Paul McCarntney and wings

Ah, wings.

If you're like me, and you most likely are, you love wings.  And I mean wings in all kinds of permutations, but especially the hot wings.  The hotter the better!  If they go up in the heat scale all the way up to suicide wings, then I'm happy as a clam.  There have been many evenings in which congregational members and I have gone out for blazing hot wings at a local eatery to talk about the origins of the universe, and our place in it.

Good times.  Easier times before I had kids, but good times nonetheless.  And chickens, as they go, are remarkably divisible.  I remember hearing from someone many years ago that Kentucky Fried Chicken was no longer going by that name because the birds they used were so genetically modified, that you couldn't call them chickens anymore.  So they changed their name to KFC.

Sadly, that cool story isn't true.  They changed their name to drop the connotations that go along with the word 'fried,' which is a dirty word these days.  But I mention KFC (or PFK if you're hon hon hon), uses all sorts of bits of chicken.  You can get wings, breast, thighs, drumsticks, drummettes, and if there's nothing left after that, then get a big ol' box of popcorn chicken, featuring the also rans of the cuts of meat.

But it's the wings that I find captivating, because you can go out for them.  Bars and clubs have wing nights, certain establishments prize themselves on their wings, all that.  Well, you all know what birds use their wings for, besides being delicious.  They use their wings for the purposes of flight.  for getting around.

But birds, they do something else funny with their wings.  They protect their young.  Now, this isn't a story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down.......  Sorry, lost my train of thought.  No hold on.  This isn't a story all about how a swan can break a man's arm with one beat of its wings, nor a story about how a flightless ostrich can kick a lion's head clean off.  No no no.  This is a story of smaller birds.

I know on Sunday I talked about mother hens gathering their chicks under their wings so that a predator might take the mother instead of the babies.  This is behavior I've heard about, but never witnessed for myself.  I've heard about it, mainly from the Bible, about how chickens will do this, but I've never seen it.  What I have seen, though, is one of those loony birds who will pretend to have a broken wing in order to distract predators from their brood.  I saw this when I was working grounds keeping for Prince of Peace Lutheran church ,school, manor, village and harbour.  And when I was employed in that regard, the grounds were so big that we'd ride a gator from place to place.  A little john deere two seater, with space in the back to carry loads of gravel. 

And as we'd tool around, we would drive past the nest of this ridiculous bird.  And this bird would do this nutso dance, doing its best for all the world to look weak and wounded, so we'd go off and chase it instead of the clutch of eggs or whatever that were in the nest.

Now, you may very well decide to make fun of this bird.  First of all, why on earth are you laying your eggs, your precious offspring on the ground, on the earth, where they can be picked up by the first hungry predator. Secondly, why oh why are you counting on that crazy dance that you do to fool anyone? 

Well, joke's on me.  I saw that bird every day, and watched it do its song and dance routine.  And I never found the nest.  So it worked.  I was sufficiently distracted to not notice one thing about the clutch of eggs.  So, well done stupid crazy bird.

Now, our judgment that we have on that bird could well be levelled against God Almighty himself.  That silly goof, why oh why did he place his beloved children on the earth, instead of in Heaven?  Why did he put us here where temptation could strike us at any moment?  Why did he put us in a place where Satan could get at us?  And especially, what was his big plan to get us out of trouble? 

It was the same as that goofy bird's plan to get its chicks out of trouble.  It was that exact same plan.  It was the plan to appear wounded, to draw the forces of sin and death and the devil away. It was the plan to be a much bigger prize, to be a wounded prize, to be easy to get, to be simple to drag away, and then the chicks would be easy prey next. 

Well, the joke's on the devil.  As usual.  What these goofy birds do is to lure the predators away, but not actually, hopefully, become dinner themselves.  They don't want to leave their chicks defenseless.  They lead the predators away, and then, just when all seems lost, when they appear to be snacktime for a hungry fox or whatever, then all of a sudden, they reveal that the wing wasn't broken, and they take to the skies.  They leave the predator hungry and desperate, as the easy meal takes to the air, fleeing their attempt to chow down.  The predator, the foxx, the wolf, the coyote, just stands there in frustration, as the big prize, the sweet meal, flies away.

That's our Lord, if you will.  His weakness drew the devil away, his broken body lured the devil to him.  His blood and nail pierced hands diverted attention away from us.  His bloody sweat, his agony, his whipped back, and finally his death led the devil to him and only him.  And then when death was about to score its final, great victory, when the devil was about to do what he had always wanted to do, to destroy God himself, Jesus took flight, rose from the dead, and left the hungry grave open and disappointed.  He led all the attention away from us, which was where it belonged, and took that attention upon himself.  We escaped the wrath and judgment, the eternal death and separation, the hellfire and damnation, because of the wounds and apparent weakness of Christ.  Leading all this stuff away from us.  Onto himself.

