Water water everywhere

If you were in church on Sunday, you'll remember how much water the average Canadian uses in a day.  For those of you who were doubting my assesment that I had on Sunday of 329 litres a day, here's the resource from environment Canada, telling you how much water we're using.  I only get my sources from the tippy top.

But how much do you pay for water?  Given that you use it every day in massive amounts, from everything to flush toilets to washing clothes, to boiling noodles to drinking, to showering every third day, and so on.  You pay almost nothing for it at all.  Yes, it costs money, but for an absolutely vital service, you pay probably a third for it as you do for cable and internet.  We are so used to water being functionally free and easy to get, that we don't think about it at all anymore.

But like with so many other things, it becomes of extreme importance when it's taken away.  It becomes absolutely vital, to the extent that you can't think about anything else, when it's taken away.  Then, all of a sudden, you dwell on that more than anything else ever.  If you don't have water, as people in Regina found out in this season of water main breaks, all the luxuries that you enjoy like cable, internet, beer, wine, spirits, they don't count for too much if you don't have water.

But the point I was trying to make, the major point from the sermon on Sunday, was that although we need water, we need water desperately, we die if we don't have it, our thirst mechanism is so thoroughly worn down that we don't even notice it anymore.  It doesn't occur to us that much that we're thirsty, and we even have a nasty habit of eating to try to satisfy our thirst reflex.  And when we get our sudden thirst on, we have a nasty habit of trying to quench our thirst with diuretics.  You know when you're out in the hot sun, and you think to yourself, 'gosh, an ice cold beer would do the trick right about now?'  Well, you may well be disappointed to find out that an ice cold beer will make you thirstier eventually.  Oh, sure, it seems at first like that'll do the trick, it certainly feels nice going down, tastes crisp, and you feel less parched, but it sucks the water right out of you.  That's what a hangover is, by the way.  Dehydration.

Now, the Gospel reading was talking about living water welling up as a spring for eternal life.  When Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman at the well, he does so by talking to her about living water.  And Jesus is quite clear about thirst quenching - there is only one thing that will do.  There is only one thing that will give us what we need, and won't give us what we don't.  The grace of God is the living water that wells up, and if we are in our baptismal grace, we will never be thirsty again.  We don't have to keep on drawing water, have to keep hauling it back and forth, have to keep on schlepping sacrifices to and from the temple.  His grace is enough, and covers all our transgressions.  It is free to us, it comes without cost, and without burden.

Isaiah 55 tells us to come, those who are thirsty, come to the waters and that we ought not to spend our money on what is not bread, nor our labour on what does not satisfy.  It tells us that there is only the grace of God that satisfies.  But you and I, we do what we do, and we seek more exciting fare.  We know we're thirsty, we know that we are reliant on God's grace, but we get bored with it.  Even though the promise is there that we need, we absolutely need God's grace for eternal life, in the same way we need water to stay alive, but we try to slake our thirst with other things.  More exciting things.  We fill ourselves full of intoxicants and diuretics, things that seem to help, but just make the problems worse.  St. Augustine of Hippo famously said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, and sure enough, you might as well say that our hearts thirst until they are quenched by God.  We are perpetually thirsty until God's living water quenches us.

What do I mean by this?  I mean that we are desperately craving eternity.  People who don't know about God crave eternity.  Nobody is seriously approaching the vast eventual heat death of the universe we ought to last forever, that the decisions that we make matter, and that our legacy counts for something, which it wouldn't, if we just die and rot in the ground.  We have eternity written in our hearts, we have the desire for eternity inscribed on everything we do, and yet death is ever present in our world.
with the appropriate response, which is to stop doing their homework because nothing matters whatsoever.  Pretty well all of us have in mind the notion that we ought to last forever.

And so, and so, and so, everything we try to satisfy this desire for eternity with that isn't God, has the side effect of making us thirstier, it has the side effect of making us crave God all the more.  We desire him all the more the more things we try to add in the way.

