I like to eat; you do not achieve and maintain a body of this size without feeding it regularly.  There are very few food groups I don’t like.  I like restaurant food and I like my own cooking.  I like meals and I like snacks.  I even like crusts and crumbs.  But I do realize that not everything I eat is good for me.  Much as I like snacks and desserts, I know I cannot live a healthy life if they are all I eat.  I eat way too many snacks and part of why I eat so many snacks is because they are generally easy, they do not require a lot of time or effort to prepare.   Tearing open a bag of chips or popping a bag of corn doesn’t require any forethought or planning.  Living on the crusts of hearsay and the crumbs of rumor is the same.

Hearsay and rumor are the fast food snacks of communication.  Someone comes to us with a story of what is happening at work, at the bar, in the community, or at the church and we just eat it up right out of the bag.  We don’t have to take the trouble of checking with the sources of this tale, we don’t have to consider all the possible reasons this might be happening, we don’t have to wait while we think through the truth of the story or the possible impact of the story.  We just consume it and, like good social people we put the snack out for everyone else to share.  The same is true of a good rumor, we just pop it open and pass it around.  We don’t have to consider what went into making the rumor, it is like a communal flask, nobody really owns it or has control over it, everybody gets to experience the thrill of passing this rumor around to everybody else.  We don’t think about who has the right to share the rumor or the consequences of our passing it along.  If somebody gets hurt by the rumor, it isn’t our fault, we didn’t create the rumor, we just passed it along.  It is very much like after a party when somebody drives drunk and has an accident.  Nobody at the party feels responsible, after all they didn’t make the other drink, they just shared what they brought to the party with everyone else.  Hearsay and rumors are not healthy food for anyone and particularly not healthy for a congregation.

We have had the experience of being fed someone else’s hearsay.  We have had the experience of being like Bartimaeus, crying out for mercy and being told by others not to disturb God with our petitions.  If we believe their hearsay, we will go away despondent and believing we are outside of God’s love and healing grace.  Or, we can take the time to keep seeking to hear God say, “Come to me.  What can I do for you?”  The only way we will know what God desires to do for us is if we take time to feed ourselves on the word of God.  I am aware that many, maybe all of you wish we wouldn’t read all three texts from the lectionary each Sunday morning.  However, I ask that we read all three texts because I think there is value in our hearing the way God has revealed God’s self to us over time.  I use the texts as support that what I am saying in my reflection isn’t just hearsay, I have researched the story, I have allowed it to cook in my mind and soul, and I have asked the Spirit to season it so it is good food and not crusts or crumbs.  I choose The Message Bible paraphrase because I want us to hear the words in new ways so we will think about the stories in new ways.  It is like preparing a food we are very familiar with but changing up the ingredients a little bit.  We can fall in love with the stories all over again.

I can assure from my own experience, when I spend too much time with the snacks of hearsay and rumor, my soul becomes sick, my spirit becomes weary, and I lose sight of the wideness in God’s mercy.  Amen.

I suppose we have all had the experience of someone putting us in our place or trying to put us in our place.  It usually isn’t a very positive experience.  Yesterday, as we had time to share with the people who attended the community bar-b-q, I thought about the different way people are treated based on their appearance, their economic situation, and their mental capability.  Some who approached to receive their burger or their hot dog acted as if they might be criticized or turned away while others approached with a confident air suggesting they knew they had as much right as anyone else to what was being shared.  Some people avoided eye contact while others stared deeply, as if looking into my very soul.  Some felt the need to justify their presence or their desire to take some food with them.  To a person, everyone of them was polite and most offered words of thanks, I heard two decline the bus pass offered, one because it should be given to someone who needed it more and one because he had already received one.  I have to believe that most, if not all of those who came for lunch with us, have been treated badly at some time in their lives, treated as if they didn’t belong, told they should remember their place and yet they treated us with kindness and respect and offered words of thanks.  It makes me wonder why those of us who have so much to be thankful for so often forget to thank those who do something for us.

The readings from Job and Mark also speak to people being put in their place.  Job has challenged God about what has happened to him and God responds by reminding Job of his place in creation.  James and John come to Jesus seeking places of honour in his dominion and Jesus tells them of his place in God’s dominion and their place in God’s plan.  It is important for us to consider Job’s situation and his argument with God.  I believe the story of Job is just that a story, intended to answer the question of whether we get in this life what we deserve or whether life is something to be lived as it comes without expectations of justice and fairness.  The importance of a story is not whether it actually happened, its importance comes from the truth is reveals to us.  In the time the story of Job was written, people assumed gods were around to assure good crops, fertility, and victory in conflicts.  It was also believed the gods visited calamity on bad people.  The story of Job argues against this belief.  Righteousness does not assure Job will not experience loss of wealth, family, or health and this does not mean God is unfair or ineffectual.  God challenges Job and us to see we cannot see the world as God, who created all that is, sees it.  We cannot understand why bad things happen to good people and that may be more our lack of ability to know all that is involved and it may be a result of a faulty understanding of what is bad.   Some have pointed out that God was able to even sit with Job in the garbage pit as if this made God humble, but maybe what it was meant to show us is that garbage pits can be sacred places.  Perhaps we need to be open to seeing our place through God’s eyes rather than the world’s eyes.  Perhaps we need to be willing to see homeless shelters, hospices, and prisons as places as sacred as our churches, homes, and office buildings.  Perhaps we should be less concerned about how attractive our place looks and be more concerned about what God asks of us in the place we find ourselves.

