Kyle's Church Blog

This morning, we are celebrating Epiphany.  Technically, Epiphany is on January 6, but we moved it up to today because it worked better with our preaching schedule.

When I started as a pastor 11 years ago, I was given the job of preaching on Epiphany, and I remember asking, “What’s Epiphany?” as I really had no idea.

There are two things going on at Epiphany.

The first is a more technical understanding.  An epiphany is a sudden or striking realization.  It’s an “Aha!” moment.   A light bulb turning on.  A “Eureka” moment! A moment where we fog is lifted and we now see.

Like this for example. 

Do you see an old woman, or a young woman?

And then, that moment where you see both of them… Ah!  There it is!

That’s an epiphany.

The second thing about Epiphany Sunday is it’s where we celebrate the magi from the East coming to visit the child Jesus, and bring him frankincense, myrrh, and gold.

Now there’s a lot of lore and myth around the story of the magi.  We call them wisemen, magi, kings, astrologers… We talk about three, but their number is unknown.  Over the centuries we’ve even given them names! Gaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior!  (Not exactly high on the baby names of 2015 though).

For this morning, it doesn’t really matter.  We’re just going to roll with the plot of some people from afar came and visited Jesus.

But, a quick aside.  There’s a joke going around on social media every Christmas.   Have you ever wondered what it would have been like if the three wise men were women?  They would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, made a casserole, brought practical gifts, and there would be peace on earth.  Har har.  Very funny. I resent this, as I make a mean casserole, helped deliver my kids, and can change a diaper with my eyes closed.

Okay. Back to the journey of the magi.

But let’s start with the word “journey.”

I like the idea of journeys. It’s a word that signifies experience. It signifies adventure.  It’s a word that signifies to us that the destination isn’t the only goal.  That how we get there is partly the point.  It helps us understand that we’ve never truly arrived, that we’ve never finished, that every step is part of the experience.

When I go canoeing, I love getting to the campsite for the day.  I love setting up the tent and making a fire and watching the sun go down.  I love watching the sun rise in the morning and showing my kids the beavers swimming by.

But the campsite isn’t the only goal.  I also love getting to the campsite.  Where every corner you turn you look for a moose in the shallows.  Where you see a fish a jump close to you.  Where you see fallen trees and cliffs and bays waiting to be explored.

In a journey, every part of it is included in the experience.

We also use this language for faith.  Not a destination.  A journey.

It’s where we understand that being a disciple of Jesus, that growing in our faith, that learning to love and forgive, learning to trust God, is a continual process. We’ve never really arrived.  We can usually be sure that if we thinking we’ve arrived is a sign that we haven’t.  God is never really done with us, and very few of us claim to have this whole spirituality thing nailed down, or consider ourselves experts in grace and peace, so we use the language of journey.  Where every new day is a new challenge and opportunity.  Where every time we stray from the path, we can get back on the path.  Faith journey has become part of our vocabulary.

Years ago, I was taking a CMU course with a prof from Harvard, Sharon Daloz-Parks, and besides being an incredible teacher, she said something that has stuck with me ten years later.

She said that while she understands why we use the word “journey” to describe our faith, she found it to be a bit to individualistic and self-centered. That faith is my journey with God, and really, if this is my journey, who are you to criticize it?

This, I believe, has led to many of us in Canada say, “Well, we’re spiritual, but not religious.”  Which, on one hand, I totally get and understand and have respect for this. We believe that life is bigger than us an our individual successes and Boxing Day shopping, but we don’t want to participate in religious rites and rituals that don’t give us life.  But on the other hand, if you were to ask how our “non-religious spirituality” affects our lives, very few of us would cite extra giving, or volunteering, or mediation, or shoveling extra driveways, or loving our enemies.

When we make faith a journey only about ourselves and God, we risk people hiding behind the idea of God while exhibiting very little transformation in their lives.

**Note – Christians are also really, really, really good at hiding behind the idea of God while exhibiting very little transformation in their lives.  Heck, I’m pretty good at hiding behind the idea of God.**

So, my prof told us that instead of the word journey, she uses the word “pilgrimage”.

A pilgrimage is a trip to a holy site, and when we’re there, we encounter something divine that changes us. And then, we go back home, bearing gifts for our community.

A journey is about a trip and back.  A pilgrimage is about being changed and blessing our communities.

It’s like MCC’s SALT program that I went to Zimbabwe with 13 years ago.  SALT is an acronym for Serving and Learning Together, where they send young people around the world to work in a variety of NGO’s for a year. And when we got back, at our debriefing, they said to us.

“We kind of tricked you. We sent you to serve and learn, but really, while the serving you was great, if we really only cared about that, we could have hired locals to do the work you did with much for efficiency, since they understand the local language and culture.  But, what we really send you out to do was to learn. To learn about who you are and a bit more about the world and a bit more about God, and now that you’re going home, you’re going to take all that you learned and go and serve at home.  We thought about calling the program Learning and Serving Together, but the acronym LAST isn’t quite as good as SALT.”