Lent

Sacrifice

The Cross

The nails.

All that.

LGBT

Let's
Get
Blogging (about)
Transfiguration.

Yeah.  What did you think I was going to talk about?  Wasn't the title totes clear enough?

It's time once again to talk about the other kind of trans, and that is transfiguration.  It only comes up once a year, right before lent, where we get to see Christ in his infinite majesty, with the veil of his humanity ever so coquettishly pulled aside (can't believe I just wrote that sentence).  You see, up on the mount of transfiguration, Jesus was transformed before the eyes of the disciples, his clothes becoming brilliantly white, his face shining like the sun, all that.  And there were Moses and Elijah with him, discussing the hot topic of the day.

The Transfiguration

²⁸ About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. ²⁹ As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. ³⁰ Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. ³¹ They spoke about his departure,^[a] which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. ³² Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. ³³ As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (He did not know what he was saying.)
³⁴ While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and covered them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. ³⁵ A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” ³⁶ When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen.

Luke 9:28-36

 Ah, Peter.  Thank you for being the everyman in these situations.  We may feel a certain sense of attachment towards Peter, primarily because he is such a dope.  If you look at statues of Peter, on some he has the Keys, some he has an upside down cross, and on some he has a Rooster.  To signify the times that he denied Christ before the next day began. Peter's assessment of the situation is notable in being what we feel about the interaction between Jesus, Moses and Elijah.  He looks at what is happening on the mount of Transfiguration, and says that this is so great, and so neat, that they should stay up there for all time.

He looks at what is happening.

You see, we see Jesus all the time.  We see him in tortillas, we see him on toast, we see him in windows and in ads, we see him in water stains and in whorls of wood on the floor. We see him everywhere.  But what are we asked to do in the Bible vis-à-vis Jesus?  Or God? 

The funny thing about all this happening, is that Jesus is not only God in the flesh, he's not only the son of God, he's the word of God.  The word made flesh.  This is of such catastrophic importance that I can't possibly overstate it.  You see, the vital nature of Christ is that he should be heard. The whole notion of looking upon Jesus, of recognizing him in ads or stains, is ultimately flawed, because we don't know what he looked like... at all.  He could be a nice looking white guy with a beard and blue eyes, but he probably wasn't. He probably looked a whole lot more middle eastern.  But you know what?  It wouldn't matter anyway. 

People spend far too much time looking at Jesus, far too much observing him, looking at statues, looking at websites full of guys who 'look like Jesus', and so little time listening to him.  It's funny, because we have zero pictures of him, none.  Not a photograph, not a painting, not a sketch, not an oil painting, nothing like that.  We have no clear images of him whatsoever, but we do have a whole bunch of stuff that he said recorded. 

It's an amazing gift, to have the actual words of the word made flesh in our homes.  Do you have a Bible?  You almost certainly do, if you live in North America.  If you don't, you're one iphone app away from having one.  If you have a Bible, then you have the recorded words of Christ.  They may very well be in red.  Remember, he's the word made flesh, and knowing that he's got some important stuff to say.  Heck, even if you don't believe that he's the son of God, assume that he's got some important stuff to say, and it might be worth listening to.  Some of it is self evident.  Some of it less so.  But let's agree for a second that his words are important, and that he said what he said for a reason.

As the voice from the cloud said, this is my son, in whom I am well pleased.  Listen to him.

Strangely enough, happy lent.  No, scratch that.  A deep, meaningful, passionate lent.  Let it be a time of spiritual growth for you.

PJ.

Flatulent puffery

You know, it took me a second to catch it, and I guess I should have proofread it a little better, but I embarrassed myself on Sunday morning with the title of my sermon.  This is why, I guess, I don't frequently title my sermons.

Yes, that's right.  I accidentally said, at least on paper:  Sermon - so easy a caveman could do it.

I'm an real dunce sometimes, and it doesn't do much to increase my market value if I say "oh sure, my job is so simple a caveman could do it."

This whole thing was obviously a riff on the 'popular' geico ads, and if you don't remember them, here's a quick video hit to remind you of them.

I still hold these up as the possible gold standard for television advertising, for a few reasons:
1 - they were the first tv commercials that I could remember that generated their own tv show.  It was terrible, but it was there.
2 - The characters in the commercials had sufficient presence to pull off ads based on a very simple premise.
3 - People who were being advertised to actually went out of their way to watch these ads.  They got quiet when these things came on, shushing the room up in a way normally expected for the show that's running, not the ad.  People would go and find them on youtube (which I obviously just did).

