Those of you who were here 75 years ago - who are they? -
could be telling us all about that time when the Church School started in the Prince of Wales annex. I hope you're all reading the "Mosaic of Memories" created for this 75th Anniversary.
We are very blessed by your memories and blessed by hearing those stories that make our past familiar and cherished.

Now we have arrived near the end of a special anniversary year. Are we ready to say: enough already?
We started in September with the congregational picture and by unfurling the Anniversary banners.
The 75th Anniversary Gala Dinner and Auction in April were real high points of celebration and purpose - with the more than $20,000 raised to help "break the cycle of poverty". This Tuesday we meet again with folks at First UC Social Housing Society to find helpful ways of distributing that money.
In this 75th year, we had 10 Anniversary speakers since last September. It looks like Meg Hickling with her wonderfully informed and deeply faithful conversation about sexuality concluded the series. Was her talk about sex too controversial? Not at all. It was great!

The series is concluding because just this week we heard that Lloyd Axworthy's travel plans won't permit him to come as planned.
Too bad. He has so much to tell about his work of making peace in west Africa, in Afghanistan, in the abolition of land-mines - all crucial work carried out to "make a difference in the Spirit of Christ."

A big Anniversary always demands looking back and looking forward. Christians are pretty good at that. We are people who know that God has been active in our past.
We are blessed by the presence of the Memorial Garden to remind us to keep faith with Shaughnessy Heights United Church folk who have gone before. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses - the saints of our past! They abide in God's care.

But we also know that God invites us into the future.
We live in God's time - aware of our past; drawn to a new future even as we live gratefully in the present. We live between memory and hope.

We heard a scripture reading about Abraham - it is really a story not just about Abraham but also about his life-partner, Sarah, of course and all the other family members and workers who make up their household - their tribe.

The story is simple. Sarah and Abraham hear a call they discern to be from God. The call is to leave the familiar behind and to embrace a new, unknown future.
When they hear the call, they are living in Haran - a city in southeastern Turkey.
I've never been to Haran - but scholars tell us it was a prosperous agricultural centre - with fertile fields for herds of sheep and cattle. There was no reason to move. Sarah & Abraham had it all. But God says it's time to move. It is time to move to a new land of promise God will reveal.

By faith Abraham & Sarah set out. You can imagine them leaving parents and uncles and aunts. I remember well in 1951 when my family left our hometown in Holland to take the train to Rotterdam and the boat to North America. And I remember our leaving Mississauga two years ago to come to Vancouver.
Friends and family, congregational members, buddies - tears, good wishes, blessings. Fare thee well prayers!

Sarah & Abraham left behind many they loved deeply and everything they knew well and the landmarks they cherished. If you understand about being an migrant you know how much it can cost. The loss of contact with people you love, the loss of familiar ways and places, and
if you move to a new culture,
the loss even of your ability to speak so that your are understood.
Migrating can be a painful affair.

Nevertheless, Sarah and Abraham were willing to venture forward to the new land - Canaan or what we would call the Holy Land. They went because deep within them, they heard God not only inviting but also promising.

God's promise to Abraham & Sarah: it isn't fully revealed immediately. They have to live in the new place quite a time before they have any sense of all that God included in the promise. It has to unfold, to ripen.

Initially it is the promise of a new and fertile land. Leave Haran, go to Canaan and settle there. Then is added the promise of many descendants to inhabit the land - to a childless, aging couple, that is quite the promise! But it is God's promise, you will have descendants: and eventually Ishmael and then Isaac are given.

Then is added the promise that through these Abrahamic descendants - Arabs and Jews - all the nations of the earth will be blessed.
Would that we could say today that the promise has been fulfilled. Would that we could see Arab and Jew - cousins tracing their lineage to Abraham - living in peace and harmony. That promise still - even today - waits for fulfillment.

But Abraham and Sarah have deep faith in God. They respond to the call, are willing to leave the familiar and travel to that new place. They are willing to give themselves to the promise.
They don't know how it will all turn out. But they not anxious about the future - they simply trust God - they bet their lives on God - willing to risk all that was familiar in order to embrace the future which God put before them. And even though the promise was not realized in their lifetimes, they don't despair. They live in trusting hope, believing that God will be faithful to the promises.

