Tagged: Church
The Unlikely Family of God
Sermon delivered at Billtown Baptist Church, Sunday October 26th, 2025.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)— 12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:11-22, NRSV)
Introduction: Animals Adopting
One morning in Churchill, Manitoba—that is a small Innuit village of about a thousand people on the Hudson Bay at the top of Manitoba—Brian Ladoon woke up, made breakfast in the dark of the short winter days, and as he sipped his coffee he look out his window and saw an unusual sight: out his backyard, which was open and stretching out into the frozen countryside, he saw his pack of sled dogs (Innuit dogs that are large dogs similar to huskies). That is not the strange part. The strange part was that his pack of powerful sled dogs were playing with a polar bear cub.
What are sled dogs, known to be powerful guard dogs, natural enemies of bears, playing with a polar bear cub?
As Ladoon investigated, he realized that this cub wondered into his backyard looking for food after its mother was killed a way away. The pack of dogs, as I said, would normally be the natural enemy of a bear, but this family of dogs saw the vulnerability of the cub, and adopted it into its pack. And so, to the befuddlement of Brian Ladoon, he watched his dog pack raise a polar bear cub. You can see a video clip of this on the internet. This was some years ago, and the polar bear grew to full size, and so you can see the strange sight of a fully grown polar bear running and rolling around playing with a pack of dogs.
The phenomenon of one animal species adopting the member of another animal species is not unheard of.
Dolphins have been known to adopt orphaned whales. Lionesses have adopted leopard cubs. Eagles have been known to adopt hawks. Ducks and loons have been known to adopt each other’s young.
Those I think are at least a bit more understandable as at least leopards and lions, hawks and eagles have some similarities.
But there are instances of orangutans adopting lion cubs in zoos or mother tigers adopting piglets. Those just don’t seem to make sense. Those two species have nothing in common. But it does happen.
These examples from the animal world illustrate a profound truth: you don’t need to be biological related to be family.
Of course, we humans know that full well. Ask any family that has ever adopted a child. Why do some folks adopt? Some are not able to have children biologically. But there can be all kinds of reasons. You commonly hear things like “Well, we just had more love to give” or “We recognized there were children in need out there and we just decided to open up our home.” Often adoption happens in foster families as the family seek to care temporarily for a child and then says, “You know what? We just can’t see ourselves being a family without this child.”
You don’t need to be biologically related to be a family. Families come in all shapes and sizes. Families can be composed of members that are all quite different from each other but have resolved to be a family.
So, what makes a family, a family? I am going to channel my inner John Lennon here and say it seems that all you need is —you know what the word is, starts with an L and rhymes with dove—love. That sounds like a platitude, but it is true.
It begins with compassion, the recognition that others are in need, a realization that love can go further, a strong bond that claims the other as one’s own, the ongoing practices of care and concern. While these things often normally happen through biological reproduction and the sense of family obligation from that biological bond, whether of parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, children to their aging parents in turn. Not all families are biologically related. Some come together simply because individuals have chosen to love each other and to care for one another.
God’s Quest to Recover God’s Family
This is what God is trying to show with the church. God is choosing to bring God’s family together from folks that would not normally see themselves related. Through God’s love overflowing and God’s care always going beyond, God is bringing together people that are not normally biologically related into one greater human family.
This visible display of family, these weekly practiced routines, this global reality is called the church.
When we look throughout scripture and history, we see that God has been trying to bring us together as one family ever since the beginning.
In the book of Genesis, God is described as making humanity in God’s image and likeness. What does it mean to be in the image of something? Well, if you were to look at my sons, you might say, particularly Rowan and Asher, they are spitting images of me (by the way, why spitting? Where did that adjective come from?—I don’t know). That is a clue: God looks at humanity, these creatures that are quite clearly not gods, not infinite or perfect or anything like that, but God says, I am going to make you and I will regard you as my children. You are in my image and likeness, you are my children, my family, I choose to see myself in you.
Family begins with unconditional love, seeing the other as having worth, needing care.
If you can remember the first moment you held your child or a niece or nephew or a grandchild—that feeling of delight in this little one being related to you. It’s mixed with a sense of obligation: I need to care for this little one. This little one depends on me. This is my family.
Well, the church is God prompting us to take that feeling, extend it further: see the person sitting in the pew next to you as someone you are responsible to. If they are hurting, do you feel sad with them the way you would with your own family? If they are in need to do, try to care from them the way you just would want anything bad happening to your family. That bond of care is what God wants for his church.
We are not all biologically related. Some of us are (it is the Annapolis valley after all), but the ways of growing more and more into a family of love and care for each other is what the church is. The church is the family of God.
We know that the human family did not stay a family. Cain killed his own brother out of resentment and jealousy. God asks him where Abel is and Cain answers, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (well the answer to that question is yes: families keep each other safe). But Cain’s answer was, in other words, I don’t care. He is not my problem. I don’t care that we are family.
As long as there have been humans, we have been turning from God and turning on each other, and we have been tragically prone to showing the next generation how to do those things as well.
When we stop seeing God as our source, we stop seeing our fellow humans as are siblings.
How many of the world’s troubles today come down to our refusal to see other human being as having dignity we need to uphold, deserving of our care? Instead, we say things like sorry you’re not my problem. You’re not a member of my tribe, whether that my family, my ethnic group, nation, or local sports team. I’ll say it again: When we stop seeing God as our source, we stop seeing our fellow humans as are siblings.
Of course, God was not content to just let this be the case. God attempted to restart and rebuild. The Biblical narrative shows the calls of God to individuals to recover this ideal of the family of God as a way of being a light and example to others.
God takes a man named Abraham and says, I am going to bless you and your descendants and through you all the families of the world are going to be blessed. Through this family, I am going to bring all families back together.
Abraham had sons, father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you, so let’s all praise the lord. (That was a Sunday school song we used to sing growing up, never mind).
Abraham’s grandson Jacob had 12 sons and from them came the nation of Israel, and that was the next step in try to restore the family of God. Hundreds of years later, this nation, Israel, was enslaved in Egypt, and God led Moses to ransom them out of Egypt to be their own nation, bringing them into the promise land. This small, insignificant nation of former slaves, he tells Israel, “I regard you as my first born. You are going to be a kingdom of priests.” That’s interesting language. It gives you a clue to what the church is.
In this recovery mission of the family of God, who does God choose to model this new family with? God chooses the insignificant, the powerless, the marginalized, the family-less, the screw-ups. If God treats these folks like family, we know God is on the side of everyone.
Any firstborn children in the room? Do you feel you parents were stricter with you or less strict with you? So, you were the rule to set the example then? Okay. Any ignored middle children in the room? Ya, I know how you feel. Any youngest’s in the room that know deep down they you could have gotten away with murder? Ya.
Israel was declared the firstborn (even though it has none of the qualities of being the first born, whether power, size, etc.) of the restored family of the nations, the other nations as siblings. How God treated Israel, how Israel related to God, would set a witness to all the other nations. So much so, God calls them priests. A priest is someone consecrated so that others can encounter God through that person. God is going to restore his human family, and he is going to use this one family, Israel, as the example. Other peoples are going to look at Israel and encounter who God is through them. That is what God’s people is intended to do. That is what God intends to do with people.
Sadly, Israel was not particularly faithful to this calling. More often than not, Israel has interpreted their call as divine entitlement (and we Christians can do the same): God obviously loves us more than others; we are obviously better; we will obviously be blessed regardless of whether or not we do what is just and merciful.
Just like any family, family can go wrong. We can turn this gift of love and care into places where we compete with one another, put each other down, manipulated and control one another, be dishonest and even cruel. And so, you have the prophets come and keep telling them, “No this is not what God had in mind. God envisions his family encompassing all nations.”
