Fifth Sunday in Lent
Jeremiah 31
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to[a] them,[b]”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
All the knowledge that humanity has ever produced at their fingertips, and people are watching cat videos.
So how did we get here? How did we go from the new and shiny hope of the information age to people fighting on Facebook? And what happens next, as everything around us becomes seemingly ‘smart’?
In the beginning, was Web 1.0. This was the era of email and the static webpage. Kids won’t remember this, but the first version of the World Wide Web featured pages with information, uploaded by anyone who could string together a little code and find a server. Don’t panic if this already seems unfamiliar, because this internet was not to last.
Then we began to see the outline of Web 2.0. You would visit Amazon and find customer reviews, both good and bad, and the teenagers running the site left them up! “Dan Brown is a terrible writer” would appear right above “I had no idea Jesus was married—thanks Dan Brown.” The emphasis shifted from presenting information to allowing visitors to have an experience, to join a conversation.
In case you are curious, there is a Web 3.0 on the horizon, and maybe it’s already here. The next web will learn about you and your interests, and present you with a web that is uniquely yours. Type in “I’m hungry” and your device will guide you to the nearest Tim’s and suggest the best donut based on your evolving tastes. I’m not sure if we should be excited or terrified.
I share this with you because the Bible anticipates the evolution of the various webs and ends up creating something that the teenage billionaires could never have expected. The same evolution in ‘user experience’ can be found in the ‘believer experience’ that makes up our tradition. So where to begin?
We begin with a series of static webpages that we’ll call Bible 1.0. If we focus first on the Law, we can see divine legislation from the beginning. God gives us the bad news first and says ‘you are dust and to the dust we shall return.’ Mortality isn’t the most cheerful topic to begin with, but you have to start somewhere.
Next up there are various bits of Law that appear as our story with God unfolds. The Rabbis point to the seven laws of Noah, binding on all of humanity and sealed with a promise to never again flood the earth. The covenant with Abraham and Sarah, and the first promise of a future with God. And all of this leads, of course, to Mt. Sinai and the most enduring static page of all, the Ten Commandments.
These covenants and the laws therein form the early basis for a relationship between God and humanity. It was a somewhat one-sided affair, with lots of “I shall do this” and “you shall do that” with both sides finding their way. It was inevitable that this relationship should evolve, and perhaps reach Bible 2.0, but how?
It begins, as these things so often do, in exile. When the best Judeans are carried of to Babylon, there begins an era of revelation and creative remembering that forms the basis of the next Bible. But like all transitions, it will not be seamless or without the occasional dig. Jeremiah begins his thumbnail sketch this way:
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
And the people were thinking ‘I guess we deserved that.’ Foreign gods, foreign wives, disregard for the widow, the orphan, and the alien. The instructions were clear, even if the presentation was looking a little dated, but the people turned away. And however you assess blame for exile, the outcome was the same: disobedient people forced to recreate their tradition in a foreign place.
Now before we get to the mechanics of this new expression of Bible, I want to dwell a moment or two in exile. Lent and exile go hand-in-hand, and this recurring theme is one of the ways we are encouraged to prepare for the season that follows this one.
Walter Brueggemann describes exile as “a community of faith living a peculiar identity in an indifferent or hostile environment.”* In other words, Israelites in exile must define what it means to be an Israelite outside Israel, to describe and maintain a ‘peculiar identity’ while overcoming the challenges of living in a strange land.
The parallels to today, which go far beyond our Lenten reflections, are too big to ignore. Having transitioned away from a society with a largely Christian self-understanding, we are functional exiles, unable to immediately see a way forward. We shift into a prophetic mode, but our prophecy is a confused mess of paternalism and whatever issue is trending today.
In the midst of this confusion, we struggle to define ourselves. Versions of Christianity abound, with all the mistrust and ambiguity that follows when it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the heart of the religion. One of the real challenges of being “a community of faith living a peculiar identity in an indifferent or hostile environment” is knowing what makes you peculiar.
So back to Bible 2.0:
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
So this is a new type of interaction from a God more accustomed to smoting and sending snakes. There was always a relationship, but it was rather static in presentation and unilateral in execution. Like those first pages that said “Hello World!” and plenty of “thou shall nots,” version 1.0 was far more stone tablet than heartfelt. This new interactive God will embed the law within us, both heart and mind, and everyone (“from the least of them to the greatest”) will have access to this knowledge.