James and John wanted a place of importance in the dominion of Jesus.  They probably felt they had given up their work, their homes, and their families to follow Jesus and they deserved a reward for their sacrifice.  I wonder if Jesus wasn’t thinking about all the miraculous things James and John had witnessed by following him, about all they had learned by being able to listen to Jesus, and how that compared to what they had left behind.  What Jesus says is that it isn’t what you have given up that matters, it is what you are willing to do with what you have that matters.  It is important for us to remember our place in God’s family is not to be children of privilege but children of service.  Our place is caring for each other, serving each other without expectation of reward.

There is another important thing for us to remember about our place.  We are the precious children of God.  We are called to service but we are not called to second class status.  Rev. Elder Troy Perry frequently says, God does not have step-children.  We are fully in the family of God.  We must never allow anyone to try to put is in our place if they believe our place to be outside the love of God.  We are created of God just as we are and we are never to apologize for being what God has ordained us to be.  Our place is to be servants to others, not slaves to others, or to addictions, or to wealth, or to power.  Our strength comes from knowing our place is near to the heart of God.  Amen.

We have been talking about the value of direct dealing to create a healthier church.  The idea is one goes directly to the person they feel has wronged them and the one wounded uses “I” statements to tell the other the impact of their behavior on the one wounded.  Direct dealing facilitates conflicts being resolved before a number of people are drawn into the conflict.  The belief is that many conflicts that have the potential to splinter a congregation will be resolved by the people involved before others choose sides.  The first way direct dealing reduces conflict is by causing the wounded person to think about whether the action of the other is sufficiently severe to warrant speaking to them directly about it.  If it isn’t worth mentioning to the person who did it, it isn’t worth mentioning to anyone else.  Secondly, direct dealing permits the one who wounded to clarify their words or actions, and, if appropriate, make amends to the harm their words or actions caused.  The theory makes good sense and the practice has proved effective in reducing conflicts and splinter groups within a congregation.

I have been told by some people that they don’t think they want to hear what others think about their words or actions.  They don’t know what they are supposed to do with the information.  My first response to this concern is to suggest they consider the source.  If the person offering criticism is someone they admire and trust, then it would make sense to consider how to speak or behave differently and perhaps to seek a way to make amends.  If the person is someone unknown or someone whose opinions have proved faulty in the past, then you may want to take the criticism less seriously and use the information more to inform you about the person.  Someone offering a criticism of our speech or behavior does not require us to accept their opinion as fact, it is just their opinion.  Another response to criticism is to thank the person offering it for being willing to share their impression of what was said or done.  It can be seen as showing interest in us.  Receiving criticism from another may be an opportunity to learn more about ourselves and how we are perceived.  Responding to criticism in this way does not require us to accept the truth of the criticism.  We can use the criticism to have a better understanding of the impression we make on others and make decisions about whether we wish to change that impression.  There is no good reason to fear criticism as we cannot be required to accept another’s view of ourselves as our own.

However, hearing what God thinks of us is not so easily managed or dismissed.  I have often said I am looking for God to post the day’s agenda on my refrigerator each morning.  One of my colleagues responded that, if this happened to him, it would greatly improve his diet control.  I think he is probably right.  If I knew what God wanted me to do was posted on my refrigerator, I would go to my refrigerator much less frequently.  The rich person who came to Jesus wanting to know what he needed to do in order to be saved had followed the law from his birth but realized he was not right with God.  He asked Jesus what was expected of him and was disappointed when he got the answer.  I believe too much emphasis has been placed on this person’s wealth as his barrier to getting right with God.  I believe Jesus was saying we have to let go of those things we cling to too tightly.  It is the things we are hanging on to that will prevent us from passing through the eye of a needle.  The rich person doesn’t have to steal, or take another person’s spouse, or cheat, or lie because they can get what they want or need without doing those things.  The rich person can honor their father and mother because they have received much of what they have from their parents.  Such a person may believe God is lucky to have them seeking God rather than thinking they have need of God.  It may be our strength, our intellect, or our nationality that causes us to believe we have no need of God’s blessing.

