Wednesday, November 29, 2017

“Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” (Romans    8:24)

Hope permeates this First Sunday of Advent.  It shines with possibility and anticipation and potential. Hope stirs the weary soul and heals the broken spirit. Hope alerts us to the future that promises blessing and peace and abundant living.

But hoping is not the same as wishing.

I wish I had million dollars, but I hope that God will help me to help others our of my sufficiency.

I wish that I was stronger, younger, and more adept at some things, but I hope that I will be able to use my God-given talents to do the best I can.

I wish that you didn’t have to face that test, but I hope that God will walk with you, even through the valley before you.

Wishing is about mostly about unrealistic expectations and sometimes quite selfish desires. It can be about chasing rainbows and building castles in the sky. Wishing is passive and improbable. It is the waiting for something good to happen and thinking it will land easily in your lap. Sometimes, wishing is born out of an attitude of entitlement and a self-deserving sentiment. It is an inward but rootless desire for results that have no likelihood of ever happening, leading to disappointment and frustration, envy and resentment.

Hoping is hard, active work. It takes creativity, imagination, thoughtfulness, and commitment. It dares look the future in the face and envisions fresh and new possibilities. Hoping is the result of having faith, trust and the strength to wait patiently. Hoping is not easy as there is much in this world that darkens its path. Anyone can wish for something but it is the strength of one’s character that truly builds up hope against the odds, against the storms, against the prevailing culture, against what seems inevitable, futile and fruitless. “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness…” (2 Corinthians 3:12)

But I also believe that the Biblical image of hope is rooted in the promise of the Kingdom of God and that means it is also attached intimately and imminently to the person and message of Jesus Christ. It is first announced in the song of Mary, “His mercy flows in wave after wave on those who are in awe before him. He bared his arm and showed his strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts. He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.” (Luke 1: 50 -53, The Message Bible)

This promise is full of hope even though we seem far from such a world as this. But it is the hope of reversal, transformation, New Creation and the impregnation of God’s Love into our lives and world.

This is a hope that warns as well as comforts; it emboldens as well as leaves us quaking in our boots; it is wild and radical as well as challenging and earth- shattering; it is visionary as well as practical and pragmatic.

Hope is the Good News proclamation that God is not yet finished with us or our world. Watch out! Hang on!  “Then Jesus  spoke: ‘You're blessed when you've lost it all. God's kingdom is there for the finding. You're blessed when you're ravenously hungry. Then you're ready for the Messianic meal. You're blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning.’” (Luke 6:20 -21, The Message Bible)

Dale

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

                Apparently, my blog site is being seen as a large industrial business.  Last week I received a very thick catalogue addressed to The Unconventional Baptist. The ULINE catalogue’s slogan is “beyond the box” which means over 700 pages of everything I would ever need to run a factory, a business, a store, a shop, or anything that is housed in a large building.  Boxes, labels, bags, vacuums, breakroom supplies, office supplies like pens, markers and tape, work gloves, trollies. You name it and they’ve got it. I just don’t need it.

It makes my little desk tucked here in the corner of the family room seem so small and insignificant. I am not sure where I could fit the stainless-steel drum although the drum cradle is a nice accessory.

It may not be the Sears’ Christmas Wish Book, (now, sadly defunct) but I know what I am getting everyone for Christmas. Who couldn’t use a nice pair of green(ish) chemical resistant gloves? Every home needs a bulk soap dispenser. If I spend over $300 I get a free T-Shirt.

We are inundated with so many things that we don’t really ever need. We are deluged by information. We are overwhelmed with a myriad of choices, decisions, possibilities, opportunities and bulk data.

Sometimes, the information we get is useless for the situation we are in. It doesn’t fit who we are or what we are experiencing or what we really need. But it can get stuck in our heads or clutter up our hearts or complicate our spirits.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Luke 12:34)  Jesus’ words speak of the value of decluttering all the stuff that we come across and fills up our lives  and instead focus on what has deep, significant, lasting value.  The Kingdom Life which Jesus finds so precious is one that lives without encumbrance in a loving, liberating, transformative, gracious, fulsome state of well-being. It is a life that does not hoard, amass, collect, pile up or accumulate. It is a life free from gluttony and greed.