Beyond this, God is promising a new style of relationship, a promise of intimacy that is profoundly new and unique among the gods. No longer will we puzzle over our relationship with God and wonder where it’s truly headed—instead we will rest in the promise of mutual fidelity. This will become clearer in the days to come, but for now we receive the promise “I will be their God and they will be my people.”
And how will this be achieved? Or rather, where to start. Well, God is willing to make the first move: “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” Thank God for that. Bible 2.0 has replaced frustration with forgiveness, a God who understands our nature and still remains faithful to us. And this will become vital when we arrive at Bible 3.0, the crucified God who stubbornly forgives, just days from now.
Our journey through Lent continues, a peculiar people who seek to walk with God each day. May we continue with God’s mercy and love, written on our hearts once more. Amen.
*Brueggemann, Reverberations
Fourth Sunday in Lent
John 3
14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,[f] 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”[g]
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. 19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. 21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
Beware the Ides of March.
Good advice, really. If you’re a dictator, and you’re on your way to the Senate, and your so-called friends have little daggers under their togas and everyone is acting a little weird and you suddenly realize it’s the Ides of March.
The Ides of March. It was actually a thing, the Ides of March. On the Ides of each month (meaning the middle) the Ides Sheep were paraded down the Via Sacra in Rome and eventually led to a place where priests used little daggers just like those rogue senators. And there was a specific ritual for the Ides of March, which involved ceremonially roughing up an old man and driving him from the city to represent the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. Suddenly the little dust up in the Senate is starting to make sense.
So it unfolds like this: Caesar is making his way to the Senate when a seer shouts at him “Beware the Ides of March.” According to Plutarch, Caesar says “the Ides of March have come” meaning I’m still here. “Aye,” the seer says, “but they have not gone.” At this point it might be wise to simply head home, but Caesar is likely thinking ‘I defeated the Gauls, I can handle a few senators.’
The trouble begins, seemingly related to one senators’ petty grievance, and this unleashes the anger of a number of senators. According to some sources, he is stabbed 23 times by 60 senators. If you’re wondering how that makes sense, I have no answer. The important moment is what happens next, according to some sources, and most importantly William Shakespeare: Caesar says “Et tu, Brute?”
This next section of the sermon is written specifically for those who teach dead languages at local universities: “The name ‘Brutus,’ a second declension masculine noun, appears in the phrase in the vocative case, and so the -us ending of the nominative case is replaced by -e.* In other words, betrayal has become a calling for Brutus, and history will remember him for it. The vocative case is how we call people or things, such as “O death, where is thy sting?” Vocative has the same root as vocation, the thing to which we feel called. And for Brutus, and the senate that day, it was violence and darkness.
I share this because the assassination of Julius Caesar was perhaps the most famous historical event in the time of Jesus. Like the Second World War in our time, everything seemed to relate back to the death of Caesar. Civil war followed, then the emergence of Caesar Augustus as the first Roman Emperor, and the regime under which Jesus and almost everyone in the known world toiled under.
Even the language should grab our attention. Within a couple years of the assassination Caesar is declared ‘the divine Caesar’ a new Roman God. Augustus, Caesar’s heir and adopted son, was in love with this fact, and began calling himself “Son of God.” It appeared on his coins, the same coin Jesus held when he said “who’s likeness is this?” Obviously the world didn’t have room for two people calling themselves “Son of God.” Something would have to give.
So listen to our passage again, but this time listen with this Son of God controversy in your mind: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” This shifts the promise of living under a Son of God from the supposed good fortune of living under Caesar to the eternal life of living under Christ. But there is more.
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
This is the Jesus that makes us feel slightly uncomfortable, the Jesus that liberal Christians tend to set aside by saying ‘that’s just John doing a little theology after the fact.’ They try to square this philosophical Jesus with the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke and they cannot. So they leave this Jesus to the conservatives (who love light and dark) and they focus instead on the ethical teacher Jesus who didn’t want to condemn anyone.