But this thirst we have, the promise is that it would be satisfied.  We are built and designed with a natural thirst for God, and he has made a way to satisfy us.  When we eventually stop trying to cram other things in there, and allow God to satisfy our thirst for him, he satisfies that thirst.  He satisfies that thirst with living water, with the living water of his grace, poured out for us on the cross.  We are thirsty for his grace, and he satisfies it, pouring out water from his side on the cross as he died.

But like with water, we get lazy with it because it is free and cheap and easy to get.  Water is so easy to get that we don't feel much about it at all, we just sort of expect it whenever we want it.  And when it's not there, then it's a problem.  But water isn't free.  Call a plumber, try to buy bottled water, drill your own well, and you'll realize that water isn't free.  It's the same with God's grace.  It isn't free.  It's free to us, but that doesn't mean that it is without cost total.  It has an immense cost to God, and that's what we think about in Lent.  It's not about how much we pay for this grace, it's about what God payed for us.  In a sense, then, the water flows without cost to us, but the grace of God was purchased at the cost of his own life.

Over this next little while in Lent, be mindful of how much water you're using.  Make it a part of your lenten observation.  Think about those who don't have clean water, who would kill for clean water.  Think about all the times when you've wasted water, and thought nothing of it.  And also, think of all the times you've taken God's grace for granted.  Remember the cost of both of those things as you continue your lenten journey.

The two services on Easter Sunday

To begin with, our church will be having two services on Easter Sunday morning, yes that is true.

But there will also be two services at the same time as each of the services.  And you can't really help it.

You see, the funny thing about the Christian season of lent is that participation is entirely optional.  Because the fasting is not only optional, but even if it was mandatory it is unspecified.  That is, you ask people what they are going without for lent, and you'll get a wide variety of answers, ranging from nothing whatsoever, all the way to meat, eggs and dairy.  But involvement in this process is voluntary.  That's what spurs the question of 'what are you giving up for lent,' is that we don't know, and aren't standardized.  And many of us choose to give nothing up.

Not only do many of us choose to give nothing up for Lent, but many of use choose not to observe lent at all!  Now, this may be because we don't go to church except for Christmas and Easter, or it may be because we are part of a church that doesn't really observe the Christian seasons, or whatever.  It could be any of these reasons, and honestly the reason isn't important at all.  What matters is the lenten journey, and the Easter celebration at the end of it.

For you see, at the end of the time of Lent, I will be celebrating Easter Sunday. And the church, if I can put on my magic hat of prognostication, will be fairly full.  And it will be full of people who have not been on this lenten voyage with us.  They have skipped it, and have decided to go straight past the fasting right the way to the joy and the glory.

And they will get it.

You see, you can, in the Christian experience, dash all the way past the gall, past the whipping, past the burdens, past the crucifixion, and end up with the glory of Easter Sunday.  You can do that essentially right away, with no stops on the way.  Nothing is stopping you at all.  And you will be there for the exact same service as everyone else.  Same responses, same sermon, same music, same white banners, all that.  And if you can get all that, if you can skip the grim darkness of Good Friday, if you can skip the ghastly judicial murder of Maunday Thursday, why wouldn't you?  Why wouldn't you just go to church on Christmas and Easter for the high holy days and enjoy them?

And it's more than that.  If you know your stuff, if you know your Bible, even in the bare minimum, you will know that the Bible can be condensed down to John 3:16.  It is the notion that God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, so whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.  And if you know this, you know that all you need to do is believe in Jesus and then you'll go to heaven.  And that's enough.  It's absolutely enough.

If you want to find that out, look at the theif on the cross, who believe in Jesus, asked to be remembered in Jesus' kingdom, and was promised that he would go to paradise that day.  And we believe that Jesus did bring him to his kingdom.  And that was all he had to do, was a deathbed (or crossbound) confession, and then he could go to heaven, no problem.  And that's true!  So for those of you reading, those of you who want to go to heaven, you should know that if you want to get there, all you have to do is believe in Jesus, and you're all good.