You’re going to take what you learned with you and serve at home. A pilgrimage.

I now like to think of the journey of the magi as the pilgrimage of the magi, where they left everything to go and encounter Jesus, and because of that experience, their lives were never the same.

They allowed an encounter with Jesus to change them.  They had an epiphany, their “Aha!” moment. They re-orientated their lives around it.  They followed a star to a foreign land and met a king.

At Christmas time, it’s really easy to go on a journey to visit baby Jesus.  We have children’s concerts and Steve Bell played with the WSO and we have Christmas carols everywhere and churches fill up for Advent, especially on Christmas Eve.  We donate extra money, volunteer more, and go caroling with our friends.  We talk about the Christmas spirit being in the air.

So maybe a better question for us to ponder is, do we allow those experiences to change us?  What gifts do we bring back to our community?  Are we more generous?    Peaceful?  Loving?  Hopeful?

As we have for all our Advent services, we’ll have a slideshow of paths and offer a time of reflection.  As we reflect today, let’s ask ourselves,

Because of our pilgrimage to the manger on Christmas, what gifts are we bringing back to our community?

 

 

A third advent sermon on Ezra 1:1-4, 3:1-4, 10-13

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The Old Testament is full of stories that tell the history of the Israelites.  It’s a library of books that were written by different people in different places for different reasons.  We have books of law and books of history and books of poetry and books of wisdom and books of prophecy.

And, every once in a while, if we’re able to take a step back, we notice something remarkable about these books.  They don’t only include the positive sides of the story.  They also include the negatives.  The criticisms.

For every good king we read about, there’s a prophet, saying, “Hey!  Wake up!  You’re still missing something here!”

For every good character we read about, we read about many of their dark sides and their penchant to lie, steal, kill, commit adultery, and ignore the poor around them.

We so desperately want to create categories of people and kingdoms and stories and label them as either good or bad, but if read these stories carefully, they just don’t give us a lot of fairy tale endings.

It takes as mature person to criticize their people while remaining among them.  It takes a mature person to criticize their faith, while remaining within it.  It takes a mature person to criticize their country, their church, or even themselves and their family, while remaining in it.

Today’s story is one of those stories.

So let’s pull out the old map, because trying to read these Old Testament stories without knowing what’s going on is always a bad idea.  

The Israelites were in Egypt as slaves.  Moses led the out, and then spent 40 years wandering the desert.  Then they set up a kingdom here, and couldn’t quite figure out how to get along, so it split into two.  Then the big bad Assyrians came and wiped out the Northern Kingdom.  Then the big bad Babylonians came and wiped out the Assyrians and took most of the Southern Kingdom back to Babylon, and this is called the exile.  And then the big bad Persians came and took over the Babylonians, and then Cyrus, King of the Persians, tells Ezra to lead the Jews home to go and rebuild their temple.

And this is where we pick up the story. After getting beaten up and kicked around and kidnapped and killed for the last two hundred years, the people were going home.

Oh yeah, we’re going home.  Kind of like how you feel after a long weekend at your in-laws.  Only imagine living there for decades. See ya!  It’s good to be home.

Only, we read in verse 3 that when they went home, the land wasn’t empty.  People who were left behind from the exile were still there.  Foreigners who moved in to the land, armies had left people there after conquest.  The land wasn’t empty, and Ezra and his people were afraid.  Afraid of the conflict that might arise.  Afraid that their hopes and dreams might be dashed.  Afraid that their safety was at risk.  Afraid that the houses their grandparents had built were being lived in by others.  Afraid of people who were different than them.  Afraid of the unknown.  Afraid.

This is also why some of these Old Testament stories are great.  They’re quite universal.  We are still afraid today.

Some of us are afraid of Muslims.  Some of us are afraid of going bankrupt. Some of us are afraid of dying.  Some of us are afraid of being labelled a failure.  Some of us are afraid for our safety.  Some of us are afraid of not having enough money to retire.  Some of us are afraid of losing our jobs.  Some of us are afraid that Christianity will lose its perceived influence.  Some of us are afraid that we’re not doing enough good in this world.  Some of us afraid of our futures.

This is universal.   It’s okay.  We’re all afraid of something.

Now, satistically speaking, we live in the best time in the history of the world.  Most of us in Canada are going to have the highest quality of lives every available to humans, ever, and what do we with that?  We buy cell phones for our children in elementary school because of safety concerns.

I read recently that in some schools, one quarter of kids in grade 4 have cell phones.  In every instance, the parent cited safety as the primary reason to get one.  I told this stat to a bunch of teenagers, and they all laughed.  “Of course we told our parents we needed cell phones for our safety.  We knew that was our best chance of getting one!”

We are afraid.  How we’re afraid may look different to each of us, but we are afraid.

I’m going to say two things about being afraid.