It's really not everyday that ads come on that people will make an effort to see.  Usually, it's quite the opposite, where people will very much go out of their way to avoid seeing ads.  They'll flick through channels, they'll fast forward, they'll leave the room to make a snack, whatever.  But it's a rare ad that makes people want to see it.

Now, fast forward mentally to evangelism, if you will.  And that's a hard job.  It's possibly the hardest job in the whole church, really.  Or, I suppose, it's the job that the fewest people actually want to do.  If you go back through the Bible, you can find all sorts of folks who were willing to be part of all sorts of jobs in the church - pastors, trustees, fellowship, teachers, workers with the gifts of administration, all that.  But very few who want to be evangelists.  Very very few.

A large part of that comes from what we feel about evangelism and how it is to be done.  In a way, evangelism is marketing for the church, and for God.  And most of us are hopelessly stuck in the past.  That is, we have an idea about how to get people thinking and talking about God, and most of us know that we're horribly unsuited for that task.  If you were in church on Sunday, you will recall that I talked a lot about ads the way they used to be.  Here is a classic example of an ad from David Ogilvy, whose work I referenced extensively on Sunday.

 

 

As a church member said who looked at this on Sunday morning: "you've got to be joking!  Who's going to read all this?"

 

 

Yes indeedy doo.  This is a big ol' block of text.  It's full of facts, no doubt, but who on earth has the time to get their head around this?  Ultimately, it's very much like the old question of 'if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?'  A falling tree obviously makes sound, but if nobody hears it, what was the purpose of that sound? 

 

It's the same with evangelism.  What we expect to happen is nothing short of miraculous, but the wrong kind of miraculous.  What we expect to happen is to be able to give unto someone a Bible, and expect them to instantly convert to Christianity.  We expect them to have a Bible, open it up, and read through the whole thing, believe it, and come to our church.  And heck, if you look at that Ogilvy ad above, you'll notice that even the layout is the same as a Bible.  Picture, headline, columns, all that.  Looks just like a Bible.  And what Ogilvy said about that ad is quite telling for us as Christians who seek to do evangelism. 

 

"Factual advertising like this outsells flatulent puffery. 

The more you tell, the more you sell.  Notice the

very long headline - and 719 words of copy.  All facts."

 

 

Sounds good in theory, but what the heck are we advertising in the church?  Are we advertising a Rolls Royce or car insurance?  No we are not.  We're talking about a guy who had a day job, and that day job is important to remember here. 

 

 

Jesus Christ is a carpenter.

 

 

Would you, if you had a carpenter who did genius work for you, recommend him to a friend by giving that friend a 2,507 page description of that carpenter's work?  No, you sure wouldn't. 

 

Even if it was true.

 

Even if you believe that the carpenter had done all of that.

 

 

Even if you knew all about it, almost from memory.

 

 

Ask yourself how you recommend a carpenter to someone.  Or a plumber, or an electrician, or whatever.  These guys, their bread and butter is earned not through big advertising firms like that of mr. Ogilvy, but through word of mouth.  They earn business based on the results that they give to their clients.  If you're on the computer reading this, then you've probably looked at an email, or a facebook message, or whatever, where someone has said 'hey, my whole house stinks like sewer water. Does anyone know a good plumber? Someone I can trust?"  The overall success of these trades is linked to the work they do. 

 

 

If you're going to recommend Jesus Christ to someone, and I honestly believe that you should, then you need to be able to do a couple of things.  Firstly, you have to be able and willing to talk, unlike all the Old Testament prophets.  Remember them?  The ones that I talked about on Sunday, the ones who didn't want to be bothered with speaking about God and His word for mankind?  The rogues' gallery includes Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Jonah, and honestly everyone else whom God approached to get this done.  They all said, pretty much "there must be someone else.  Lord, send someone else."

 

But God said no.  He said that these people were selected by him for a very good reason.  And a large part of that reason was that God fixes broken down kitchens.  Because of carpentry.  And there's the second thing you need to be able to do.  To be able to talk about what this carpenter has done for you.  It honestly does you no good to be able to talk about what the carpenter has done in someone else's kitchen.  It does you no good to be able to talk about a carpenter who you assume does great work.  If you're going to be recommending someone, it's going to have to be someone who has done good work for you.  Some sort of before and after.

 

 

So here we go. 

 

 

Jesus, the carpenter, Jesus the savior, has done great work for me.  I'm not perfect, and the house, the temple, that he's working on, it isn't perfect either.  It's like an older house, in that it'll never really be 'done.' But with each successive job, it gets a little better.  I eat too much, and I'm too short with my family.  I tire of people far too quickly, and I'm a little bit lazy if I don't get a prodding every now and then. 

