WWJD

It's the bracelet that folks were wearing for a while, maybe they still are.  WWJD?  What would Jesus do?  The idea is similar to the rings that the Mormons wear, the 'choose the right.' one.  And the bracelet with WWJD was quite popular when I was in high school.  A bunch of folks were rocking it out.  And the question that you're supposed to ask yourself before you undertake any type of decision is, what would Jesus do in this situation?  Any time you're about to do a thing, you think to yourself, 'is this what Jesus would do?'  If yes, then do it.  If not, then steer clear.

That's good right?  A sensible way of approaching the world around you.  It should be simple enough, that you should only do the stuff that Jesus would do.  Easy decision to make, right?

Okay, sure.  You know this.  And honestly, it shouldn't be too hard to work out what Jesus would do.  There's a man who has been blind from birth that you happen to run into on your way home from work.  WWJD? Probably miraculously heal him.  You're out and about, maybe having a bit of a stroll, and ten guys affected with horrible disfiguring illnesses call out. WWJD?  Make them all better.

Okay, I'm being a bit facetious, because those are all things you can't do, even if you wanted to.  Even if you really had in mind to go out and heal everyone with miraculous powers, there's another problem locked deeply under the surface. Anyone rocking the WWJD bracelet, anyone rocking the CTR ring, anyone telling themselves that your Christian faith is a matter of choosing the right things, being a good person, being a fine apstanding citizen, has forgotten something.  You can weigh your decisions all day, feeling as though you just can't do what Jesus does, so therefore what's the use in trying, but Jesus has something to say to us all.  Those of us, at least, who are of the position or ability to read this on a computer (or tablet, or smartphone, or whatever), really have to keep bearing one particular Biblical story in mind, one we'd rather forget.  You can find it in Luke 18.

¹⁸ A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

¹⁹ “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. ²⁰ You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’^[a]”

²¹ “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

²² When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

²³ When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. ²⁴ Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵ Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

²⁶ Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

²⁷ Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

Well, this doesn't seem too hard at all!

Luke's Gospel talks specifically about someone who is rich, and who thinks that he keeps all the commandments.  Someone who asks, like a child who feels as though he has done his homework, what he should do now.  What is there possibly left to do?  And Jesus tells him to go and sell what he has and give it to the poor, and to go follow him.  Yay Jesus!  Stick it to the rich guys.  The rich guys like, um.......

you.

You want to run down the list of WWJD, this is one of those times where you don't have to ask what Jesus would do, or what he would have you do.  He's pretty obvious about it.  If you were a rich girl, what would Jesus have you do? Well, probably sell everything you have, and give it all to the poor.  It's a good think you're not wealthy, right?  It's a good thing that this only applies to the Gates family, and the Getty family, the British Royals, and the Zuckerbergs of the world.

Oh dear.

In thinking that the words of Jesus Christ only convict those whom we would see as being super rich, we forget quite easily how rich we are.  Oh sure, it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, so thank goodness we're not rich!  But we are.  That whole time spent thinking about the 1% during the occupy movement failed to realize that we are the 1%.  Well, that's not a scientific measurement of GDP or anything, but there are very few people globally who live as well as we do.  Canada has no wars, no major calamities, high standard of living, government supplied health care, welfare, and libraries that will rent DVDs to you.  We have clean streets, very little crime, and we're not ruled over by cartels or militias.  We elect our leaders, and the vast majority of us have disposable income that is honestly more than the entire incomes of an awful lot of people all over the world.  If Jesus is talking to rich people, saying they should sell their belongings, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him, that applies to us, too.

But there's another part to WWJD.  Because there's something that Jesus would never EVER do, but that you should.  Nay, that you need to do.  And when you ask yourself what would Jesus do, it will never include this particular item. But this should be part of your daily life: repentance.  The rich young ruler who comes up to Jesus asks him what HE has to do to inherit eternal life.  Jesus tells him about the commandments, and the ruler says that he's kept all those commandments since he was a child.  Of course.  But when pressed into something else, something that gets to the core of who he is, and most importantly something he'd rather not do, he leaves angry.  If this guy can't make it, someone wealthy, well thought of, someone who at least believes that he's kept the commandments all his life, if HE can't get into the kingdom of God, then what hope is there for anyone else either?