The story of Job is about a person who had wealth, health, intelligence, and great political power and was beset by tragedies.  At first Job believes he has a case for arguing with God about how he has been treated.  Many of us who read Job want to argue about whether God, as we understand God, would permit all of these calamities to strike Job.  We want to hold God to our standard of what is fair.  God’s response is you don’t want me to treat you fair.  No one really wants God to give them what they deserve based on their words and behaviors.  We all want God’s mercy rather than God’s justice.  We want to hear God’s words of reassurance rather than God’s critique of how we are doing as a child of God.  If we apply the principles of direct dealing to our relationship with God, we should be more open to hearing God’s critique because God is a valued source who has been accurate in assessing behavior and consequences.  Even if it is hard for us to hear, we must be open to God’s words if we hope to live a life of meaning and worth, a life where we will hear, “Well done good and faithful servant” when we transition into God’s direct presence.  Amen.

I find one of the greatest struggles I have as a person who believes in the Divine is understanding the relationship between God and me.  I am clear on God as creator, I believe in God as loving parent, I am ok with God as guide, but what I struggle with is how God and I function together.  God is all powerful, all knowing, and present everywhere so what need does God have of me?  I have heard the statements; God has no feet but my feet, God has no voice but my voice, God has no hands but my hands.  It is a nice sentiment but what does it really mean?  Does God need feet, voice, or hands to accomplish God’s desires?  I am thinking, if God needed them, God could create them and maybe that is why mine were created, but the bottom line for me is that God is not fretting about whether any of us will perform our assigned tasks.  God is able to accomplish God’s will with or without me.

Did you know that the Book of Esther is the only book of the Bible that contains no reference to God?  Some people have rewritten Mordecai’s statement, “Who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” to read, “Who knows but that God gave you this royal position for such a time as this?”  But that is not what the text as best we can translate it says.  It may be the foundation of Mordecai’s statement but Mordecai does not reference Yahweh in what he says.  The story of Esther is about a person, a woman, who finds herself in a position to rescue her ethnic group from destruction but at the possible cost of her own life.  The book does not tell us that Esther prayerfully sought God’s guidance and received assurance from God that she would be successful.  God did not give Esther powers to prove she was acting on behalf of God nor did God give her a walking stick she could use to do amazing feats as God did with Moses.  All we know is Esther determined to risk the king’s wrath and spoke out in behalf of her people and they were spared.  The good that happens in the Book of Esther happens as a result of human bravery and human wisdom.  God does not intervene in any way according to what we read in the story.  Does that mean God wasn’t working in the story?  Is the story and example of the saying, “God helps those who help themselves”?  Which, by the way is not found in the Bible, or, is it a story of how sometimes we are called upon to act on our faith without God giving us super powers or telling us the game plan?

My faith tells me God does not need me, I need God.  The reason I seek to know and do God’s will is not to help God out of a tight spot, I seek to know God’s will because I believe doing God’s will is what will allow me to have the most fulfilled and joyful life.  Doing service for others is not a burden; it is an opportunity to experience a life that makes a difference.  Working for justice isn’t a sacrifice; it is an opportunity to experience a world with less tension and despair.  Loving others as God loves them, is not risking being hurt; it is an opportunity to experience ever greater love.  Somewhere we got the idea being an ally of God meant hard work, sacrifice, and joyless living and nothing could be further from the truth.  When we, like Esther, risk leaving our comfort zone and living a faith filled life, we will experience the fullness of life God planned for us.  I am not saying a trouble free life; I am saying a full life.  We will have grief, we will have sickness, we will have all sorts of trouble and we will have a community to comfort us in our grief, to lay hands on us in our illness, and to support us in our trouble.  Being an ally of God means we are on a team of people working to bring about God’s dominion in this world.  It really doesn’t matter by what name people work toward a world of peace, justice, and love.  What matters is we are working to live the core truths of most faith traditions, too treat others as we would be treated, to care for those who are vulnerable, and do nothing out of greed and self-glory.  God has allies that understand God in different ways, who worship God in different ways, and who name God with different names and none of these are important.  What is important is we are working toward the same God given objectives of a healthy, peaceful, and just world.  Amen.

For us to think about what makes us virtuous, we need to think about what we mean by virtue.  The basic definition of virtue is: moral excellence. The difficulty with this basic definition in now having do define what we mean by moral.  Morality is defined in many different ways over time and even in different cultures existing at the same time in history.  During World War II all combatant nations claimed to be fighting a moral war.  Today we are involved in conflicts where all of the combatants claim to be fighting a moral war in the name of God.  It is clear to me the meaning of virtue will vary a great deal based on our understanding of what is moral behaviour.  If you compare the paraphrase of our reading from Proverbs with what you find in a Bible, you will discover very significant modifications to eliminate gender and hetero normative language in the reading.