 

 

That's the before picture.  The after picture is far different.  I believe in a God who understands the human condition.  I believe in a God who has been like us, and so understands my failings.  I believe in a God who had a job to do and didn't necessarily want to do it.  And I believe in the work of Jesus Christ being redemptive at its core.  He makes all things new.  There is no such thing as too late.

 

That doesn't mean I'm perfect.  Far from it.  But it does mean that I know my faults.  I have no excuses for them.  They're not my parents' fault or my wife's fault or the fault of my children.  They're my faults.  And knowing them, I turn them over to my carpenter.  I give him my busted up kitchen, my leaking foundation, and my rattling windows.  And I say to him 'make these things new.  Because that's what you do.'

 

 

I'm a work in progress folks, but I believe that Jesus, the carpenter, fixes what I did wrong.  All the problems with my house, he fixes those up.  It's what he does.  He takes my weakness, and turns it into strength.  Because he's the one who promised to do it, who can do it, and whose work I have seen in my life.

 

Looking for a carpenter?  There's one I can recommend.

 

PJ.

Nights like tonight

Nothing funny to say.  There are some people going through some incredibly difficult things, they are suffering and they are burdened.

In this, it may be incredibly difficult to see God.  When things have gone from bad to worse, when there's nobody left, when the days get short, and the chips are down, it's hard to see God.  I understand that.

But you know, as tempting as it may be to default to the 'footprints' poem, where there was only one set of footprints when God was carrying you through your hardest times, maybe a better image was given to me by one of our Sunday School kids on Sunday.  She was a little fidgety at the communion rail, and when her parents tried to get her back to her pew, she didn't want to go.  And as her father picked her up in his strong arms, she said this:

No! I don't want you to carry me!

There are a great many times in which we don't want God to be carrying us around.  We have no interest in him being interested in us.  We want to fix stuff on our own, we want to make it right, we want to do whatever we can to make sure things are good for us.  And then they aren't.  They aren't perfect.  They're a long way off.  And suddenly, they've gone too far for us to fix. All you're left with sometimes is a big pile of broken dreams, and no way of making things better.  The time is over.  The umbrella is torn, the milk is spilled, the metal has rusted away.  And all you have left is regret.  And that's exactly the moment in which you resist God's help.

It's human nature, I suppose.  When your heavenly father reaches over to pick you up in his strong arms and to bear you to safety, you don't want him to carry you.  It's the way we've always been as people, the help we desperately need, we refuse.  It's that way from the time that you're a baby, and you're exhausted, but you'll fight sleep like nothing else.  As the Terminator said in Terminator 2: Judgment day:

It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

And you all thought that was spoken about nuclear war against the machines! No, it's about the thousands of small moments throughout a day, where you have what you want RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU but somehow you manage to drive it away.  On purpose.  You drive your family away, though there's nothing you want more than them.  You drive parents away, though you love them and care for them.  You snap at spouse and kids, even though they're the most important thing in the world to you.  And you say to God: I don't want you to carry me.  Better to be dead than wrong.

Well, folks, there are a lot of broken relationships out there tonight.  A lot of heavy hearts.  And you are staring down the possibility that your relationship might be breaking.  Or broken.  Or whatever.  And you may be looking all around for God and finding him nowhere.  But for goodness sake, let him carry you.  Let him do the work that he wants to do.  When you're about to faint from your human weakness, when you're about to pass out, when you've got wedges driven between you and everyone you know about, when you've tried everything you know and it hasn't worked, stop.  Switch burdens with our Lord.  That's what he's offered to you.  Give him what you have that is burdensome, give it to him and be troubled with it no more.  

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.  For my yoke is easy.  And my burden is light.

God's blessings to you in your hurt and weakness, friends.  If you have time, even at the eleventh hour, to make things right, then be reconciled to your brother.  Make things right if you can.  If you can't then turn it over to God, in humble submission.  Learn from what has happened, and do your absolute level best to not push away what you've always wanted anymore.

PJ.

ASTAR, sea star, star wars

Ugh.  Before I even start writing, I know what's going to happen.  You see, when I talk about Astar, a robot, one of two things is going to happen.  Either:

a) You grew up in the 80s and will get a shot of insta-nostalgia when I talk about him, or
b) You're a young tech savvy punk who has never heard of this in any way whatsoever.

Well, consequences be darned, here's a video of Astar from the 1980s doing what he does best, i.e. death defying stunts and limb removal.