Number one.  We are not allowed to put our own safety before that of others while claiming we follow Jesus.  No.  Can’t do it. I know why we do it, because who doesn’t want to be safe?  But when we use the excuse of our safety to deny the opportunity to love of others, we are not following Jesus.  Putting your own security and safety before the well-being of others is something that Jesus didn’t say.

Can you imagine Jesus not talking to some people because he was afraid of them?  Or not healing them?  Or not having supper with them? Or not hanging out with them?  Or not living with them?  He did his ministry with enemy soldiers and violent revolutionaries and sex workers and tax collectors and foreigners and people with communicable diseases, and never once cited his safety as a concern.

And he ended up on a cross, while loving and forgiving the people who were killing him.  We shouldn’t act surprised, because this is exactly what Jesus invites his followers to.

If taking up our cross to follow Jesus doesn’t mean to embark upon a life that risks suffering, loss and even death, then what does it mean? (Brian Zahnd).

Doing to others as you would have them do to you does not include any clauses about risk and safety.

So we do not get to say that we are putting our trust in Jesus and then put our own welfare before that of others.

That means that we open our doors to refugees.

That means that open our doors to Muslims.

That means that we don’t talk poorly of others in our coffee shop conversations.

That means we don’t spread falsehoods and on Facebook and fact  check any pictures we share.

That means we don’t advocate violence against others.

That means we don’t blame helping others for health care wait times or tax rates or housing availability.

Jesus asks us to take up a cross.  Surely, then, we shouldn’t be surprised when we actually have to do so.

Do to others as you would have them to unto you.

Number 2:

We all have our own fears, anxieties, our own doubts, sin… Our own issues.  But when we don’t acknowledge them, and seek healing for them, what we end up doing is projecting them onto a different person, or a different group.  It’s called scapegoating, and it is evil.  As soon as we scapegoat another group,  as soon as we blame another group, as soon as we name ourselves as better than someone else, or more deserving than someone else, then ever so slightly we open the door to bullying, exclusion, racism, violence, genocide, and crucifixion.  If you want to see the devil work wonders in our world, check out all the scapegoating.   When we say that we’re just being safe, we have to help those at home first, that they’re different than us so they wouldn’t fit in, it is the Devil masquerading as an angel of light.

When we hear someone blame another group for something, chances are that it’s a form of scapegoating.

Have we been paying attention for the past few months?

We’ve scapegoated Muslims.

We’ve scapegoated refugees.

We’ve scapegoated Syrians.

And we in the church are equally to blame.  We have a long and proud history of scapegoating other groups.  We love circling the wagons and creating enemies and getting everyone riled up and afraid.

We’ve scapegoated other religions.

We’ve scapegoated other denominations.

We’ve scapegoated sexual minorities.

We’ve scapegoated political parties we disagree with and people who don’t vote like us.

We’ve scapegoated people who don’t believe the same doctrine as us.

As Canadians, are we able to learn from our own history?

We’re turning 150 years soon.  And in those years,

We’ve scapegoated Jews.

We’ve scapegoated Chinese.

We’ve scapegoated Japanese.

We’ve scapegoated Muslims.

We’ve scapegoated the French, the English, the Germans, the Irish, the Ukrainians, and the Mennonites.

We’ve scapegoated women.

And sweet mercy me have we every scapegoated First Nations people.

When we, as humans, are afraid, we have the capacity to do terrible things to others.

CBC has shut down the comments section on its website for articles on First Nations people because of the racist comments people were writing.

The Holocaust museum in New York issued a statement comparing the rhetoric around Syrian refugees to the rhetoric of Jewish refugees pre-World War II.  Pre-Holocaust, Canada only let in 5000 Jewish refugees, with one official even saying, “None is too many.”  The Holocaust killed 6,000,000 Jews.

When we are afraid, and when we blame other groups for our problems, we can do terrible things.

You may not have noticed, but almost every pronoun I have used this sermon is in the first person, using either “I” or “we.”  Why?  Because the first step to not scapegoating is to not use “us vs. them” language.  It’s hard, and it’s sloppy at times, but talking about others as “we” at least attempts to see our connection to others, and our own ability to make mistakes, whereas talking about “them” easily turns into “enemies.”

Now, back to the story of Ezra for a moment.  I am fully aware that me up here preaching to not be afraid doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re all going to go home not be afraid anymore.

Our text this morning tells us that despite their fears, Ezra and the Israelites kept building the temple.

And when they were done, they sang the following:

“God is good.  His love towards Israel endures.”

In this story, the Israelites had been kicked around, killed, and kidnapped for almost two centuries, and what are the words from their lips?

God is good.  His love endures forever.

They gathered together to remind themselves that even though they are afraid, there is a different story to listen to.  Sometimes we have to turn off the news, turn off social media, turn off the coffee shop banter… Sometimes we have to turn our heads a bit and listen real carefully.

