We bring our praise to you

We bring our praise to you, God.
We bring our praise 
in the words we say,
in the songs we sing,
in the silences we keep.

We bring our praise
for those moments
when we have been awed by the beauty of creation,
for those moments when we have caught a glimpse
of the greatness of your steadfast love and faithfulness.

We bring our praise
for those moments
when we have sensed your Holy Spirit
hovering over this world
unsettling us
pushing us into new life
opening us to new possibilities.

Turn us toward you 
in those times
when praise gives way to 
sorrow
or anxious fear
or horror at the world’s pain and violence.

Teach us
that deep trust which 
makes even those troubling times
moments when we know that you are
moving us deeper into your love and grace.

We bring our praise, O God,
in the name of Jesus
and in the power of your Holy Spirit
for it is your goodness that holds us and keeps us
through all that life brings us.  Amen.

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Is there a word from the Lord?

A sermon preached at Shiloh Inwood United Church on October 3, 2021, Worldwide Communion Sunday, based on the lectionary reading: Hebrews 1: 1-4; 2: 5-12

Zedekiah was the last king of the ancient nation of Judah. He was king at a time when two empires — Egypt and Babylon— were jostling for power and control of that part of the Middle East. He was neither a very good nor a very strong king. He certainly was not a faithful one. Nevertheless, at one point, when he was particularly desperate, he sent for the prophet Jeremiah and asked, “Is there any word from the Lord? I am stuck; I am at the end of my own resources; I cannot see my way forward. Is there any word from our God to guide and help me?”

Is there any word from the Lord?

That’s the question we ask every Sunday as we gather for worship. Is there a God who is stronger than the troubles we face day by day? Is there a God who cares about the troubles we are facing? Is there a God who can act and save us — or at least give us the courage and strength we need to keep on the journey?

The letter to the Hebrews was written — or probably preached — to a congregation asking those questions. They were asking those questions because they were getting weary and were thinking about giving up. They had been faithful through the years but now the troubles were many and were unrelenting and were threatening to overwhelm them.

The Preacher answers their cries by placing them in the midst of a great story:  “Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets; but, in these last days, God has spoken to us by a Son.”

We are part of a story in which the answer through the centuries has been, “Yes, there is a word from the Lord.”

God speaks a word and there is light and there is dark — the first day. God speaks five more times and a whole creation bursts into being — a creation so good, so wonderful that even God can take time to rest and enjoy this new life that God has made.

God speaks and an old man and an old woman who have given up all hope for the future receive a promise and a child long after the time when that seemed possible.

God speaks and the prophets point the way for communities to live humanly and humanely together. 

At the centre of this story, God speaks and the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, full of grace and truth. Even though Jesus came to his own people — the people God’s Word had created — they did not receive him. Nevertheless, his light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.

To be a follower of Jesus is to be part of the story in which God speaks powerful words — words that change lives; words that transform the world.

When you are in the midst of trouble — troubles that threaten to overwhelm you — you choose, you decide again and again:  Will you trust that God is speaking that life-giving Word even here, in your life, in your circumstances?

Such choosing takes practice. In our culture, we have been trained to respond to trouble either by ignoring it or by trying to harder to fix whatever is wrong. We trust in denial or in technique. Either way, we trust in our own resources to get through it.

Living in a world where God speaks takes you in a different direction. For one thing, you get to face your troubles honestly, head on. Because God is bigger than the troubles, we see that there is a limit to them. 

Because, in Jesus, God has experienced the worst that life can bring, we don’t have to hide from God any part of what we are going through. God has entered into our suffering. God already knows the depths of what trouble is doing to us, what it is doing to our souls.

Like the psalmist in today’s psalm, we are free to admit it all to God who is more powerful than all of it: 

Be kind to me, God — I’m in deep, deep trouble again.
I’ve cried my eyes out; I feel hollow inside.
My life leaks away, groan by groan;
my years fade out in sighs.
My troubles have worn me out, turned my bones to powder.