So why bother with the rest of it?  Why bother with the whole church thing, the good works thing, why bother with the sacrifice, with the piety, with the fasting, with the prayer, with any of it?  Well, the best thing to do is to think about the story of Abram, which we heard in the worship service on Sunday.  He was told by God that he would have a child.  Good news so far.  And he was told that he would have a child past the age that his wife would be able to bear children naturally.  He was told this when he was 75.  He had the child when he was a hundred.  That's a 25 year age gap, as you well know.  And he managed to keep the faith for that time, and the late arrival of Isaac, the late fulfillment of the promise, it made it all the more poignant when he arrived.

So those of us, what do we do while we're here?  We're baptized, we've been promised salvation, we have a guarantee in the blood of Christ of our heavenward journey, so what do we do while we are here?  We learn and do what Jesus would have us do.

Sometimes it's not just about the destination, it's about the journey.  When the destination is locked up,

then the journey becomes important.  Or, to put it another way, you can take the greyhound if you just want to get somewhere, but you can take the train as an event.  They take almost the same time, you get to the same place, but in the one case, the journey is far far far superior.  You and I, as Christians, staring down the vast chasm of Lent, we may say to ourselves that we're not into the fasting and prayer and suffering, and Easter service will still roll around regardless, so what's the point?

It's about why Jesus came to earth in the first place.  He came so that you may have life and have it abundantly.  Does this mean you get to go to Heaven?  Yes, of course it does.  Does it also mean that your life here is supposed to be augmented, sharpened, intensified?  Yes it does.

I'm fond of saying that for a book that tells us ostensibly that nothing you do earns salvation, there sure are a lot of rules, which there are.  And they aren't there to be ignored.  In the same way as God made a promise to Abraham and then fulfilled it a quarter century later, he has made a promise of everlasting life to you, and is planning on fulfilling that too.  But what to do in the meantime?

There aren't two heavens.  There's only one.  You're not going to get into a better heaven by being a better Christian, in the same way as I'm not going to be leading two services simultaneously on Easter Sunday, one for good Christians, and the other for C&E Christians.  There's one service.  But by the time you've been through the fasting and penitence and piety of Lent, you ought to be absolutely thirsting for Easter Sunday.  You will have a hard time moving through the period of lent in its austerity, witnessing the judicial murder on Thursday and Friday of Holy Week, and not absolutely hungering and thirsting for the greatness of the Easter Sunday morning.

In other words, why will there be two different services?  Not because the service changes, but because the audience does.  Those participating are changed by the journey.  Not saved by the journey, but being part of the life and experience that God wants them to have.  If you are around for the services, if you're around for the fasting and the piety, if you're around for the dark times and the lean times, then rounding the corner makes Easter better, and heck, makes the whole rest of the church year better.

So why do you do these things?  Why keep the law, why keep the rituals, why keep the routine, why the fasting why the piety, why the charity?  For salvation?  Nope.  For God's happiness?  Nope.  For your own good?  Bingo.

Jesus came so that you may have life, and have it abundantly.  Not just after you die, but life while you're still alive.

Blessed lent, everyone.

Snake Oil

If you were in church on Sunday, you would have heard me talk about snakes.  As I did.  And Snakes, well, we don't care for them normally.  Again, as I mentioned on Sunday, the official scientific term for fear of snakes is Ophidophobia, and it makes a lot of sense.  There's a good chance that none of you reading this today are herpetologists, and so you don't know much about snakes.  All you know about snakes is that they're all pointy at one end, and some of them can kill you with a bite.  And that's all you need to know.

But the other thing about them is that they are solidly unnerving.  Snakes, having no arms or legs, are amazingly unnerving to see moving around.  Whether swimming, sidewinding, or just sliding around, snakes are completely and wonderfully off-putting.  They're a terrifying thing to see moving around.