Perhaps it's not WWJD, but WDJD....what did Jesus do?  He laid down his life for your sins, yours and mine.  And in doing so, he took away our need to be as perfect as him to get to him.  You weren't going to do that anyway, he knows that.  Were you going to be perfect?  Highly doubtful.  He took the sins of everyone, rich and poor, and took them upon himself, giving his perfection to us.  Yes, it's impossible for us to earn our way to heaven, but with God all things are possible.  The one thing that leaps out to me through all of the Bible is that God doesn't just sit back and wait for folks to choose the right thing, to be like him, in order to give them the time of day.  He seeks them out. He finds them where they are.  You, you horrible, profligate sinner, you're the one that he comes to find.  He loves you too much to wait for you to be perfect.  He love you enough to make you perfect, by forgiving you of everything, commission, omission, both.  In this is real love, not that we loved him, but that he loved us, and gave himself up for us.

PJ.

La Jeunesse

As you've worked out by now, Kari, Bruce, Luke and I were not around on Sunday.  Yes, we were sneaking and peeking. Since Pastor Bryan was in town to baptize his granddaughter (plus bonus Macknack), we took off to check out the cathedral, and town surrounding it, in Gravelbourg.  If you've never been, you might want to consider it.  It's one of those things that honestly isn't that far away, but if you're anything like us, you've driven past it ten hundred times, and thought to yourself a couple of times 'huh, a touch of Europe on the prairies.  We should go there someday.'  And then you never do.  Well, we made up our minds to check it out, and check it out we did.  And it was quite the thing to behold.

Before I talk at all about the cathedral, though, I'd like to talk about the town.  The town is not kidding. That isn't to say that nobody in the town has a sense of humour, not at all.  It's just to say that there's a marked difference between somewhere like Gravelbourg, and somewhere like Calgary.  Our other trip this summer was down to Calgary to see the Calgary Stampede (the greatest outdoor show on earth), and in Calgary, they are kidding.  For a week every year, the entire city pretends to be a bunch of cowpokes, buckaroos, and hayseeds.  Everyone wears jeans, everyone wears plaid shirts, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats.  And then, as soon as the week's over, all that stuff goes back into mothballs, waiting for the next year to roll around, and Calgarians get back into their uniforms:  Golf shirts and khakis.  Along with black socks and sandals.

But in Gravelbourg, they're not kidding.  It's not just that they're advertised as being french, and they all pretend to be french for a week during "Gravel Days" or whatever.  Nope, they're not messing around with the idea.  You go into stores, and everyone can speak perfect english.  But they also would much rather speak perfect french.  And they're very happy if you speak french to them.

Now, how did that happen?  How on earth did this island of French culture and language survive in the midst of this prairie ocean? Well, I've got my theories, and I think that if you're tempted to check it out, check it out soon, because there's no guarantee that it'll be around for forever.

The Cathedral.  Oh my.  It's immense.  It's colossal.  And it's spectacular.  And it's in the middle of nowhere.  It was built and the town around it, complete with convent and schools, according to the vision of Pere Gravel, the priest of the town.  The guy whose vision set it up.  It seems so strange to me to even have the thing there in the first place.  It's the sort of building that belongs in a much bigger centre, right?  Why put a cathedral in the middle of nowhere?

Well, Pere Gravel had a dream, a vision.  He saw not a town, he saw a community.  We feel as though a cathedral with that level of magnificence belongs in a larger centre because we know what we know about churches: That on an average week, about ten percent of Christians will be in church on Sunday morning.  And it'll pretty much be the same ten percent.  And so we figure that to support a cathedral, you have to have an awful lot of people around to make a go of it.

But imagine, if you will, a community in which it's a small centre, with a much bigger commitment.  Imagine, if you will, a community in which the people are bound together by their faith, and it touches their lives.  I get the feeling that there's a reason why Gravelbourg has hung together as well as it has, despite being French in the middle of english Canada.  Because they were knit together with purpose and vision.  And this highlights the problem that they're encountering, which is the problem encountering communities, and churches, all over this great nation of ours.