Have you been there? Has someone you love been there? If you have, you know that part of what you suffer in such a place is that words fail you. You cannot even put into words what you are feeling and experiencing, especially in prayer to God to whom you have turned for help.

Here, the Psalm prays your prayers for you. The Psalm gives you the words that your spirit doesn’t know how to say. You pray the psalmist’s words over an over again. Slowly, they become your own prayer. They become your own words that you lay before God.

“Desperate, I throw myself on you: you are my God!
Hour by hour, I place my days in your hand,
safe from the hands out to get me.”

People who pray this way are learning to trust that God is in control. Through trouble may loom large, it is not larger than this God. At the heart of reality, even in the deepest depths, Jesus has gone ahead of us. Jesus meets us with God’s faithfulness and God’s steadfast love that will not give way.

People who pray this way are learning to depend upon the Holy Spirit to sustain us, to renew our strength, to overcome and lead us into God’s new creation.

In conversations I have been having over the past few weeks, I have been struck by how weary and stressed people are. The challenges keep coming and last longer than they expected. People are at the end of their own resources.

Health care workers and first responders — stretched beyond their limits for months on end and still being asked for more.

Small business owners, restaurant managers — struggling to navigate the changing government rules and regulations; faced with angry customers and mounting debts and supply chain problems and too few staff. 

School teachers, farmers, parents, seniors and young people — all stretched beyond their own capacities to cope.

And the Church, not immune from the troubles engulfing our world.

We bring all that with us when we come to worship. We have gathered it all up in our prayers and in our songs; in our speaking and in our listening. 

“Is there any word from the Lord?”, we ask with Zedekiah and with the church through all the ages.

“Yes, there is,” says Jeremiah.

“Yes, there is,” says our Psalm

“Yes, there is,” says the scripture reading this morning. 

The word from the Lord is God’s Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.

“Come,” says Jesus. “Come to me and rest your weariness. Come to me and take my body broken for you; my blood poured out for you. Come and know the power of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. In the world you will have trouble; but, courage, I have overcome the world.”

The mystery of faith is that those words are enough. Those words are enough to sustain us and give us hope while we watch and wait and listen for the ultimate word which God will speak. The powerful, life-giving Word that God will speak will take us to the far side of our troubles. That powerful, life-giving Word will usher in God’s new creation, full of grace and truth. That powerful, life-giving Word is even now at word in your life and in mine. This is a Word you can trust with your troubles, with these confused and confusing times, with your life. Thanks be to God.

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To this truth we turn

God, you are our refuge and our strength;
you are a very present help in trouble.

This is the truth your people have trusted
through the ages
when the world seems to be falling apart,
spinning towards the cliff-edge.

To this truth we turn
in these days
when fear and anxiety grow hour by hour
when the unknown looms large and threatening,
when faith is pushed beyond its usual horizons.

We lean into this truth today.
We lean toward you
whose faithfulness
and mercy
and grace
have chased after us
all the days of our lives.

Open our eyes,
our minds,
our hearts,
our spirits
to your healing, redeeming presence,
to your crazy, holy grace.

We ask in Jesus’ name
who promises to send
your Holy Spirit,
the Comforter,
your own self.

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Waiting and Trusting

A prayer for Baptism of our Lord Sunday (Matthew 3: 13 -17).

Jesus, God’s beloved Son,
God’s delight:
you are light for our blindness;
you are food for our hunger;
you are grace for our living.

We sing your praise;
we offer our prayers
and then we wait —
we wait for that moment
when you show up.

We wait
because we know we cannot
keep on this journey of faith on our own.
There are times when the path ahead
is uncertain
or rocky
or seems blocked altogether.

There are times when
we wonder if your promises are true:
if your grace is real;
if your strength will be enough in our weakness;
if your love is stronger than our fears.

We wait

We choose to trust
in your care for us
in your resurrection power
that your truth will set us free
and give us life.