The passage from Proverbs is commonly referred to as the virtuous woman.  My first challenge is writing a paraphrase of the passage was determining whether there was a legitimate basis to say virtue was gender determined.  In other words, are there behaviours that are moral for a woman to do but not moral for a male or moral for a man and not moral for a woman?  And, if so, what is moral for a person with gender fluidity?  The culture of Proverbs 31 had very clear moral distinctions based on gender identity.  Women were considered property of their fathers until they were given to their husbands and a woman’s virtue was based on how well she served her husband and this is clearly reflected in the original version of the chapter.  Even so, this Proverb credits women with the ability to make good decisions about managing assets and running their own businesses.  Our current culture claims to accept gender equity but the actions of most suggest they have little difficulty accepting the Proverbs version of virtue based on a person’s gender identity.  I believe virtue is not gender based.

Virtue comes from living a Holy life, living in the example of Jesus.  Virtue comes from surrendering our greed and desire for self-importance for a desire justice and the common good.  When the disciples are arguing among themselves about who will be greatest in the dominion Jesus will bring into being, Jesus responds that greatness comes from the willingness to serve.  Just as in the proverb of the virtuous person where the person is seen as being great because of her or his acts of service, caring for the poor, nurturing the family, and being a good steward of the assets at his or her disposal.  Jesus tells the disciples it is their willingness to care for even a small child, which, incidentally, would have had even less status than a woman in Jesus’ time, that made them great.  Virtuous service is the service we give to those who can do nothing for us.

Too often we want to measure our greatness based on how much money we have, or how much influence we have, or some other material measurement the world says measures greatness.  Our virtue as a person, or the virtue of this church will never be based on how much we have in our bank account, but what we did with the treasure we were given.  We will not be found virtuous based on how much influence we have, but what we did with the power we wielded.  It is easy for us to think about the place of honour we are earning by the service we do for the church and, when we do so, we have lost the honour of the work.  We do not serve and glorify God when we work to increase our position or prestige.  There is virtue in a cup of cold water given in God’s name not what we do in our own name or in the name of this church.  We will be hosting the community picnic in a few weeks.  There is virtue in this when we do it to serve God’s people and to allow ourselves to be served by them.  The meal will become self-serving if we do it out of a desire to enhance our image in the community or to show ourselves to be righteous by providing for those less fortunate than ourselves.  We do the picnic because it offers us a chance to be in conversation with people we might not regularly speak to, and to share some of our abundance of material things while they share from their abundance of life experiences. 

We will gain virtue when we are able model the life of service Jesus led, when we are able to hear God calling us into new life, and when we are able to love as God has loved us.  Amen.

There is a cartoon with two people sitting at a table in the midst of a New Year’s celebration.  The one person says to the other, “My New Year’s resolution is to stop putting my foot in my mouth and I’ll be yours is to lose weight.”  Foot in mouth disease is such a difficult disease to cure and there is no simple vaccine to prevent us from catching it.  We are in the midst of a flu pandemic and people are being encouraged to get the flu vaccine and even more we are being told to prevent the spread of the flu by regularly washing our hands, wash your hands before you touch your eyes, nose, or mouth.  Wash your hands after you sneeze or cough, wash your hands often.  Avoiding foot in mouth disease requires the same diligence.  Stop and think, stop and think before you speak, stop and think before you act, stop and think before you do anything.  Allow wisdom to guide your thoughts and actions.

One clergy person at clergy study group this week referred to Wisdom as the female personification of God.  I cannot say this way of understanding the passage is wrong, but I would have some problem with some of the statements in the passage if we were to apply them to God.  “What if catastrophe strikes and there's nothing to show for your life but rubble and ashes?  You'll need me then. You'll call for me, but don't expect an answer. No matter how hard you look, you won't find me.”  I cannot hear God saying this to me.  I can hear wisdom saying this to me.  If I go off and speak and act without consulting wisdom and I offend and I create trouble for myself, it will do me no good to seek out wisdom to undo what I have done.  Once we have spoken without wisdom there is no way to take the words back; once we have acted without wisdom there is no way to undo our actions.  We can seek forgiveness, we can do acts of contrition, but we cannot erase the words or undo the actions. 

James tells us quite plainly how powerful our tongue is and how difficult it is to control.  If we are not very intentional about thinking about what we are about to say and the impact of our words, it is very easy for us to say things that are hurtful and things that are untrue.  I have been told that all of the talk we have had about not gossiping and not telling stories that are not ours to tell has made it almost impossible for people to be sociable.  This can only be true if the only things you discuss among yourselves is stories about people who are not present and have not given you permission to share what you know.  It is perfectly appropriate for you to ask about how the people present in the group are doing.  It is ok to share something you have been told by another person and been asked to share the information with the people at church.  It is good to share with each other that someone might appreciate a call or visit where they could share their own story.  There is no reason this congregation cannot be as caring and supportive of each other as they always have been.  What needs to happen is for each one of us to stop and think before we speak and seek wisdom to know what we should share and what is not ours to tell.