Paul in Ephesians: Jews and Gentiles, One Family
So, what does God do about it? Well, here is one way to put it: Do you have someone that is the “glue” of the family, the person that keeps people together? When we come to what Paul has written to the congregation in Ephesus, Paul describes how God has acted decisively to bring his family back together: God has sent Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s unique son, perfectly one with God and one with us to bring the human family back together.
And Jesus has come and he has, it says, “destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”What is this dividing wall? What is causing the hostility? Well, it seems that for this congregation and several others that Paul has to deal with, Jewish Christians are insisting to Gentile or non-Jewish Christians that if you want to be a part of God’s family, the people of God, the nation of Israel, what you need to do is basically become Jewish: You need to get circumcised, you need to commit to obeying all 613 laws of the Torah, you need to adopt the dietary restrictions, and so on and so forth.
In some way you might say, they are saying something that goes against what true and good families are: true families allow you to be yourself. Toxic families are built on expectations of perfectionism, uniformity, and conditional acceptance. And if anyone has had a parent or sibling treat them that way—the feeling that you are just never good enough, the feeling like you are just not allowed to be you—you know who hurtful that is.
And so, this faction of folks is saying to the others, “Sorry, you don’t belong. You’re not good enough to be in this family.” And the really sad thing is that they are using God’s law, religion, to separate, to divide. They are using God’s laws that were intended to help us become humbler and more merciful, to be an example to other, they use it to be self-righteous and judgmental.
Well, Paul turns to them and says, that is not what God’s family is about. Why because that is not what Jesus is about.
Jesus, the one who was perfect and sinless, the very fulfillment of the law, died as one punished by the law, cursed by the law.
Jesus, the Messiah, died as one executed by the law, the law you folks love so much. If you know Jesus saves you, your whole way of using the law to exclude others does not work.
If that is the case, your whole way of saying who is in and who is out no longer makes sense. Because the one who by his very nature should have been included, died as one excluded. And if he is the one who fulfills the law, that says something about who belongs in God’s family: God includes the excluded.
You see Jesus doing that all through the Gospels: The Samaritan woman, the Syrophoenician woman, the Roman centurion, the tax collectors like Zaccheus, folks with diseases—folks that God’s people at the time kept saying, sorry you don’t belong—Jesus turns to them and says, “Actually, yes, you do belong. God’s family is for you. You are a true son or daughter of Abraham, even those you are not a biologically descendant of Abraham.”
Jesus has destroyed the thing that keeps us from being a family together. The division we have, the hate, the hostility, God has said, I want my children to be together and the only way this can be the case is if I take that hostility and bear it myself.
This whole way of saying who is in and who is out is done. Paul says God has taken that and nailed it to the cross. It is no more. There is nothing you can do that will stop God from looking at you as God’s child. Because Jesus died on a cross, no one is excluded.
This is what God’s family is about. That is what the church is all about.
God is bringing people who would normally be unrelated, maybe even at odds with each other, and he is teaching them how to be one family, a family through Jesus Christ.
Living as the Family of God
I had this illustrated to me one time pastoring in Sudbury. One guy, new to the area, called me up, wanting to come to church. They guy faced a lot of problems, mental health and poverty. But he had a strong sense of commitment to faith, and so, I would pick him up on my way in to prepare for church service.
People were not quite sure what to do with him for a bit, but then two of the older women took it upon themselves to start to get to know him.
I distinctly remember one Sunday, he was walking in to sit down and they were walking behind him. These two older women turned to him and said, “Young man pull your pants up.”
I was at the church computer. I heard this and thought, “That’s not appropriate. That’s how you offend someone.” I need to say that the one lady was like 90 years old and did not have much of a filter.
Sure enough, the guy fired back, “Don’t tell me how to dress. You do you think you are, my mother?”
To which the one ladysaid, “I sure am. Don’t you know I think everyone in this church is my child? And I try to look after every one of them.” The other piped up, “I am your mother too. You know I am going to tell you what’s best.”
Now, before I tell you that this story has a happy ending, I need you to understand that just because it does have a happy ending that this does not mean we should go around tell people what we think of their fashion choices. Good families have boundaries—I’m just saying.
Nevertheless, these women had taken upon themselves to cook food for this guy and help him out on several occasion. They were bantering but they really did mean that.
The person stopped, and then brightened up: “Wow, this is great. I don’t even know who my mother is, and now in this church I have two mothers.”
I remember just sitting there realizing I had just witnessed something of a holy moment. God was making God’s family here, this unlikely family.
This is what the church is: people who would not normally have anything in common. People who are not biologically related. Yet through what Jesus has done, have begun to regard each other as family.
Now, it needs to be said: If the church is like a family, it is important to say that it is not going to be perfect.
We are not going to think all the same, whether it is politics, theology, or what colour the church carpet should be. Families will argue. Good families will argue passionately, but also, hopefully, respectfully.
I say this with full disclosure: It seems that God has a sense of humour or at least a twisted sense of irony: of all Sundays, one the Sunday I have to preach on family, my older kids go to the Challenge youth rally this week. They came back tired, and they woke up super grumpy. We did some arguing this morning.
Anyways, some of the most difficult challenges Paul faced was people in the church, members of God’s family were not treating other people truly as family.
Some are tempted to say family is just not worth the headache. I was talking to one person that said, “I don’t want to be a part of a church. I just can’t stand dealing with people. My religion is found in watching a sunset or taking a nature walk.”
Perhaps you have heard similar sentiments: I so badly want to say to them that it is really easy to encounter God in a sunset. If you did not encounter God in the beauty of nature, I would be concerned for you. If you can’t deal with people, you need to realize, however, you are one of those people too.
The church exists because we fundamentally cannot encounter God fully on our own.
Why? I don’t know the full sense of how I am forgiven of sin until I forgive others.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has cared for me until I care for another.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has refused to give up hope on me until I refuse to give up hope on another.
I don’t know the full sense of how God has claimed me as God’s family until I am ready to extend that to another.
That is what the church is. Not all families are biologically related. Some come together simply because individuals have chosen to love each other and to care for one another. That is what God is doing for us. That is what God wants us to do for each other.
Church like family is not easy, but when we try to live this out, with love, albeit imperfectly, hat is how we encounter God in a deeper way.
Paul says at the end of this passage: “in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives.”
Brothers and sisters, does God live here? Are we allowing God to dwell in this space? Are we allowing God to dwell in us? We know this when we love each other.
Let’s pray…
Counting Garbage
Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you. 2 Watch out for those dogs, those evildoers, those mutilators of the flesh. 3 For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— 4 though I myself have reasons for such confidence.
If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.
7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. 10 I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Phil. 3:1-11)
The Birthday Debacle
“Pastor, could you wish Mary Lamega happy birthday at announcements? She’s 90 years old.” One of our deacons, Miriam, asked me just before service on Sunday morning. I had heard of Mary before: She was one of the matriarchs of the church and a Ukrainian immigrant to Canada. She survived the holocaust, and then her family and she had to flee communists who tried to imprison them in their country; they escaped the Iron Curtain to come to Canada.
Of course, I was new to the church, so I was eager to build a good rapport with the congregation. Prove to them they made a good choice in hiring me. Prove I was relatable.
“Oh wow, that’s special. Certainly,” I said, “Umm…by the way, which one is Mary?” I had never been formally introduced, or I probably had, but it takes a while to learn names and faces.
Miriam pointed.
“Okay, got it.”
Service began, which meant after the call to worship, the first song, and the First Baptist tradition of passing the peace that devolved into a several-minute hug fest, an introvert’s worst nightmare. Ya, it was beautiful to see the folks regard each other as family, but as one regular attendee, Dale would mutter every Sunday as everyone went around shaking hands, “Well, that is how we all get sick.” Dale was ahead of his time.