So here we are today in Vancouver.
Today we want to think about this household, this tribe called Shaughnessy Heights congregation that God is calling to move into an unclear future.

As a congregation we already know that when God calls us to move, there are things we have to leave behind. We just can't carry everything from the familiar past with us.

So over the years, we have already had much to leave behind. We've left behind a congregational style that emphasized formality - hats and gloves for women, suits and ties for men, clerical collars for clergy, and a polite, civil distance between us in both worship and congregational life.

God called us to move and in the congregation we are learning more about communicating our true authentic selves. We discovered how important it is to open ourselves to others, to be willing to risk becoming more vulnerable. To share not just joys and opinions, but also fears and brokenness.
God is calling us urgently to move towards deeper community where we can both help carry each other's burdens and celebrate each others joys. Someday that will involve re-arranging the worship space so that we can better see each other - engage each other - worship with each other. It is all part of that movement from form to substance, from observing to participating, from knowing about God to cultivating a deep relationship with God.

In our traveling from then to now, we have had to forego the self-satisfaction, which can grow when there are large crowds of worshippers and huge budgets.
As a congregation, we are learning to embrace humility and to struggle with what good stewardship demands of everyone one of us. We can no longer assume that a few phone calls to people with bigger chequebooks will solve the budget problem. We all need to move and learn sacrificial giving. We are all called to move in faith.

As to what we believed: There may have been a time when it was okay to give verbal assent to what the minister or the big church said was true. There may have been a time when we were convinced our church had the corner on the truth, and that other faiths just had it wrong or at least incomplete.
There was a time when we were all too ready to judge and blame people who diverged from accepted norms - especially those who diverged from the norm of heterosexuality.

But God called us to move. And now we all have to wrestle with what we believe. Today it's okay to admit that often the questions are clearer than the answers;
that the struggle is more important than the certainty;
that seeking may be more faithful than knowing.

We need though to learn about struggling together - struggling as a community aware that truth is always larger than our ability to grasp it;
And we are learning that even when we can't fully express our faith, then God still has faith in us.
That even when we are unable to love God,
we can recall our baptism by which God's love for us was sealed.
We have moved and also learned that truth is larger than just us.
We have opportunity in a city like Vancouver to benefit from the faithful witness of Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and other religious communities.
In both this congregation and in the whole United Church and other denominations, we have learned how much blessing was lost when homosexual persons were kept out or kept in the closet.
We have moved and learned that God's truth is larger than our ability to control it.

Friday and Saturday I spent time at the BC Conference of the United Church - about 500 delegates, plus 35 children and 25 young people - from across BC meeting at Capilano College - celebrating, sharing stories, praying, singing - being the people of God.
Our congregation was well represented: there were two children - Jamie Cryder and Stan Carmody, one young person Lauren Hodgson, an adult member - Ann Moir, four current staff and one to arrive soon: Bob Miller, Marion Wong, Cathy Cryder, Ross White, and myself.

At the Conference, it was clear to me that the church is in a very fluid state. Structures are changing. The rock solid sense we once may have had, today jiggles like jello.
For those of us who need the familiar and the secure, that can be worrisome - even painful. We might even be tempted to batten down the hatches and nail the furniture to the floor.
But I believe the church is responding to God's call, and is moving, we are in motion - responding to God's invitation to travel to a new place.

What was most striking about Conference for me is that there is a much deeper sense that we are a community called by God. And knowing that we are called by God, we aren't as anxious or afraid as I've seen us previously - we can be like those lilies of the field - not consumed by anxiety, but clear about God's steadfast care.

I believe firmly that God calls households and tribes and congregations to migrate, to travel, to move towards an unclear, but promising future. And on the journey we really do ask ourselves: do we only grieve our familiar programs and secure arrangements,
or are we willing to trust God with our lives and with our church? Will we invest ourselves in the journey; will we trust that God can make us and our congregation a blessing for the world?

At milepost 76 for our congregation, we know we are going to keep moving towards new territory along roads that are not familiar, and we may not even in the next 75 years see the fulfillment of God's promises, but we travel by faith - faith is being in relationship with God, who alone is the faithful one.
Blessed be the name of God.

I invite you to rise, turn to page 918, and profess our shared faith as written in the New Creed