Consider the story of Peter from our readings today.  Peter is asked what he believes about Jesus and he says, “You are the Christ, the Messiah" and he gets an A+.  A few moments later Jesus shares what must happen to him to fulfill God’s plan and Peter speaks up and says he isn’t going to let God’s plan happen, and he earns a failing grade, in fact, Jesus calls him Satan and tells him to get out of the way.  The first time Peter spoke, he spoke out of wisdom.  The second time he spoke, he spoke out of passion and without thinking.  It is when we speak out of passion and without wisdom that we get ourselves in trouble and do the devil’s dirty work.  When we share stories that are not ours to share, the devil uses them to put a wedge in our community; to divide us so we cannot do the mighty things has planned for us.  Each time we do something hurtful to the community, we defeat ourselves in achieving all God purposes for us here.  What we should desire is for the Holy Spirit to dawn upon us and provide us with words of wisdom for us to speak so we will be voices of healing and affirmation rather than voices that wound and tear down, so that we can be the blessing of words of wisdom fitly spoken.  Amen.

It is generally not easy for us to tell someone we are sorry.  I have been told that some people in the maritime use the word sorry as a way of letting another person know they have done something wrong.  What I was told was that, if someone runs into another person with their shopping cart, the person struck may turn around and say “sorry”.  I was told this was like someone in the states saying, “bless your heart” when they are thinking you are too stupid to live.  But that is not the expression of sorry I mean.  It is hard for us to say I am sorry when we really do regret what we have done.  It is even harder for us to actually behave sorry.  Too often we believe saying we are sorry is enough.  There is no need to do anything to make amends or to make fundamental changes in how we think and act so we do not cause us to have regrets again.  The friend who apologizes for being late but continues to always be late makes it hard for us to believe they are really sorry.  In the long run, what we say is much less important than what we do.  There is a scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye asks Golde if she loves him.  Her first response is to think about all the years they have been together and what does it matter if she loves him and then she thinks of all they have shared in those years and decides she does love him.  It matters less in their marriage whether words of love were ever spoken than the acts of love that were shared.  Mother Teresa said this about love, “Love cannot remain by itself—it has no meaning.  Love has to be put into action and that action is service.  Whatever form we are, able or disabled, rich or poor, it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing, a lifelong sharing of love with others.”

As Christians we are challenged to live out what we believe.  Jesus did not come to bring us a religion; he came to bring us a way of living.  Our faith is, like Tevye and Golde’s marriage is better defined by what we do than what we say.  We say we agree with what James was telling the early church about not showing preference to the person with money who comes to worship but do we act so that no one who enters here is treated any differently from anyone else?  The point of what James was saying isn’t just about wealth or fine clothing, or power.  We should not give better treatment to the person who comes to worship that we agree with or we enjoy than to the person who we find disagreeable or hard to treasure.  Most often it is the person who pushes our comfort that has the most to teach us.  Jesus did not avoid the people that challenged him.  I can think of two times when Jesus behaved in a way that was not welcoming.  One is when he spoke to the religious leaders of his day and called them hypocrites and a brood of vipers.  Jesus was angry because their actions did not match their words.  They were supposed to be showing the people the love of God and they were teaching them to fear God and to become slaves to the religious leaders.  Jesus had a strong dislike for those whose actions were different than their words.

The second incident of Jesus not being welcoming is the story we heard today, the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman.  This story is subject to many different explanations.  Theologians have for centuries done very impressive mental gymnastics to have the story not say Jesus changed his mind.  I love the story just the way it has come to us.  It is more important to me that Jesus is fully human living a life fully connected to God than that Jesus is God masquerading as a human.  I believe Jesus was raised in the Jewish tradition.  He was raised to believe the Jews were God’s chosen people and, as such, they were the ones God sent the Messiah to so they could have a closer relationship with God.  Jesus was taught that those who were not Jewish were not God’s children.  He is confronted by this Syrophoenician woman and his first reaction is to dismiss her and her child as unworthy of his time, he even compares her with a dog.  The story is all the more amazing in that this gentile woman challenges a male and a Jew.  And Jesus understands that God has sent him to bring God’s love and compassion to all of creation.  I do not think it is coincidental this encounter comes right after Jesus has taught his disciples about what makes a person clean and unclean.  The story is very much like the story of Peter being taught by God not to call unclean that which God has declared clean.  This story if how Jesus is challenged to consider who is worthy and how he recognizes his call to care for all should be foundational to how we consider how we are church and how we treat those who challenge our understanding of what it means to be church.  Because the Syrophoenician woman did not accept the norm of the day that women do not challenge men and gentiles do not confront Jews, she gave Jesus the gift of seeing how broad his ministry was.  I believe there is no stronger love than the love friends show when the gently and lovingly rebuke me for my arrogance and sense of privilege.  Few people love us enough to risk our anger at pointing out ways we could be better.