God is good.  His love endures forever.

The story is there.  It’s always been there. We’ve heard it before.  Are we listening?

God is good.  His love endures forever.

Our story of Ezra ends with something unique.  It’s one of those parts of the story where they’re quite mature in writing down what actually happened.

Ezra and the people left Babylon, lived with their fears, remembered that God is good, and finally rebuilt the temple.  And when it was done, some of the people were letting out whoops of joy and excitement and acting like the Winnipeg Jets were back in town!

But others… they wept. They remembered what the temple was like, and realized that this temple, in comparison, stunk.

They realized that the future was not the past.

Similar to us, our future is not our past.

We don’t know how Canadians are going to respond to an increase in refugees and Muslims.

We don’t know who the Americans are going to elect President.

We don’t know what our current government is going to do, and what will happen again in 4 years.

We don’t know what our families are going to look like, what our jobs will be like, what our church will be like, what our country will look like.

All that we know, it that the future is probably not going to look like the past.

That’s what the Israelites realized all those years ago.  And that’s what we’re still realizing to this day.

As we all look to an unknown future, with all our own fears, are we listening?

Are we able to hear?

Are we able to trust?

Are we able to trust God?

Trust that God is with us?

O Come O Come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.

Based on Deuteronomy 6, 4-9.  And I again screen shot my art work, so please do your best.

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Let’s start with a timeline, and let’s start over here. The world is 13.8 billion years old, plus or minus 0.04%.

And that is a really cool number, isn’t it?  I mean, how often do we get to write down the number 13.8 billion?

Okay.  

And the moving on to our timeline, around the 16^th century BCE, we have the story of Moses and Exodus.  You may know it, where there are a bunch of slaves and then Moses says “Let my people go!”, and then some frogs and gnats come, and Moses leads them out of Egypt.  Of course scholars can’t agree on when it actually happened, or what actually happened, but that’s okay.  For today’s purpose, we’ll just roll with the 16^th century BCE.

And then, after wandering around in the desert for 40 years, we have the Israelites ready to enter the promised land, the land of milk and honey (aka:  Kleefeld).  They’re about to cross the threshold, put their names on paper, and move in.  It’s a big moment, and someone is probably putting a picture of it on Instagram.

And it’s here, before they go and create their new county, that we hear these words from Moses, telling the people that they are to love God with all their heart and soul and strength, and that all these commandments are to be on their hearts, and that they’re supposed to tell their children about them.  Not going too much into specifics, he’s telling them to do what they have to do to remember their history, remember their laws, remember their community, remember their God, and pass it on to you their children.

But here’s the thing about the book of Deuternomy.  It was probably written down and compiled on paper, as we read it, about 1000 years after Moses said the words.

And knowing that little piece of information is really, really, important.

Why?

Here, I’ll use a map to make this as easy as possible to understand.

The Israelites are slaves here.  Moses leads them out.  

They wander around here for 40 years, eating quail and manna and grumbling.

And then they’re about to enter the promised land here.

And then they set up a kingdom, and sometimes they’re great, and other times, they’re not.  And very quickly they hold a national referendum on national unity (we Canadians know all about this), and they split into two kingdoms.  And then each was doing their own thing for a while.  But then the big bad Assyrians came from here and obliterated the North Kingdom, and then a little while later the Babylonians came and obliterated the Southern Kingdom, and took all the people to live in exile back to Babylon.  And it was here, in Babylon, 1000 years after Moses, that they most likely wrote down Deuteronomy as we knows it.

This is really, really, really important to know because writing down their stories about God, their rules, their history, was all about preserving their identity.  It was about them remembering who they are.  It was here, in exile, where they became a “people of the book.”

“Who are we? No, we’re not Babylonians.  We’re Israelites.  We believe in one God, who is mighty to save.  This God beat the Egyptian God.  He’ll beat the Babylonian Gods.  He’s mighty to save.  We were once a mighty kingdom.  And when we are again, we’ll remember how we ruled.”

You can actually think of the Lion King here, where Mufasa is telling Simba, “Remember who you are.”  It works as a great analogy.  Remember who you are.

They’re writing about the past to explain the present.  How did we end up here?  Well, there’s a story to that, and we are not going to forget it.    Because how we live now is because of our story.

How we live now is because of our story. 

Remember who you are.

I’m going to take a bit of a leap now and speak to our present.

I know we’re in an election, and we’re all getting a little tired of all the election signs, but over the past two months, a lot has been said about refugees, immigrants, Muslims, security, and minorities.   So let’s talk about how our stories shape how we live now.

And I’m going to speak of our present stories in 3 different ways, as Canadians, as Mennonites, and as Christians.

