Much grace. Very wow.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday was the one in which Jesus gets as close as he gets to being genuinely offensive.  He gets as close as he gets to being upsetting.  And normally, what we're used to is Jesus being offensive in a particular way, offensive to the Pharisees, calling them whitewashed tombs.  Offensive to the Chief Priests, calling them a brood of vipers.  Offensive to those who figured
that they had it all together, and that they had no real need for God even in their faith.  They figured that God had no place in their faith, which is where an awful lot of American Evangelical Christianity is headed, really. You know, when people say that the Bible is the most important book in the entire world, but have zero idea of its contents?  Yeah, that one.

And yet, in this case, Jesus talks to a nice Caananite woman who asks him for help.  And the disciples tell Jesus to send her away, to be done with her.  She's bugging them, she's in the way, she's loud, she's insistent, and she has real needs.  And the disciples say to Jesus - 'send her away!'  Get rid of this loud, yappy woman!  Send her away for she follows us and bothers us!

And so Jesus tells this woman that he has been sent to the lost sheep of Israel.  Simple statement, really.  He has not been sent to the Caananites, and tells her as much.  So she continues to pester him, continuing to say 'help me, Lord!'  And so Jesus replies that it is not right to take the children's bread, and throw it to the dogs.

Ouch.

You really can't read that a whole bunch of ways.  You can't read that and think, 'no, Jesus wasn't really calling this woman a dog.'  Wasn't he?  Are you sure?  We're part of a church that believes and confesses that, among other things 'is means is,' and yet dog doesn't mean dog?  Yes it does.  It really
does.  You can almost hear the air being sucked out of the room, when Jesus looks this woman full in the face, and tells her that she is a dog.  Oh wow.

Not nice, for a guy who is known as being meek and mild, is it?  Not nice at all.  And why oh why would he look at this woman and call her a dog?  Why would he look at her, straight at her, and call her a dog, and say, essentially, that she is unworthy of the good grace that Jesus would lavish on the people of Israel?

Well, maybe Jesus wasn't the first one that day to treat her like a dog.

Yes, our eyes stop traditionally at the words of Jesus there, saying to this woman that she is a dog, and rightly so.  But there is more to it than that, for the disciples who were there, who saw this Caananite woman, they used words and language that they would use for someone really unimportant.  Someone who was essentially beneath them.  Sort of like a yappy dog.  They told Jesus to send this woman away, tell this dog to get lost already!  Get her out of here, and quit wasting our time, quit taking up our space.   And the disciples have done this other times too, mainly with children, telling the parents of the children to get those kids out of there, and to quit cluttering up the savior.  And Jesus responds to the children in the same way as he does with the Caananite woman, which is by showing them as an example of faith to the dismissive disciples.

Isn't that crazy.  Jesus tells her that she's a dog, which she is, according to the disciples anyway, a yappy, insignificant presence that should be shooed away while the grownups are talking, and she replies with 'yes, yes I am a dog, and yes, all I can hope for is to eat the crumbs that fall on the floor.  Which is why I'm begging.'

Great is your faith, woman!  Great is your faith as someone who has been told that she is a dog, and she responds and says that she is, and is begging at the feet of the Lord.  And it is this that so many other people fail to understand.  For in reality, the only one who deserves the bread of God's grace, the bread of heaven, the bread of salvation, is Jesus Christ himself.  He is the only one, the only son of God, who has a seat at the table.  The rest of us don't have a seat at that table.  We don't get a spot.  And when we approach the throne of God's grace, when we approach the banquet hall and jump up on the table, it's as though we are dogs, leaping up to steal the bread off the table.  The yappy, pushy, drooly dogs who steal food from the children.  And most of us fall into that category, and so too did the disciples.  They fell into that category as well, and all of us would hate to be put into that camp. We wouldn't just be offended for the woman, but also for us.  We are all collectively offended on our own behalf with the reality that it isn't right that we would be seen as begging dogs.

But we are.  We all are. The sooner you get over that, the better it will be.  The sooner you get over the fact that you don't deserve the food at the table, the easier it will be to accept the food that is given to you.  For the Caananite woman, the disciples, the Pharisees, the Saducees, the Chief Priests, the scribes, and you, you're all begging at that table.  None of you are the children who deserve the bread.  And it is only through understanding that, that any bread is given.  Any dog, cat, any type of animal who believe that they deserve a seat at the table are perpetually chased away.  The more you force your
way to that table, the less likely it will be that you will be admitted.  The disciples seem to forget that quite often, believing that they deserve a spot, and that they are the children who deserve the seat at the table.  But they forgot their real status as beggars, in the same way as the Pharisees and chief Priests did.  That was their biggest problem, was that they were so into God that they had no need for him.  They had no need for his forgiveness and love, because they had earned their reward by themselves, at least in their own minds.