This was classic Canadian content right there, and gets to the heart of what our great nation is all about: It's stylish, weird, and has a message.  And that message is very simple: a fun loving robot can put his arm back on, but human beings can't.  You lop off an arm, and I'm pretty sure that you'll be doing an impression of a slot machine in pretty short order.  The human body is a marvel of design and engineering, but it doesn't do what we honestly wish it would do most of the time: If you cut part off, it doesn't grow back.  

Now, this seems like a bit of a cruel joke, given that there are many species in nature that are unencumbered by such an issue.  Check out the starfish, or more accurately, the sea star.  Now, you know that they have a whole bunch of arms (between five and five thousand), and you'd perhaps expect them to be able to grow arms back if they get removed.  No problem there.  But the sea star can do something wholly remarkable:  From a removed arm, the sea star can grow a whole new sea star.  Bet you never saw THAT coming!  

It's funny that you never saw that coming, because it's something that you sort of expect to happen as a Christian in a church, isn't it?  You see, this last week was the reading from Corinthians all about how we as Christians are part of the body of Christ.  It's a long, elaborate metaphor, which remains one of the best metaphors for membership in a Christian church.  It is so precisely because the human body is one of the few things that we have a really intimate relationship with.  That is to say, we know it in and out, because it's ours, and we have to live with it and in it and it is us and we are its.  Or, as Norm MacDonald would say: "You don't have a soul, you are a soul.  You have a body."

The body of Christ image is painted for us by Paul in first Corinthians, where it says this much:

¹² Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body,so it is with Christ. ¹³ For we were all baptized by^[a] one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. ¹⁴ Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
¹⁵ Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. ¹⁶ And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. ¹⁷ If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸ But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. ¹⁹ If they were all one part, where would the body be? ²⁰ As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
²¹ The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” ²² On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³ and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, ²⁴ while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, ²⁵ so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. ²⁶ If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
²⁷ Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. ²⁸ And God has placed in the church first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kinds of tongues. ²⁹ Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?³⁰ Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues^[b]? Do all interpret? ³¹ Now eagerly desire the greater gifts.

Paul writes a big old block of text, but his underlying point is sound:  We are members of one body.  Now what on earth does it mean for us to be members of one body?  That means first of all that we're all part of one bigger system, which is part of the appeal of our faith.  You are plugged into something much bigger than yourself, something that goes back older than time itself.  The head of the body of Christ, we learn from Colossians, is Christ.  And all of us are his various body parts, and systems.  All good so far, right? We get that.  And we've all got a specific job to do, as in the endocrine system handles the insulin business, the digestive system handles the snack times, and the lymphatic system does whatever it does.  And after a while, we see how we fit into the church that we exist in.  No problem there.  But then there comes the natural human inclination, in that we desperately want to find people like ourselves, and latch onto them.  And your church  may not have people like you there.  It may not have suburban twentysomethings, or young families, or youth, or heck, even seniors.  And it's what we do, we look for folks who are just like us, and latch onto them like crazy.  But the body of Christ was not supposed to be like that.  Although eyes want to be with other eyes, if it was nothing but eyes, things wouldn't go too terribly well for anyone.  The eyes may be glamorous, they may be the windows to the soul, but unfortunately, if they're detached from everything else, then even they themselves stop seeing.  You get a whole bunch of feet together and they stop walking.  They just sit there.

These are feet with other feet.

Together, these feet are nothing.  They're just feet on their own.  They have no agency, they're done walking.  They have nothing on their own.  Vacant, deprived of life, they're all done.  But this is what we want, or so we think.  We think we want things that are just like us, and only things that are just like us.  And we are wrong.  The body only works as long as the body works.  It only functions as long as all the parts are working together.  But we Christians have a really funny idea about how we fit in, because we feel as though we are starfish.

We honestly get to thinking that we, if we break off from the head, will carry on. And not just carry on by ourselves as a floating limb, but that we will spontaneously grow the rest of the body, just like a starfish.  We feel as though we can drop off from the body of Christ, and then grow a whole new body of our own, based off of us.  But it just isn't all that likely.

Unless you're a starfish, and you're not, the odds of you successfully navigating this maze are about zero.  You lose a limb, and it's gone.  You drop an arm, and not only are you not like Astar, but the arm you drop isn't going to grow into a whole new body.  It stops there.  The body goes on, and the arm withers and dies, once removed from the body.  That's all.