1. Let’s start with Canada. What’s the story of Canada?  Well, remember who you are.   Unless you are First Nations, someone in your family was an immigrant.  Possibly even a refugee.  Even if we go as far back as we can, someone came across that ocean.  My own story, I can trace my Mennonite side back to one of the founding families of Steinbach, and we even have a bench at the corner of Kroeker and Main.  And my French side, well the first Saurette came over from France to fight the English, (he obviously didn’t have a good security check done), and he married a woman who had been in New France since 1650, and her family was one of the first several thousand immigrants to New France.  I have deep roots in this place called Steinbach, I have deep roots in this place called Canada, but, somewhere, somehow, in all of our histories, some people moved here from somewhere else.

Remember who you are. Remember your own story.  Tell your children.  We were immigrants.

2. Let’s go with Mennonites.  Some of you will know more than I do, but I typed Mennonite Migrations into a Google Image Search, and I came with this. (It’s in Spanish. Sorry.  Unless you speak Spanish.  They enjoy)  From Switzerland and Holland to Prussia to Ukraine to Russia to Canada and Paraguay and Mexico.  Sometimes we moved with lots of money.  And other times we moved without lots of money. Sometimes we had good working relationships with local people and government.  Other times, not so much.  But our history is one filled with us being immigrants, us fleeing violence and persecution, us seeking safety, us being refugees, and finding a safe place to live.

Remember who you are.  Remember your own story.  Tell your children.  We were immigrants.  We were refugees.

3.   Early in their story, the Israelites remembered that they were slaves once:   “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)   And then we have the early church writing down the words of Jesus, “Whatever you did for the least of these sisters and brothers of mine, you did for me.”  (Matthew 25:40)   And there are these great stories in our history of Christians where they helped people unlike them, such as French Christians risking their lives to shelter Jews during the Holocaust.  But we also have these painful stories of Christians forgetting to care for the least of these, such as the crusades or owning slaves.  Telling both the good stories and the bad stories shapes how we live.

Remember who you are.  Remember your own story.  Tell your children.  We follow a God who loves everyone and invites us to do the same.  We follow a God who claims us as beloved children, whether we’re deserving of that title or not.

Remember who you are.  Remember your own story.

Two weeks ago, here at Grace we had our first information meeting about our church sponsoring another refugee family.   I had set up chairs for 20 people.  43 of us showed up.  Plus a whole bunch of you emailed us saying that you couldn’t be there but wanted to help.  When I think of that meeting, I still smile in gratitude.   And our second meeting is on Wednesday, and the MCC refugee coordinator is going to be there, as we begin to move from information to action.

After the first meeting, I had a conversation with one of you.  You were one of the younger ones there, under the age of 60.  And you told me how, at the meeting, you look with awe and respect at some of the less young people, the ones over the age of 60, who had been helping sponsor refugees for the past 30 years.  And this led you to think of your place here at Grace, and how you can continue the work that we’ve been doing all these years.

Ahh… my heart melted.  This is a story of us remembering who we are.  This is a story of us remembering our own story.  This is us knowing that our own story shapes how we live now.

I don’t think that one of my sermons would be complete without me quoting the Franciscan Father, Richard Rohr.  So to wrap up, especially since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, here is something for us to share at the dinner table over turkey and pumpkin pie.  Someone once asked him, “What’s the point of life?”  And he replied “To give back that which we have received.”

The point of life is to give back that which we have received.

Remember your story.  Remember who you are.

Grace and Peace.

Amen.

I preached a sermon while drawing on an iPad.  I just took some screen shots after my sermon, so my apologies if the pictures don’t match up 100% with the words.

My sermon was based on Genesis 32, the story of Jacob wrestling a stranger in the night.

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These ancient stories of Israel are just the best.  Genesis is full of these stories, that at first glance, are just bonkers.  But once we take a second to figure out what’s going on, there is just so much good stuff in there.

Okay.  Jacob.  He was the grandson of Abraham and the brother to Esau. He’s the guy who put some animal fur on his leg to pretend he was more hairy and stole his father’s blessing from his brother.  And then his brother got mad, and Jacob ran away.  And then he’s the guy who worked 7 years to marry a woman, and was given the woman’s sister instead, so he worked again.  And then there’s this bizarre story of the two wives trading mandrakes for the opportunity to sleep with their shared husband. What’s a mandrake?  All I know is that it’s a plant grown in Professor Sprout’s class in Harry Potter.
What a strange guy this Jacob is.  And then, twenty years later, along with some wives, some servants, some kids, and whole lot of goats, sheep, and money, he is making plans to go home.

But there’s one thing.  Jacob thinks his brother is still mad at him, so he sent him a text, asking, “You still mad bro?”.  But he didn’t get a response, even though his phone said “read” and Jacob thinks that his life is in danger.  Now, Jacob obviously missed the point of the expression “Women and Children First”, as he sends his family and servants and wealth ahead of him to danger in an effort to butter up his brother, and this is where we pick up the story about him wrestling someone in the night.

What a strange story, isn’t it.  Wrestling strangers in the night, touching each others hips, exchanging names and asking for blessings.  What in the world is going on?

