God’s Dream

It’s not often that I feel the need to share an entire Sunday morning’s teaching, but this is one of those times, with only a few edits from this morning’s spoken version, including this preamble.

Today, the last Sunday of November, is Reign of Christ Sunday, or Christ the King Sunday. It is seen as the culmination of the church year. Many of us clergy, in the United Church of Canada, at least, have trouble with this day. Christ as King of my heart is acceptable to me, but Christ as King in a colonializing way is not. (For an example of that teaching, have a peek at this.)

Next week is the first Sunday of Advent, when we start thinking about the baby Jesus once again. But here, today, at the end of the liturgical year, we are supposed to be celebrating Christ the King, the King of the Universe, the King of our hearts, the King of Kings. But that is far from what Jesus wanted. Jesus never wanted to sit on a golden throne, crowned with anything but that crown of thorns, which was a joke of the Roman soldiers, and an instrument of torture.

One of my school friends once said that this is the day when we “celebrate the undereducated, blue-collar, nomadic, brown, king of an upside-down kingdom”. Definitely brown. We forget that. We imagine a blonde Mary, and a blue-eyed baby in the manger. But no. Definitely brown.

We can get too enamoured of Jesus the King, sitting in heaven. Religious people through the centuries believed God was “up there” sitting on a cloud. Consequently many people in our society, if they think of God at all, still imagine God to be elsewhere, uninvolved, other than to judge. But Jesus is not that kind of king.

Our Gospel reading today, in Matthew 25, starts out with the Son of Man coming, in his glory, it says, with angels and a throne. And everyone in all the world gathers together to hear what the King has to say.

In this story, Jesus, the King, divides everyone into two groups. He blessed one group, the group that saw the King when he was hungry and thirsty, and fed him. They noticed him when he was a stranger, a refugee, a new person in town, and welcomed him. When they saw him naked and poor, they gave him clothes to wear. They visited him in the hospital, and in prison.

The people could not believe that the King was saying this. When, oh when, was the King EVER hungry or thirsty, or new in town, or naked, or in the hospital or in prison?The answer came back quickly. Whenever they saw ANYONE hungry or thirsty or new in town, or naked or in the hospital or in prison, that person was the King.

God, the Divine, the Source of All, the King above all Kings, was not sitting on a throne in the sky, far off, and remote. God, the Divine, the Source of All, the King above all Kings sits beside you at the doctor’s office, stands in line with you at the Post Office at Christmas, and walks Queen Street with cap in hand asking for a bit of change.

Jesus insisted that every life mattered to God — that we could see Divinity in the face of anyone around us. Those who are hungry… those who are thirsty… those who are lonely… those who don’t have enough… they all matter deeply to God. That is where God is.

These days few people think about coming to church to worship or to learn about the Sacred. As I’ve said on many occasions in the past year or so, more people are seeking God in Nature than in churches. And why is that? Maybe the answer can be found in the words of Isaiah, in chapter 58.

It says it is a message for the people of Israel. Keep that thought in the back of your mind today, but I want you to hear this as a message to Church people, a message to Christendom. We live in a world where Christian nationalist governments say they want to let God rule their countries.

What is happening in the United States is only part of the broader picture. There’s also Russia, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, etc. Before the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington, people gathered to pray around a heavy rough hewn cross, hugging Bibles to their chests, and waving “Jesus saves” flags, before marching with their weapons toward the Capitol. A CNN article from last year quotes author Kristin Kobes Du Mez as saying that “White Christian nationalist beliefs have infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career.” I am so grateful to be part of the United Church of Canada, about to say what I am saying today.

Christian Nationalism is so strong in the United States that the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, in a recent interview on Fox News, said: “Someone asked me today in the media,… what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it — that’s my worldview.” “The danger,” wrote one journalist, “is that Johnson will follow the Bible, and not the Constitution.”

So, back to Isaiah 58, where it says, starting in verse 2, that “day after day, you worship [God] and seem eager to learn his teachings. You act like a nation that wants to do right by obeying his laws. You ask him about justice, and say you enjoy worshiping the Lord. You wonder why the Lord pays no attention when you go without eating and act humble. But on those same days that you give up eating, you think only of yourselves and abuse your workers…. Is this really what he wants on a day of worship?”

