June 19, 2016

Sermon:   Our Wrestling and Our Blessing

Prayer:

God forgives, and calls all of us to confess our fears and failings with honesty and humility.
God reconciles,
and calls us to repent the part we have played in damaging our world, ourselves, and each other.
God transforms, and calls us to protect the vulnerable,
to pray for deliverance from evil,
to work with God for the healing of the world,
that all might have abundant life.
We sing of grace

I wrestled with this sermon.  I have written and rewritten this sermon more times this week than any other I have ever written.  The more I wrote, the angrier I got. The more fed up with injustices in the world, the more pessimistic I became.

My plan for today had been to talk about reconciliation … why we are have been having these conversations about Right Relations with Indigenous Peoples, about the hope for the future, possible practical steps forward … looking at the question of … what can we do to work for reconciliation.

And then last Sunday happened.  I hadn’t listened to the news and Mark lifted a prayer for the people affected by the mass shooting in Orlando.  I know that GLBTQ rights are still a work in progress, especially in parts of the United States, but I had allowed myself to slip into comfort, not remembering how dangerous it can be.

As this story continues to dominate the news cycle, we are reminded that the people affected by this are not just the families of the murdered and those who will forever live with the experience of being there.  Members of the LGBTQ community and their allies around the globe have spoken out, naming their fear.

It is an unfortunate reminder for us, that when we pray for “those affected” we have no idea how far that reaches.

It also reminds us that those hurts, that kind of violence and oppression and fear stretch through time.  And that is why we need to do the work of reconciliation.

I am proud to be a part of the United Church, with its history of advocacy for the GLBTQ community.  But I know that support isn’t church wide, and that the work is far from done.

I am equally horrified to be a part of a church with a history that includes residential schools, and systemic violence.  And I carry that responsibility.  Of course I wasn’t there – I didn’t make the decisions or carry out the centuries of acts of oppression, but as a person who feels called to life in the United Church of Canada, I am responsible for making amends.

You hear me talk about our God of love … a lot … That is the tradition I live in, that our God is a God of love. But our christian history is complicated and interpretations varied.  Today we heard two scriptures that give us pause to reflect.

Jacob, one of the twins born to Isaac and Rebekah.  Always striving for more, he tricks his twin Esau out of his birthright and blessing, and has to flee from his brother.  Jacob is not really a good guy. He puts his desire for blessing ahead of his relationship with his family.  And there is a cost for such tretchery.  Jacob is returning home and wants to reconcile with his brother, but he is afraid that his brother will not forgive him.  On the eve of his meeting with Esau, he has gone away from his family and servants, and spends the night wrestling with a man he identifies with God. This passage is short but paints for each of us a pictuer.  We fill in the details that we need to read into this, but at the end of hte wrestle, Jacob demands a blessing of the one he has realized is God.

I think the idea that we can wrestle with God and be changed, in name and in body as Jacob was, is a powerful idea.  Infact, I think anytime we engage with God we can be changed and blessed, but like this all night wrestle,  engaging with God is never easy.  Taking our preconceptions and our biases and allowing the God of Love to wrestle them away, leaving us with only love is a spiritual discipline worth doing.  We will limp away from those experiences, with a fresh view, and most importantly with the blessing of God’s love for us and the opportunity to share that love with the world.

Our reading from Galatians reminds us that we are all one.  That there is no place arbitrary distinctions between peoples, no “us vs them” in our faith.  When we think we are superior to others, we are not living as part of the Body of Christ.  When we allow a society that values our money more than our lives to tell us that we should care more about the distinctions between groups of people based on their culture or sexual orientation, we are swayed away from the community that God calls us to.

Not only do we need to individulaly stand against that thinking, we need to speak against it.  As the church, as canadians … there can be no place for divisiveness in our lives.

And that is why we name our support for the GLBTQ community, why we push our legislators to enact laws to protect them, why we ordain Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and transgenered clergy.

And that is why we work for reconciliation, why we apologize for our history, why we offer welcome and repentance to our Indigenous populations.I see our passage from Galatians lived out in that work.

In the days following the violence in Orlando i saw our faith of unity in the overwhelming calls for calm, the offers of support, the coming together of GLBTQ and Muslim communities over Ramadan meals and Pride Parades.

I saw that scripture lived out the UN Security council condemning the violence, the first time they had done so for a crime against GLBTQ people.

I saw this scirpture lived out first hand with the thousands of people who marched last year at the conclusion of the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, walking together to demand change.

But this passage needs to be more prominent in our faith.  And we need to do a better job of living it out. And that starts with us.

it is not enough to say we want to work for reconciliation … when the Native people are ready to meet us on it, or stop drinking and get their lives together.  Love needs to be offered at to people where they are at, without judgement.

to live out our passage from Galations we can engage, attend a full blanket exercise, or a reading of the UNDRIP (There is one tomorrow night at Christ Church Cathedral on Sparks Street),

learn about the Free the Falls movement here in the city,

and petition leaders to live into their commitment, to enact the TRC recomendations and the UNDRIP

you could attend the Affirm AGM and learn about how the church can welcome and embrace the GLBTQ community intentionally

or attend a pride event – come to the pride parade in August (To watch or to walk) – Pride Parades are often seen as celebrations of sexuality, but really they are a protest, a colourful demand that the GLBTQ community have safe places to live and love.

reach out to people you know in the Indigenous or GLBTQ community and tell them you love them for who they are.

I saw a couple of post online this week in the wake of the Orlando shooting.  One said “this is what hating the sin looks like” Recognizing the approach so many churches take which says Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin, it draws attention to the fact that that isn’t Christian. Because living love is never sin, but saying we are better than another person is sin.

Because in Christ, we are all one.

And when one of us hurts – from systemic oppression, years of violence, fear… we all hurt.

As we named in our apology “we tried to make you be like us, and in doing so we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were.  As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred and we are not what we are meant by God to be”

When we reach out in love, we can all love and be loved.   And that after our wrestling, that is the blessing God offers each and everyone of us.

I leave you with the blessing that was the other post I saw this week.  Like our scirputre from Galatians, we would do well to live it everyday:

May God give you grace never to sell yourself short,
grace to risk something big for something good,
and grace to remember that the world is too small for anything but truth
and too small for anything but love.

Amen.