Pentecost 6 - C

Moving On

Introduction

I chose the theme song from the Littlest Hobo for our opening quote today in the bulletin because I think it expresses something similar to our Bible readings today – a sense that there is more to the world, more happening, than meets the eye… and also a sense that we are all on a journey, all seeking something.

So where do you find yourself this weekend? What is on your mind? Are you feeling like you would like to settle down more, have less to do, be able to sit on the couch and do nothing; or are you feeling like you wish you could have a vacation, wish you could go away somewhere, wish something, anything would happen?

Human beings are funny things, we are, for the most part not content. We are restless in that we are always thinking about something else. But this is part of human nature, part of who we are deep down in our souls.

Augustine, a famous bishop from the early years of the church once said, my soul is restless until it finds it rest in God.

And I really think that might be true. We are made for change, we are made for growth, we are made restless…

Of course, the world is continually changing around us. As much as we sometimes want to stop the spinning wheel and get off things are different today than they were yesterday and tomorrow they will be different again.

Is that human nature? Is that the way we were intended to live? Why are we on a journey and where are we going… all will be revealed… well…  maybe not, but perhaps we can explore that little today.

Heading on Up to Heaven

So first up, change happens. It is inevitable. And as you are all well aware, there are different ways to react to the way the world changes around us.

I want you to realize that there is a lot going on in the story of Elijah and Elisha, but at the very simplest level, Elijah is going to die, and Elisha knows it.

You see, what is happening here is that everything is changing, and everyone knows it. Elijah keeps saying, stay here, you have done enough. Elisha keeps going each and every time. Elijah asks what he wants, and he says to follow in your footsteps, to inherit the family business, and Elijah responds that if it were up to him, he would…

Now, we can talk about prophets, about miracles, about followers… but what is really happening here is that things change. And sometimes, we are ready for the journey, and sometimes we want things to stay the same.

Remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed to God that if there were any other way besides the crucifixion, he would like to know about it now… we don’t always want change.

But still, it happens. So here is where I get back to human nature. We can do one of two things, we can deny change, stick our heads in the sand, wish for things to be different – or we can accept it and answer the question, so what now? What do I need to get through this?

I like to think that each and every thing that happens to me is an opportunity, a challenge, a moment where I get to choose to re-invent myself and find new ways to cope and new ways to get through things. I know I am sometimes actually sad and depressed when things change, but on my good days I see that there is opportunity.

So change happens, and it still seems like how we react is the main thing that matters.

A Hole in the Ground

My kids had a book I read them when they were little. It was a simple little book about a stray cat looking for a place to sleep. It always made me think of this Bible passage. That cat finds that hanging upside down like a bat is too hard, or that living in a burrowed hole in the ground like a fox is too dirty… so where is the place for it?

Perhaps this goes back to my original point about how we are restless. And the truth is most of the time we are restless AND heading somewhere. We have goals, or tasks to accomplish, and we are heading out there to do them… but the thing is that life gets in the way… it can feel like no one understands or appreciates, it can feel like we are all alone…

If you think of this Bible reading about Jesus as a video, what would you think the expression of Jesus’ face might be? I think he would be somewhere between two things – certain and lonely.

Here he is, heading off to do what he knows must be done; but it feels no one wants to come along, no one wants to support him… and that is rough.

You see, as much as we want change and are restless; as much as, like Elisha, we are trying to make the best of things and move forward… there is always this one little stumbling block, the fact that most people are also comfortable with how things are.

I know this sounds like a contradiction, and it is. But it also seems to be true, we would like to change things, but we also want things to remain the same…. And that really makes living life hard.

And it makes it hard for people who decide to go ahead and change things. They get misunderstood, they get to feeling lonely, they have to change things and work on that journey from here to there and take scary first steps… and we fight against them.

Ever tried to change anything and discovered people did not really want you to change? You probably have. And it is hard.

But change is inevitable. Life is constantly changing, and so are we. I wonder what would happen if we stopped fighting against it.

Conclusion

Okay, you may have realized this entire sermon has been circling around a theme without naming one, without making any conclusions, without drawing on any facts even – everything I have said has been pretty abstract without any specific details… change happens, sometimes we are prepared, sometimes we fight against it.

People will tell you that a sermon should have some Good News, which is what Jesus was always all about, helping people to find the good news in their lives….

I guess in my own meandering way the sermon was trying to show what life is really like… you don’t know what is going to happen or where you are going.

When I started, way back at the introduction I asked you to think about your own life… about what is happening in it…

Here is mine – I am feeling old lately. I am slowing down and the way I have lived is making my body prematurely old. My kids are growing up and I am missing huge chunks of it. That thing that happens where time speeds up as you age has so overtaken me that it feels like I cannot remember anything happening between Christmas and now…

So what are the things that are making you feel that things change too fast? Someone could die, work could change, people will come in and out of your lives, your grandkids could grow up without you noticing…. And some of you may be feeling old too….

But here is the thing. We were made for this. That is the good news. We are people who are restlessly driven into the future, who change, who adapt… and we find new meaning, and hope.