We choose to trust and to hope,
grateful that you have called us by name,
that you have made us part of a people
who have waited before
and have been met by you,
surprised by you,
summoned by you to holy work.

With them we sing our joy
in the power of your Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Beyond the safe places

A prayer based on Mark 10: 17 -31 and Hebrews 4: 12 -16. Prayed after singing “Open my eyes, that I may see“

Jesus, Saviour, Friend,
you come into our lives
and you summon us out
beyond the safe places we try to create for ourselves.

We pray that you will open our ears
that we may hear the glimpses of truth you have for us
but, the truth is,
we do not always welcome your powerful Word.

You see us as we are;
you love us enough
to cut through our defences and excuses.
You summon us to live with
a vulnerability,
an openness,
a love
that is beyond us.

So we are grateful
that you do what we cannot do —
you walk with us along your Way:
you work within us,
setting us free from the things that hold us;
your Holy Spirit
takes what we offer
and infuses it with
mercy and grace beyond our own.

You entrust us with work more holy
than we would choose for ourselves.

Jesus, you have been through weakness and testing,
through disappointment and rejection.
You trusted in God’s faithfulness in all of that.
And in you, God overcame every power that binds us
and won our freedom
and gives us new life.

Open our hearts
to receive the mercy you offer;
open our lives
to receive the help you give.
Amen.

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We Give Thanks, We Turn To You In Trust

Gracious God, extravagant, God,
your goodness overflows into our lives.
You pour out abundance,
you wrap your love around us all our day.
What a wondrous world you have created.

We give thanks for the bounty of the earth,
for those who work the land and harvest the crops,
for those whose work provides us with food on our tables.

We give thanks for those who work for healing
of our bodies,
of our minds
of the earth.

We give thanks for those who learn and teach
for wisdom and knowledge and guidance.

We give thanks for those who struggle for truth and justice,
for those who risk their lives for others,
for your people throughout the earth who seek to follow you,
for those who bear witness to your Way and your grace in our world.

Surrounded by signs of your care for us,
Immersed in your abundant gifts to us,
we turn to you in trust.

Move us from worry to peace
that rests in your good keeping.

Move us from anxious grasping to
living with open hands
and open hearts
and open spirits,
ready to receive from you
life in all its fullness,
the heights and the depths
permeated through and through
with your grace,
with you,
our Saviour,
our Redeemer,
our Shepherd,
our Lord.  Amen.

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Cultivating Imagination

Do you know someone who is knowledgeable in every subject except ‘life’ and how to live it well? There are different kinds of knowing. Perhaps the most useful comes when you get to the point where you know that you don’t know everything. Living wisely means keeping open to the unexpected.

Imagination is the ability to acknowledge that there is more to this world than what can be reduced to facts and charts and worked out by long-range planning. Imagination is the capacity to be open-minded enough to admit that there’s more going on here than what we can see and touch and hear.

As congregations move into the new future that God is creating, they need to find ways to cultivate the imaginations of their people and of the faith community as a whole. Not just imagination in general, though; imagination that is alert to the ways in which God is working in and through them and in the world. They need to cultivate practices whereby they live into the stories of scripture. All of our stories are stories of a God who operates beyond the known facts. Whenever our God acts, God opens up worlds that everybody else had thought were fixed, tied down, closed, settled:

Abraham and Sarah, childless in their nineties, end up with descendants as numerous as the sands of the sea — because God shows us and invites them to risk trusting God’s promises.
Hebrew slaves in Egypt become a nation that, in the midst of greed and violence, offers an alternative world of covenantal neighbourliness — because God acts to set them free and moves into faithful relationship with them.
Jesus creates a new community where the last, the lost, and the least find they are given new life, new hope, new identity.

As we immerse ourselves in these stories, our minds and our hearts and our bodies are being formed in imaginative, creative, open ways.  We don’t have this world all figured out: we don’t know for certain what can happen and what cannot. We loosen the tight grip of control by which we try to keep everything safe and predictable. We surrender certainty and rest in the mystery of God’s sovereignty and faithfulness.