Now, no matter who you are, and how herpetologically inclined you may be, the movement of snakes is, well, it's a thing.  We don't like it.  It's not nice to see, and unlike almost everything else we know,with no legs, feet or limbs of any kind, we can't relate.

This is part of the general feeling of malaise with snakes, that there is something just sort of off with them.  They're just sort of off.  Almost alien.

From their forked tongues, to their lack of ears, to their cobra hoods, to their venom, to their swallowing food whole, it's as close as you can possibly imagine to something completely alien in this world.  And the serpent in the scriptures is no different, not really.

The thing about the arrival of the serpent in the Old Testament is that, well, it is something we need to consider, is that it's an encounter with something wholly alien.  The presence of the serpent in the Old Testament has been something of a bugbear for us Christians, as people have a bit of a larff at the notion of a talking snake.  'How silly,' they all say, 'to think of a talking animal.  Such nonsense!'  And yes, if we were talking about a snake, it would be rather silly.  But we aren't talking about just a snake here.

Honestly, this story turns around a couple of issues, and they're both things that we Christians get in trouble for these days - Talking animals and the devil.  The devil, he's fallen out of vogue these days.  He used to be the big boss with the hot sauce for quite a while.  For quite a period of human history, the devil has been an ever present issue, hovering in the background
of what we've been doing.  And it's worth noting that for a creature who isn't described in great detail in the Bible, we sure all know what he looks like, don't we?  Horns, pointy tail, beard, cloven hooves, all that.  And that figure has become largely a figure of fun, as kind of silly, and kind of forgettable.  And because that figure has overtaken the authentic Satan from the scriptures, well, it's been great for Satan.  He's been so thoroughly emasculated, that it is difficult to even talk about him.  We can't even have the chat, because by the time we bring him up, he's been laughed out of the room.  And that's perfect for him.  He's happy for you to laugh yourself all the way into his clutches.  In fact, for the devil, this is a way better strategy than his strategy of possession, of causing fear, of instilling paranoia, or anything else like that.  His current strategy of laying low, of letting us feel as though he either never existed, or if he did, was a bumbling goofball, that strategy works great, because then we're way less likely to recognize him when he shows up.

If you want to know what happened, and not that this is the only thing that happened, but it's part of it, our Biblical literacy dropped.  It dropped way down.  We knew far far less about the contents of the scriptures than we otherwise wanted to.  And we replaced that, by and large, with shorthand for everything.  We figured that Jesus looks like this, and Satan looks like this.

This is how we view the devil and Jesus.  All horns and red flesh on one side, and nice trimmed beard and white skin on the other side.  But there's a point behind our faith being essentially entirely verbal.  There's a point behind the injunction against the making of graven images to be worshiped.  There's a point behind the essence and core of the Scriptures being a verbal, written experience, and it goes back to the point that was made in the Transfiguration, which strangely enough, was last Sunday.

"This is my son, in whom I am well pleased" said the voice from the cloud "listen to him."

This point is so small, and yet is so frequently lost.  In our world in which we like looking at things, in this world of on demand video on a constant basis, in a world of perpetual youtube on our smartphones, it's no wonder that we're not much good at listening, and we're better at looking.  And our desire to look as a shorthand for things is hurting our spiritual growth.  We do waaaaaaay more looking than we do listening, and in doing so, we miss a lot.  The scriptures talk about this, about our words fairly significantly, partially in Matthew 7.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but 

inwardly are ravenous wolves.  You will recognize

them by their fruits.  Are grapes gathered from thornbushes,

or figs from thistles?  So every healthy tree bears good fruit,

but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.  A healthy tree cannot 

bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every

tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 

Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

Matthew 7:15-20.

What's the deal?  You'll be able to recognize them, and everyone else, by their words, by their fruits. There is an awful lot of listening that has to go on if you're to recognize the devil at work in the world.  He's not going to show up in front of you in red jammies, he's not going to have cloven hooves, he's not going to have a literal forked tongue, he's not going to be so completely obvious.  Except if you listen to him.   