Isaiah goes on to say that real worship is setting free those who have been treated unjustly. Real worship is sharing food with hungry people. Real worship even involves inviting the homeless into your own home, and giving your clothes to those in need. “Then your light will shine in the dark; your darkest hour will be like the noonday sun.”

It’s hard, if we look at policies of those Christian Nationalist governments, to find examples of justice, compassion, and care. It’s much easier to imagine a God of vengeance on the throne, than an undereducated, blue-collar, nomadic, brown, king of an upside-down kingdom, ruling those countries.

I don’t want you to think that I am only thinking about governments in what I am saying today. The United Church of Canada emphasizes justice, compassion and care, on the larger scale. But in our smaller churches, when we are afraid that our doors will close, we often spend more time thinking about how to keep the church going and the lights on, than we spend helping the hungry or thirsty, the new in town, the naked, or the people in the hospital or in prison.

If God were making a Christmas list, if Jesus was describing God’s dream for the world, it would not be a wish for full church buildings. It would be a wish for a group of people wanting to change the world through justice and compassion. It would be a wish for a group of people wanting to care for the Earth as well as the poor. It would be a wish for everyone connected with any church to be going out, into the streets and neighbourhoods, making their worship real through justice, and through sharing food, housing, and clothes.

Right now, too many people think that all God wants is for us to obey the laws of the Old Testament. They see a Christianity in the news that is far from what Jesus called for. They see churches that follow tradition behind closed doors, when Jesus wants them to see love, outside, on the streets, and in the neighbourhoods. “Then,” Isaiah said, “your light will shine in the dark.” Then people will see what the Kingdom really is, or should be. That is God’s dream. That is Jesus’ dream. Not church buildings or Sunday School programs, or Christian governments. But love, mercy, justice, kindness, compassion, and care.

James Webb, Palestine, “Waste Canvas”, and What We Think We Know

It’s a rainy November Saturday. My husband and I decided to spend part of the morning sharing what we were watching or listening to. I shared a podcast episode from the Ezra Klein show. The web page describes the episode thus:

“This is a conversation about the relationship between Jewishness and the Jewish State. About believing some aspects of Israel have become indefensible and also believing that Israel itself must be defended. About what it means when a religion built on the lessons of exile creates a state that inflicts exile on others. About the ugly, recurrent reality of antisemitism.”

I have listened to this twice now. Ezra Klein interviews Rabbi Sharon Brous regarding her September 25, 2023 sermon, which predates the horrors of the current war in Israel and Palestine, by a matter of days. In the interview, she explains how what we think we know is based more on our own experience than on any continuing solid fact, how American Jews are keenly feeling their kinship to Israeli Jews, how antisemitism has touched them in places they had previously felt were safe.

And for her, as for me, comes the uncomfortable awareness that the ancient scriptures say to love your neighbour. For a people whose religion is founded on the story of exile to be exiling and harming those very neighbours … well, as she says, right now they are grieving. Right now they are terrified. But that does not negate the foundations of their faith; it only highlights the ethics, the paradox, the hard hard questions.

After that, we watched a video about the James Webb telescope, and how the newest views of Deep Space question the idea of the Big Bang, because the telescope has found galaxies and star systems that were fully formed far too soon. This, the video says, is like looking at a photo of someone you know should have been a baby at the time of the photo, only to learn that person was already adult when the photo was taken.

Our ideas of what the universe looks like have changed so much since Einstein. Now, for most of us, what we learned since then feels like fact, rather than theory. But, again, what we think we know to be true may not be true at all.

As we watched and listened, I was stitching on a project I’ve be working on for a year. I have inherited yarns, embroidery floss, aida cloth, and hoops of all sizes. Wanting a tiny portable project, I dug into my supplies, and began a freestyle piece based on what I found there, with no pattern beyond the developing picture in my imagination. By spring, the tree was complete, and strand by strand, the morning sun brightened the sky into dawn.

I have long used craft work to focus my mind — embroidering through high school classes and irritating university professors with the click click of my knitting needles. One day this spring, I was stitching away at a meeting, when a woman commented that I was using “waste canvas.” Pardon me? What did you say?