The psalmist prays,
Lord, I have given up my pride
and turned away from my arrogance.
I am not concerned with great matters
or with subjects too difficult for me.
Instead, I am content and at peace.
As a child lies quietly in its mother’s arms,
so my heart is quiet within me.
Israel, trust in the Lord. (Psalm 131)
now and forever.

Charles Spurgeon said, that this is “one of the shortest psalms to read and one of the longest to learn.” It is the prayer of someone who has discovered the truth of God’s creativity and faithfulness beyond all our facts and answers and solutions. There is the mysterious presence and action of God whom we can trust with our lives because this God  loves us beyond all our knowing.

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Surely the Lord is Present in this Place

A sermon based on Matthew 13: 1-9.

Some people think of the Bible as the place you go to get answers to your questions:

What happens when I die?

What does God want me to do?

What is the “Christian” response to poverty?

That is certainly the approach that was taken when I was in Sunday School. You heard the story; you asked the question; you learned the ‘lesson for living’.

Several years ago, I read something that changed the way I listen to the Bible. In Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World, Jacques Ellul proposes that “The Bible is not the answer book to our questions. You go to the Bible ho hear the questions that God is asking you.” Through the scriptures, God is talking to you. God is asking you questions about your life, about who you are, about your relationships.

More than that, in the scriptures we host Sunday by Sunday, God is speaking to us as a community of faith that is participating in God’s mission in this place and in this time. Our task is to hear the questions God is asking us and to answer as truthfully as we can. It is a different way of hearing the scriptures. It takes some practice.

Lectio divina is a way to listen for the questions that God is asking you in your life. You read the scripture passage several times slowly (preferably out loud). You listen for words, phrases  or images that emerge as you hear the passage. After meditating on those words, phrases or images, you pray them — talking with God about the thoughts they evoke in you. Then, you take some time to sit in God’s presence, becoming aware of God’s great love for you . . . receiving it into your life.

That is a lengthy introduction to today’s gospel story, which includes the “Parable of the Sower”. A sower went out to sow seeds and, as he sows, the seeds fall on 4 different kinds of soil: on the path, on rocky ground, among thorns and into good soil.

How many times have you heard this parable and told that its meaning was that you were to work hard to be good soil — the kind that produces a harvest of grain, some one hundred-fold, some sixty-fold, some thirty-fold? You hear the story. You ask, “What does God want me to do?” The answer is, “God wants you to be good soil.” Having heard your assignment for the week, you go out to implement it. Lesson learned.

Listening for God’s question to you in the passage takes you in a different direction. What words, images or phrases emerge for you?

When I was preparing this sermon, I didn’t get as far as the parable. The first words that stood out for me were the first words of the passage: “That same day”. I wondered, “What ‘same day’?” I went back to the chapter before this story and found out what else had happened on that day.

On that day, Jesus had been accused of working for the Devil, for Beelzebub. The Pharisees were conspiring against him. They were criticizing him and trying to figure out how to destroy him. They tried to trap him. They demanded that he prove who he was. On that day, in the midst of trouble and challenges and difficulties, Jesus tells a story about a sower who sows seeds with reckless abandon.

This sower doesn’t farm in the way you and I know farming: preparing the soil, planting carefully chosen seeds in straight rows, watching and waiting for the rains to come or to stop. This sower went out to sow and as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path and birds ate them up. Some seeds fell in rocky soil and couldn’t put down deep roots. Some seeds fell among thorns and got choked by them. But, some seeds fell in good soil and produced an abundant harvest.

Jesus’ parables help us pay attention to God’s presence in our lives. They help us hear the questions God is asking us. Jesus has been telling people that God reigns over this world. God is at work in this broken world, always and everywhere, setting things right. Nothing in all creation can ever come between us and that power love of God that is at work in this world.