Satan is here to obstruct, to oppose, to confound, to accuse.  And if he is going to tempt you, as he attempted to do with Jesus, it's not going to be by showing up in front of you stamping his cloven hooves and muttering past his beard.  It's going to be by whispering into your ear what you want to do, and what you know you ought not to do.

So, yes, ultimately, as usual, it comes down to listening, as so much does. The Lord of Hosts probably wasn't a good looking white guy with a trimmed beard.  But guess what?  You'll know who he is by listening to him too.  The whole Bible is predicated on the notion that God speaks, and we listen.  We identify the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, by listening, by reading, by waiting and by hearing.

Lent, as I've said like ten hundred times, is a matter of slowing down.  All our sacrifices we make, all our change in lifestyle, in diet, in attitude, ought to come with a heightened sense of hearing.  Once you remove the clutter and detritus, you can listen all the more closely to what God has to say to you, and you can know him through his words.  Lent is a time to slow down, to hear, to appreciate the God you worship.  Be still, and know that he is God.  Find him in the quiet, contemplative stillness.  Don't look for him in a beard and halo, look for him in the words of his scriptures, in the Lord's Supper, and where two or three of you are gathered together.  Listen to him, especially in this time.  As you slow down and listen to the voices, think twice about everything you hear. Be quick to listen and slow to speak.  Muse through each and every single one of the voices that comes up, and know that you will know them by their fruits.  

PJ

Where does God stay when he's camping?

Where does God stay when he's camping?

In omnipo-tents.

I'll see myself out.

No no no, hold on.  Bad jokes aside, this is one of the few moments in the scriptures, the Transfiguration, in which Peter offers to get a tent for Jesus.  At the moment of Transfiguration, Peter looks at Jesus and says to him 'Lord, it is good to be here.  Let us build three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.'  And that's a good place for him to start.  You see, Peter appraised the situation the same way you or I would.  If you find a place where Jesus seems really real, if you find a spot or a moment where God seems to coalesce, you want to keep it pristine.
Have you ever noticed the rich adornment of churches?  Have you ever noticed how elaborate and ornate older churches especially are?  If you wander into ancient sanctuaries, in which the tapestries are rich, the glass stained, and the art representative, you'll be hopefully awe-struck by the beauty of it all.

But, of course, this had the opposite effect from what was desired of it.  If you've ever been to Europe, you will have se

en the massive and elaborate churches, and you will also have seen the masses of people who are clamouring to get inside.  On a weekday.  Not for prayer, mind you, but to look around.  The big, famous churches, like Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, they're crammed full of people all the time, and they're full of people who just want to have a peek around, and a look at things.  And the desire to make a tent for Jesus in which he would live, and where we could always find him, totally backfired, as people became more interested in the tent than they did in the inhabitant.

Now, this remains an issue for us today, in the here and now.  I can't tell you the number of weddings I've done for people who just wanted a nice church to get married in, or baptisms for people who

wanted something to be nice and in a church, but who don't want things to get too churchy.  And in a sense, they're right. They have in mind that they're in a tent, but they're using it as a tent, and not to meet or glad hand with the resident. And we Christians, we exascerbte this problem, as we behave differently, dress differently, and have a different attitude when we're in the tent.

But, of course, as you know from your own lives, it's not so much the tent that's important, is it?  It's the resident.  It's not just the shell that we've made for him, but it's the person who is inside.