Well, announcements came, and so I, the pastor, got up and announced, “Well, everyone, today is a special Sunday. It is a certain, special person’s birthday today.” I proceeded to give a short impromptu speech about how valuable this person was to the church. I came and sat down next to the lady. “Well, how old are you on this special day?” The lady responded sheepishly, “Oh, it’s not my birthday today.” I responded, “Now, now, you can’t get out of it that easy, Mary; I know it’s your birthday today.” She responded, “I’m not Mary.”
Now, my immediate thought was, “Wow, this Mary character really loves to play games.” But then she said, “I’m not Mary; I’m Gwen.” The lady next to her, Marguerite, confirmed with an embarrassed nod. “That’s Mary Lamega over there,” she pointed. I turned my head to find a lady sitting there with the most horrified, bewildered look on her face. And she awkwardly waved.
To add insult to injury, our worship leader, Bill, witnessing the whole thing, said under his breath, and yet standing too close to his mic, we all heard him say, “Wow, that’s embarrassing.”
What do you do when that happens? I felt like calling it a day and going home. Nope, couldn’t do that.
I awkwardly walked over to Mary and told her some sad, condensed, half-hearted, soul-sucking version of the same shpiel about her being special and valued that everyone there knew to be an exercise in attempting to close the proverbial barn door after all the animals run out. I think we may have sung Happy Birthday, or we didn’t out of the painful awkwardness of it all. I don’t remember. I may have blanked out. I remember preaching a sermon. I remember forgoing the usual pastoral chit-chat after church, hiding out in my office to “get something.” And then, I went home, and I just said to my wife, “I just need to be alone for a little bit.”
I can tell you that I wanted to curl up in a corner and die.
I am not going to tell you how many episodes of Seinfeld it took for me to watch before I started feeling better and ready to rejoin humanity—Seinfeld is my therapy sitcom (it’s a thing; you’ll learn about that in pastoral care and counseling I am pretty sure).
I have learned one thing: Miriam was way off. So, I also learned the vital life lesson that Miriam points out with the accuracy of a stormtrooper. If she gives you directions, get a second opinion. Follow me for more life-changing advice.
(Also, I need to go on record saying that Miriam and her husband Carl are actually great people).
I learned one thing: Making the Christian life and ministry about looking good and getting status and approval never goes well…especially if you are nerdy and awkward like me and, apparently, can’t follow basic directions.
Paul’s Problem: People and God’s Approval
Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, is talking to a church that has lost sight of the important things, about how the Christian life is about grace above all else, following Jesus, no matter how messy it looks.
They have put their own egos, their own quests for status and looking good, you might say, ahead of simple faith. You can see what this means through this beautiful letter: it looks like those who are preaching the gospel for the wrong reasons in the first chapter. It looks like the petty grumbling and arguing described in the second chapter, and particularly here in the third chapter, it goes a bit deeper. There are Judaizers whom Paul calls the “mutilators of the flesh,” those who argue that the marks of circumcision are true signs of status, of whether one truly deserves to be in God’s family.
Well, Paul has some words to say about that. I used to think that Paul was just humble bragging, but I think our boy Paul here is doing something cheeky and brilliant (this is where I cite that I am not a New Testament scholar, and I give a hat tip to Danny and Grace for safety’s sake). He says, “Hey if you people want to make faith about ways to flex your muscles, if you want to make ministry about one-up-man ship, allow me to take you down a notch.”
“My Jewish heritage is purer than yours. My rabbinical credentials are more prestigious than yours. My ability to follow the law you think makes God love you, that you think gives you the status to say you belong here and those Gentiles don’t….Well, guess what, I was better at that than you, but—and here’s the problem—I was so obsessed with it that it led me to literally persecute and kill people—God’s people— before I realized how misguided I was.”
That’s a reality check.
Paul realized that this whole way of thinking about faith is worthless; it’s a distraction, and it’s worse than that: garbage.
When you turn your faith into a way of having status before God and others, other people become your competition or worse, threats to be eliminated (as Paul or Saul, the zealous young Pharisee, saw Christians), and if you keep going on that path, you can have something really humiliating happen. You might have a Jesus moment like Paul did on the road to Damascus, where you realize all the stuff you tried to fill your life with is worthless garbage.
Pastoring: Are We Doing It to Seek Approval?
The Great May Lamaga birthday debacle was twelve years ago (wow, that makes you feel old when you casually reminisce about what happened a decade ago). I had just started as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Sudbury, a small struggling church four hours north of my stomping ground in Southern Ontario.
Moving up there was not something I foresaw myself doing. I had aspirations of planting a thriving, sheik church plant in the GTA area.
However, my contract ended as a church planter in my denomination at the time. My aspirations were abruptly ended when the leader of the association found out I was supportive of women in ministry (which this particular denomination was fiercely against), and he proceeded to give me several ultimatums: if you value your job, your funding, you won’t rock the boat, you will toe the party line. I refused: my wife says I have the spiritual gift of not knowing how to shut up about things.
After a few months of unemployment, dozens of applications sent out, and a handful of interviews with no call backs—the whole process felt so humiliating—Big churches said things like, “We are a large church, so we need a pastor with a lot of experience to guide us.” Little churches would say, “We are a little church, so we need a pastor with lots of experience to guide us.” Finally, this little church in the great white north took a chance on me.
My first couple of years were tumultuous. I had convinced myself I can grow this little church: All I needed to do was work harder, organize more programs, and put more time into sermon prep.
I can’t fail at this. My wife gave up her job to relocate here to pursue my vocation. My family relies on this job.
But it was more than that: When I moved, one former classmate of mine who, shall we still ardently held to all the things I no longer did, took it upon himself to invite me out for coffee. When I thought it would be a time of reminiscence with a college mate, it ended up being an hour of this person telling me I don’t have what it takes to be a Baptist pastor because I am too academic, too radical in my views. “Your church is going to be ill-served with you in it,” he kept saying. He also said that I would probably just end up teaching at some liberal theology school one day (I will leave that comment to your apt judgment).
This was just one of many hurtful conversations I had when I left the denomination I used to pastor in (the denomination my Grandfather helped found), and while I believed I was authentically following truth and justice, God’s will in scripture, in doing the things I did, I have also learned that our actions in life can be deep, entangled knots, forming layers of complicated motivations.
Actions like pastoring a church, preaching a good sermon, and organizing an event can all be, in some sense, good things that God calls us to, but they can be fronts for pride, fears, deep resentments, and hurts.
You can say to yourself as I did: “I hope so deeply that my church grows, that it sees hearts changed, disciples made,” and that is true. But that can also be intermixed with an undercurrent of spite deep in one’s heart, “I hope it grows so that it proves to that church that didn’t hire me, they were wrong. I hope it grows so that those classmates of mine know they underestimated me.”
Preaching a good sermon can be both the delight in knowing a biblical truth as impacted people, but it can also be intertwined with pride, “I hope people see how smart I am, how capable I am, how pious I am.” (How is this sermon going, by the way?)
Your character can be the result of God’s grace at work in you; indeed, praise God. However, it can also very quickly become a source of judgment against another: “Oh, you do that. Well, I am thankful I didn’t make those choices.”
Ministry can be the best job in the world. I deeply believe that. A job where you get to encourage and serve people, help them know God loves them, study and teach God’s word, where you get to be at the center of a community of good, saintly folk.
Ministry can also be one of the toughest jobs in the world. The time demands, the emotional weight of caring for people, the worries of particularly smaller, less financially stable churches, and also the feelings of being put on a pedestal that happens in larger churches.
And if you let it, ministry can be about appeasing your insecurities—your need to feel liked, all the ways you desire an ego boast and seek recognition, or just surround yourself with the safe and familiar—and what can make pastoring particular hazardous is that there can be nothing more satisfying then rubber stamping success and status with God’s will. See, this is why God is pleased with me.