Do you believe it? Do you trust those promises even when you cannot see much evidence of them? Do you trust that God is at work in your life even when God’s grace and love fall on the hard path you are walking at the moment? Do you trust that God’s love is the most decisive power at work in your rocky relationships? Do you trust God when troubles come so thick and thorny that they choke the life out of you? Do you trust that God is at work even when the world seems against you? Because, that is how God works.

The apostle Paul describes what that trust looks like: “We continue to shout our praise, even when we’re hemmed in with troubles . . . so, stay alert for whatever God will do next.” (Romans 5: 1-8)

I know a minister who put up signs around his church that said, “Expect God to act.” You would turn a corner and see the sign. You would walk up a flight a stairs and see the sign. He was trying to help the people of the congregation develop eyes to see the Sower sowing seeds of love and grace and hope in every place, in every circumstance.

A few weeks ago, another minister told me that he had done something similar. He put up signs that said, “Surely the Lord is in this place. Pay attention. Don’t miss it.”

Someone I was talking with last week says that, every time she meets with a group of people that she is mentoring, she asks them, “Where has God met you in the past two weeks?”

What answer would you give? Where has God met you in the past week?

Take a moment and think about the places in your life where the path you are walking is hard and difficult. Offer those circumstances and say, “Surely the Lord is present in this place.”

Take a moment and think of a place in your life where relationships are rocky, where it hard for love to take root and grow. Offer that relationship to God and say, “Surely the Lord is present here.”

Take a moment and think of a place in your life were trouble is troubling someone you care about. Offer that situation and that person to God and say, “Surely the Lord is present.”

Take a moment and think of a place in your life where God has blessed you. Give thanks, offer those blessings to God and say, “Surely the Lord is present in this place.”

Lastly, look to the week that is ahead of you. Offer it to God and pray, “Surely the Lord is present. Lord, help me to notice.”

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Awaken Us to Your Spirit’s Work

Day by day, you pour your love over us.
Day by day, you meet us with surprising grace.
Day by day, you speak the Word that
calls us deeper into your presence.

Yet, so often,
we wander through our days
oblivious to you
and to the ways you are working
in our midst.

In this time together,
we bring to you
the week that is past.

We bring to you
our tattered souls.

We bring to you
the deep longings
that haunt our spirits.

Take what we offer,
such as it is.
Move among us.
Open a space
where your reign of love
is welcomed with joy.

Silence the noise in our minds
that drowns out your Word.

Shelter us from the storms
that unsettle our lives.

Settle the clutter of worries
that crowd out your peace.

Then, awaken us to your Spirit’s work:
in our lives,
in our neighbours,
in our world.

Lead us to trust you more deeply,
even when we cannot see
the signs that you are with us.

We pray in the name of Jesus
who is your Word to us,
the Life we seek,
the Way we walk. Amen.

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Harder than we thought

Holy God, holy and mighty,
You know the promises we have made in our best moments:
to love you with
all our heart
and all our mind
and all our strength.

We have promised to worship you alone.

And our intentions are good.

But you know the anxiety that grips our hearts
when problems loom large
and solutions are not easy to find.

We value effectiveness.
We strive for efficiency.
We know how to get things done.
We want to fix what’s wrong.

So, we are not too good with mystery,
especially with the mysterious ways
you work in us and in our world.

We struggle to trust you —
You, whose ways are not our ways;
You, whose timing is so different from ours.

Worshipping you above all else
has turned out to be harder
than we thought it would be.

We try to use you for our own purposes.
We try to summon you to serve our own agendas.
We want you to help us get what we want.

We would give up,
except you will not let us go.
You meet us in mercy where we do not deserve it.
You transform us by grace we do not earn.
You give us your Holy Spirit
to begin again,
to learn a better obedience.

So, we wait —
for the gift of your forgiveness,
for the gift of your Spirit,
for the gifts we need to be your people.

We wait,
handing control over to you
and to your mysterious way with us.

We wait,
through the grace of Jesus Christ
who knows us as we are,
yet loves us still.

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