But the reality of the Christian church is that we are all beggars hoping for scraps.  We are all dogs beneath the table, none of us deserve God's grace, none of us get to walk straight up to the front and sit down at the best spot.  As Jesus says at another moment that when invited to a feast, you shouldn't take the best place of honor, because you will almost certainly be moved down the bench in shame.  Instead, you ought to take the seat of least honor, so you can be moved up.  And yes, the lowest of all places is on the floor.  Begging.

We all beg from God.  We all beg because we have no health in us, we are sinful by nature and cannot redeem ourselves.  We have erred and strayed by our own fault, by our own most greivous fault.  There is nothing we can hang onto of our own merits that will bring us up to that table. So we beg.  And God gives.

Through Christ, the riches of God are poured out upon us.  We are adopted as children through Baptism, given bread and wine at the table in communion, and given forgiveness of sins through the cross.  And, to quote the book of Romans:

 'For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.  

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, 

so you live in fear again, rather the Spirit you received brought about your

 adoption to sonship.  And by him we cry 'Abba, Father.'  

The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.  

Now if we are children, then we are heirs.  Heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.'

Romans 8:14-17a

This is why we have a spot at that table.  Because we have been adopted into God's holy family through the suffering and death of Christ.  Any time that you feel as though you are offended if Jesus were to call you a beggar at the table, remember that that is exactly what you are.  A fed beggar, a satisfied beggar, an adopted beggar, but ruin comes upon you, the nation of Israel, the scribes the chief priests, the elders of the people, when they forget where they came from.  It's merit all right.  Christ's merit.

PJ.

The perfect storm

Here's the thing.

We figure that we're a pretty advanced people.  We're a pretty smart bunch, who have control over a whole bunch of things. We are able to figure stuff out, do math, have calculators and tvs, use computers and the world wide web, all that stuff is wonderful and great.  And we fall back on that stuff because we have spent
our entire lives standing on the shoulders of giants.  Every generation learns a bit more than the one before, which is why a century ago, people were mainly riding in steam locomotives, and now there are essentially none.  We have advanced to a time in which even things like fax machines are seeming to be horribly out of date, and so we have a bit of a snooty attitude about the people who lived in the past as though they were a bunch of dummies.  Which they were, obviously, but probably not any worse than the dummies who live today.  

For the thing is, that for all our science and advancement, we still haven't figured out how to make sure that storms stop when we want them to stop.  As advanced as we are, we are still subject to the whims of the weather.  We can't stop any of that nonsense.  And when it comes to that, the people who live right on the land, whose lives and livelihoods are tied to the land and the weather, they know it much better than we who are sedentary city dwellers do.  

I know that we look down on the people of the Bible as being bottom dwelling bronze age goatherders, but honestly, the disciples would have been savvier about the weather, and related issues, than I am.  What do I do when it rains?  I go inside, and I wait for it to stop (or I ride my bike, one of the two), and that's what I do every time.  And beyond a slight scheduling inconvenience, that's as bad as it gets.  But the disciples, especially Peter, Andrew, James and John, they knew what it was to be in a storm.  They knew what it was like to be tossed by the wind and the waves.  For them, there was to be no retreating back into a house, no hopping in the car and turning on the wipers, if they were out on a boat, they were going to have to wrestle against the storm just to get safely back to shore.

This is what makes the miracle of Jesus walking on the water as important as it was.  Because it happened right before people who really knew what it would mean.  The men who were desperately rowing against the
storm knew they were in trouble, and knew, quite clearly, that they were unable to do anything to change it.  All they could do was to work within the rules that they had been given, but could do nothing to change the situation that they were in at the time.  

And there comes Jesus, walking to them upon the waves. Doing what was clearly impossible for human beings to do.  Strolling towards the boat calmly, as though nothing was wrong.  And he approached the disciples, he did so with assured, demonstrated mastery over the elements of earth.  And he walked towards the disciples, who thought he was a ghost.  

And it was at that moment that Simon Peter asked Jesus that if it was truly him, that he should command Peter to walk across the waves to him.  And Jesus commanded it.  So Peter got out of the boat.  And this is where things started to go wrong for Peter.

Peter, walking towards his Lord on the waves, when he saw the wind and the waves, and the storm, began to sink.  He began to sink because he knew, as any good sailor does, that walking on the waves is impossible.  And knowing that, he began to sink.  He took his eyes, his attention, his focus, and his faith off of Jesus, and placed all that on the waves and the wind and the sea.  And then he tried to hold himself up, eventually realizing that he couldn't.