When we do that, when we equate ministry with our worth, our need for secure status and recognition, there will always be pressure then to hide our faults or, worse believe we have none. We will feel like we are living behind a mask. We will refuse to ask difficult, costly questions. We will bend the truth to make it more palatable and convenient. We will neglect the needy and broken of this world since they serve us no purpose. We will treat people as a means to an end.
Some of us will be wise enough to see these hazards early on and self-correct. Some of us will just move on to the work that needs to be done. Others, some of you, might be looking at me like, “Wow, Spencer is really hard on himself and really overthinks things.” That’s true, I’ve learned. (As I have regularly said in interviews, my greatest flaw is that I just care too much).
Also, we are all human.
Learning to Count Garbage…Literally
And in the daily grind of ministry, I felt like I lost sight of things. I did not have a vision of Jesus where I fell off my horse and went blind as Paul did, but you might say I did have a come to Jesus moment. Two years into pastoring, the honeymoon phase ended. The church had not really grown. In fact, a number of people either died or retired and moved away, meaning the loss of several key leaders.
I soon realized that an ongoing challenge of the church was relating well to the daycare it founded years ago but had since taken on a life of its own, and many church people felt that in terms of space usage and other resources, the daycare was the tail wagging the proverbial dog.
I tried my best to do programs that might appeal to the daycare families and build good relationships with the staff of the daycare.
Well, it felt like it all came crashing down one day. A bear got into the garbage. By the way, Sudbury had a lot of black bears. On my back deck, every evening in the summer, I would watch about a half dozen black bears scurry along the edge of the forest to begin scavenging for food, usually from the dumpsters of the different apartment buildings in the town.
However, this time, it was our building’s garbage. Here is a fun fact: bears love diapers. That is actually a disgusting fact. Bears tore open the dumpster lid—they are that strong—got into the garbage, and so torn up, half-eaten diapers were all over the church’s lawn.
Well, I got a call from one member of the church, “The daycare needs to clean that up; it looks terrible; it’s their diapers.” Then I got an email from the daycare operator, “The church needs to clean that up; after all, we pay rent.” One church leader responds, “We don’t have money for that. The daycare can pay. And while we are at it, we need to charge more rent!” And it went back and forth like that. It got ugly.
Well, guess who has two thumbs and ended up cleaning all those diapers up? This guy. I’ll tell you one thing: I did not feel like “the Reverend” anything that day.
It was so gross. I think I threw up in my mouth a couple of times. I remember thinking, “How can it get any worse.”
Then it started raining. That’s just great. And you know what is more disgusting than regular diapers? Wet, water-logged diapers. That’s what.
I remember wanting to quit. I wanted to fire up what Chris Killacky has come to know as his “Rez-um-may.” (By the way, that counted as a Chris Killacky reference, so you can check that off of your ADC Chapel bingo cards).
There I was, literally doing, as Paul called it, counting garbage. (See what I did there: How’s that for a thematic unity?)
I remember thinking to myself words similar to Marta from Arrested Development (my other therapeutic sitcom): “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
This is not what I thought my ministry would look like. Any aspiration of looking like that cool, successful pastor looked literally like hot, steamy garbage at that moment.
What made that moment feel so degrading was the fact that I had made ministry into this desperate obsession with growth performance: more programs, more events, working more hours—all the ways I needed to do more in order to show people I was more.
I realized I lost sight of the stuff that mattered.
You are Enough
At that moment, I remembered the words of one of my mentors, Pastor Tim Walker. I was his intern back at Bradford Baptist, and we have been able to meet every year and just talk for hours. When I told him that I was moving up north to pastor this small church, he gave me the best advice I have ever been given in ministry. It’s advice that is so easy to lose sight of amongst all the work and all the worries of life and ministry.
“Spencer, you know it’s not your job to make the church grow. It’s your job, first and foremost, to simply be faithful.”
Ya, church growth is important, but if you make ministry about the numbers, if you make success strictly about that, it’s worth nothing but garbage, and you will probably feel like garbage by the end, too. You may have to say this as Paul had to…
I count it all garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own…
Compared to all the other things that Paul and his community considered successful, worthy, and righteous, the only thing that mattered was having Jesus.
And so, in case you just have not heard it enough:
To Jesus, you are enough. With Jesus, you are enough. In Jesus, you are enough.
Can I just tell you how incredibly freeing it is to pastor a church and say, you know what? I don’t know what this church’s future will be. I can’t say that I will be successful at everything I do in ministry. But if I am seeking to know Jesus. If I’m trying to sincerely follow Jesus, it’s worth it. That’s all it ever has to be. Once you have that in sight, everything else is in its proper place.
I know I am not the most eloquent preacher, the best event planner, the learned bible scholar, and if I am honest, some days in my faith, I don’t even feel all that pious either: I feel like Paul when he calls himself the chief of sinners.
If you are still looking to Jesus, then nothing else matters.
Paul says this in this congregation in Philippi, where people used their religious and ethnic status as a way of securing God’s approval and excluding others. I saw it in my own ministry every time I made ministry about performance and achievement.
Same Goes for Education
(No, this is not the point in the sermon where I tell you that Jesus wants you to do your homework…but also, ya, you should be doing your homework). There is a reason why we call ourselves disciples, students of Jesus’ way.
I have realized that how we treat our education is really a practice run for how we will end up treating ministry. How we approach our convictions in assignments trains us for how we will work on our convictions in life. If you make seminary about achieving, ticking the performative box, getting the quick answer, and looking smart, you’re going to get yourself into some more garbage.
I remember doing a course for the history professor of my Bible College, Dr. Paul Wilson, who was known to be one of the toughest profs at the college. (Why is it always the history professors, right?)
I took his History of Western Civilization part one course by distance education in my first year, and I thought I got this. I was one of the top students in my high school; I can do this. I wrote a paper on reasons for how the early church grew. I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but I started the paper in advance, not on the night before. That’s right. I actually looked up sources, like the ones that are on paper. I even looked over my paper for typos before submitting it. Can you believe that?
Dr. Wilson scheduled a time to debrief the course at the beginning of the new semester. I strolled into his office and sat down. Here it comes. He is going to tell me how much he loved the paper: “Well done, good and faithful student.”
“Spencer, I have to tell you,” he began, “Your paper, I’ll be honest, just wasn’t good.”
I think I heard that record player, “burrrt,” noise go off in my head.
And like a dagger in my heart: “Spencer, I don’t think you really understand how history works.” I feel you judging me, Melody: “Spencer still doesn’t understand how history works.” Church history is not just older theology written by dead people, ya, ya; I get it.
“Spencer, where did you do your research?”
Sheepishly, I answered, “A library…?”
“Which University?”
“Umm…it was my church’s library?”
Exactly. He made that same wince noise. Then he proceeded to pull book after book off of his shelf and stake it right on my lap. “Spencer, you should have read this book on Roman culture, and this book on Greek household churches, and this book on…”
I remember saying to myself, “Hold it together, Spencer, don’t let him see you cry.” I said, “Thank you for your feedback; I have to go now,” and I got up and left.
And you know what? I felt like garbage (I’m nailing these thematic tie-ins, aren’t I?). I left feeling so, so dejected. I scurried back to my room and said to myself, “I need to watch some Seinfeld.”
And yet, when I look at my education, the courses that I did the worst in were also the ones that I actually learned the most in. If there was one course that taught me the most about how to think critically, write, and research well, it was Dr. Wilson’s History of Western Civilization course…part two.
I can even say that I got an A+ in his Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman history course. The second time I took it.
I say I had to take it a second time because, during one semester in college, I failed several courses.