That's the bad news.  Or maybe it isn't.  The thing is, that if the body could just re-grow a lost limb, then the limbs would be replaceable.  But they aren't.  You cut off an arm, and that arm was one of only two.  And you don't necessarily get another shot at it.  The reason that Jesus came to earth, lived and died, was precisely because as members of the body of Christ, you and I are irreplaceable.  He doesn't just get to grow limbs back, though we may think he might.  He's not a starfish either.  You and I, as branches sliced off, had to be grafted back on.  As limbs removed, we had to be sewn back, because nothing like us was ever going to come back.  It's not like bacteria, where they're identical and reproduce by just separating off into identical versions of themselves, no no no.  It's a matter of the individual bits being massively important.  You cut them off, and you have to reattach them back, because nothing close to that is ever going to grow back.

Christ's love for you has that kind of impetus.  The separation that we felt from him was so staggering that it caused him to take on human flesh, dwell among us, live and die to graft us back onto him.  Knowing that each and every single one of us is a unique part, a vital component, and a precious snowflake, he did what he had to do to get the body back together.  And this is why it pains him so terribly when we reject him - because it's the same as when an organ or system rejects the host.  Something that was meant to be there is no longer, there is an absence, a void, a gap that desperately demands to be filled.  And it is not being filled.

And so what do you do?  If you are missing a body part, odds are you can live without it, without a foot, or without a gall bladder, or tonsils, or a thyroid, or whatever.  But even as you're missing this thing, it becomes abundantly clear that your body is incomplete, and is crying out for this lost item to be replaced.

I cannot believe that I'm about to nerd myself out like this, but for goodness' sake, it's happening for real.  The idea is that we aren't like B'omarr monks, from Star Wars.  They were a sect of monks who thought that the best thing to do would be to remove their bodies completely, and just be brains in jars attached to droids, so they could better ponder the universe without the sensory distractions that go along with, you know, having a body.  And there's a great subsect of Christianity that feels this way too, that feels as though everything regarding matter is bad, that the human form is dreadful, and as soon as we're done suffering through this body, then we can finally be free of it.  But it really isn't the case.  Why oh why would God make bodies, or anything for that matter, if it was all universally bad and wrong?  It went wrong, that we know.  It went wrong and bad a long time ago, and we're still suffering through that.  But that doesn't mean that it always was.

At the end of all things, according to the Christian faith, you have a body.  You're not without one forever.  Your body, fully and complete, without spot or blemish, without the taxing weight of the second law of thermodynamics.  Without frailty or disease.  For any who think that the idea is to be spirit people floating around without a body somewhere in heaven, you've missed a pretty important part of creation: that before the fall, people had bodies, and they were good.  After his resurrection, Christ had a body, and it was good.  And both Christ and Elijah ascended into heaven in their bodies, and that was good.  In a sense, then, Norm MacDonald was a little bit off.  It's not as though you are either a body or a soul.  You're both.  Because you're human.  And being without any part would just be wrong.

PJ.

Turning water into wine, as opposed to the other way around.

Hi folks.

This has been the week where we commemorate the wedding at Cana, the first of the miracles of Christ.  And the funny thing is, I'm going to reproduce it here, so you can all read it, and that's funny because you all already know it.  You could almost recite it off by heart, but you know what?  The devil's in the details.  And it's the details of this story that are so powerful.  You all know the big picture (water = wine), but do you know the deets?

The Wedding at Cana

2 On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ² Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. ³ When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴ And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵ His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

⁶ Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.^[a] 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. ⁸ And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. ⁹ When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom ¹⁰ and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” ¹¹ This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

Familiar stuff, wouldn't you say?  Yes, you know this story.  But without some context, without some background, this passage can quickly turn into a sort of magic trick kind of deal, where Jesus turns water into wine, and everyone has a pretty good party.  But why did he turn water into wine in the first place?  Well, because they'd run out of wine.  As in, the party guests had already consumed everything.  Fun for everyone, right?  It's one of those weddings.  I've been to those weddings, and probably so have you.

The couple you see here on the left, their wedding was the one where before we'd even said grace, the MC came to the microphone and informed us that the wedding was completely out of pil.  That's right.  Cocktail hour was set to become mocktail hour, because the table from Saskatchewan had already consumed all the pilsner in the house.  Now, wouldn't it be convenient if we had someone at that wedding who could turn water into to pilsner?  While everyone else was busy turning pilsner into water?

The MC of that fateful wedding. Bearer of bad news

It would have been convenient, but we probably shouldn't reduce the work of Christ to a fun holy trick that gets folks out of a bit of a jam.  It's more than just party time, and Jesus is more than party God.  Let's look at the detail that I want to draw your attention to, shall we?  