It is a life that discovers with joy that life is better when we freely and generously give away all that we have as Jesus once said. The real treasures are the people around us, family and friends but even the stranger becomes our neighbour in this Kingdom Life of blessings.

There is no catalogue when it comes to Kingdom Living. Yet everything about this kind of life resonates with blessing and abundance.

                But, sorry – no free T-shirt!

Dale

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

                I have endured off-and-on again Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) since I was a kid. But I have never had a colonoscopy until yesterday. O joy! O bliss! Over the last few weeks my IBS has been persistently chronic and none of my usual tricks for coping have been working. So, it is time to get to the bottom of things (pun quite intended).

                The actual procedure was nothing, lasting about a half hour. But as anyone who has had the procedure will tell you the day before is no walk in the park. The intestinal cleansing and purge is a pain in the … well, you know where! Figuratively and literally! The 24 hour plus of fasting was no picnic either.

                I have survived but I am glad it will be another 5 years before I have to do that again (I hope, anyway).

                In Biblical times it is my understanding that the human bowels were figuratively the seat (OK; I’ll  stop punning) of any deep human emotions and feelings, whether positive or negative. “Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” (Job 38:26)  

                For example, we have the much distressed and beleaguered Job complain that “My inward parts are in turmoil and are never still.” (Job30: 27) Many of the great Psalms which express the poets’ distress, dismay, pain and anguish would seem to refer to the gut-wrenching experiences they were enduring. It is said of Jesus that at the funeral of his friend Lazarus, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (John 11:33)

                Even today, some may refer to having a “gut feeling” about some situation. A deep loss can be a “hard blow to the gut”. Somebody may ask, “What’s your gut telling you to do?” Some bold, daring action can be described as a “gutsy thing to do”.    

Not all deep inner emotional experiences are bad. Our deep feelings of love, mercy, compassion, joy, well-being may also come from the depths of our inner being.  For example, the old KJV translates Colossians 3:12: “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering…”.  Although the idea of clothing ourselves with these qualities makes more sense, it is an interesting use of words.

                In fact, that translation drew me to Jesus’ words in Mark’s Gospel as a counterpoint. He has been addressing the superficiality of religious traditions, customs, and the easy, shallow hypocrisy of some of the religious leaders. He then speaks to the crowd which had been listening in, “Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile." (Mark 7:15)

                Certainly, I know that my own IBS can be triggered by stress, anxiety, fear, worry and anger. Then my gut is in a mess and nothing good comes of it. But to fill up on the good things of life, love, happiness, generosity and the like leads to and produces a positive and beneficial effect all around me.  

               Deep inside each and every one of us is the full capacity for abundant living. “There is far more to your inner life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body.” (Luke 12:23, The Message)

“I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3: 16 – 19).

Blessings for the week!

Dale

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

We and a few friends had gathered for supper recently and we got talking about the huge public reaction of grief accorded to musician Gord Downie after his sad death a few weeks ago. The two old goats around the table had to admit to a generational gap between ourselves and the age bracket who really sorrowed and then celebrated the man and his music after his passing. I must confess that I wouldn’t know a Tragically Hip piece of music even if my life depended on it. My woeful ignorance means no disrespect to the man or his music or his contributions to Canadian culture.

Yet, yesterday, I felt much the same as Downie’s fans when I heard the news of former Blue Jays’ pitcher Roy Halladay who died tragically at the age of 40 in a plane crash of his small private plane that he had been flying. For some reason, it really hit me hard. “Doc”, as he was nicknamed, was one of my favourite all time ball players. I had followed him throughout his career, even cheering for him when he was traded to Philadelphia. Of course, I have never met the man, but I had gained much admiration and appreciation for not only the ball player but the kind of man he was. In fact much of the anecdotal stories about him both yesterday and today started with him being a man of faith, a good husband and father, a hard worker before they begin to tell his baseball story.