Well, my best answer is that nobody actually knows what actually happened.  We have one version of the story, but Jacob wasn’t live tweeting the events.  This story was written down thousands of years after Jacob lived, and I doubt there was a video camera filming the wrestling, so we have no idea who the assailant really was, or if he was real, or a dream, or what was said between the two.  So, my first question about this story, and maybe better question, is this… Why was this story written? Why has this story been passed down for thousands of years and is now sitting in front of us?

3 reasons, I think.  Number one is that Jacob wrestled with God.  Number two is that Jacob was blessed after the wrestling.  And number three is that he was left limping for the rest of this life.
Okay. Let’s start off exploring these three things by drawing a line.  We can call this line “Construction.”  This is the stage of life where we, as humans, construct our faith.  This is where we build it up.  This we give Bibles to our children and tell them that God loves them deeply.  We tell them stories about God making the world and Daniel and the Lion’s Den and David and Goliath, and how but we leave out the part where David cuts Goliaths head off and brings it back to his army base.  And then as they grow older, we talk about Jesus, and sin, and redemption, and doctrine, and grace, and love.  Construction.   Building up of faith in our lives.  Love it.

And then, we draw a second line.  We can call this line deconstruction.  This is where we wake up one day and realize that not everything fits into nice little boxes.  Deconstruction is where we start asking questions.  We ask questions about the Bible, such as why are there two creation stories?  And if Genesis was written thousands of years after Jacob lived, who wrote down this story? Or we ask questions about how God seems so violent, why people use their faith to justify violence, or about the role of church of and state.  We look around at other religions and they seem like nice people too, or we wonder how evolution and the Bible work together.  This is called deconstruction.  I like to say that deconstruction is where we wrestle with God.

This is deconstruction line is the realm of university students.  They move away and start asking questions, and we wonder if they’re ever going to find their way back to church.

Deconstruction can also be a lonely place, especially if one’s faith community is primarily in the construction phase, and you aren’t allowed to ask questions or doubt or disagree. You can also stay in deconstruction a long time… measuring this in years is not out of the question, maybe even decades.

But then, staying here in deconstruction isn’t the best either.  This is where angry people hang out.  This is where the Debbie Downers and Negative Nellies live (with all apologies to the Debbies and Nellies who are reading this).  Living in permanent deconstruction can quite easily lead into cynicism, arrogance, and relativity.

So let’s draw a new line.

We’ve had construction.  Then we’ve had deconstruction.  And then we have reconstruction.

This is where we rebuild our faith, only this time it’s deeper.  It’s filled with mystery.  It’s filled with more love, especially for those not like us.  It’s filled with more grace.  It allows paradox.  It holds less things tightly. It’s more empathetic.  It’s better at loving our enemies.  It’s less anxious.  It’s filled with more peace.  It’s more giving.  We have reconstructed our faith in the image of Christ.  This is the stage where we can really say with all sorts of authority, no matter what our lives look like – God has blessed us.

We have wrestled with God, and God has blessed us.

Back to the three things about this story.  I believe that these are the first two reasons why we have this Jacob story passed down to us for thousands of years.  It’s okay to wrestle with God, and at the end, if we make it to sunrise, we will see God’s blessings all around us.

But before we go to the limp, a few things about these three lines.

I have drawn them linearly. In reality, it looks like this:  A three dimensional scribble of life that goes in all sorts of unexpected places.
Life isn’t linear.  We love and we lose and we win and we hurt and we suffer and then we believe this and then we believe that and then we don’t know what to believe anymore, let alone how to act.  This movement is not always linear, but I just found it easier to draw.

Secondly, I turned 32 this week.  If I reflect, I can look back at my own story and find these themes.  I can look to Sunday School and youth and working at camp as all part of my construction.  And then I can look at my time in university and living in Zimbabwe and then working in churches and seeing their dark side as deconstruction.  And then I can look at my spiritual direction and prayer life and book reading and learning from Mel as learning to love better as all part of my reconstruction.

And the great irony of this is that most likely, on a big life timeline, I am probably somewhere over here, still in the “construction” phase.  If any of us at 32 think that we’ve arrived, we are probably wrong.  This is a life long journey.

Okay…  There’s more, but let’s talk about the limp first.

Why the limp?  Why would the stranger touch the hip of Jacob and leave him limping for life?

We only grow and mature because we have to.  Life forces us to.  And, to quote Richard Rohr, the only things that make us grow are great love and great suffering, and great love always leads to great suffering.  And suffering will leave us with a limp.

Let’s go back to the timeline.  You’re here, life is great, and you’re singing kumbaya every Sunday.  And then, you experience some sort of suffering that doesn’t fit very well into this (look at the lines on deconstruction part).  It could be a job loss.  It could be that someone close to you passes away.  It could be a health crises.  It could be the end of a relationship or a marriage.  It could be that you prayed for something and it didn’t happen.  It could be an intellectual crises, like you read a book and now you don’t know what you believe anymore.