La Jeunesse.

Or, in english, the young people.  A number of times, in the town of Gravelbourg, people told us that the cathedral is great, the town is wonderful, but the young folks of today just aren't into it.  They don't show up for church, and they can't wait to leave Gravelbourg.  The cathedral, as great and wonderful as it is, is incredibly fragile, as fragile as any of the vacant churches that dot the prairies, and there are a lot of them.  Every small town, every community had a church, and for the most part, they're boarded up and vacant.  And that's the fate that awaits the cathedral in Gravelbourg as well, if not immediately, then sometime soon.  And when the cathedral folds, I get the feeling that the rest of the town will as well.  All churches everywhere pretty much are having a problem with 'la jeunesse,' and the small towns are a bellweather for what will be happening in the future with bigger centres.  We, as of now, in mainline churches, inherit Christians who move into the big cities.  But what do we do with the young folks?  Without them, the churches in small towns become boarded up, and crumble to dust.  We get smug in bigger centres, thinking that it's a small town problem, but guess what. It isn't.  Churches close every day, all day, for one prime reason:  The church in question finds out that it is realistically only one generation away from losing everything.

The big churches, the mainline churches, the small churches, the country churches, it's all the same thing.  You're only one generation away from losing it all.  The unbroken legacy of faith that has stretched back to the time of Christ and his apostles, the faith that survived the massive persecutions of the roman empire, the faith that spread past the borders of the middle east, that withstood the caliphate onslaught at the battle of Tours, the faith that survived the relentless attempts from every side to quash and destroy it, that faith has found it's greatest foe.  Apathy.

You and I have a profound responsibility.  As churches close, as they empty, we have a chance to fight this last and greatest foe.  We have a chance to confront apathy, and shake the world out of its sloth, out of its complacency, before it's too late.  We have a chance to say to the masses who make up our church population on paper, yet who are far too busy to ever show up, we have a chance to say to them
"This still matters.  This is still important.  This faith of yours still has life and strength and power and authority.  It's not a relic trapped in the past, it still has something really important to say to you here and now.  It talks about the human condition, about life and death, good and evil, failure and redemption, everlasting glory and the secret desires of the human heart.  Those things haven't changed as long as there have been people, but we assume that they have.  But here we are, living in the same world, with the same problems.  Take the yoke of Christ upon you, and learn from him, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light."

You may not believe me, but either way, head into see the church in Gravelbourg before it's a museum.  Head in to see it alive and full of life and music.  See the murals whilst the vaulted ceilings fill with words as old as civilization.  And if you think it won't happen, take a look at the churches in europe that have become condominiums, or the churches in Quebec that have become the same.  Or the churches in small town saskatchewan that have become museums as well, this is happening right in our own backyards, because we're living in the last believing generation.

But we always have been.  Remember that we are, forget your thought about how the church will always be there, and treat the church, your church, as something worth saving.

PJ.

Victimless crimes

In my sermon on Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time talking about the idea that the real problem in the world is you, the individual sinner.

Sorry, let me back up a bit.  You, as the individual sinner, probably aren't the biggest problem in the world.  In the same way as you, average joe polluter, aren't the biggest polluter in the world.  If you think about the immensity of the world, and how much carbon dioxide people toss up into the atmosphere, you may think that your piddling amount of carbon is really not that impressive or that big of a deal.

But the issue is not how much do other people pollute, the issue is what can you do about it?  You can spend your whole life worrying about how much other people pollute and waiting for them to fix it, or you can do something about the only polluter you can fix.  And that would be you.

It's the same with sin.  We spend a lot of time worrying about what the biggest problem in the world is today.  And for many of us, it's something that other people do.  Internet pornography, or rude kids, or the wars oveseas, or extremism, or rampant avarice, or the jazz music.