Saying we are an inclusive church is meaningless if we behave in ways that turn away those who are different.  Saying we want to know what the community needs and wants from a spiritual home is meaningless if we ignore or silence those who have a vision different than our own.  People will remember what we say for a very short time, people will have a hard time forgetting what we do.  Amen.

The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches is founded on the gospel of liberation.  We believe the Word of God is intended to liberate the oppressed, bring release to the captives, and light to those who are imprisoned in darkness.  We believe we have been anointed by God to preach the Good News.  Recently, someone on Facebook, posted the comment, “But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to people whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?”  On first read, the post did not make any sense to me.  Who better to tell the Gospel, Good News, to than someone in a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?  It then occurred to me the author of this question may have had a very different experience when someone preached the Gospel to him or her.  There are some who use the name of God and the Word of God to imprison and demean others rather than to liberate and affirm them. 

Jesus speaks frequently and harshly to the religious leaders of his day because they have failed to preach the Good News of God’s liberating love for creation and have, instead, made the revelations of God into unbearable rules, rules that have sucked the joy right out of the lives of the people.  There always seem to be some religious leaders who want us to believe God does not want us to feel free and to feel good about ourselves.  They preach a gospel of joyless, submission to a severe deity.  I have been told there were many arguments about whether Song of Solomon should be included in the Christian Bible, the rabbi at our clergy study group said even Jewish leaders debated whether it should be kept in the Hebrew Bible.  The Song of Solomon was considered to be too earthy, too much talk about lovers, and too much celebration of the beauty of the human body.  Certainly God couldn’t possibly want us to think our bodies were beautiful and that we should admire and celebrate the bodies of others.  Despite these concerns and desires to keep Song of Solomon away from Bible readers, the Spirit prevailed and it is in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.  God does want us to find our bodies beautiful and wants us to celebrate the beauty of others.  Some Muslims believe the female body must be completely covered because to view a woman is to create too much temptation.  I cannot believe God created beauty and then demanded it be hidden because some people are unable to express their appreciation of beauty in appropriate and respectful ways.  We don’t dam up the Niagara Falls because the majesty of them tempts some people to go over them.  We don’t ban music because some people become so absorbed in the music that the fail to care for their basic needs.  No God provides us with beauty and we must learn how to enjoy it appropriately.

The liberating love of God means we don’t have to worry about whether we are obeying God’s laws as interpreted by other humans.  God’s liberating love means we are free to hear what God desires for us individually.  God has placed inside all of creation a moral compass to guide us to what the Word of God and Spirit of God is saying to us.  We are told it isn’t how pious we appear that matters, it is how pious we are that matters.  If we keep all the rules and do not have compassion for others, our behavior is not pleasing to God.  It does not matter how much you give to the church, how hard you work for the church, if you are giving and doing for the wrong reasons then there is nothing God honoring or God pleasing in your behavior.  If this is to be a place where people hear the Good News, then we must live and speak in ways that tells them that they are loved by God just as they are, and they are loved by us just as they are.  The way we experience the wideness of God’s mercy is by inviting everyone one into it with us and finding there is more than enough room for all.  It is only when we can fully love others that we can fully live in God’s liberating love for us.  Amen.

This message is intended for the Universalist Unitarian Church in Halifax but the hurricane may interrupt the plan.

I generally try to avoid wearing my collar unless I am performing some function that makes the collar appropriate.  You might think I avoid wearing the collar out of some sense of embarrassment or desire to keep my faith in the closet but neither of those are true.  I am comfortable with my identity as Christian and I enjoy the exchange of ideas that can happen when someone recognizes me as a person of some kind of faith calling.  I avoid the collar because I do not like the box some people put me in when they see me as a person religious.  I don’t like when people assume certain topics are off limits when a pastor is present, or certain jokes can’t be told in my presence.  The only joke I find offensive is the one that demeans another person or group.  I prefer to identify as a person of faith and not as a religious person.  Religion for me denotes all the trappings and such we have attached to our faith which includes what is moral behavior and speech that has less to do with morality and more to do with judging and controlling others.  Religion, to me, tends to define people out, while my faith defines people in.  What I like about wearing the collar is it will facilitate having a conversation with another person about what they have faith in and what they believe.