These are some of the things that life throws at us, these things that we don’t have control over, and they force us to grow and mature.

Life throws us curve balls, and they leave their marks. They leave us limping.

This is the story of Jacob.  He was raised up.  And then, either through his own actions or the actions of others, he lost control of his life.  He had to run away to avoid his angry brother, his father in law manipulated him, his wives were trading mandrakes for sex, so I’m assuming that home wasn’t a bastion of peace.  All these stories moved him along, and they represent the wrestling.  And at the end, he made it to sunrise, he saw the blessing, but he was limping.

We grow, we wrestle, we see our blessings, and we are limping.

Richard Rohr says, “Wrestling with God, with life, and with ourselves is necessary. . . The blessing usually comes in a wounding of some sort and for most of us it is an entire life of limping along to finally see the true and real blessing in our life.” 

This is the story of Jacob wrestling a stranger in the night.  It’s a story about wrestling, a story about blessing, and a story about limping.

It’s an ancient story, but it’s also an invitation. An invitation for us to wrestle with God.  And invitation for us to look for your blessings.  And an invitation to embrace the limps and scars that we acquire along the way as part of our growth.

It’s an ancient story, but it’s really an invitation. An invitation for us to wrestle with God.  And invitation for us to look for your blessings.  And an invitation to embrace the limps and scars that we acquire along the way as part of our growth.

Based on Proverbs 8

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Have you ever searched the original language and meaning of what your name means?

For example, the name Kyle is Gaelic in origin, and it means “fair and handsome.” My parents must have known what known what they were doing when they named me 31 years ago.

Ashley’s name means, “One who lives near the ash forest”, so obviously I win that one.

Do any of you know the meaning of the name “Sophia”?

You probably don’t, because why would you, so I’ll help you out here.

Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom.  Wisdom in Hebrew is the word Hochma, but we’ll stick with the Greek this morning.

Sophia means wisdom.

And did you notice something about the text this morning? It kept referring to Wisdom as a she.  A person.  A woman.  The ancient Israelites personified wisdom as a woman.  This is where we get the name Sophia from.

Wisdom is a woman.  This is going to go fun places, so stay with me here.

In verse 2-3, we read that Lady Wisdom calls out in the public square.

At the highest point along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand;  beside the gate leading into the city, at the entrance, she cries aloud:

“To you, O people, I call out; I raise my voice to all humankind. You who are simple, gain prudence;  You who are foolish, set your heart on it.  Listen, for I have trustworthy things to say; I open my lips to speak what is right.”

Lady wisdom, Sophia, is in the middle of the city, in the public, calling people to listen to her.

Why is this important?

Because the previous chapters give a warning against the adulterous woman, which is also “folly”, or “foolishness” personified.  The adulterous woman is in the middle of the city, in the public, calling people to listen to her.

And the writer of Proverbs has this to say the people who listen to her:

With persuasive words she led him astray:  she seduced him with her smooth talk.  All at once he followed her like an ox going to the slaughter, like a deer stepping into a noose, til an arrow pierces his liver, like a bird darting into a snare, little knowing it would cost him his life…

Do not let your heart turn to her ways or stray into her paths.  Many are the victims she has brought down:  her slain are a mighty throng. Her house is a highway to the grave, leading down to the chambers of death.
So don’t follow that woman!  Follow this woman instead!

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Quick aside.  Both foolishness and wisdom are personified as women here, because really, most of this ancient literature was written by men, for men, in a patriarchal sexist society.  We all know that men can be wise and men can be foolish, and men can cause people to lead astray as well.  Especially Derek Shepherd from Grey’s Anatomy (McDreamy!).

And also, I think that while the adulteress is framed as a sexual temptation, I think it’s a heck of a lot more than that.  I think it’s a metaphor for foolishness, for folly, for being unwise.  But what’s one way to get a young man’s attention?

And, finally, this text was written in a different era and culture than ours, so we’ll try working at this sexist text without being too sexist.

Okay, aside over.

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So Lady Wisdom wasn’t just there to offer a different voice to the Lady Seducer over there.  Oh no.  According to the ancient Israelites, she was much, much, more than simply that.

Sophia, Lady Wisdom, was the first of God’s creation.  She was there when God made the heavens and the Earth.

When God said “Let us make humankind in our image… male and female he created them”, Lady Wisdom was one of those characters that was there.  She was constantly at God’s side, and delighting in all that God made.

But it doesn’t just stop there.  No no no no.  The ancient Israelites even kicked it up a notch.  They were audacious enough to borrow language from other cultures and set her up as a semi-deity, as permeating all creation, as nothing short of being God’s presence “up close”.  Ancient poems from the apocrypha write that Sophia creates the world, pervades all that is, and is the one in whom God and humans meet (Tom Yoder Neufeld in Studying Jesus – Learning Christ).

