CELEBRATING:
SERMONS
"Choosing God"
Nov 11th, 2002
Prayer: Let
only truth be spoken and only your truth be heard, O
God, our strength and our redeemer. AMEN
"Do you believe in God?"
Pollsters will tell you that today there is still a
vast majority (but in British Columbia, fewer than the
national average!) who would respond "YES".
"Yes, of course, I believe in God."
But have that same pollster ask
those random individuals, "What do you mean by
'believing in God?" Then far too many would be
tongue-tied - unable to explain what belief in God means
for them.
And if that same pollster were to
ask, "Does believing in God make any difference
in the way you live?"
Then only a few in our sample would say much more than
some vague things about right and wrong.
In our time signs of living relationships with God are
hard to find. In fact, Margaret Visser who presents
the CBC's Massey lectures on CBC radio's "Ideas"
program next week, says: "People don't want to
hear about God. … It's not respectable."
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once
remarked that modern humans jettisoned tradition, authority
and religion, and chose instead: self-determination,
the liberty of private conscience, and personal experience.
Reason and analysis will, for moderns, demystify the
unknown and fill in the gaps where God once was. As
moderns, we no longer inhabit a world where mystery,
cosmic purpose, and divine manifestations offer evidence
of an invisible reality. God has been edged off the
radar screen by a culture of reason and skepticism.
But at the same time, Carleton University
professor Peter Emberley has gone to great lengths to
note that "nearly all of us know colleagues, friends,
and neighbours who quite suddenly are on spiritual walkabout.
The popular Vancouver publication "Common Ground"
reveals the extent of this searching in many of our
contemporaries.
Whether they seek consolation, spiritual ecstasy, an
exit strategy from everyday busyness, or hope - these
individuals are spiritual seekers.
In charismatic and evangelical Christianity, Orthodox
traditionalism, in new religious movements, Eastern
religions, and home-churches, they seek for truths,
which have thus far eluded them.
(in Peter C. Emberley: Divine Hunger - Canadians on
Spiritual Walkabout. HarperCollins 2002. ISBN 0-00-200094-6.
pp.5f.)
So on the one hand we have modernity's
embrace of reason along with individualism and rejection
of the mystical and mythical.
And on the other hand there is a post-modern move towards
religious experience from a variety of sources - "new
age" cults and other.
For us as Christians, this raises
lots of questions.
Do we join the "spiritual walkabout" and sample
from the various religious groupings - some more bizarre
than others, some more fanatic than others, some more
vague than others?
Or do we dogmatically pound the pulpit Bible and cling
to the church's historic statements?
More basic still:
Is there any room left for God in our modern and post-modern
world?
Now lest my questions disquiet you, let me immediately
say, with Joshua: as for me, I will serve the Lord.
(You'll note that I didn't say Me
and my household.
In Joshua's patriarchal age only the alpha male need
speaks for the whole tribe. But today it is no longer
- thank God - the male prerogative - even for clergy
- to speak for their households without prior consultation.
But I digress.)
Joshua - the successor to the great
Moses - had gathered the elders of Israel's twelve tribes
to Shechem.
The picture is akin to that great conflab of tribal
chiefs in Afghanistan we witnessed earlier this year.
The question in Shechem is not as in Kabul, can we unite
on a common government?
The question is: can we unite on a shared relationship
with God - are we all rooting our lives, relating to
the same God? - the God who brought us to this land,
who called our fore-parents to be faithful, and who
delivered us from slavery in Egypt?
The temptations for the people were
real. In this new land - the Promised Land - there are
lots of local gods and gods of indigenous peoples -
do we want to get in bed with them?
Or do we maintain our allegiance, our relationship with
the God we have known? The God who shaped us as a people
and rescued us from slavery?
Choose today whom you are going to serve - the local
gods or the covenant God who has accompanied our people
along the way?
Believing in the role of leadership,
Joshua didn't waffle or wait for a pollster to tell
him how the wind was blowing. He didn't ask for a secret
ballot, or try to fudge it and say, well, you know,
there are some good things about the local gods and
some bad things about our understanding of God in the
past. Maybe if we just blend them together we can do
away with friction or disagreement
No, Joshua poses the question. And then proclaims the
answer true to himself.
I venture to say that this household,
Shaughnessy Heights United Church, by definition is
a congregation called to serve God - as revealed through
the Christian experience.
I sometimes put it very simply in quasi-commercial terms
- even as I recognize that this is not essentially a
business:
the only "product" we are promoting is God!
When we distill and then distill some more we discover
that our only reason for being here - the only real
"why" - is the relationship with the living
God - God's relationship with us and ours with God!
So in real ways, we, who inhabit
this space and form this community, we serve as an ongoing
witness to the living God - God revealed in creation,
enfleshed in Jesus the Christ, experienced in the Spirit
within us and among us.