But the problem is, and always has been, that the Christian faith doesn't lend itself well to that kind of approach.  It's not as straightforward as all that.  The thing about the Christian belief is it's not an instruction manual for what everyone else is doing wrong.  That would be easy, and fun, but it wouldn't be Christianity.  But that's pretty much how we as Christians approach it.   We treat the Bible, God, everything about the whole thing, as a big long list that tells everyone else what they're doing wrong.  But there's a significant snag with that.  That's how everyone else approaches it too.  And if everyone on earth seriously believed that the problem with everything was everyone else, well, we'd be at a bit of an impasse.  And are you ready for the horrible truth of it?

We are.

If you wonder why the world is in such a rummy spot, well, this is sort of why.  Because everyone, deep down, believes that the real problem is the speck in the eyes of others.  And if something is ever going to change, then it's up to someone else, usually everyone else, to fix that.  Well, Jesus talks a bit about that, talks about it in terms of, as you may have guessed, specks and logs.  

3“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? 4“Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? 5“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5, NASB.

Yes.  We hear this, but how rarely do we apply this to not just us, but what is wrong with the world today in general.  Yes, there are some thing we shouldn't do, and some things that we know are trouble, but let's give ourselves some pause for thought.  There's a real good chance you think of sin the way I do.  You think of sin as something you do that hurts someone else.  It's sort of like sports penalties:  You're way more likely to get a penalty, or a more severe penalty, if someone gets hurt.  If there's blood.  And this thinking spills over into any sort of discussion of sin at all:  As long as nobody gets hurt, as long as nobody bleeds or cries, it's okay.  It's a victimless crime.

And so all the stuff we do that is dishonest, or cruel, the stuff we do that is petty, that is vindictive, those thoughts, those emotions, those words we have that are spiteful or wrathful, as long as nobody gets hurt, then there's no problem, right? The real problem with the world is out there somewhere, because we're not really doing anything wrong.

But here's something to think about:  If you can't find a victim in your crimes, then guess what: You're looking in the wrong place.  It reminds me of a very nerdy episode of a very nerdy show:  Doctor Who - Snakedance.

(A ceremonial helmet with a crest of five faces is on a display stand.)
AMBRIL: Now take this, for example. It dates from the middle Sumaran era and unusually is mentioned quite specifically in the Legend. Oh, there can be no doubt. The reference is to the Six Faces of Delusion. Now count. One, two, three, four, five. You will observe there are five faces, not six as the Legend would have it. Now, my point is this. I do find it quite extraordinarily difficult to take seriously a Legend that cannot even count accurately. Of course, artistically speaking, it's an entirely different matter. The piece is exquisite. An undoubted masterpiece.
DOCTOR: What is it?
AMBRIL: Hmm? Headdress.
DOCTOR: Try it on.
AMBRIL: What?
DOCTOR: Try it on.
AMBRIL: Certainly not. Whatever for?
DOCTOR: Please. I want to show you something, then I'll go and leave you in peace.
AMBRIL: Very well.
(Ambril puts on the headdress.)
AMBRIL: Well?
DOCTOR: Now, count the faces again.
AMBRIL: Do as he says.
CHELA: One, two, three, four, five.
DOCTOR: And one makes six. The sixth Face of Delusion is the wearer's own. That was probably the idea, don't you think?
AMBRIL: Get out! Go on, get out!

We spend a lot of time looking for victims that we hurt with our sin, and sometimes, most of the times, that victim is us.  What we find is that in every way, in every decision we make, we enter more and more into the process of changing ourselves.  Your sin begins as something you do that you know you shouldn't.  It ends by becoming a part of you, which is what makes it so hard to repent of.  After a while, you feel like you are being called upon to repent of being yourself.  You have been changed by your sin so much, you were so much of the victim, that you never noticed that you were changing from being you to becoming your sin.

But there is good news, of course.  You may ask what is left after your sin has been taken away.  You may ask what remains once your sin has been dropped off and your goodness can shine through. Well, what remains is the real you.  The you that was always good, the you that God died for. More you than you can be right now, so clouded and turned by your sin that you are. God came to earth to make you perfect.  To forgive you of your sins, even and especially the ones that are hard to repent of.  Because you commit them against yourself.

PJ.