We were created to embrace life in all of its fullness, no matter where we find ourselves in it. So look around, find out where you really are, and live…

God will be with you in the details.

Communion Sunday

A small caveat. I have not felt like a sermon I have ever preached worked worse than this. I changed it in each church and I still never got the feeling that I connected to the people or evoked the thought or feelings I had hoped for. Perhaps I was not able to put into words what I was feeling...

Church

Introduction

I am taking things a little differently today. I am going to invite you to participate in a church service about church. In other words, I want to talk about what we do here every Sunday. Not in the abstract, but in the concrete reality sense of saying, what are we doing now, and why…

Church services have been happening for thousands of years. People have gathered together for a number of reasons… one of the first was probably food. Gather together around the campfire and pray for the mastodon or buffalo to be plentiful… then after we started planting crops I am sure people prayed for rain, or sun, or to keep the frost off…

The point is, religion began when people banded together for a common goal. They all decided they wanted one thing… rain in a drought, or sunshine in a storm. And they prayed and prayed and hoped for things to get better.

There was always a beginning. And the beginning was always an invitation… think of lighting the candle, or the opening prayers, or a song we sing as an invitation not only for us to enter into the experience, but for God to be present with us.

You see, the things that we do are ancient, in a way… we do them differently, but they are the same, we are still using the opening moments of church to set the stage… we are still using word and song and prayer to get us in the right mood, and to help us to see the holy, to see God, in our midst.

Communion

At the heart of what we are doing is communion. Not the meal which we will be sharing later, I will get to that, but the idea behind the word… communion.

Have you ever heard someone say, they are going to commune with nature? I used to say that when I smoked and had to go outside… grin. But seriously, I think lots of people say this… and what do they mean?

They mean that they are becoming one with… that they are emotionally connecting to… nature.

The actually dictionary definition is to share ones most intimate thoughts or feelings. So what we are talking here is that we connect with in some way… and behind our church service is this thought that we are connecting with God, and with each other….

Perhaps that is why I love the passage from John, the one in which Jesus is talking about vines and branches… It points out the connection we all have. It is as if we are all part of one another. This is true whether we are talking about our family, our church family, everyone out there in the big bad world, or God…

At the same time, it is more than that. What Jesus actually says is that all of this communion, all of this being the branches, takes effort. We have to choose to remain connected. We have to work at it and we have to “actually” be connected.

So there are essentially three things: First, recognize that we are all connected. Secondly, we need to work at this relationship. Lastly, what we need to do is to, as Jesus puts it, “we must bear fruit.” It is not just about being connected in name, it is about being in tune with each other, about working together, about being on the same page…

When we come to church, we are saying that we believe this… that we are all connected…

Eucharistic Yearnings

So, the sacrament of communion goes right back to Jesus… or perhaps further back. Like I said, people have been getting together for religious services as long as we have been around. There used to be feasts and meals and celebrations long before Jesus. In fact, Jesus and the disciples were getting together for a religious feast and church service in the first place, the Jewish Festival of Passover.

But Since that night, things changed, and as Christians we have made this special meal, called communion, or the Eucharist, the central part of our worship together. The reason we do it is as a re-enactment of that Last Supper in the Upper Room.

We know that Paul, while in the church in Corinth, was celebrating this meal just a few years after Jesus died.

We also know that one of the reasons the early Christians got in trouble was because people thought they were cannibals… that they were actually eating the body and blood of Jesus.

But we are not doing that… so what are we doing? Well, first and foremost we are sharing a meal. By doing that we are doing something we usually only do with family and friends. Secondly we are remembering and re-enacting the last night of Jesus’ life.

That is important because we know that when everything was going wrong, Jesus did something nice for his friends, he prepared a meal, he invited them, he served them… but more importantly, he gave them a way to remember. Each time you eat this bread or drink from this cup… remember me.

And we can understand that… Here is my grandmother’s recipe for macaroni and cheese. Boil macaroni in a pot, drain it, add a can of tomatoes and grate some cheese into it. Add some salt if you like… It is not like this is high cuisine or even a very memorable dish… but I love it, and every time I eat it I think of her.

Jesus was pretty smart in setting up something simple, eat some bread and drink a bit of wine and remember me… because thousands of years later we still do.

Conclusion

So I guess what I am trying to say is that church is about relationship. It is about how we come to be with each other, recognize each other, and become united just as the vines are united to the branch.

Sure, it takes work, and there are responsibilities, and it does not always seem like we are connected in ways we could be… but….

When we come here, when we commit to this, we are working on it… and when we are honestly doing that, we are on the path.

Pentecost 2 - C

Come Together… Right Now…

Introduction

It almost seems too simple to say this… but together we are stronger than we are apart.

Last weekend I was in Sackville for the Annual General Meeting of Maritime Conference. For those that don’t know, the United Church is separated into regions, and ours goes from Bermuda to the Gaspe. So it is Bermuda, Nova Scotia (Cape Breton… they get angry if you think saying NS includes them), Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and the Gaspe region of Quebec.

It is geographically huge… but at the same time, we tend to forget our own size. When you come to church in Whitney and these 20 people are your fellow United Church folks, you forget that we are the largest protestant denomination in the country.