According to Old Testament wisdom literature, if you want to see what God looks like, all you need to do is look at Sophia, Lady Wisdom.  God, up close, looks like a woman named wisdom.

Whoa.

But it just keeps getting more mind blowing, and hopefully in ways that are a little bit applicable to our daily lives.

So, this Old Testament wisdom literature was written about 900 years BCE.  And then, about 900 years later, this guy named Jesus came and did stuff… said some stuff… and rose from the dead.  And the early church believed that this guy Jesus was kind of big deal, kind of important…

So as they were writing letters to each other, and writing songs, and writing down the stories of Jesus, they were looking for ways to connect this Jesus guy to their Jewish story.  They believed that Jesus was not only an important part of the Jewish story, but the climax of it, the culmination of it, the pinnacle of it, and so they were looking for language and metaphors and similes and poems to express that.

And as they did this, they remembered a woman named Sophia from the wisdom literature.

And they not only borrowed the language used to describe wisdom to describe Jesus, but they also named Jesus as THE wisdom of God.

In John chapter 1 – In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  All things came to being through him.

This is even a bigger deal when smart biblical scholars tell us that the Greek words for wisdom and word were used interchangeably in the Old Testament.   So we can say “In the beginning was wisdom”.

And then the wisdom became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Or we can read Colossians 1 as well.

The writer of Colossians 1 re-wrote a poem about wisdom to be a poem about Jesus.  He calls both wisdom and Jesus the place where “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” (Tom Yoder Neufeld again).

The writer of Colossians 1 fused the notion of wisdom as co-creator of the world with the wisdom of the cross, the wisdom through with which the world is being reconciled.

Jesus is described as wisdom.

This is huge for two reasons:

1)  The New Testament writers used the language to describe a woman, Lady Wisdom, to describe Jesus.

I love this.  If we understand God to be beyond gender, some of us get hung up on Jesus being a male.  So, I think comparing Jesus to Lady Wisdom addresses some of that.  But also, it fits well with what Richard Rohr says.

“Like many other people I’ve continually wondered why Jesus came to us as a man and why he chose twelve men… I think that if Jesus had come as a woman, and had this woman been forgiving and compassionate, and had she taught non-violence, we wouldn’t have experienced that as a revelation.  ‘Oh well, typical woman,’ we would have said. 

But the fact that a man in a patriarchal society took on these qualities that we call ‘feminine’ was a breakthrough in revelation.  So he spent three years teaching twelve men how to do things differently – and they almost never caught on.  And for two thousand years the men in the church have never caught on. Because we wanted a God of domination.” (In Simplicity).

I just love that.  Jesus and Lady Wisdom are in cahoots because men are stubborn and have a tendency to see themselves as a hammer and everything as a nail, and power and fear and violence and domination are not part of the Kingdom of God.

2) Second reason why Jesus described as wisdom is a big deal.

So if you want to see what God looks like, look at Jesus.

If you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus.

Jesus is the center of what God is doing in the world.

This is actually one of the defining beliefs in Anabaptism.  Palmer Becker writes that there are three core values to Anabaptism. One, that Jesus is the center of our faith.  Two, that community is the center of our lives.  And three, that peace and reconciliation is the center of our work.    These three things permeate everything we believe and do.

And, when we place Jesus in in the center of our faith, we join the company of the New Testament writers who used Old Testament language of wisdom to describe Jesus.

By making the connection between Jesus and wisdom, we see that Jesus, like wisdom, is the lens through which we see faith.

The center of Christianity isn’t the Bible.  It’s Jesus.  We look through the Bible to see Jesus  (Thanks Pete Enns again).  The Bible is like a treasure map, and the treasure is Jesus.

I came across something great by Brian Zahnd about God being revealed to us through Jesus, and all the ways that helps us see the character of God.

“Once we understand that Jesus is image of God, the exact imprint of God’s nature, and the only perfect theology, we can answer some important questions about God that in the past we humans have often gotten wrong.

Does God send the storm?  No. He calms the storm.

Does God cause famines?  No.  He feed the hungry.

Does God inflict sickness?  No.  He heals the sick.

Does God shun sinners?  No.  He welcomes them.

Does God condemn the guilty?  No. He saves them.

Does God blame the afflicted?  No.  He shows them mercy.

Does God resent human pleasure?  No.  He turns water into wine.

Does God take our side in our hostilities? No.  He humanizes the other side.

Does God kill his enemies?  No.  He forgives them.

Does God return with revenge on his mind? No.  He comes with words of peace.”

I think that knowing that God is revealed in Jesus, is wisdom.  I think that feeding people and welcoming people and showing mercy and forgiving enemies and bringing peace, is wisdom.  I think that living self-sacrificial lives for the benefit of others, is wisdom.  I think that living our lives as a gift, and returning that which have been given, is wisdom.

Oh, Sophia, you lady wisdom you.  May we continue to find you, and find life.

Amen.