Looking Ahead to January 2, 2022

 This being the first Sunday of the month (and of 2022 for that matter) we will be celebrating the sacrament of Communion. If you are joining us on-line you are encouraged to have elements ready so that we can all eat and drink together

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Micah 4:5-10
• John 1:1-5

The Sermon title is One God? One Word?

Early Thoughts: I was always led to believe that the stories of Scripture unflinchingly claimed there was only one God. That is not true.

The stories of the Hebrew Scriptures make it clear that other cultures have other gods. At most there is a claim that "our" god is the One True God. There are parts of Isaiah that predict a time when all the nations will worship the God of Israel. But otherwise there is an acceptance that there are other cultures with other gods.

Even Paul preaching in Athens (Acts 17) is dealing with the question of other gods, although Paul gets closer to saying "those aren't actually gods".

What do we do in a pluralistic world with multiple expressions of faith? How do we make a claim to there being one God, known in many different ways, with many different faces and not make a claim that other expressions of faith are unworthy or evil or wrong? I am not sure we have done all that well on that point.

In the end, I think faith language is a love language. I think faithfulness to our understanding of the Divine is a statement of love. Years ago I watched an interview with Rabbi Harold Kushner who used the example of a spouse claiming that their partner was the best partner in the whole world. Obviously that can not be proven or dis-proven but it is still a true statement -- even when multiple people say it about their own partners.

So our challenge, as people of faith, is not to prove that "our god is better than your god" or that our understanding of the Divine is more accurate than someone else's. The challenge is to witness to what we believe about the Divine and why and what difference it makes in our lives.

Reading the Micah passage reminds us not only that other cultures have other gods, other understandings of the Divine, but also that God is with God's people, that we are being redeemed and lifted up. Reading the opening of John's Gospel reminds us that the God we meet in Jesus of Nazareth is the God who was present at the beginning of our faith story.

As Christians we proclaim a particular understanding of God. Like Judaism and Islam Christianity proclaims that there is one God. Unlike them we proclaim that the one God took human form. Our task is to proclaim how we understand God, how we understand God's activity in the world, how we understand God's hopes for God's people. What does it mean to us to name that there is one God, and one Word that takes on human form. How does the Incarnation inform our understanding of how God is redeeming us, how God is building us back up?

--Gord