also taught his followers to forgive.  In the prayer we call the Lord's Prayer, it says "forgive us as we forgive," to which, in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus then adds the comment, "If you forgive others, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive you" (Matthew 6:14-15).  In other words, there is a link of some sort between our forgiving others, and the forgiveness we receive.  There is some sort of correspondence, some connexion, which is in some way activated by what we do with forgiveness or how we do or don't forgive.

So look and listen again: "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."  Is this a statement conferring the power of judgment on the disciples, or is it another way of saying what Jesus said in Matthew?  Is it the Johannine way of saying, "When you let go a sin, it is let go of, but when you hang on to it, it is hung on to"?  (Or maybe even: "When you let go of a sin, it lets go of you, but when you hang on to a sin, it hangs on to you.")

But let's say for a moment that this is the granting of some sort of authority to decide whose sins are forgiven and whose are not?  Wouldn't it then be urgent for the disciples to forgive as freely as possible in order to save people from the judgment?  Wouldn't this be a way of saying, "Look, these people's condemnation is all on your heads because you didn't forgive them"?  And if this authority was passed on to the Church, then shouldn't the Church forgive freely or become guilty of sending people to judgment and condemnation?  Or if it was passed on to all Christians, not just the Church as institution or lineage of leadership, but to rank and file followers of Jesus, then shouldn't we all forgive as freely as possible to save as many people as possible?

Certainly that would be the logical conclusion for me if I saw these words as that sort of legal power to forgive on God's behalf.  It is for this reason that I do not see these words as that kind of granting of authority, but see them rather as being cut from the same fabric as the words in Matthew's Gospel: forgive and you will be forgiven; don't forgive and you won't be either.

Forgiveness means restoration of relationship.  Legal pronouncements do not restore relationships.  But what does is when the trespasser and the victim of the trespass can sit down with each other and own what needs to be owned and let go of what needs to be let go of.  I think that's the fabric that these words are cut out of.

So Jesus breathes on the disciples, a symbolic action mimicking the way God breathed life into creation in Genesis, and bestows on them the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the one who will speak on their behalf, and declares to them that their most important mission is forgiveness.

That was key back then, and today teaching people how to forgive is still the single most important thing we can do in this world from the point of view of human relations.  Wars happen because peoples can't forgive each other.  Crimes happen because perpetrators can't find forgiveness for their families of origin, or for authority figures, or for people who have more than they do: in other words, cannot find compassion.  (Forgiveness and compassion are two sides of the same coin.)  Family feuds fester because people cannot forgive.  On and on it goes.  We are all good at rationalizing why we shouldn't forgive, why we are right, why we are owned an apology or restitution, but we are not so good at recognizing why we should forgive: for the sake of humanity, for our own sanity and physical health, and because to be Christ to the world means to forgive.

But what does it mean to forgive?  What does forgiveness look like, inside?  How does it feel in my body when I have really forgiven?  As I have said before, forgiveness is not a simple mental decision.  Rather it is a process of letting go.  Jesus usually uses the image of debt cancellation to talk about forgiveness.  Everyone who has not forgiven believes that the other person owes them something: an apology, compensation, something.  You have to know what it is that you think the other person owes you.  Then you have to begin to let go of that.

That can happen many different ways.  You might imagine what it would be like to actually get what you want and realize that to have it wouldn't actually do you much good.  I remember one time when I was mad at someone for something they had said.  I wanted revenge.  In front of several other people I found my moment and I zinged them, trying to make them look bad.  Instead I only made myself look immature.  That incident taught me that most or maybe all of what I hang on to is silly, and I am better off letting go of it.  I find peace, my relationship with that person comes to a place of peace, and perhaps they also find or keep peace.

How interesting then, that just before Jesus says "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained" he says "Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you."  You know you have forgiven when you experience a sense of peace about the matter.  Until then you are still clinging, still expecting or wanting repayment, and probably making yourself unwell in the process.  Peace be with you.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

I think these words from today's reading really have the most mundane meaning: when you forgive you forgive, when you don't you don't.  But in their mundaneness, they are perhaps all the more profound, because they bring us back to the simplest and most powerful truth about forgiveness: It is something in our power, and it is a powerful something given to us as a gift which we can share, and in sharing make everyone's life the better.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.