And if you start to sink, you start to drown.  And drowning, well, it's a major problem, and a difficult thing to rescue people from.  For you see, if someone is drowning, and they start to sink, then the worst thing to do is to swim out to them and rescue them just on your own..  They'll drag you down extremely quickly, and try to use you as a life raft.  All they can think of is trying to survive, trying to take the next breath, trying to make sure they'll survive the trip to shore.  And they will grab onto whatever they possibly can, in order to use it to survive.  And this is why we can't swim out to each other!  We're all in the same sea.  We're all in the same storm, and obviouly none of us can make the storms cease just by speaking.  It's not possible for us. The best way to rescue someone from drowning is to have feet firmly planted on the ground, and toss them something that will help, something like a pole or a rope, but if they're too far away, then how on earth can you get out to them?  

Well, when Jesus was walking on the water, he was showing a couple of things.  First of all, his mastery over all the elements as the eternal God who made heaven and earth, who set the limits for the seas, and so on.  He showed himself to be the same as the God who calmed the storm in Jonah's day, the same God who parted the Red Sea, and the River Jordan, the same God who made it rain in Noah's day, and stopped that same rain after 40 days.  But he also showed that this is the God who, whether incarnate as a man or not, is
not tied up and tied down and dragged under by the storms and waves that afflict us.  This the the issue behind Jesus as a savior, is that he isn't subject to the same whims and whiles as we are as human beings.  He is the only one who can rescue us from where we are drowning in our own personal storms, because he's the only one who is not pulled under by these storms.  He comes to us, walks across the surface of the storm, walks to us above the turmoil, above the weeds that drag you down, above the riptide that drags you out, and as your strength falters and you can't take one more breath, He reaches out, plucks you out of the water, places you in the boat, and makes the storm to cease. 

And then he says something very simple.  The same thing he says to all of us.  The same thing he says to all of us when the storms seem very real, when death and disaster and calamity and fire and pestilence and unemployment and financial desperation surround us, he says something very simple.

'O you of little faith.  Why did you doubt?'

When we see the grace and strength and power of God, the power to transcend any and all storms of our lives, the power to go beyond what is making us sink and plummet, the power to go beyond what is causing us to disappear beneath the waves, the power to rise above it all, and to pull us out of it.  This is what Jesus continues to say to you now, you know.  As the storms rise all around you, as you look to the wind and the waves and begin to panic, as the water rises and it's all you can do to just keep your lips above the surface of the water, and that's when you need to keep your eyes on the one who doesn't sink.  All your struggling, all your waving of arms and tilting of your head has accomplished nothing.  That's when you absolutely have to keep your eyes on the Christ who is above it all, the only one who can save, the only one who can rescue.  He can rescue because he's not part of the same system we are, he is in the world but not of the world.  And so the wind, the waves, the turmoil, the struggle, the seaweed and death itself, no longer has any dominion over him.


PJ.

Scare-city

For those of you who don't know, my mother is a numismatist.  And as a numismatist, she would frequently have people stop by with their treasured family heirloom coins which were old as dirt, and they'd expect them to be incredibly valuable.  Unfortunately, for most of the people who bring stuff in, they find out that what they're bringing in is as common as dirt, too.  For counterintuitively, the age of a coin doesn't determine its value.  The value of coins is determined by the value of everything else - rarity.  If a coin is rare, it is worth money.  If it is common, it is essentially worthless.  For example, here is a canadian coin that is worth $253,000.  It is a penny from 1936.  And it's only worth so much because there is a tiny dot under the date.  Most of the pennies from that date don't have that dot.  Only three of them are known to exist.  That's why it's expensive.

Now coins, as I said, are like everything else.  They're like everything else in that cost is based on scarcity.  If something is common enough.  If it is rare, it is expensive.  So something like water, or air, is tough to market, since it is all over the place all the time, and therefore is incredibly thrifty.  The only time that changes is when you enter into a marketplace in which that item is limited, and hard to find.  Then scarcity dictates that the cost goes way up.  Think for a moment about the disastrous Woodstock '99, in which the scarcity of things like pizza and water made the cost balloon up to $12 for pizza and $4 for a half litre of water.  In 1999 dollars.  This sort of price gouging is only possible if
there is relative scarcity, which dictates that the thing you wouldn't pay a penny for at a restaurant now

suddenly makes sense at Woodstock.  And of course, we all know the most flagrant offender, which is movie theatre snacks.  The sign up at the movie theatre says that you can't bring any outside food or drink into the theatre, which makes sense, because if you could, then nobody would ever buy movie theatre popcorn or drinks.  Because they're incredibly expensive.  They cost about 12 times what they're worth, and the only way you could possibly get away with charging that much money for them is if you had no other choice, which is exactly the point.   If you want a reasonable snack available from the movie theater, then you're going to have to sneak stuff in, by strapping it to yourself, or by putting it illicitly in your purse, or whatever.  The staff and owners know that if they give you the choice, you're going to buy a two litre bottle of pepsi from the supermarket, instead of the small pepsi from the movie theatre, probably for a comprable price.