We ought to know better, but we don't.  We tend to reduce the Christian faith to magic and sorcery.  We make crosses into talismans, we make prayers into spells, and we make churches into tents.  I had a conversation with someone the other day in which they asked if you put holy water on your bed, you wouldn't have bad dreams anymore.  It's a fair question, and one in which we as

Christians have to admit that we've done a darn fine job of presenting our faith as a matter of magic and sorcery, a matter of explaining to people that if they pray hard, good things will happen, that if they have crosses in their homes, or hanging from their rearview mirrors, then vampires will recoil from them.  We've done a great job of telling people that all they need to do is to own a Bible, to have possession of a cross, to have their children baptized, and to be nominally Christian, and then we're fine.  It's less of the faith, more of the having of things.  And it's that way with crosses, Bibles, churches, all those things.

We build tents for Jesus to keep him where he may still be found.  We build tents in all sorts of places to keep him locked up, to keep him somewhere where we can go and find him if we need to.  We can find him in the spot that we've set aside for him.  And this has the unfortunate effect of making God seem rather small.  He can be found in these buildings we've made for him, or on a mountaintop, or in a temple, or in a certain patch of land, or in a book or anywhere else like that.

God is Spirit, and the time is coming when those who worship God will not worship him in that temple or on that mountain, but in spirit and in truth.

The truth of the matter is that Jesus is not confined to any particular place where you can go and find him, and that's the real, genuine mystery of the Transfiguration.  The great mystery is that Jesus walks up onto the mountain with his disciples, is transfigured, and then walks back down the mountain with them again.  He isn't placed in a tent, he isn't put in a temple, he isn't locked in a bottle of holy water, he isn't trapped in a Bible, none of that.  He's wherever you are.  If you think about the greatness of Christ and the work that he does, the magic is only that God left heaven, and goes to where his people are.  The magic and the glory of it, is that Jesus is fully God and fully man.  That means that up on the mountaintop, he will flash like lightning, he will glow like the sun, but while you're walking around for the rest of the week, he will be approachable, proximate, and human.


This, then, is the glory of the transfiguration, is that up on the mountain, in the temple, in the church, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and Jesus seems so real, and so divine.  In the church, we pray and give thanks, we are enraptured, we are carried aloft like incense in our prayers and worship.  We see the fullness of mercy and truth in elaborate wonder and grandness.  And then we walk down off the mountain, we leave the church, and Jesus seems a lot less clear in his divinity.  He seems a lot less clear in his magnificence.  His divinity is harder to see, because Jesus looks like a regular, everyday guy.  And that's okay.  He looks like a regular guy, because you look like a regular guy.

But he still speaks like God.

The other mystery of the transfiguration is that whether Jesus is lit up like the sun, or whether he's walking around in sandals or whether he's speaking to you from the pages of the Scriptures, he's always going to be divine in his words.  It's not like it would be where he is divine part time, he's always divine.  But whether he's lit up and majestic, or earthy and human, he's still God, if you take time to listen.

This is why the end of the voice from the cloud's one bit of dialogue is so important.  Hidden in there is why Jesus always tells people not to tell about what he has done, this is why Jesus tells his disciples not to tell anyone about the vision that they have just seen, because Jesus doesn't want to be looked at.  He wants to be listened to.  And herein is the magic. That Jesus is with us always.  He understands our human condition because he's been human.  He is part of our lives in a way that a God in a tent could never be.  Look at the story of the wandering people in Exodus, and in there, you see the elders having to leave the rest of the people and go up on a mountaintop and worship Jesus there.  You see the people being separate from God, and trying to find him all over the place, but always in seclusion and in a crowd.

Throughout these forty days of lent, we have Jesus being his most human.  He works as a suffering servant, and he tirelessly tries to work with us fallen people.  And as he gets closer and closer to the cross of calvary, he becomes more and more beaten down, more bloodied, more injured, culminating with his final statements to the world on the cross.  And as he looks down, he says to those who are there: "It is finished."  My work is done.

He doesn't look lit up like the sun anymore, he doesn't look like he's flashing like lightning.  He just looks like a guy, and a dying guy at that.  But the voice from the cloud doesn't tell us to look at him.

"Listen to him."

Nowhere is this more important than during lent, in the throes of humility.

Blessed and meaningful lent to you all.

PJ.