It's the water.  Or more accurately, it's where the water comes from.  Check out the stone jars, and you'll get an idea of what's up.  Six stone jars, used for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.  That's a lot of water, for a lot of purification.  And there was a lot of purification in the Old Testament that was required.  You forget about this a whole lot, because, as Christians, you don't get into the whole ritual purity thing.  You are new Testament people, you are people who have Christ firm in your hearts, and there's not a whole lot of stuff in the New Testament about ritual purity.  As well there might not be.  Because we've moved past that. And why have we moved past that?  Why do you not care (beyond, you know, germs and stuff) how hands are washed?  Why are there not wudu stations set up in the Christian church? Why don't you care about ritual purity?  

It's because of passages like this one.  The water used for this water into wine business is taken from the selection that the hebrews would have been using to wash themselves, ritually, so that they may be clean.  But they weren't actually 'clean'.  All they were really doing was adding another layer of whitewash to the outside of the tomb, and inside was all spiders and decay.  But when Jesus looks at this situation, what he does is quite remarkable.  He makes more wine so that the party may continue, yes.  He does in fact do that.  But he takes the water away from the works that people were doing to make themselves clean.  He takes the works that people would do for themselves and for God, to make themselves right with God, and removes the ability that people have to make themselves clean.  And he replaces that water with wine, in effect replacing law with Gospel.  That's the good news of this passage.  What were the people at this wedding going to be using to ritually wash themselves with now? nothing!  There was nothing to do that with.  God is there in human form with them, and what does he do?  He blesses them, both by providing the drinks (yay) and by removing the requirements of the law (double yay). 

This seems like small potatoes, doesn't it?  I know it's a miracle, but providing wine at one wedding?  Big deal.  So the people at that wedding were happy and were ritually unclean.  So what?  Well, this is just a shadow of what is to come.  Because you all know what the Old Testament folks did to get clean of their sins, right?  Sacrifice.  Sacrifice of animals at the altar of God at the temple in Jerusalem.  They'd bring animals (the animals referred to in Leviticus), and slaughter them there, and that would make it all better.  But like with everything else, it turned into a work that people could do to merit God's attention.  And like with the washing, and the Sabbath day, all these things turned into how best to get God to notice us.  So so much.  But then, at the moment of the crucifixion of Christ, the temple curtain gets torn down.  Well and good.  The barrier in the Temple between God and humanity was torn down, so that people no longer had to have anything between them and God, sin included.  But the temple curtain was probably put back up, and sacrifices continued, until that fateful day in which the Temple itself was knocked down, and everything of value was removed, taken to Rome, and presumably melted down to make jewellery for Caesar's wife.

So what do you do, as a believer in God?  Most likely, you wring your hands, and accept the burden of your sin, realizing that sacrifices themselves have to stop, and there will be no more scapegoating.  Unless, unless of course you heard about the teachings of a rabbi who talked about how the sacrificial system was coming to an end.  Unless you heard about someone who promised to take away sin in a way that killing a bull never could.  Unless you heard about someone who had lived and died, and rose again from the dead to hammer the point home that sins were being forgiven, and people were clean before God. 

This was hot, hot news.  In fact, it still is.  And it is such hot news because it changes the entire profile of the faith, away from what you do for God, and towards what he does for you.  It's not about how you wash yourself to get free from ritual impurities, it's about how he washes you in baptism.  It's not about how you sacrifice animals on your altar, it's about the sacrifice he made for you on the cross.  This is hot, hot news, perhaps it always will be.  And it's linked in so deeply with the changing of the water into wine.  It was taking the law, turning it into gospel, taking the rules, and turning it into a blessing.  Taking sacrifice and work, and turning it into wine and joy.  With any and all miracles Jesus does, and this one is no exception, he makes all things new.  Including, but not limited to, you.

PJ.

Ring around the font.

No, the title doesn't refer to a fun game we play in church when we think that nobody's looking.  It has to do with the ever pervasive problem of what happens to the dirt after you have a bath.

Now, I know, nobody ever takes baths anymore.  There was a commercial on TV (doubtlessly on GSN), for a company, a service, that would, for a price, go into your home, and take out your bathtub, replacing it with a walk-in shower. The nice lady in the commercial said "Come on, who even takes baths anymore?"

Well, me for one.  I never really got into the whole shower thing, and now it's too late.  But as a bather, I have to deal with the criticism of people who think about baths, and say "you're just stewing in your own filth."  I suppose.  The dirt doesn't immediately go down the drain, it sort of sticks around with you in the water.  Granted, if you toss enough Mister Bubble in there, you can't see it, but it's there.  Now, even if we were to assume that all the dirt flows off you and doesn't come back, what happens to it after you get out of the bathtub.  Yes, that's right, it sticks to the sides of the bathtub.  Oh gross.

We call this the ring around the bathtub, and it's quite the phenomenon.  That is, your bathtub, the thing you trust to get you clean, is what you get dirty.  Now, that's a thing on its own, but what do you do with all the accumulated filth?

