Looking Ahead to March 31, 2024 -- Easter Sunday

The Scripture Readings we will hear this Easter Day are:

• Isaiah 25:6-9
• Mark 16:1-8

The Sermon title is Fearful Joy

Early Thoughts: A great surprise! A wondrous terror! Run and hide! Share the news!

Or maybe we could sing:

Refrain:
This is the day that God has made!
Rejoice! Rejoice, and be exceeding glad!
This is the day that God has made!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Hallelujah!

Christ has conquered death at last,
left the tomb that held him fast!
Gone the sorrow, gone the night,
dawns the morning clear and bright!
(beginning of This is the Day that God Has Made, #175 in Voices United)

Thine is the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won.
Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave-clothes where Thy body lay.
(beginning of Thine is the Glory, #173 in Voices United)

On Easter Sunday we announce boldly that they powers of death and destruction do not have the last word. Life and love will win. Who could help but sing and dance and share the news where ever they go?

Well, according to Mark, the first witnesses to this surprising victory had a very different reaction. In what is commonly believed to be the earliest, original, ending to Mark's Gospel we read "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.". 

To be honest, I get that. When your whole understanding of how the world works has been challenged, when you expect to weep at a graveside only to find an empty tomb and news of resurrection, when the world has been turned upside down terror and amazement seem natural. Maybe later you might tell someone else about it (which obviously Mary, Mary and Salome did) but first you might need some time to process what has happened.

Easter is a surprise. Easter is a shock. Easter is, to someone who is not really expecting it, terrifying. Easter disrupts life (with life itself ironically). This is not a comfortable experience. It may be wonderful news but that does not make it comfortable. In some ways this original ending of Mark's Gospel is my favorite Easter story. It captures that mixture of joy and disruption, wonder and fear so incredibly well.

For the Easter season our worship question about finding God is going to be "where did God surprise you?". AS we celebrate the Good News of an empty tomb this year I invite all of us to consider what times we feel that mix of fearful joy. Where is God surprising, elating, and terrifying you all at the same time?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to March 29, 2024 -- Good Friday

This year we will hear the story from Arrest to Burial as told in the Gospel of Mark 14:43-15:47

The Sermon title is Disaster???

Early Thoughts:  What do we think about as we sit at the base of the cross and remember this story? Can we read it, immerse ourselves in it, feel all the feelings, without remembering the rest of the story? Does remembering that this is not the end of the story rob the cross of its horror and power? (And is that necessarily a bad thing?)

The disciples, the people closes to Jesus had to live through this not knowing for sure what the end of the story truly was. For them it must have seemed very possible that this was the end. All their hopes were being destroyed. The promise of a new world was gone. The horror and terror must have been a palpable part of their experience.

For them, this was a disaster. Yes Jesus has repeatedly told them that the Son of Man would be executed and then would be rise three days later but I am pretty sure they did not believe it. After all why would they? As far as they knew dead meant dead. Some of them might have heard and even believed in the idea that the righteous would be raised at the last days, resurrection was a part of some Jewish schools of thought in the first century, but still was now the time? What they knew for sure was that Jesus was hauled away and his death was imminent. For all they knew the highly identifiable followers of Jesus could be next.

How might you react if you had been there?

To be honest I think that even though we know the rest of the story (so far, the story has not actually come to an end yet) we need to stop and pretend we don't for a moment. It is too easy to ignore the horror and terror of this day when we want to jump right to an empty tomb and the promise of new life. I am not saying that is bad. Hope is always a good thing. Remembering the promise of God that life and love will always defeat (in the long view) death and fear is always a good thing. But maybe if we don't pause to remember the realities of death and fear, despair and defeat we don't fully appreciate the power of the victory.

The world around us knows a lot about fear and death. Despair is a common reaction to our news stories. Some days it seems like the disaster wins -- sometimes on a personal level, sometimes in our faith communities, sometimes on a global scale. We may need to sit with the disaster for a bit, even as we try to live into hope.

What are the disasters you need to sit with this year? Where does it look like the forces of empire and destruction are beating down the Kingdom of God? What makes you want to run away and hide so you are not the next one to get caught in the web of death?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to March 24, 2024 -- Palm Sunday

The Scripture Readings this week are:

• Psalm 118:19-29 (read responsively to open the service)
• Mark 11:1-11
• Mark 11:27-33
• Mark 14:1-2

The Sermon title is Triumph!??