My Dark Summer
It feels weird to admit this to some of you who are students here looking to me as the professor, but I have probably failed more courses in my seminary education than anyone else in this room (if you have failed more, feel free to share!).
As some of you know, in my third year of college, my dad died of cancer. Meanwhile, my mother was also facing cancer and died two years later. My best friend at the time tried to commit suicide, and my pastor friend and mentor had a meltdown, snapped one day, and walked away from his family, his faith, his whole life, and ran off with someone else.
To make matters worse, the only job I could find was working the night shift four nights a week at Tim Hortons. My job every night was, you guessed it, taking out the garbage (Ya, I know, now I am just shoe-horning the garbage theme in—oh well).
The result was many nights left to my own thoughts, and I didn’t know how to process all the grief mixed with anger and frustration mixed with doubts and despair.
I remember sitting there one night, feeling like everything that mattered in my life, in my faith, had come crashing down. My dad died a terrible death. Good friends that I looked up to had lost faith, and as someone who prided myself in my studies and, moreover, in my faith, always finding the right answer, the notion that for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to believe anymore, was the scariest thing I have ever experienced.
For some of us our way of knowing we have God’s approval in our lives is whether we have the right answers, and that all gets stripped away the second you don’t know something.
And yet, at that moment, in that moment of sitting in my basement apartment, sitting there thinking, “Is anything true anymore? Is life just a veneer over an abyss of meaninglessness?” I remember having a profound, even mystical moment. It occurred to me that even if all my truths (small t) are wrong if Jesus is who he is, if Jesus is Truth (capital T), I can fail; my beliefs can fail, but God’s grace won’t.
Humility is What Saves Us
I have learned that God sometimes reveals Godself most beautifully, not when we are at our best, but when we are at our worst, and if we are afraid of failing, we will never fully see God redeeming.
If we cannot humble ourselves, we cannot know fully that it is God’s humble love that saves us. That kind of vulnerability is scary, but we can trust it. Because, as Paul said earlier in Philippians, Jesus…
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing…
That Jesus is the God who became nothing for us, humbled himself even to the point of death on the cross for us…If that is who God is, as Julian of Norwich would say, then all shall be well; all shall be well, and in every manner of thing, it shall be well.
I can tell you that from that moment on, my studies took on a new drive, a delight and curiosity for asking the tough questions, all the ones I was afraid to ask before, and this led me to want to pursue a doctorate in theology. I can also tell you that after that reality check, picking up diapers on the church lawn, things, for one reason or another, turned around.
But, of course, that is not the point though. And if we ever make it the point, we need to remind ourselves again with Paul’s words:
Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:12-14)
Let’s pray:
Gracious God. You love us despite our sins and failures. You love us even when we think it is because of our achievements and successes. We thank you that you love us simply because you are who you are, revealed in your son Jesus Christ, his cross, and resurrection.
God, teach us how to count garbage. Remind us how nothing else matters compared to knowing and walking with you, how everything matters properly when we see all things through you.
God, there are some today that might be here, and the only thoughts on their minds are words of thanksgiving. There are others here where the only thoughts they feel are ones of worry, doubt, and discouragement. God, comfort us and remind us that you are always with us. You never leave us or forsake us. Thank you that you love us as we are and that you are leading us always to know further the power of your resurrection.
For these and so many other reasons, we praise you, God. This we pray in your name, amen.
Can These Bones Live?: The Resurrection of the Body and the Mission of the Church
Preached November 21, 2021, at Brookfield Baptist Church for their 159th anniversary service.
Let me read to you a text of hope for our troubled times. It is a vision of Ezekiel’s from Ezekiel chapter 37:1-14:
37 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. 3 He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army. 11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’” (NIV)
God bless the reading of his word.
I remember my first day as a lead pastor. This was after several months of applying around, resume after resume, each church turning me down – they did not want to take on a doctoral student, they also wanted someone with more experience.
Life then was so uncertain back then. I was just beginning my dissertation for my doctorate at the University of Toronto. My contract as a coordinator of a drop-in center for those who faced homelessness and poverty in downtown Toronto had ended due to the funding cuts to social programs in Toronto. My wife and I just had our second child, Emerson, a few months prior. We had just bought a home and now were realizing we might have to sell it. My contract as an intern for church planting in another Baptist denomination had come to an unfortunate end: the denominational leaders found out that I was in favor of women in ministry, and for this Baptist denomination, such a belief was beyond the pale. I had a meeting with a denominational leader, a card-carrying fundamentalist, who gave me an ultimatum: he put on no uncertain terms that the belief that men lead (and are the only ones that can be pastors) and women submit – this conviction was for him and the denomination essential to the Gospel, and that meant for me that I had to either shut up or have my funding as a church planter cut. I decided I could not in good conscience continue. It was hard leaving the denomination that my grandfather was a founding pastor of. When you have to leave the church family you were raised in, it feels like you are leaving Christianity itself, since it is the only Christianity you know. When you are literally threatened and attacked by your church family, the one that raised you, attacked over the beliefs you feel are biblical, if you have ever had a similar interaction with some of your Christian friends, it can make you wonder, does the church have a future? If it does, is it a future with me in it?
So, in all the uncertainty, a Canadian Baptist church, the 120 year old First Baptist of Sudbury hired me. They wanted a young pastor. First Baptist Church of Sudbury was a little church four hours north of Toronto, a place I had only visited once when I was in high school in the winter, a place that gets down to minus 40 in the winter, and I wondered how any human being could live here. It was this church that voted to hire me.
All of that is to say, I remember walking into my office to see that the interim pastor had left a report on my desk. It was a church growth flow church, charting the birth of a church, the peak years of a church, and then qualities and stages that indicate decline, and finally twilight and death. There was a big red circle around the word death.
This was a church, as I found, that had experienced over a decade of turmoil to no fault of its own. Two pastors one after the other had really done a lot of damage to the church. One ran off with the wife of one of the deacons. The other was hired and did not tell the church he was going through a bitter divorce with his wife and then divided the church. I remember that summer the church attendance was less than a dozen people.
It was not a very encouraging first day as I reflected how we just moved my family 400 kilometers away to a small church, all of which were twice and sometimes three times my age. Does this church have a future? Does the church have a future?
This is a question I think many are asking especially in this time of the aftermath of the Pandemic. Financially the pandemic has rocked Canada: the Toronto Star has estimated that pandemic has costed Canadians 1.5 billion dollars of every day of the pandemic. For the United States, the total cost to date is estimated to be over 16 trillion dollars. People are worried whether there will be enough to go around.
Yet, it is the human cost that is most important. According to the most recent numbers on John Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center, there has been 256 million reported cases globally and there has been 5.1 million deaths attributed to the virus. Canada has seen 29 000 deaths. We call that being fortunate, but it is really so, so tragic. Many of these individuals have been seniors in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. But make no mistake: this virus is unpredictably deadly. I heard that a classmate of mine a few months ago, a woman my age with a child, got the virus, went to bed, and did not wake up.
For many, it has been the emotional toll that people have felt the most: feelings of isolation, burn out, anxiety. Churches have felt this as their pastors have been over worked to put services online and adapt to new health standards. All our churches have felt distant from members of the community but also feeling obstructed from doing ministry in the wider community.
As we look out at a post-pandemic world, as it moves to endemic stage, while we are still facing waves and new variants, it feels like we are surveying the wreckage. It feels like we are the survivors of a battle.
In my reading of Scripture, recently I went through the book of the prophet Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet and a priest that proclaimed messages and visions from God about 600 years before Christ. Ezekiel watched a foreign empire, Babylon, come and destroy his home. The Jewish armies were decimated by a cruel and brutal military superpower. The people then were brought into exile. Ezekiel went with them where he served as a priest and teacher to a small expatriate community, living in exile.