There's an old folk tale out there, by an old folk artist, named Theodor Geisel, who wrote about a feline in a topper, who returned one day.  And this cat in the hat who came back, he proceeded to eat cake in the bathtub.  And when the kids told him to get the heck out, he hopped out of the tub, and left a big ol' pink ring.  And the whole rest of the book is them trying to get the pink stain off of wherever it ends up, using increasingly creative means (that is, using a dress to get the ring off the tub, the using the wall to get the stain off the dress, then hilariously using "dad's new $10 shoes" to get the stain off the wall, and so on).  It's a spiraling web of turmoil and frustration, as the cat in the hat, who knows a lot about that, continues to try to get the stain off of things.  But the punchline in this story is that the dirt, the stain, doesn't go anywhere.  That is to say, it doesn't ever really go away.  Whatever the cat uses to get the stain off of the last item, it just clings to the next one.  It does that all the way until they get the stain outside, to the snow, and it makes the snow pink.  And mom would not like pink snow!

Now, we in the church, we tend to think about forgiven sin as being sort of water-soluble.  That is, your sin is forgiven, and it just goes away.  It disappears.  Functionally, it never happened, and never existed in the first place.  It's gone.  Well, that's a way of looking at it, but it doesn't really get to the heart of exactly what we're talking about.

Have you ever read Leviticus chapter sixteen?  No, of course not, pastor Jim, I don't read that boring and mildly disturbing Old Testament claptrap. Well, perhaps not.  But if you don't, then you've missed out on something rather important.  Check out, in Leviticus 16, the concept of the scapegoat.

"When [Aaron] has finished atoning for the holy place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat.  Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task.  The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region, and the goat shall be free in the wilderness."

Okay, do you notice anything about this?  You should.  The idea here is that the sins committed by the congregation were not neutral.  They didn't just get dissipated and vanish into thin air.  The sins committed by the Hebrew people got transferred to this goat, and the goat was driven out into the wilderness with the sins of the people upon its head, presumably to die.  But they didn't sacrifice that goat. They let it go out into the wilderness with all their sins on it.  This is so phenomenally key that I can't possibly overstate it.  Just like the cat in the hat with the ring around his tub, the stain that went along with their transgressions didn't go anywhere at all.  They aren't neutral, they don't just vanish, they got transferred over to the scapegoat who took them away from the people.


Now, this last weekend, our reading was about the baptism of Jesus, which many of us in the Christian church may say would be unnecessary.  Why oh why is Jesus Christ getting baptized? He's perfect!  What we know about baptism, we take from Luther's small catechism, which states about baptism:

"It works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation to all who believe this, as the words and promises of God declare"
                                                                                                                       -Luther's small catechism.

Okay, great.  If those are the benefits of baptism, what did Jesus have to do with all that?  He's sin-free, perfect, flawless in the extreme.  And John the Baptism even confesses as much when he sees Jesus, and says, when Jesus asks him to baptize him in the Jordan river:

"I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"
                                                                                                                       -Matthew 3:14

Jesus, with no sins, went to be baptized by John, even though John was pretty sure that there was no forgiveness of sins required.  And he was right.  There was no forgiveness of sins required.  So what the heck was Jesus doing going into that baptismal water?  He was taking that ring around the tub, the ring around the font, onto himself.  Just like that stupid pink stain that the cat in the hat had, the sins had to go somewhere.  And so when Jesus was dipped into the baptsimal waters, he took all those sins on himself, just like the scapegoat did.  And just like the scapegoat, he was then driven out into the wilderness.

"Then, Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  He fasted for forty days and forty nights."
                                                                                                                       -Matthew 4:1-2

Do you see what's going on here?  Jesus is not only the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he's the goat of God too.  The sins that get washed away in baptism, that's what Jesus takes with him, out to the wilderness.  In a way, it's a lot like bathwater.  If you go into clean bathwater, as in water that's cleaner than you are, then you get cleaner.  But if you get into a bathtub that fifteen, twenty, or a hundred people have bathed in, and you're using the same water, you're going to end up with an awful lot of other peoples' filth on you.  It's a beautiful thing, really, though it may not seem like it at first.  When the goat is led away into the wilderness, it presumably dies, is eaten by predators, who knows really.  When Jesus is led out into the wilderness, he comes back better and stronger. When animals are offered for sin offerings in the old testament, they are killed, their bodies are burned, and their flesh is eaten.  When Jesus is killed, with your sin on him and mine, he comes back better and stronger, with death no longer having any dominion over him.  He is free from death forever.  And if, as St. Paul says, we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

Happy festival of the baptism of Christ, everyone.

PJ.