Jesus Sends the Disciples

When I looked at the scripture readings for this week that were part of the lectionary, I didn’t want to read or talk about any of them. The Hebrew scripture reading tells the story of Hagar and her son Ishmael being forced to leave the community and wander in the desert until they are about to die of thirst.

The second reading from the Hebrew scriptures has Jeremiah crying violence and destruction and praying that God will come and destroy all his enemies.

The psalm readings continue this theme and the reading from Romans was all about sin and death. Then there’s the reading from Matthew 10:24-39. None of these readings seem very uplifting or inspiring. I wasn’t going to use any of them, but I was in a meeting early in the week with some other diaconal folk and someone shared a prayer/ reflection that they had written about the scripture we just heard. It forced me to go back and relook at this passage.

This passage is very challenging and when I read it initially, I felt overwhelmed. I had trouble forcing my tired and muddled brain to really read and hear the words. The passage is full of paradoxes. It contains things that sound like good news and then follows it up with death and destruction.

Jesus has just commissioned his disciples to go out into the world—healing and teaching. This reading is part of his advice and instructions to them. It shows God’s deep and abiding love for us and then tells us that if we are not faithful, we are unworthy and unloved.

I imagine the response of one of the disciples:

Jesus sent us out yesterday. It is strange not having him right beside us. He sent us on a mission: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” I feel totally unprepared for what he is asking me to do. I watched Jesus cure a couple people, but I don’t know exactly how he did it. I heard that he raised some people from the dead, but I wasn’t actually there when it happened. I don’t want to touch the lepers and get infected myself. And well demons? That’s another whole kettle of fish.

We aren’t supposed to take anything with us but rely entirely on the generosity of others. I don’t like the idea of trusting that I’ll have a safe place to sleep each night and that food will magically appear in front of me. That’s not how our society works. Why does Jesus think we can just ignore the social norms of paying for an inn and food? Why does he think we should rely entirely on the hospitality of strangers?

I’m really uncomfortable with this mission. Jesus told us we should be like him, our teacher, but not him. I can’t do everything he does anyway so I can’t be like him. He told us not to be afraid. He said all the secrets would be revealed. What secrets? My secrets? There are lots of things I don’t want the whole world to know…. Is that what Jesus is talking about? Or is he talking about what he already told us? Is what he’s been telling us a secret and now it’s about to be revealed to the world?

It got even more disturbing. Jesus told us not to be afraid of being killed. What? This is more dangerous than I thought. I figured I’d just be walking around, and people would bring their sick to me. I’d heal them somehow, even though I feel completely inadequate for the task. Then he announces there’s a good chance I might be killed but not to worry about it. Aaauk. I’m supposed to worry more about the people who will kill my soul. Is that even a thing? Can someone kill my soul? That’s the essence of God. How can someone kill the essence of God?

There was one good moment. As he was getting ready to send us out, he reminded us how much we are loved. More than the sparrows. God has counted the hairs on our heads. That moment was so comforting. I felt surrounded by a warm blanket and held. I could almost sense God’s presence.

And then it was gone again. Jesus started talking about judgement and about how if we don’t do this thing for him if we don’t go on this mission, he will deny us access to God. He told us that by following him, we will inevitably end up in conflict with our families. Family is everything. I don’t want to tear my family apart or be estranged from them. How can he ask this of me?

I thought hanging out with Jesus would bring peace and calm to my life. Instead, it has brought turmoil and uncertainty. If we don’t follow and do what he asks, he says we are unworthy of him and presumably of God. He said that in order to find the life we have to give up life.

I’m so tired of the riddles. I’m tired of trying to figure out what Jesus wants from me. What he is asking is too hard. It’s too much and I don’t want to do it.

I really struggled with this passage because it bounces between a sense of God’s compassion and God’s judgement. I hate the idea that God finds us unworthy. We are human. We are not meant to be Jesus or God. We are not always going to be able to be faithful. We try our hardest and still make mistakes. None of this makes us unworthy. It makes us human.

Sometimes, being faithful, being true to who we are creates conflict in families. I don’t think it was Jesus’ intention to create this conflict. Sometimes, being true to God, being true to who we are meant to be, leads us to places where our own values and our family’s values come into conflict. That type of conflict can be heart-wrenching and soul-destroying.