The difficulty with this reasoning is that it reflects the relative peace and security of the North American early 21st century Christian instead of all the other Christians that have ever read this text. Read it again with 60 frenzied senators and 23 stab wounds, recalling that it is a top-of-mind story for everyone who may have heard Jesus’ words:
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
The link here is compounded by the fact that the senators couldn’t even own up to what they had done: most fled the chamber to literally run away from their crime. Some tried to let the public know that Rome was now free from the dictator Caesar, but no one wanted to hear it. The city literally shut their doors in the face of trouble, some fearing anarchy and many upset that the leader they loved was now dead. What followed was a dozen years of civil war.
Now, whenever we feel uncomfortable, and we can’t square the Jesus we love and the Jesus we can’t seem to love, we always need to do the same thing: ask Paul. Only Paul can be trusted to bring these Jesus’s together in a way that makes sense. And the other lectionary reading for Lent 4, the one we didn’t make poor Lang read, is from Ephesians 2:
All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
For two weeks now our intrepid group of religious historians have been looking at Wesley, Calvin, Knox, a little Luther, the remarkable Susanna Wesley, and lesser known reformers like Lady Huntingdon. The thread that connects them all is the discovery described by Paul: “by grace you have been saved.” For some the moment of discovery is quite specific, and for others we cannot know. But the conclusion, and the life-altering shift was the same: Emerging from a sense depravity to accept the grace God freely gives, leading to the grateful response of a life of faith. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
It was Paul that discovered that at our baptism we died with Christ, and when we emerged from the water of baptism we were raised to new life in Christ. This a gift freely given, we need only embrace it. We can’t earn our way out of trouble, and we can’t stop being being who we all on our own (“children of wrath, like everyone else”). We need God’s help and God’s grace to overcome the very heart of ourselves and become who we were truly meant to be, best found in John 3:
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
May we live this grateful response, living in the light of God’s grace and truth, and may we help others find it too. Amen.
*Wikipedia
Third Sunday of Lent
John 2
13 When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. 15 So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!’ 17 His disciples remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’[a]
18 The Jews then responded to him, ‘What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?’
19 Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.’
20 They replied, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?’ 21 But the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.
Long ago, in what now seems like a field trip attached to some child-ordination program, I went to Israel.
Do you ever have that sense that you’re on the wrong bus? Did you ever have it for ten days? Well, it turns out that the mainline clergy familiarization tour was too small, and so they attached our small mainline rump to the charismatic tour instead. I may still be in recovery.
Maybe it was the overbearing tour leaders—a former priest and a former nun—who would do things like praise the Jewish guide to his face and them pray that he find Jesus the moment he stepped off the bus. Or maybe it was the constant loop of praise music that would make Jesus blush and say “no, I’m not your boyfriend.”
Or maybe it was their habit of bypassing world-class religious sites, then saying “we won’t be visiting there—it’s too Catholic.” Or maybe it was the day we tried to visit the Temple Mount, and we had a lesson in how not to approach other religions.
It seems remarkable now, but Christian groups would visit the Dome of the Rock, which along with the Al-Aqsa Mosque is considered the third holiest site in Islam. And so our bus arrived at the bottom of a very long ramp and our leader went off to prepare for our visit. Time passed. Eventually we learned that there would be no visit that day, and our other leader gave the final word on the episode by saying “it’s okay, we didn’t want to visit anyway, that place is an abomination.”
Maybe you can imagine the boy ordinand running to the front of the bus as fast as his little legs would carry him, and finally sharing his righteous anger at the intolerance of the tour leaders. The rest of the episode is an embarrassed blur.
Now, there is an ironclad rule that the preacher should never make himself the hero of the sermon, so I must say that there were countless things that the “angry young man” abroad should also have challenged, but did not. Mostly I learned that the presence of North American Christians in Israel should make the situation better, but I fear it only makes it worse.
Of course, tension in and around the Temple Mount isn’t new or even unexpected. Even before it became an obsession for three of the world’s great religions, it was a place of conflict and tension. Built by Solomon, the Temple was destroyed in the chaos of 586 BC. Rebuilt under Cyrus, it becomes the point of contention for every new ruler who wants equal time for their gods alongside YHWH.
Expanded and renovated by Herod (and thereby earning the title ‘the Great’) the tension only continues. Herod adds a new feature (commonly called Robinson’s arch) that allows speedy access to the Temple for Jerusalem’s ‘better citizens,’ while aliening others. The arch also seems to enhance the mercantile side of Temple activity, which will lead us to the tension found in the Gospel story this morning.