Image source

Early Thoughts: Hosanna, loud hosanna the happy children sang...  All glory laud and honour to thee Redeemer King... Ride on ride on in majesty...

Opening lines from 3 Palm Sunday hymns. Just typing them out conjures up images of people parading around the church waving palm branches. It brings out feelings of hope and joy. 

When I read the story of the entry into Jerusalem it carries with it that feeling of hope and possibility. The air seems to resound with the triumphant glory that the king has entered the city. It may well have been street theater. It might have been carefully staged to make a point. But there is a clear sense that the air rings with great news.

Unless you look beyond those verses of course.

The trouble seems to start immediately. People with power see Jesus' street theater as a threat. They start to wonder how they should react. (To be fair Jesus seems to be doing a fair bit to antagonize them as well.) By the beginning of chapter 14 the direction is clear. As Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice put it "this Jesus must die".

What type of triumphant story is this? When we sing those hymns and wave the branches what victory are we celebrating? The next few steps of the story seem far from victorious, in fact they lean more toward disastrous.

The Palm Sunday story is often called "the Triumphal Entry". But there is a big shadow looming over the parade. In fact  one of those hymns I quoted above includes the line "in lowly pomp ride on to die". 

Where do we go from here?
--Gord

Looking Ahead to March 17, 2024 -- 5th Sunday in Lent

 The Scripture Readings this week are: 

• Jeremiah 31:31-34
• John 12:20-26

The Sermon title is Life-Changing Promise

Early Thoughts: What difference does it make that to our lives to have the New Covenant written on our hearts and souls? 

Does it lead us to fall into the ground and die so that growth can happen?

Can people who watch how we live and act tell whether or not the words have soaked into the heart they were written on?

With this week's reading from Jeremiah we continue the theme set in the first two weeks of Lent of talking about covenants.  We started with the covenant of the rainbow, then we looked at the covenant made with Abraham. Because of our Annual Meeting Sunday we skipped over the covenant marked by the 10 commandments, and now we have Jeremiah and the promised new covenant. 

I read an article last month that suggested that each "new" covenant is in fact a divine act of covenant renewal -- arguably stretching back to the first covenant found at the beginning of Genesis. In the beginning God calls Creation good and has a vision for how the world could be. God makes promises and agreements with the first humans. Everything that follows from that point is God's attempt to keep these humans God has created in line with the vision. All these other covenants are times when God is trying again to bring God's beloved children back to the hope, to what they were created to be. In this process God has tried a variety of signs and forms. Now God has a new way.

Maybe the problem is that all the old signs and promises were external. Maybe the heart of humanity needs to be changed. Maybe if the law of love,  grace, mercy, and community is written on humanity's heart it will change how they live, how they interact with each other.

Christians have traditionally understood that this new covenant is enacted in the life, ministry, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. As we grow as followers of The Way, as we develop as disciples of Christ, the law that is written on our hearts becomes a part of our DNA, becomes the guiding/shaping/forming principle that moves us forward.   

I firmly believe that how we use our time, talent, and treasure, what we do with the life we have been given, shows what is truly written on our hearts. I also believe that allowing the law of love,  grace, mercy, and community to soak deep into our very being will change how we use our time, talent, and treasure. A deep reading of what God, through Christ, has written on our hearts and souls will lead us to be good stewards of the lives we have been given.

For all of the existence of the church there has been an understanding that when we give ourselves fully to the new covenant, when we choose to be wholehearted followers of The Way, it is a process of dying so that we may live. In order to live in a new way we have to let (or encourage or even cause?) old ways of thinking and living die. Indeed, one of the reasons that white is a traditional colour for baptismal garments is to mimic the funeral shroud, as in baptism we pass through death and into new life (language often used more for Believer's Baptism than infant baptism and for immersion rather than sprinkling). Jesus himself, in this week's reading from John (and other places in the Gospels) reminds us that sometimes the only way to live and grow is in fact to die.

What needs to die so that the word God has written on your heart can fully impact how you live your life? What needs to die so that we can be great stewards of the lives we have been given?

There is something written on our hearts and souls, something that would, if we let it, sink deep into the very fiber of our being, something that can guide and shape all of our lives. Will we let it? HOw will those words of promise change our lives?
--Gord