Being Father’s Day, I invite you to think about your own parents and families. Families respond to conflict in different ways. If this conversation brings up challenges for you that you feel you want to talk about, please be in touch with me during the coming week.

I invite you to think for a few moments about your own family. Have there been moments when someone being true to themselves or true to their faith created conflict? Were you able to resolve the conflict and rebuild the relationship or was there an estrangement?

Some families are able to navigate conflict with compassion. They might not agree on everything, but they still love and support each other. Some families avoid certain things because they know it will lead to conflict. Still others are quite prepared to have full-blown conflict on a regular basis. Some families push people out because they are unable to hold the tension of difference.

Jesus is calling us to a life of faithfulness. It isn’t always easy and sometimes puts us in conflict with people we love and care about. Faithfulness has two sides to it. Part of faithfulness is knowing how we are being called to live and being faithful to that. This requires strength when we know it might lead to conflict. The other side of being faithful means living with love and compassion even in conflict. It can be challenging to hold fast to our convictions about God within us and hold compassion for those we disagree with.

My prayer for families, this Father’s Day, is that families will navigate the messiness of life with compassion and love for each other. I pray that families will find ways of supporting and nurturing each other even when they disagree. I pray that families will be places of safety. I pray that parents will create an environment in which children know they are loved, accepted and worthy no matter what. I pray that in families where there has been conflict and estrangement people will find ways of healing and letting go of the pain caused by broken relationships. May families learn and grow in faith together, always with a heart of love and compassion. Amen.

Laughter Yoga in Worship

Last Sunday at St. Andrew’s, we used laughter yoga in worship as a way of releasing some of the heaviness of the last few weeks and months. We are experiencing covid-19, have watched the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, see the death of George Floyd, and witnessed protests. We are challenged by racism and the black lives matter campaign. All of these things are a reality in our lives and in the world. We carry the challenges of these events in our hearts and minds. We hold each other in prayer and we also need to release the anxiety, fear, anger and despair that these events might be creating within us. This is not to in any way negate these situations but allow us to connect with the breath of God within us, find joy and hope even in the midst of struggles. It is easy to get caught in the negativity and heaviness of these events and perhaps feel overwhelmed. The intention is to free us up so we can respond in ways that are loving and compassionate towards ourselves and others.

The laughter yoga that I use in worship relies heavily on the work of Laura Gentry , an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We began with centering pray to gather and ground ourselves. We ended the centering prayer with “Hug Yourself Laughter”–giving ourselves a hug and being surrounded by God’s love.

We read Psalm 100 which picks up on the idea of the whole creation celebrating and singing praise to God. Lion laughter followed by tree laughter connects us to the earth.

The scripture reading, Genesis 18:1-15, tells the story of Sarah laughing when she finds out she will be a parent in her old age.

As I said earlier, this is a heavy time for many of us as we look around our community and world. It might be easy to get caught in worry, doubt, fear, anxiety, anger or uncertainty. These emotions are real and have something to say to us about the time we are in. But if these are the only emotions we are experiencing, it can be overwhelming.

Scripture is constantly holding contrasting emotions side by side to remind us not to get caught in one or the other. We find despair and hope side by side. For example, Psalm 42:11 offers these words:

Why are you in despair, my soul? Why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God! For I shall still praise God, The saving help of my countenance, and my God.

We find the prophet Jeremiah buying land in the middle of a war and encouraging people to settle down, plant vineyards and have children. That seems like a sign of hope in what could be a despair filled situation.

We also find mourning and dancing together. Psalm 30:

What profit is there in my destruction, if I go down to the pit? Shall the dust praise you? Shall it declare your truth? ear, Yahweh, and have mercy on me. Yahweh, be my helper.” You have turned my mourning into dancing for me. You have removed my sackcloth, and clothed me with gladness, To the end that my heart may sing praise to you, and not be silent. Yahweh my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

So there’s always this tension between whether we should cry or laugh, sit silently in despair or dance with joy. I feel like Sarah was in this kind of moment where she doesn’t know how to respond. She’s been disappointed so many times, been the brunt of jokes in the community and yet here is someone offering hope at a time when pregnancy seems impossible to her.