This notion of scarcity is what drove the Gospel reading from Sunday.  The reading in which Jesus feeds the five thousand.  And he feeds them in a very specific area.  He feeds them in a desolate place where he had retreated to after hearing about the death of his cousin, John the Baptist.  Upon hearing that his cousin had been slain by Herod, Jesus retreated in sadness into a desolate place, but the crowds followed him.  And what do you know about desolate places?  Well, what do you know about Woodstock '99?  You know that there was scarcity, it was a desolate place, and therefore people could charge insane, absurd amounts for their products, and people had to pay it.  And after the crowd had been with Jesus all day, they were hungry.  And Jesus was faced with a famished crowd, and a desolate environment in which to feed them.  And then, upon asking if there was any food around, he was informed that they had five loaves and two fish.

The food that they had, at that point, was extremely scarce.  Five loaves, two fish, for a crowd of five thousand men, plus women and children.  There were that many people to feed with this amount of food, and given all that, it would be incredibly easy to sell the loaves and the fish to the highest bidder, to sell them for max money, and make a reasonably generous profit.  And for the disciples as well, men
who made their living selling fish, men who wanted the highest value for the fish they brought in, Peter, Andrew, James and John would have spent their entire lives waiting for a situation like this, in which they could sell a relatively meager catch for big bucks.

But what Jesus does is not to feed himself, not to feed his closest companions, what Jesus does is to essentially put an end to scarcity itself.  He takes a limited resource, a finite resource, something that does not have enough to go around, and makes it unlimited.  The loaves and fish which would have commanded a hefty price moments ago, now were without price, without cost, because they had been so successfully multiplied.  It wasn't just as though the people were fed, but they managed to collect basket after basket of leftovers afterwards.  There was no scarcity, there was no want.

This echoes the sentiment found in the Old Testament reading, that we ought to come to the land that God has prepared, that we ought to go to a land that is overflowing with milk and honey, that is brimming with abundance.  The reading tells us to come and buy without price, and without cost, to not spend our work on what does not satisfy.  And most importantly, it tells us to partake of what has been prepared for us from before the foundation of the world.  Not just in terms of food to be eaten, but to suggest to us that for the first time ever, since the creation of everything, that scarcity itself could be beaten.

Scarcity governs everything we do in this modern world.  We live and die by it.  We spend our lives working with dwindling resources, we spend our days thinking about and pondering the fact that our resources are running out.  We are running out of oil, food, water, aerable land, and all sorts of other resources that are vanishing before our eyes.  And the greatest resource of all, time, is similarly running out.  We are running out of time to do things.  Our lives are goverened by the clock, by the calendar, by birthdays which come and go and leave us with a sense of lethargic depression as time ebbs on, and as we run out of it.  There is more sand in the bottom of the hourglass than at the top.  But the presence of Christ at the feeding of the five thousand reminds us that what he came to beat was scarcity itself.  When he says to us that he came so we may have life, and have it abundantly, he isn't joking.  He came that the whole concept of things running out, of there not being enough, that great curse laid upon the world when Adam and Eve sinned, that they would not have enough and would have to work to stay alive, all that was flipped upside down with the presence of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who takes limited resources, and multiplies them abundantly, beyond what anyone could possibly consume.

It's good news for us.  Good news for us who live in a finite world that is running down.  Good news for us who are people who are habitually running out of time, who get to the end of the paycheque before the end of the month, who find themselves worked into a corner and who never have enough of

anything to go around, who are squabbling over oil and water, who have to sneak food into movie theatres, who have to scrounge and fight for what remains, it's good news to ponder that we worship a God whose idea of paradise involves a removal not just of scarcity, but of the concept of scarcity.

For heaven is a place where all tears are wiped away, and there will be no more suffering.  How can there be no sin in heaven and yet we have free will?  If there is no scarcity.  No want.  If there is no division created between us by what we have vs what we want.  If you will, it's a lot like that movie 'the gods must be crazy,' in which things were fine until a coke bottle fell out of the sky, and then all of a sudden, there was something that only one person could have.  It was a very useful thing, but very limited.  And everyone wanted it.  Before that, there was no scarcity.  After that, there was.  And so the plot of the film revolved around the attempt to be rid of the 'evil thing' forever.  To return to a time before scarcity.  A time in which there was nothing to desire, because there was nothing that was not abundant.  The only thing they were lacking was an abundance of time, eternity.  And that is what Christ gives us through his work on the cross.  He redresses scarcity, shows us that there is a promise of abundance, and finally gives us an abundance of life, life everlasting.  Each of these miracles that he performs shows us the same thing - that he is working to undo the curses which brought shortages, of life, of time of food and drink, and gives us his abundant grace, an abundance of resources, an abolishment of want, and eternity with which to enjoy it.


PJ.