And today, of course, there is tension between the various religious groups and even within the groups. Jewish women continue to be barred from praying alongside men at the Western Wall, and are encouraged instead to pray in newly renovated section under Robinson’s arch, to the south. A brave group called Women at the Wall insist this makes them “second-class” and continue to press for equality, taking the case as far as the Supreme Court.
***
And his disciples remembered his words and remembered that it is written “Zeal for your house will consume me.” It seems like such an obvious connection to make, this connection between the ‘cleansing of the Temple’ and Psalm 69.
“Zeal for your house will consume me” seems to perfectly describe what is happening here: the holy days approach, and Jesus makes his way to the Temple Mount, only to find a menagerie and a market, part farmyard and part Money Mart. In his zeal, he scatters the coins and turns the tables, all the while shouting to defend the sanctity of the house of the Lord.
More tension follows, and an argument about the future of this structure, and the metaphorical three days that it will take to rebuild it. The critics are silenced, the disciples are lost in thought, knowing full well that everything they have seen and heard this day has some deeper meaning. So what is it?
“Zeal for your house will consume me” is the clue we need to understand the deeper meaning, more than just an obvious proof-text, but an opening to the future of this story, and the conclusion of our Lenten journey to Jerusalem.
Psalm 69, where we read “zeal for your house,” is the second most quoted psalm in the New Testament after Psalm 22. As we hear the psalm it speaks in a voice that is unmistakeable:
16 Answer me, Lord, out of the goodness of your love;
in your great mercy turn to me.
17 Do not hide your face from your servant;
answer me quickly, for I am in trouble.
18 Come near and rescue me;
deliver me because of my foes.
19 You know how I am scorned, disgraced and shamed;
all my enemies are before you.
20 Scorn has broken my heart
and has left me helpless;
I looked for sympathy, but there was none,
for comforters, but I found none.
21 They put gall in my food
and gave me vinegar for my thirst.
Remarkably, vinegar appears in all four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, with some confusion as to the meaning of this gesture. Matthew, Mark and John seem to describe an act of compassion, pressing sour wine to his lips in those last moments of his life, while Luke ties it to the abuse he suffers at the hand of the soldiers. It’s the latter approach that seems closer to what the psalmist is describing, part of the scorn that the Lord’s servant must endure.
All of this makes the Cleansing of the Temple as turning point more obvious, a line of demarkation between the ministry before this event and the passion that will soon follow. Zeal for your house becomes the turning point, where enemies have observed all they need to observe to drive the story forward, and the disciples see what they need to see to reconstruct all of this in memory.
Overall, we are learning about the fate of the reformer. Jesus doesn’t set out to create a religion, or make anything new. He only seeks to reform his own faith, to challenge the so-called holy ones to follow their common faith in a way that honours the God they serve. So back to Psalm 69:
32 The poor will see and be glad—
you who seek God, may your hearts live!
33 The Lord hears the needy
and does not despise his captive people.
34 Let heaven and earth praise him,
the seas and all that move in them,
35 for God will save Zion
and rebuild the cities of Judah.
And this is the Lenten challenge for all who seek to be faithful: to rediscover the heart of religion, to lift the poor and hear the needy, to love those that God cannot despise, and trust in God—that cities will be rebuilt and the earth will be glad. Amen.
Second Sunday of Lent
Mark 8
31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul? 38 For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
It’s a good idea to try to help someone in distress, but you just might be walking into a school project.
I was reminded of this possibility last week while listening to Michael Enright’s piece on the Bystander Effect. Coined by sociologists, the Bystander Effect suggests that the likelihood that someone in need will get help is inversely related the to number of people aware of the need. Put another way, the more bystanders, the less likely that any one of them will help out.
And obviously sociologists have lots of time on their hands, because they have tested this phenomenon in a number of ways. The first example is from the UK, where actors were hired to act distressed in front of a London tube station.
The first apparent victim is a rough-looking man lying on the ground, clutching a beer can, and asking for help. No help comes. The second victim, a woman, is also on the ground crying out, and it takes a full five minutes for someone to come to her aid. Another man, casually dressed and without a beer can is also ignored. The final ‘victim’ is a man in a business suit, on the ground crying—help comes in just six seconds.