Laughter as a spiritual practice allows us to see the world and ourselves differently. We sometimes get caught in thinking and feeling certain things. Laughter helps shift our perspective so that we experience the world differently. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the situations around us change. It gives us the ability to experience joy and gratitude in challenging times.

Laughter is one of the gifts God gives to us. It is one of the ways we experience joy. Many of us have had the experience of hanging out with a friend and things just get so hilarious you can’t stop laughing. Our bodies need laughter and many of us have been missing out on laughter lately because the world feels heavy and because we are having less social interaction.

Today, I’m inviting us to intentionally laugh using laughter yoga. Yoga means to have union with God or the divine. By laughing we reconnect our spirits to God’s spirit. We reconnect to God’s presence within us.

Laughter helps us to breathe deeply. When we breathe deeply we are more calm and can think more clearly. The more anxious and fearful we are the more shallow our breathing, which contributes to our stress level. We need to access this gift that God has shared with us.

It might feel a bit forced at first but the body can’t tell the difference between the hilarious—can’t stop laughing kind of laughter and laughter that starts as forced.

Try out these laughter ideas:

Potluck Jello Salad…. Many of us have missed eating together, coffee after church and potluck meals. There’s almost always a jello salad at potlucks…..use your imagination and imagine that we have all become jello—wiggle and giggle.

Mourning to dancing – fake cry, laughing…We know there’s lot’s going on in the world right now so take a few moments, have a fake cry, whine a bit, be a bit grumpy and then we will switch to laughter.

As people of faith, we live in hope. We know that God’s presence is real and can sustain us through all the challenging times of life. Death, violence, destruction does not have the last word in our lives or in the world.

We closed our prayer time with laughter blessings. I invited people to turn on their gallery view on zoom or to imagine all the people they would see if they were at church. We put our hands out in front of us, looked at all the pictures and offered laughter blessings to those we could see and those we could imagine.

Our service ended with laughter affirmations. I pulled out key phrases from A New Creed. After each phrase, we raised our arms and gave a “yay!”

We are not alone!

We live in God’s world!

God works in us and others!

We trust in God!

We proclaim Jesus crucified and risen!

We are not alone!

Thanks be to God!

Jesus and Racism

This was a difficult reflection to write. I want to respond to the conversation about racism in a way that grounds us in our faith. Sometimes, it is easier to separate our faith and our political life—the ways that we interact with others in the wider world. Racism is a challenging conversation because, for those of us who are white, it forces us to ask ourselves difficult questions about our place in the world and our role in oppression. As people of faith, our response needs to be grounded in our theology. I want to put the conversation about race within the context of our faith and theology.

The Creation story in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 readings describe an amazing array of creatures created by God. There is a sense of awe and wonder at the diversity. Genesis sets us up to experience a utopia where all creation lives in harmony. God’s happy, the earth is joy-filled, the creatures are thriving and abundant and humans get to live in the midst of this wonder.

It doesn’t take very long before the utopia starts to crumble. As we move through the Hebrew scriptures, we see story after story with murder, war, racism, destruction of the earth. As the story of faith unfolds, people create laws to help figure out how to get along with other people. The prophets in the Hebrew scriptures remind people, again and again, to love the foreigner, share with the poor and marginalized…basically to look after each other and especially those who are most vulnerable.

Then Jesus comes along and repeats again what the prophets had been saying for centuries. The reading from Mark 7 offers us an image of a very human Jesus. Jesus is tired, he has been teaching and healing, plus he’s just had an argument with the Pharisees. Now a foreign woman comes to Jesus asking for healing for her daughter. Jesus calls her a dog and starts to walk away.

The woman isn’t going to let the interaction end like that. She says, “Yes, but even dogs get the crumbs under the table.” In other words, the fact that she is foreign shouldn’t prevent her from receiving Jesus’ healing.