Some people will start the conversation by explaining, while they have nothing against people of faith, they just don’t believe in anything that requires faith.  Like most discussions, these discussions can be futile unless we take a little time to define our terms.  I understand faith to mean, “confidence or trust in something or someone that is not based upon proof.”  Based upon this definition I am fairly confident in ascertaining that everyone places their trust or confidence in people or things that is not based upon proof.  I suppose for you to be persuaded, we would have to have a shared understanding of the word “poof”.  Let’s just say proof is independently obtained information that would be convincing to the vast majority of people.  I don’t think it would take most of you very long to think of something or someone you place your confidence or trust in that you do not have proof to back up this confidence.  You may trust your partner based on your belief that you share love, but love is something very difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the vast majority of people.  You may trust the efficacy of medication you take and have confidence it is not going to cause you harm without obtaining proof that would convince the vast majority of people that it is efficacious and harmless.  Some of us may wish to believe we have confidence and trust in only that which can be proven to the satisfaction of the vast majority of people but I think even this is a leap of faith because it depends upon trusting the wisdom of the vast majority of people.  I trust you can all think of examples of when the vast majority of people were not very wise.  I think it is debatable that humans are the most intelligent of all of creation.  We claim superior intelligence base on all the tools we have invented.  Perhaps the rest of creation gets by without all these tools because they are wise enough to survive in their environment without them.

Ok, the point of this discussion is to assert we all have something or multiple things we place faith in and even more my point is that it is important we know what are the objects of our faith.  What we believe in informs how we live and, if we do not consider what are beliefs are, and if we don’t do so regularly we will be woefully ignorant of why we do what we do.  Our core beliefs form the foundation for what we do without thinking each day.  If we trust the government than we live without questioning what the government is doing; if we trust the free market system, we buy and sell without a thought to the appropriateness of doing so; if we trust that people are inherently good, then we interact with people without a thought as to whether they mean us harm.  We all need these core beliefs so that we can function in a world that requires us to act without weighing the pros and cons of our every action.  I moved to Halifax six months ago and the first few months seemed fine, I got about, got my bearings, and set up a routine.  By about the third month I started to struggle, I found myself questioning simple things, I had trouble expressing myself, and I felt depressed.  I described this as homesickness, which it was and a good friend explained to me that the homesickness came for my discomfort in not understanding the local culture, my challenges with living in a metric world, and my difficulty in relating to people who have a different way of being in community together than has been my experience growing up in Michigan in the States.  Life becomes difficult when our internal guide posts are screwed around with, life also becomes more sincere when we intentionally examine our internal guide posts.

An unexamined belief system allows us to do respond to people and situations without ever considering the impact of our response.  One of the greatest struggles I have is recognizing when I am responding out of my place of privilege as a person born male, white, and a United States citizen.  Only when friends lovingly rebuke me, am I able to hear my own arrogance.  If I don’t want to oppress with my privilege, I must constantly examine what I believe about the world and the place of women, people of color, and citizens in economically disadvantaged countries in it.  I have heard other men bemoan always being asked to apologize for being male and/or white as if they don’t benefit from their privilege.  They can believe this only if they refuse to examine their beliefs about the world and who has the power.  Each one of us must examine what we believe and how those beliefs inform the way we live.  Most often we have beliefs that give us confidence, that give us strength and the most important question we can ask is whether that strength comes at the expense of making someone else weak.  As a Christian, my beliefs should conform to the teachings and ways of Christ.  But as Ghandi is quoted as saying, "Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ."  It doesn’t really matter what belief system we claim, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, humanist, scientist, creationist, evolutionist, and/or atheist.  What matters is how we live out that belief system.  The labels are so easy to claim but truly living what our belief system is what is hard.  Too often we claim to believe certain things but live as if they only important thing is having power and control and keeping other people from having any.  I wish I had made arrangements to play the Holly Near song, “I Ain’t Afraid”.  It is a wonderful song I first heard at General Conference of MCC held in Toronto.  The core message of the song is that what scares her is what people do in the name of their god whatever is god to them.

My challenge to you today is to examine what your beliefs are and determine if they make the world a scary place for any that share the world with you.  Let it be so and amen.

A core principle in any time management course is to plan your day based on setting your priorities based on the most critical tasks required to achieve your goals.  This seems like a pretty simple way to organize your day and I have attended many time management courses in my time, most of them paid for by my employer.  It took me a while to realize that task selection is the easy part of time management.  The hard part, the part we would generally just skim over in class was identifying our goals and determining the task necessary to achieve them.  Most likely because these classes were paid for by my employer, there was an assumption that my goals had to do with completing my work assignments timely so I could advance within the organization I worked for at any particular time.  It was also assumed that the tasks to achieving my goals had also been clearly set out for me by the same employer.  And therein lies the difficulty with making this time management system work.  It became clear to me over time that my employer’s goals for me were not always my own goals and that advancing within the organization did not always look good to me.  The result was that I would choose different tasks to work on rather than the ones that would achieve corporate success.  Unless we are clear on what our goals are, we will never be successful at identifying the task need to achieve those goals, and we will not be able to identify the priority tasks to do each day.  There is a catch phrase time management people use, “Don’t let the immediate keep you from doing the important.”  Each day there will be many things competing for our attention and, if we don’t stop to decide what is important, we can be very busy all day only to find that nothing important got done.

