The changeless God in a changing world.

The wooden sculpture in Holy Redeemer

As you may know by now, I was away this last weekend.  I was in Calgary, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the church I grew up in, Prince of Peace in Calgary.  Fifty years, as I glibly joked in my sermon, is more than most marriages last.  Heck, it was twenty-five times as long as Britney Spears' marriage, which is my official benchmark.

But, here's the thing about my church, and about many churches.  We moved.  And in the move, something fairly important happened.  The church changed.  All of a sudden, there were new people there where there had just been familiar families.  The facility changed from a small residential church to a sprawling behemoth of a facility on the east end of town.  And it was sprawling.  The Prince of Peace complex is big enough to have its own water treatment plant, like wow.  Huge.  And all of a sudden, the ministry changed from Calgary family ministry, the usual Lutheran stuff, to school, seniors' housing, a village, and everything in between.  How did I feel about this?  Strange.  I drove by my old church the other day, the old building that is, and memories came flooding back.

The front doors of my school

The teeny tiny gym.

Of course, that wasnt' the only thing that happened that weekend in Calgary.  My elementary school, Holy Redeemer, was heading into its last year of being open.  This June, the doors are closing for good.  It is really strange to think about.  The school where, as our principal reminded us, we spent more time there than at home, awake anyway, is closing down.  It is slated for demolition, and away it goes.  The school, the playground, the ball diamond, the foursquare squares, the hopscotch spot, the soccer goals. Gone.
G
O
N
E.

The Old church building is now owned by nuns.  The old school will likely be torn down and replaced by condos.  My old house that I grew up in is now lived in by my grandmother.  My old bedroom is her sewing room.  All these things that seemed so permanent, that you could go back to them whenever you wanted, all due to be demolished or replaced quite soon.  This stuff moves faster than you think it does.  It isn't until you stop to think about it that you realize that everything you took for granted is in total flux.  All the houses of bricks and mortar that you lived in, worked in, went to school in, worshiped in, whatever, they're all due for demolition.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday.

And this brings me to the point that I wanted to make in the sermon that I gave on Sunday.  The church is not made of bricks and mortar, or beams and timber, or plastic and pvc.  It's made of people.  And that's what doesn't change.  Oh sure, church membership changes.  People show up, people leave, people die, people are born, and on and on and on.  But people are forever.

Everything else changes.  Always.  Faster than you think it does.  All of a sudden they stopped making pennies, and you had to take bad jobs if you're on EI.  All of a sudden, they're knocking down my school and making condos.  I blink, and things are gone.  But people stick around.  Even the ones who die.

That's why we love.  That's why we love with abandon, that's how we can love each other, and live our lives with purpose, because there are no unimportant days, and there are no unimportant people.  The stuff you do here on earth has eternal consequences.  It really matters, because the people in your school, your church, your work, your family, those people are going to be around forever.  And we have confidence in that because of the God who has made promises to us. 

"See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands," God says in Isaiah, and we believe him. The entire dialogue between God and humanity in the scriptures, and in day-to-day life, is a conversation between the eternal and the temporal, and the one changes the other.  The book of James tells us that

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming 

down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."

                                                      -James 1:17

The wonderful things we have are from God.  And they have that feeling of the divine, of the forever, in them.  If we spent every day thinking about how the school you go to is going to be dust, or the house you lived in is going to be condos, or how we're all going to grow old and die someday, we'd never get anything done.  We'd be sapped.  But even the people who don't believe in God live with the same purpose as those who do.  The presence of God is engraved on their hearts along with the rest of us.  That's why we all love as though we'll never lose, and cherish as though things wouldn't disappear.  And there's a caution built into all this.  Jesus tells us to seek first the kingdom of God, and his rightousness, and then everything else will be added unto us.  If we love the divine, the changeless, even more than we love the temporal, then we will get both.  If we love what fades, if we set up treasures for ourselves where moths invade and rust destroys, then we will lose both.  It's God's eternity that makes anything worth loving.  

Because people are forever.  Forever and ever.

Amen.