A similar experiment was conducted outside a football stadium, with the man in distress wearing a jersey for the local team (lots of help) and then wearing a jersey for an opposing team (no help at all). And you may recall the last time I preached on the Good Samaritan, where the theology students didn’t stop to help because they had just studied Jesus’ parable, but because they were in no particular hurry. So much for applied theology.
What can we conclude from these stories? Is someone in Toronto more likely to get help if they are wearing a Leafs sweater, or will they just receive pity? Or ridicule? The studies seem to indicate that people will help if they feel some connection with the victim, or imagine that the victim is the right sort of person. But if there are lots of other people in the vicinity, all bets are off.
34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.
This passage is often included in the so-called ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus, passages that the ordinary believer will find extremely difficult to follow. Invitations to give all you have to the poor, to remove a wonton eye or wandering hand, or to make a choice between God and mammon—these are hard things to contemplate.
Jesus seems to be inviting his disciples to literally give up their lives for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel. And of course, more that a few will do this. St. Stephen will be the first, and many will follow, including St. Paul (beheaded) and St. Peter (crucified upside-down). There is nothing subtle about the invitation to pick up your cross and follow—neither then nor now.
Among the growing list of victims of ISIS are 21 Coptic Christians, murdered in Libya, and already recognized as martyrs by the Coptic and Roman Catholic churches. Just a month ago Bishop Romero was finally declared a martyr, some 35 years overdue and thanks to a pope seemingly less concerned about the old battles between left and right.
But for those of us who live in the relative security of Canada, where our religion is respected (or at least tolerated), how do we deny ourselves and pick up the cross? What can we glean from these seemingly hard sayings of Jesus to live according to some template or plan?
The answers, I would suggest, are hidden in plain view. The first iteration of self-denial is there in the words of the rebuke, when Jesus tells Peter to ‘set his mind on the things of God rather than the things of man.‘ Human concerns—avoiding trouble, not getting involved, assuming someone else will deal with it—have a way of clouding the mind to God’s desire. Loving our neighbour, treating others as we wish to be treated, tending to the most vulnerable members of society—these are the things of God.
The second iteration of self-denial is harder still. When Jesus says ‘what does it prophet a man to gain the whole world by lose his soul’ we always have the luxury of pointing to the one percent. With the eighty wealthiest people on planet Earth controlling as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people, we seen to have eighty cautionary tales or eighty good reasons to let ourselves off the hook. But that’s entirely too easy, since we in the vast and seemingly downtrodden middle-class in Canada are fat cats compared to the global poor.
A third iteration of self-denial is learning to live without shame for being religious. In what is perhaps the hardest of the this group of hard sayings, Jesus says: “For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
This one can’t be sugar-coated. Liberal Christians are notorious for trying to fit it, to appear just like their neighbours, and share with the non-religious a deep suspicion of outward signs of piety. We will tie ourselves in knots explaining that ‘it’s the right thing to do’ or ‘we’re just doing our part’ before we confess that Jesus’ sacrifice demands that we care for others. We are saved by grace, and our grateful response is to love and serve others.
And none of this is new. On Thursday, we will learn about the sorry state of the English church in the years before Wesley and his friends saved the Christian religion from itself. Churches were empty, religion was mocked, and any outward signs of devotion were dismissed as ‘madness.’ Here’s a sample:
In 1760, the Archbishop of York visited a parish where the priest was accused of being too evangelical. Afterward the Archbishop accosted the priest on the street and shouted “if you go on preaching such stuff you will drive all your parish mad! Were you to inculcate the morality of Socrates, it would do more good than canting about new birth.”
The church survived the so-called Age of Reason, and went back to ‘canting about new birth’ and the new life in Christ we now enjoy. But we’ve come full circle. The hostility of a Quebec judge toward a Canadian woman exercising her Charter right to express her piety in an outward way should be alarming to everyone, and not just the religious. Mocking religion and subverting religious freedom in favour of other freedoms, these are both signs that being religious will become increasingly difficult in the age of secularism and extremist terror.
Our best defense is continue to do what we do. Be as political as CRA rules allow. Care for the most vulnerable people in our community. Continue to do counter-cultural things like harm reduction and praying for others. Notice that I didn’t say work harder, because that too would be buying into a worldly value.
We are called to glorify God and walk with God each day. Giving thanks—for the opportunity to serve, for seeing Christ in others, and for sharing the Good News that transforms lives. Amen.