Such hopelessness and insecurity can make our own situation seem so insignificant, but then again, we too are feeling a sense of dislocation, insecurity, and uncertainty, and when we come to Scripture, the Spirit of God animates these ancient words to say something to us today, something we need to hear.
It is in this context that Ezekiel has a vision of the aftermath of a battlefield, filled with corpses, dry bones, and it is a vision that is symbolic as it explains, but it names the spiritual reality that God’s people were in: a state of feeling defeated.
Yet, the spirit of God is not. God says to Ezekiel: Can these bones live? And Ezekiel replies in the most human way he can: “I don’t know. I don’t know the future. But you God do know.”
And he is given this vision: he sees the dry bones being raised up, the breath of God, the Spirit of life that animated all humanity and all living things in creation, this breath now is causing death to be reversed, a new creation.
God says of these bones that they are the house of Israel. They are God’s people who have said, “Our strength is gone, our hope feels lost. We feel cut off and separated.”
And God says to them, “I will restore you. I will bring you home. I will put my spirit in you and renew you.” God is saying this to us today, I believe.
It can feel like the church in Canada has lost a battle or just barely is scrapping by. So many of us have sent the past year stressed and anxious, our bones feel dried up, our hope feels lost.
And yet, the Spirit of God has not been defeated. God is still God, the Lord Almighty, the God of all possibilities, the God whose plans are always good, the God whose promises will not be thwarted.
Our God’s will and plan and promise is to bring salvation, forgiveness, healing, life, love, and liberation to all people – these have not been stopped for they cannot be stopped: God’s kingdom is still coming so that earth will one day be as it is in heaven.
And we know this definitely because this vision here is a prefigure of what happens to Jesus, God’s son, the messiah. For when the forces of darkness, of death and despair came against Jesus, Jesus gave himself up as a ransom to liberate us from these things, dying on a cross, a god-forsaken death. God became a cursed corpse. By this we know God is with us in our darkness moments. And in that time of hopelessness, in the time that it seems like the plan of God was truly foiled, that Jesus’ claims to being the messiah were disproven, on the third day the tomb was found empty; Jesus is risen from the grave by the Spirit.
As we celebrate where we have come today as a church, we must remember that we stand on the hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are his body as the church, and the body of Christ, while it was bruised, beaten, and crucified, the Spirit raised this body to new life.
This is our hope for a time that has seen such death. This is our hope in a time that has seen such sadness. We have the hope of Jesus.
The church is founded on this truth, and we cannot forget this. We live because Jesus is Lord.
The same Spirit that raised Jesus is the same Spirit that came on the first disciples to begin the church at Pentecost. It is the same Spirit that moved the first Baptists in Nova Scotia, prophets is like Henry Alline, to speak God’s word boldly, to live God’s gospel courageously, even in the face of all that has gone wrong in this world. It is the same Spirit that moved that is alive with us today.
As we remember God’s faithfulness to our churches in the past, and ask the question what does the future have in store? Our question sounds very similar to what God said to Ezekiel, and our answer must be the same:
O Lord God, you know. We trust you and your way. You know because you are sovereign. You know because you are good. You know because you have made promises you keep, plans that will come true.
These are words I know I needed to hear when I first started pastoring. Because the fact is many of us have convinced ourselves that we can control the future, that we can predict it and change it by our power and skill. I thought that pastoring. Looking at that depressing church growth document all those years ago in my office, I thought to myself: I can change that. I thought I could save the church.
I became obsessed over the next few years of starting programs and fundraisers and advertisements. Many of these did not have much effect (at best people from other larger churches came to these programs, used them like a free service and continued attending their own churches), and after two years of it, I just found myself burnt out and wanting to quit.
It was in that moment that I realized I don’t know what the future of this church will be. Only God knows. But what I do know is that I must be faithful to live what God is calling the church to be.
The church was located in the town of Garson. The church relocated out there in the 70’s hoping that this new suburb would be the next up and coming neighborhood. The reality was the city zoned it to be where the poor of the city were sent: supplemented income housing was built on all sides of the church. Many of the stores had graffiti on it. You would very often see police cruisers making stops.
One day a guy called and wanted a ride to church. He lived in a one room apartment around the corner from me, and as I got to know him, he faced a lot of mental health challenges. He had attended other churches that frankly saw him as a burden and ignored him. Other churches wanted to grow the church by attracting easier, and I should say, richer sheep.
This was the person God had given us, our family of faith, so we did our best, and I soon found he had a lot of friends. I put out a sign in his building that if anyone needed a ride to the foodbank on a Tuesday afternoon, I would drive them to the other end of town and have coffee with them after.
Many would ask me, “Are you just being nice to me to get me to come to your church?” And I would say emphatically: “While I strongly believe that a community of faith and weekly worship is important to our spirituality, I will always be there to help you, even if you never set foot in our church.”
I realized in those experiences that if the church is to have a future, it will be by taking up our crosses in a new way. The church must die to self: it must lay to rest its obsession with money that causes it to see the poor as worthless; it must lay to rest its expectations of what a successful Christian life is, which causes so many to feel they are not worthy to be in the family of God: the mentally ill, those who face addictions, those whose love lives are messy and complicated, those who are in the sexual minority. The church must take up its cross in a new way, embracing the discomfort the Spirit is calling us into.
It was in those moments that I know I saw the church, what it can truly me, a place where th outcasts was welcomed, a family of misfits. Let’s face it: we all are seeing very pointed reminders of the failures of the church today: racism and residential schools, stories of bigotry and abuse, or just the stories of apathy and irrelevance where churches just don’t actually care about doing what is right or sharing God’s love.
One elderly lady in my church said to me, “Pastor, I don’t know what to do with some of these people.” And I said to her, “I get it, I don’t know how to handle some of these issues either, but at the end of the day, a lot of these individuals are people without parents. I know you know how to be that.” So, the ladies of our church started cooking meals and putting them in Tupperware containers to give out. We organized community meals for people in the common area of the apartment building. It was the old folks of the congregation that said, “We know we need to be open minded, because we know what happened when we weren’t.”
It was pastoring this little church that renewed my confidence in the church: the church that is not a building, but a community of disciples, imperfect but willing to bare one another’s burdens, living like a family, being family to those that have no family.
It is amazing what can happen when the church is ready to take up its cross.
And it must be said, if we want to see the reality of resurrection, the Spirit moving and breaking in and causing new life, it will only happen, when a church is ready take up the cross, to sacrifice all that it is and even can be.
I emphasize here “can be” because so often we go out on mission for the purpose of the “future of the church,” but that really means we just want to keep what is ours. And when we do that, we will ignore those who don’t matter to our budget, our building maintenance, our membership lists. We will be vulnerable to politicians that promise power to the church. We will make the church and its mission about us.
While the future offers no guarantees – I know I constantly worried: “Will we have enough money to pay the bills? Will we have to amalgamate with another church?” – the promise of God in this passage is that God will do wonderful things, surprising things, in the valleys of dry bones.
I had a bunch of stories I wanted to tell, but here is just one: In ministering in Sudbury, I came across a young man, who also lived in the low-income housing development.
Early twenties, a poor kid, as I got to know him, he had endured the worst in this world: terrible abuse, such that just to talk with him, he was deeply erratic. It did not take long in his presence to know his soul was in deep chaos: that lethal mix of hatred and hurt.
I would come by his apartment from time to time to check on him. He was on welfare, but there was a strong possibility that it would run out, so he was looking for a job. He was about the same height as me, so I gave him some of my dress clothes. We practiced interviews. He applied around all over the place. Each time, employers would just hear how he talked, how it was hard to hold down a conversation with him and go with someone else. Didn’t matter he was willing and able. As he applied here and there, the more downcast he got.