We usually think of Jesus as a kind, loving, compassionate person and yet here is a story where Jesus doesn’t live up to our expectations. Jesus had accepted at face value a widespread belief within his culture that he was not to interact with Syrophoenicians. They were outsiders and different from his own people. We see Jesus behave in a way that is racist and exclusionary. If Jesus has racism within him, it is likely we all carry the ability to behave in racist ways within us.

What’s amazing about this story is that Jesus is open to learning from a foreign woman. When she challenges him, he takes a step back and re-evaluates his behaviour and his attitudes. He wasn’t as kind and compassionate as he thought. He had to face that reality. It can sometimes be scary to face the reality of racism within us. Most of us will think of ourselves as kind, generous, compassionate, inclusive. We know that we make mistakes and we don’t always live up to our own expectations. It can be really hard to recognize that we all (like Jesus) have racism within us. Those of us who are white don’t experience racism and often don’t see it. Seeing racism within ourselves might challenge who we think we are as good and faithful Christians.

Photo by Josh Hild on Pexels.com

It isn’t until something jars us out of our complacency that we start to notice differences based on the colour of our skin. Sometimes it is something that catches the media attention like the murder of George Floyd. Sometimes it is something that we experience in our own life.

A number of years ago, Roland and I were Vancouver in the area of the convention centre. We’d been out most of the day wandering around. It was early evening and I needed a bathroom. I walked into the convention centre and into the bathroom. No one questioned my right to be in that place. An Indigenous woman walked into the convention centre about the same time…also headed for the bathroom. The security guard came and removed her from the building. That experience shocked me, and I remember being deeply troubled at the time. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that someone would be denied access to a bathroom because of their race…Maybe historically, but not now, and not in Canada. This was one of my learning moments when I had to take a step back and examine my privilege.

There are at least two kinds of racism. There’s the racism that happens on a personal level in how we interact with others. Most of us would say we have a good handle on this kind of racism. We interact with and try to be inclusive of others. We might have friends with different colour skin and we avoid telling racist jokes. The personal forms of racism are more obvious to us and the ones we are more likely to talk about.

The second kind of racism is systemic. Most of us are so steeped in it, that as white people, it is hard for us to see and articulate this kind of racism. Because it is hard to see and because it benefits those of us who are part of the white majority, we prefer not to talk about it.

One of my field placements during my diaconal ministry training was at the Prince Albert Shelter for women and children leaving abusive relationships. It wasn’t unusual to have Indigenous women from northern Saskatchewan at the shelter. Sometimes they spoke very little English. Often they would not have completed high school. In many cases, they lived with addictions to alcohol or drugs. They stayed at the shelter for a period of time while they began to find housing, employment or registered for school. Many were residential school survivors or descendants of survivors.

There was a stigma attached to leaving abusive marriages because the Christian church had taught generations of Indigenous women that the only way out of marriage was death. As a result, they had little family support.

When the women went to look for housing, they would call and make an appointment for viewing. They would arrive at their appointment and be told that it had already been rented. If we called back to view the same housing, it was still available. The housing was unavailable to them because they were Indigenous.

Something similar happened with employment. Indigenous women would apply for jobs and go for interviews, be told positions had already been filled. It was rare and unusual for women at the shelter to actually find employment.

It might be more comfortable for us to say someone isn’t qualified for a particular job. But then we have to ask why they aren’t qualified. If we ask that question, we might have to think about inequality in education for Indigenous people. We might have to talk about all the things that contribute to high rates of Indigenous people not completing high school.

This is an example of systemic racism at work in Canada. The specifics might look different depending on what racialized group an individual is a part of, but racism is alive and well in Canada.

You might wonder how all of this connects to our faith and theology. A few weeks ago I talked about Rabbi Heschel saying that theology is worrying about what God worries about when God wakes up in the morning.

I think God worries about racism and that way it impacts lives. I think God worries about inequalities in wealth, education, healthcare, employment, addictions and higher rates of incarceration based on race. My invitation is that those of us who live with white privilege will ask ourselves and our communities difficult questions about race. My prayer is that we will encourage structures in our country to shift so that it is easier for people of a variety of races to live well and contribute to our communities.  My hope is that we will continue to be grounded in the creation story so we can see all people created in God’s image—deserving of our respect and a life of abundance.