I doubt that many of us spend much time deciding what our goals are and, if we do, we rarely go back and consider if the goals we have selected remain our goals.  We are generally content to take each day as it comes, handle as much as we can of what comes at us, call it a day, and go to bed.  How different would our days be if we started each morning with our calendar in front of us and our list of life goals and we decided what we would do today based on whether a task moved us toward our life goal or not.  Letting go of some tasks screaming at us because we realized they are diverting our time and efforts from the important.  Now imagine how different your activities would be if you started each day with your calendar, your goals in front of you and you meditated on each goal allowing God to speak to you about whether it is the right goal for you now.  Allowing yourself to consider whether a goal has lost its importance.  Perhaps you have had a goal of meeting the right person and settling down and you have had this goal for many years, perhaps that is not the right goal for you, perhaps you not emotionally equipped to share your life on a one-on-one basis with another person.  Maybe you have set a goal of financial security for yourself but you always seem to spend whatever you have coming in, perhaps your goal needs to be to find contentment with just having enough.  We should not turn our goals into idols that control us and we dare not change.  Our goals should be what we discern as what will allow us, at the end of life to say, “I have had a good life with my time well spent.”

While our goals must always be open for reconsideration, they should not be short term goals.  The challenge is to think over a lifetime, not a day, a week, a month, or even a year or two.  Short term goals aren’t goals, they are more like tasks.  Imagine if you were to have a conversation with God like Solomon did in his dream.  What one gift would you ask of God?  You could ask for riches, but ask the people who win multimillion dollar lotteries, riches can easily be lost.  You could ask for good health, but look at the healthy people in long term care facilities who suffer from dementia, their health means very little to them.  You could ask for soundness of mind, but consider the other side of  the aging coin, those whose minds are still sharp and they are acutely aware of the failure of their bodies.  You could ask for wisdom at Solomon did.  With wisdom, we can make good choices and be able to support ourselves over a life time.  With wisdom we can make good choices that will improve our chances to be healthy and of sound mind as we age.  With wisdom we can know what is important and what is just immediate.  Wisdom is a good long term goal as well as a good gift to ask for.  Faith is another good long term goal.  Faith allows us to live in the mysteries of life with contentment.  Faith allows us to face uncertainty without fear.  I am reading the book, The Places that Scare You and the basic premise is that fear comes from uncertainty and mostly uncertainty about people and things we perceive as different or unknown to us.  The means to eliminate our fear is to achieve a sense of oneness with other people and eventually all of creation.  The book describes meditation techniques to help us achieve this oneness but it is easier if we start with faith in the Creator and belief the Divine is present in all of creation and therefore we are connected with all of creation.  Wisdom and faith seem like good life goals to me, but each one must decide for themselves what their life goals are.

Once we have our goals, the next challenge is to identify what steps must be taken to move from where we are toward our goals.  We need to have a vision of what achieving our goal would look like and feel like and then identify what needs to be done to look like that and feel like that.  Then each day we can look at the tasks available and decide how each one will move us along the steps we have identified to achieve our goal.  We can let go of tasks that demand our attention but are just busy work or barren acts as they are described in Ephesians.  We can chose that which is important.  This sounds fairly simple and the idea is simple but simple is not always easy.  It will not be easy to let go of the things that demand immediate attention, the things that will provide quick satisfaction, to let go of those things that are routine and easily accomplished for those things that are difficult and may not produce rewards for a long time, maybe not even in our lifetime.  Jesus taught the disciples they would need to change what they thought was important, they would need to stop seeking after what the world said needed to be done, and what meant success.  Jesus challenged the disciples to live fully the life Jesus lead and to find their satisfaction in that.  The Bible says, “⁶⁷After this a lot of his disciples left. They no longer wanted to be associated with him.”  It will not always be easy to choose to surrender short term satisfaction for long term goals.  We too may be tempted to turn away and take the easier road.

Safe Harbour MCC must also do the hard work of discerning what will be its long term goals, and what are the steps that must be taken to move us toward those goals.  We must let go of the way we have always done things, we must be willing to stop doing the things that demand our immediate attention so we can do the things that are important, the things that will move us toward being the congregation that God has called us to be.  The next task of the intentional interim process is to seek a vision of what God is calling us to be and then to identify the steps that will take us there.  This vision is not permanent, it is what we believe here and now.  It will inform the way we are church and the type of pastoral leader you need to lead you.  The goals will have to always be open to reconsideration allowing the Spirit to send you in new directions but you must have a vision so you can know what tasks are important and make the best use of your resources.  Without a vision the people perish.  Amen.