Waste canvas, she explained, is used when one wants to cross stitch onto regular fabric. You stitch through both the canvas and the garment, for example, and then remove the waste canvas by washing the item. “If you wash that,” she said, pointing to my beautiful creation, “all that will be left will be a tangle of string!”

She knew it was Waste Canvas because of the blue lines. I hadn’t cared about the blue counting lines because I planned to cover every inch with colour. No blue would show. I’d never heard of “waste” canvas. My heart sank. I was faced with the choice of tossing the whole thing, or continuing, knowing what I now knew. Since then I have been vigilant, protective of this vulnerable piece of art.

Today, as I listened and stitched, I thought about how so many things we think are true just aren’t. Rabbi Brous expresses the conflict I too feel about Israel becoming the oppressor, but she holds a depth of historical trauma that I will never experience. Potato famine is nothing by comparison. I listened and stitched, and felt these words rising. What else in my world is not as I believed? What “truths” are morphing into new realizations with each new day?

From a war on the other side of the world, to the far distant beginnings of the Universe, so many things become other than we expected when we look more closely. And so it is, regarding Waste Canvas. Turns out, the woven strings of the canvas don’t actually dissolve. The warp and woof of the material is made sturdy by a dissolvable glue. Once wet, the strings can be pulled away with tweezers, an exacting and exhausting task.

There’s no way that my piece will become a tangle of colourful thread. The glue may be gone, but the stitches are so dense that nothing could pull it apart. At least that’s the story as I understand it now. But with reality tending to dissolve on closer inspection, one never knows for sure.

Black Ash Baskets

“It’s not enough to simply find black ash; it has to be the right one – a tree ready to be a basket…. Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for the harvest. Sometimes the answer is no…. If consent is granted, a prayer is made and tobacco is left as a reciprocating gift.”

If I were a black ash, the answer has been no. Just no. And yet there has been a theme of late, of letting go. The moon, the planets, the time of life. Let go.

No! Or, why? Mostly why. The Cutter has asked permission to cut, without explaining the purpose. Does not Creator know that asking permission includes explanation? And so, my Heart, my Soul, my Tree Self has said no, again and again until today.

This is the week of New Moon in Scorpio…. after months of messages of a Great Let Go. My Tree Self waits, expectant – but no explanation, until today. There’s something about today….

Today my shoulder blade said, Let go. You are shouldering too much. Let go. Today my reflexologist said there’s a lot going on in your solar plexus, your heart and your throat. Today I drew a card, her gift to me – “I surrender it all.” I gesture toward my solar plexus. My solar plexus winks. Today I draw another card, as I usually do, and usually the message of the second card seems unrelated. Not today – today I draw, “Let it go.”

“Tell me, Creator! Tell me! Let go of what?!”

I drive away, holding that question, waiting, wondering. Will Creator answer? I drive, listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s audiobook, Braiding Sweetgrass. The cadence of her voice, the poetry of her words, pull me into the story. She has been to see John Pidgeon, renowned basket maker, for lessons in basket making. She explains that John does not teach basket weaving, with piles of splints supplied and ready. No, “he teaches basket making, beginning with the living tree.”

Choosing the tree, straight and strong. The asking. The consent. The cutting. The carrying home. The pounding. And then the stripping. “The tree’s life is coming off in his hands, layer by layer…. He gestures to the big pile of splint we’ve accumulated. ‘Don’t ever forget that. It’s the whole life of that tree you’ve got piled up there.”

I hear Creator’s voice. “I want to cut you and strip you and make you into baskets. Are you willing?” I see strips of my life peeled off, woven into baskets of words. My whole life piled up. Am I willing? This time, I answer, “Yes!”

  1. Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, p. 143-144.
  2. Ibid., p. 143.
  3. Ibid., p. 145.

On the Threshold of the Unknown

I love this post from the Centre for Action and Contemplation.

We are all in a place of transition, whether we realize it or not. We all stand on a threshold not knowing what is on the other side of this door that is opening in our lives. Every one of us stands with our hand on the door knob.

Sometimes we are holding that door shut with all our strength and intention, but the door will not stay closed. The door will swing open by the wind of Spirit, and each of us will be swept into the Unknown. It’s scary here on the edge of the Unknown. But we will be held through it all, if we allow ourselves to be held. 🫶