One day, I did rounds around the apartments asking if anyone needed a ride to the food bank. I would take them as per my Tuesday noontime routine. I knocked on his door, and he answered, a bit dishevelled. I figured he was just getting up. He decided to come along to the food bank that day, even though he did not need anything.
I turned to him in the car and gave him a Jesus Calling devotional. I had gotten a bulk order of these things, figuring this was an easy way for some of the people, who were not strong readers that I ministered to, could nevertheless hear an uplifting Scripture spoken over them on a daily basis.
While the one guy went in, this young man turned to me and said, Spencer, I was sitting in my room thinking I got nothing to live for. I have no peace in my life. I was ready to end it when you knocked at the door.
I prayed with him, and I suggested, let’s see what words of encouragement the devotional he had in his hand had to offer. Turns out that day, the topic was scriptures relating to finding peace in life.
He did a stint in the hospital. After he got out I met up with him again. He seemed to be in a bad state of mind. I learned that previous to me meeting him, he had committed a crime, which he was going to be sentenced for. The possibility was weighing heavily on him. I asked him about what he believed in, whether he trusted God’s love and forgiveness in all this.
He turned to me and said that he admitted his mind is so erratic, so faulty, he resolved at some point to just stop believing anything. He figured his brain is just so unreliable, there isn’t any point to believing in anything. He told me he felt ashamed about all the ideas that would get him worked up. So, one day he just decided he would stop believing in anything.
I tried to offer some words of encouragement, but I was taken back. How do you get someone to believe in Jesus, when they don’t even think they are capable of believing anything?
I went home that day particularly distraught. I remember praying, “God how can a person like that be reached? How could a person like that be discipled? God you’ve got to reach this person, but if the Gospel means anything, it has to mean something to a person like that. The Gospel is good news to everyone, especially a desperate, troubled young man, who needs hope in his life.”
My prayers for the next little while took on a tone of frustration and disappointment.
A little while later, I came by his apartment. I found him in the apartment’s communal kitchen. He turned to me. “Spencer, I was sitting in my apartment. I was ready to end it all. I just felt so worthless. But then he showed up.”
“Who showed up?” I asked. He just pointed upward. In that dark moment, he heard a distinct voice say to him, “Your life is worth something to me.”
“Spencer, I don’t know what I am, but I know I ain’t an atheist anymore.”
God surprised me that day. God surprises us most often when we are ready to be the Gospel for the broken and when we are willing to be broken for the Gospel.
It is a beautiful irony that church growth did not happen when I obsessed about growing the church. The church started growing when we resolved to be there for those in need in our communities even if it could cost us “the church” as we know it.
The church will only find itself when it is ready to die to self. It will only rise when it is willing to dwell in the valleys of dry bones.
As we celebrate today, Brookfield Baptist Church, where we have come from, where we are now, where we hope to go. Remember we are the body of Christ: We live in this world crucified and only in and through this, we can see moments of resurrection.
Let’s pray:
God of hope and new life, we praise you that you are faithful. You have been faithful through the years in this church, and so we trust you with our present and future.
Lord, we do not know what the future holds. And we have seen so much discouragement these days.
Lord, teach us in new ways to trust your Spirit. Inspire us in new ways to take up your cross.
Empty us into this world, so that we can be with those who need to hear about you.
Permit us to see moments of resurrection, moments of your kingdom come.
We pray longing for the salvation of all people, the restoration of all things.
These things we pray in your name. Amen.
Psalm 84: Dwelling Place
How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
When Meagan and I were first married, we lived in Holland Landing, just about an hour north of Toronto. Holland Landing was a farming community that at one point had a community of radical Quakers. Quakers are a Christian fraction that believes less in the scriptures per se and certainly no traditions of any kind (which I don’t think is actually possible), choosing instead to prioritize the raw experience of the Holy Spirit. They got their name from sitting in silence meditating till they quaked with the Spirit.
Their church, depicted here, is a temple, which is now a historic site. I toured it one day with some friends. It was beautiful inside because they intentionally designed the interior like heaven. The building has three levels like how heaven is symbolically described in the Bible. Inside there is a rainbow shaped staircase going to the very top, representing Jacob’s ladder. The sanctuary has no pulpit, just a center where the Bible was placed. Everyone sits in a square with everyone equal. The windows on all sides let in an enormous, moving amount of light in the morning, filling the room as your eyes are drawn upwards to the top of the ceiling.
It is a deliberate attempt to symbolically create this sense of heaven on earth, God’s dwelling.
I grew up in Stoney Creek. Hamilton has the mountainous escarpment going through it, which then moves straight up all the way to Manitoulin. One point, formed by glaciers, is a bowl shaped small canyon. It is called the Devil’s Punchbowl. Legend has it that it got its name from someone dying there by suicide. That’s just a legend though. At the top of the punchbowl is a look out with a cross. This cross you can see from most of East Hamilton, and always gave me a sense of hope. I remember hiking around up and down the Devil’s punch bowl as a kid, and it always felt eerie. Looking up at the bowl from its base gives you this uneasy looming feel, while looking down at the bowl from the look out with the cross was serene. The place for me was a kind of religious place, representing God’s presence in the world.
The cross at the top of the punch bowl felt like a lasting reminder of God’s victory over the devil.
My wife before we were married went on a missions trip to Turkey with her college friends. They stayed in southern Turkey and worked at a mission, teaching English and assisting the missionaries there. They got some time to tour the country and went to Istanbul. Istanbul was at one point the capital of the Roman Empire, after Emperor Constantine moved the capital from Rome to there. In doing so, he commissioned this massive cathedral. When Muslims eventually conquered Turkey, the Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque. Now it is a tourism site. One of the architectural masterpieces of the ancient world, the Hagia Sophia uses its golden domes, widows, and candle chandeliers to bring light in and give this heavenly sense to the room. Look up and all you see is golden light coming down on you. It’s beautiful isn’t it?
I grew up 45 minutes from Niagara Falls. One thing we did often as a family was to go and tour the Falls. We would go on the Maid of the Mist, which was a boat that went right up to the edge of the bottom of the waterfall. The roar of water was intense. Whether at its base or just looking at it from the other side, the sound was moving. Some people described it like the voice of God: commanding, rumbling, powerful. This spectacle of nature remind people of the power of God.
On my wife and I’s honeymoon we went to Europe.
My favorite day was touring Rome. We went to the Vatican. I remember walking into St. Peter’s Basilica and looking around. The walls are encrusted in artwork and monuments to great saints of the Church. When you get to the center altar and look up, no picture can do this sanctuary justice. It is so large you can fit 4 statues of liberty inside this dome comfortably. The little specks in the distance were people look down from a second level balcony. The room is so large and beautiful, you cannot help but feel moved with its splendor.
These are all places that people have descried as heavenly, reminders of God dwelling in the world.
However, these are in the end just man-made buildings and the creation, not the creator.
God has chosen to dwell on earth, to make his dwelling place here, in a place more beautiful than St. Peter’s basilica, more powerful than Niagara Falls: God has chosen to dwell in our hearts.
While the saints of the Old Testament met in a temple, because Jesus is the Word made flesh, because he sent his Spirit, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, our hearts are spaces of God’s beautiful dwelling.
The theme of dwelling place is what we are going to meditate on.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
2 My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.
3 Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
1. God dwells with us.
As we have been talking about, this Psalms longs to worship God in the temple, a place where ancient Israelites knew God’s presence dwelt.
The Israelite temple was built around 960 BC by King Solomon. Solomon in his wisdom and wealth set out to make a proper temple for God. The temple was a magnificent achievement of the ancient world. It had three sections. The deepest section was the Holy of Holies where the ark of the covenant was placed. The floors and ceilings were lined with approximately 20 tonnes of gold.