Now there were equally good people who were killed at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, including a whole family and several children. Before this terrible event they weren’t famous like Downie or Halladay. But they loved and were loved. A famous person’s death is not more tragic or more important than these folk in Texas.   These deaths are all equally sad and maddening and unfair and senseless and cruel.  We feel so powerless in their path and wish and pray for explanations to make sense and keep the chaos away.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus references a couple of tragedies that had befallen the people, one being Pilate’s execution of Galilean rebels and also a construction accident which had killed 18 people. The discussion arose when people asked some tough questions about cause-and-effect and probably the unfairness of the tragedies. Jesus did not give them particularly reassuring or pat religious answers. “Of those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4)  He then uses these tragedies to suggest that people look more deeply into their own personal lives, take stock, and put their lives in good order and get right with God.

Jesus was not one who usually connected physical disability with sin which is not to say that sin doesn’t have its physical affects. For example, when the disciples were connecting a young man’s blindness to his own sin or the sin of his parents, Jesus knocked that theory down totally. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned” but then he gives a fresh direction by which we might deal with these tough deaths and calamities. “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (John 9: 3)

I suppose that modern, scientific enlightenment has taught us that there is always or should be always a rational, reliable, sensible answer to every question, doubt and uncertainty which we experience as we ask how or why. Lots of luck with that!  

I believe that God has always been fighting the Chaos and endless Darkness from the second that God touched off Creation with sacred Light and Life. “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

Sometimes it seems really hard to hang on to that much trust and hope, but other times it is the only Way by which I can actually make any sense of what is happening all around you and me. 

Dale

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

                So, are you feeling particularly saintly today?  If so, this must be your day – All Saints Day on the Christian Calendar.

                What is a saint, you might ask? But you would be asking the wrong guy; I am no saint. Saintliness is not on my resume.  You might say that I have had a devil of a time in grooming the characteristics of sainthood. I don’t think a little plastic figure of myself will be sitting on anybody’s car dash in the near or distant future.

On the surface, saintliness sounds like a lot of blood, sweat and tears.  Saintliness seems to be the result of a lot of humbling, selfless, sacrificial work. I am pretty sure that it is not about how religious you are, how many bible verses you have memorized or whether you have a perfect attendance pin for Sunday School attendance. I don’t think it is about piety, creedal purity or being chair of the Church Board. Not that any of those things just mentioned are necessarily bad things; they just don’t add up to a full-bodied saintliness.

The Apostle Paul would regular address his letters to the saints who were in whatever particular church to which he was writing. E.g. “To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints.” (Romans 1:7) Now he was neither buttering them up with fake accolades or ignoring their faults.  He knew, just like himself, nobody is perfect. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” (Philippians 3:12)

 Nobody is without sin. Nobody has it all figured out. Nobody has achieved a flawless selflessness or faultless service or has a spotless record of good deeds and works.

Nobody has completely mastered being like Jesus!

Some impossible, idealistic notion of perfection is not the foundation of saintliness, by a long shot. I know that Jesus said that we are to strive for perfection as God is perfect (Matthew 5:48), but I don’t he is referring to some cold piety of stiff, religious duty.

If God is Love then our perfection is pointing in that same direction - the Way of Love that Jesus embodied and exampled for us to follow. "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."  (Matthew 19:21) Many of us are more likely to emulate the rich young man to whom Jesus spoke and walk away from Jesus grieving that Jesus was setting impossible standards of discipleship.

The continuous and selfless act of loving and therefore the road to true sainthood is indeed hard, uncompromising and challenging at times. We are taken beyond our comfort zones, find ourselves in strange company, and are forced to take risks and make decisions that ruffle our assumptions and stretch our spiritual muscles to weariness. 

This is the stuff of sainthood and the miracle is that commonplace, ordinary, regular men and women and even children show saintly natures each and every day. They are the saints who quietly go about loving others by working in food banks, help in making meals for the homeless, run shelters, spend nights in Telecare watch, volunteer at hospitals, make a phone call on somebody’s birthday, etc. etc. etc. There are saints in church choirs and those who lead scout troops. There are saints who pray regularly and continuously for others’ well-being, health and salvation.

You actually may be a saint although you would probably deny it.  But if you love others as you are loved, you have taken a step toward sainthood.

“I send this letter to you in God's church at Corinth, Christians cleaned up by Jesus and set apart for a God-filled life. I include in my greeting all who call out to Jesus, wherever they live. He's their Master as well as ours! May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours.” (1 Corinthians 1:2 – 3, The Message)

Saints alive! That’s powerful stuff!

Dale