But in a Hockey Rink in Sackville, with some 700 people, the view seems quite different.

Margaret McCain, yes, one of those McCain’s, gave a speech about why she donated money to the United Church. Essentially it was this: Although she goes to another church, she thinks the United Church has done so much for the world, for Canada… we led the way in terms of Women’s rights… Mount Allison was the first university to grant a degree to a woman and we were the first denomination to ordain women… It was a United Church member who went on t politics and created welfare and medicare, we have fought for including and treating as equal everyone, no matter their race, or sex, or ideals…

We, together, have made a difference.

Acts 2:42-47

 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

With Kids

 Working Together…. Lego… what can we build, how do we work together more… why?

Socialist Jesus

So when the followers sat around for a while and thought about what Jesus was saying… here is what they came up with… we should work together!

Let’s pool all of our resources, let’s all work together, and live together, and create a new way to be in the world but not part of the world.

If we did that right, there would be no poor people, no one would have to worry about food or housing, everyone would get enough….

It didn’t last too long, partly because Christianity spread too fast… it was located in Jerusalem for a year or two tops, then it spread to all the Roman Sea Ports, and then inland. Hard to all live together when you are talking thousand mile differences…

But the idea stuck… monasteries and convents were the main places of learning and prayer, they were the social agencies and food banks of the middle ages… and followed this same principle that we should all work together and be together and support one another…

The same is true of congregations. We are meant to be a community where we come together, work together, help each other, are there for each other.

It still does not work as well as it should. I have often thought we could figure out a way to do it better. But it is hard. There are a lot of things each of us are involved in… there are a lot of directions pulling us to head out of here…

But in the end, the sentiment is still the same, together we are stronger than when we are on our own.

Hebrews 10:23-25                   A Call to Community

Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Provoking One Another

There was a story on the CBC this week about an American Spelunker… that is a cave explorer… who went to the Ukraine to explore some cool caves… he just thought they would be fun… but when he got down in them he discovered something he did not expect… shoes…clothes… lots of other things that suggested someone, sometime, had lived in these caves known as Priest’s grotto.

So he started asking questions, and doing the research… what he discovered was amazing. In the 1940’s in the Ukraine, Nazi soldiers had begun to round up the Jews for concentration camps. In fact, in a few weeks they had taken half the town.

One mother sent her son into the forest to find a place to hide, he found a cave. So eventually 38 people ended up spending 344 days in this cave, the lived for over 2 years underground. The cave it huge, the 10^th largest in the world, and could be accessed only by a sinkhole the size of a fireplace chimney.

Ok, seriously, how long could you stay in one cave, in the dark? I think any one of us alone for that long would go insane, not to mention it is only 10 degrees in there…

But together, working together, taking turns, caring for each other, telling jokes and stories, those people hid, and lived, for 10 years.

It makes it seem to me, that when we help each other we can do superhuman things; that when we work together we create things and do things that we would never have believed that we can do.

We could all tell stories like this… perhaps some of them less life threatening… but stories of people bringing food after we lose a loved one, or stories of someone helping you to fix a deck, or move… or gong fishing with you when you are sad. Being together changes everything. Working together changes everything.

The author of Hebrews, writing to the early church, says we should meet together and provoke each other to love, and good deeds. We should encourage one another and push one another and help one another. That is what church is all about.

Mark 3:31-34                          The Spiritual Family of Jesus

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!

Why are we here?

 Every so often I find someone who comes up to me and says that they do not need church, that they find God while walking in the woods, or standing on the seashore… and I say, of course you do, but… that is just God. You don’t go to church to find God, you go to church to find yourself.

I also notice that there are quite a few people who do not go to Presbytery, or to Conference, and I wonder the same thing… why do we go to church? You see, in these passages  we are told the answer… we go to church because it is there that we meet people who are like us, who believe like us, who work on the same things as us, who are our spiritual sisters and brothers… and we go to lift them up, and to be lifted up by them.

No matter how many walks in the woods I take, it is not going to challenge me to be a better person. Going to church is. Meeting someone who has a great idea for something and wants to do it is going to challenge me to do something more…

I guess in simple terms, we are here in church for each other.

Jesus was not really a mean person. Later on he arranges for one of the disciples to take care of his mother after Jesus is executed. But he is saying something important… he is saying to the people gathered around him that they are as much his family, as much a part of him, as his own mother and brothers and sisters….

And he is there for them, and they are there for him. That… is the reason we go to church.

Conclusion

So there are two things I want you to remember from today – one is that the United Church is not dead, nor is it going anywhere. We are still the second largest denomination, we are a huge group of committed people, and we are trying to make a difference in Canada and the World so that everyone gets to live the way God intended.

Secondly, being here is important… I don’t mean you have to com every week, I don’t mean you need to do it when you are sick, or anything else. Heck, there are lots of weeks I want to go do something else… but being part of this community, being connected to other believers and worshiping together… that makes a difference… and you need to be a part of it in order to be a better person.

Put those two things together and I believe anything is possible. That old where two are three are gathered God is there adage means a lot to me… I think that when we set our minds to it and work together, we can change the world…

And I think that is what God is calling us to do.