If we are going to be of any use as Christians in our
society,
we need to deepen our own knowledge of our faith tradition
and discover anew the treasures of 40-plus centuries
of Judaeo-Christian experience and wisdom - even as
we readily admit our false notions and failures during
those 4000 years.
I rejoice that we have 10 SHUC folks
doing the Disciple Bible Study program - there with
steady, if demanding effort, we are going through the
scriptures of the first and second - old and new - testaments
to re-acquaint ourselves with the core of our faith.
The renewal of the congregation hinges on more of us
seriously engaging the scriptures and the faith tradition
to discover how the saints before us experienced God
and nurtured a relationship with God.
If our relationship with God is our only real "product",
then we better understand deeply that relationship as
it has been lived over the ages
and understand better how we are called to live it today.
Now immediately we have to make
two clarifications about why we need to know our own
story better:
Today, we profess our faith in contrast and contradiction
to the other gods being flogged, sought, pursued, created,
or imagined in our society. We resist false Gods.
Certainly we have to confess our
complicity in serving the false gods of our society:
the false god of security - as if we can finally secure
life;
the false god of money - as if money can buy salvation;
the false god of consumption - as if things created
by human hands can redeem us;
the false god of power and control - as if putting others
down will make our egos confident;
the false god of rationality - as if we can reason our
way out of all human dilemmas;
the false god of comfort and pleasure - as if ensuring
our abundance is the only thing that counts;
and a thousand other tin gods that undermine life in
its fullness. Even recognizing our own failure in succumbing
to these false gods, we actively resist them.
We reject these gods for ourselves
and invite other people to abandon these phony divinities
in their lives.
We invite others to commit themselves to the living
God, who alone can give security, salvation, redemption,
confidence and courage, wisdom and understanding, and
joyful, abundant life.
Secondly, we profess our faith in
this living God, but we don't arrogantly assume that
other religions have nothing to contribute to knowing
the living God.
There used to be a time when along with the early Israelites,
there was lots of energy for wiping out people of other
religious convictions.
There remain the insecure fanatics of every religion
- Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, or whatever,
who will try to destroy other faiths.
Today we have learned to not only
tolerate other religions, but also to learn from them.
For me that is crucial because our understanding of
the living God is always less than complete. Even if
we fully know the scriptures and the tradition, we still
acknowledge that our understanding is always limited
and
God is much larger than our mental boxes can contain.
So we engage other faiths. It's
the reason I am a member of the Multi-Faith Action Society
here in Vancouver and have helped to organize a monthly
inter-faith leaders breakfast that often meets here.
The world is too small and God too large for any person
of faith to assume they have it all figured out. We
need the wisdom of other faithful people - of whatever
tradition - to inform our relationship with God.
In the end, it is this relationship
with God that is at the heart of this church and the
centre of faithful lives. And that involves three responses:
First, it calls us to pray and worship
regularly.
Think about it - we are talking about God - larger than
the cosmos and yet intimately embroiled in our lives.
Awesome and wonderful. We need to spend time encountering
and rejoicing in this God with heart and soul and voice.
Second, this relationship with God
calls us to learn more about God - as lovers. For our
own sake and for the sake of our conversation with people
of no faith and other faith, we need to be much better
informed about what is involved in our heart & head
relationship with the living God.
Ignorance of our faith history takes away from faithfulness.
We need better and deeper knowledge in order to honour
God.
Third, this God relationship calls
us to be doing God's work. That is, we are Christians
- called to work in the Spirit of Christ for the mending
of the world, for the healing of creation, for the redemption
of the human family.
This is no small matter and I rejoice
that our Outreach Group is helping us to rethink this
essential purpose for being Christians.
Christians are people committed with all their resources
to God's transforming mission in the world.
And on Remembrance Sunday, that transforming mission
is to re-commit ourselves to the cause of peace-making
and fostering understanding and respect between peoples.
That's why you'll see me at the demonstration for peace
with Iraq next Sunday.
So the bottom line is, we have the
freedom
to choose other gods,
to forget about god, or
we can choose the living God.
As for me, I don't just believe
in God - that's too vague and too safe.
I am committed in my home, in the church, in our community
and nation, and in God's world to cultivating the relationship
with the living God, to serve God -
the God revealed to our Jewish ancestors in the Torah,
and
to our Christian parents as the liberating Christ, and
in our time revealed in the sustaining Spirit - the
Spirit of the living God.
Whom will you serve in your living?
AMEN
Back
to Top
Shaughnessy Heights United Church
congregation is a Christian faith community — people
at various stages in the faith journey.
1550
West 33rd Avenue,
Vancouver, BC V6M 1A7
Canada SEE
MAP
Tel:
604-261-6377
Email: admin@shuc.ca
|