The Temple was meant to speak of the symbolism of the splendor and majesty of God.
But this Temple was inevitably destroyed 400 years later by the Babylonians and the people were carried off into exile. A replica was made by Ezra after the exiles returned.
About 500 years later, Jesus shows up and says that he is the new temple. Through him, people will be able to worship in spirit and in truth. As John 1 says, “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
How lovely is your dwelling place: that dwelling place is Jesus.
Jesus is our King, our God, the Lord Almighty. It says that as he died on a cross for our sins, the barrier to the Holy of Holies in the Temple broke asunder. There is no barrier between God and man. God has taken our sins away and is now with us. God’s dwelling is now with us, in us, always for us.
40 days after he rose from the grave, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles to begin the church.
Where does God dwell? We see his beauty in mountains and waterfalls, in temples and buildings, but the truth is God dwells with us, in our hearts. He is with us in his Spirit.
He is in our hearts as we trust and accept him. He is in our midst when we worship and praise him. He is around us as we love one another.
God’s dwelling place is you. God’s dwelling place is us. God is dwelling with us right here, right now. Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered, there I will be.”
That is all a church is. It is us. Don’t forget that. It is not this building.
A church is the people, the community, the people of God, who have taken time to dwell with each other to remember God dwells with us.
In our modern age it is important to remember that the church is not the building, the church is not the organization on paper. The church is God’s people. These other things are just an organized effort that we do as a community to help worship together and advance the Gospel together. They are important, but not the center point.
But the other side of it is that I can’t be a church by myself. Sure God is with me when I am by myself, but if God is love, he is most intensely present not in solitude by myself but in service to each other. That is why we have “church.” God is present to us when we get together with others different from ourselves and learn to love as he loves us.
In Jesus God dwells with us, not through a temple anymore, not a building, but in our hearts, in each other, through each other.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you…
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
whose hearts are set on pilgrimage…
2. Do you take time to enjoy God’s dwelling with us?
Blessing is that sense of joy knowing God approves of us and loves us. It is his reward and embrace.
While the ancient people heard this to refer those that made the trek to the temple, in the Spirit we hear this another way.
We can take this to mean today that we are blessed when we take time to remember God is with us. We are blessed when we sing to God, listen to his word, fellowship with other Christians.
We are blessed when we tune into God in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We are blessed when we take time to see God in each other. We are blessed when we love others and see God active in that.
I know singing to God charges me up. I know just sitting and having a word of prayer renews my strength. Those are their own blessing. They are right there for us to do. God gives us all these means for enjoying him. The question is will be take advantage of them?
It says blessed are those whose strength is in God, whose hearts our own pilgrimage.
Is your heart on pilgrimage? Have you resolved that there is nothing more satisfying, more strengthening than knowing God’s presence? Have you resolve to seek nothing but God’s truth and have your resolves to seek that truth using nothing but God’s strength? Because you will never find God by your own strength. It is only by God’s grace, let me tell you.
6 As they pass through the Valley of Baka,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
7 They go from strength to strength,
till each appears before God in Zion.
3. When God dwells with us, we bring God to others.
What is the Valley of Baka? Well Baka means “weeping” so this is the valley of weeping. It was also called the valley of Hinnon or “Gehenna.” Gehenna is used as a metaphor for hell in the New Testament.
The valley of Baca or Gehenna was a place pagans would sacrifice their children in the fire. King Josiah tried to stop these detestable sacrifices by burning their alters there in turn, as a kind of ironic judgment. Then the prophet Jeremiah warned the people that if they kept sacrificing children in the flames in Gehenna, the whole city would burn and be like the fires of Gehenna. Sure enough, the Babylonian army came and leveled the city, burning it to the ground. The whole land looked like a charred wasteland. Jesus takes this warning up again in the Gospels and says if we don’t follow God’s ways, something like what happened in Gehenna will happen to us. Hell after we die is something like this place of burning punishment. In fact, the area of Gehenna, a valley going all the way to the dead sea where Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed in burning brimstone was called the Lake of Fire. So, the Book of Revelation picks up on this imagery when it warns us of the dangers of refusing to follow God.
So, this valley has a rich and powerful history, as biblical history and memory continues. But for right now, the valley of Baca or Gehenna was a place of death, a burn wasteland, full of ash and carrion.
Any pilgrim going from their town to the temple to worship God would have to pass by this place of death and judgment, reminding them of what can happen if they refused to acknowledge God and follow pagan ways.
These are places that we think of as places of the absence of God.
Think of the desolation from the Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This desolation you could think of as a place of the absence of God, places of death and destruction. Although these were not created by God’s judgment on the Japanese but by our sins as the Allied forces, mostly the Americans but us as well, who were quite comfortable killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives in order to stop a war, in the ultimate ends-justify-the-means logic.
Or one closer to home is look at the regeneration that has happened around us due to the reforestation projects. Sudbury terrain has turned from a wasteland to beautiful forest.
The Psalmist names this geographic symbol of a place of God’s absence and then says that those whose hearts are close to God are like healing streams to places of desolation. They are like streams that refresh and regenerate and restore.
Through the biblical narrative the imagery for hell, the places that the prophets use to warn us about our consequences of sin, also are captured with symbols of restoration. Ezekiel describes the waters of the temple replenishing the dead sea back to life. Revelation depicts the waters of flowing outside the gates of the city. And here, Baka, the valley of weeping, is turned into springs of life.
Those that walk with God turn hell on earth into heaven on earth, and that is the deep heart of God.
Let me ask you: Are you a healing presence to those around you? Are you bringing hope to others around you.
When you walk into a difficult situation, is it your natural inclination to just pass it by, walk away, don’t bother? Or do you feel called to help, heal, comfort, speak truth in places of deception, forgiveness in places of hate, hope in places of despair?
Do you turn valleys of Baka into Mounts of Zion? Lakes of fire into streams of Eden? Do you bring heaven to into places of hell on earth?
When God dwells with us, we bring God to others.
8 Hear my prayer, Lord God Almighty;
listen to me, God of Jacob.
9 Look on our shield, O God;
look with favor on your anointed one.
The psalmist longs for their prayer to be heard. And their prayer is for God to raise up the king, the anointed messiah, to be the protector of the people, bringing them back to God, bringing back justices and righteousness and mercy.
In the line of the human kings of Israel, that hope failed. God’s people were not meant to place their hope in human strength. But God filled this Scripture in sending Jesus, a descendant of king David, to be the perfect messiah, the perfect anointed one.
10 Better is one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
the Lord bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
from those whose walk is blameless.
4. To have nothing but God is to have more than to have everything except God.
In our world today, we face very real and powerful and persistent forces that want to choke us off in our faith.
We are far more likely to worry about our finances than to worry about our faith.
The rat race of life can keep us from prayer and pursuing God’s will for our lives. Even something as good as our families can quickly become an excuse to forget about meeting together as a church.
All the worries of wealth, the stress about work and time, the obligations of friends and family, school, sports, and whatever else. God is easily forgotten.
Jesus warns us, what profit is there if we gain the whole world but forfeit our souls?
It is the same truth as this Psalm. What is really worthwhile: working more and more to get that promotion or that next achievement and in doing so forget about God?
Better is one day in God’s presence than thousands elsewhere. Better is just a few moments resting in his love than a whole lifetime wasted trying to win in this world.
I’d rather be a door keeper in the house of God: If we had the choice between kings and billionaires in this world, this life, and being peasants in the kingdom of heaven…
To have nothing but God is to have more than to have everything except God.
Or as Jesus said, “What profits a person if they gain the whole world but forfeits their soul?”
We as Christians all know this, but the question is will we start to live it.
12 Lord Almighty,
blessed is the one who trusts in you.
Let’s pray recommitting ourselves to trust in this
Spencer Boersma 