New Songs for Old.
Psalm 98 (Acts 10:1-48)

by The Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones

Psalm 98 is a great psalm!!
It’s a lovely addition for Mother’s Day,
sets the mood for flowers and brunch and crayon cards.
It’s jubilant, upbeat, grandiose, and inclusive off the scale:
not only are all people regardless of race, age, gender, ability, orientation,
political persuasion, economic status
invited to pick up noisemakers  and make a joyful noise,
it also includes breaching whales, soaring eagles,  earthworms, dirt piles, dandelions
and mosquitos
- and yes even tulip wrecking squirrels –
in a sung symphony of praise to God.

If the Book of Psalms were a hymn book – which it is ! -
this would sit in a section called
“Raise the Roof Praise Songs!” – which it does!
Psalms  95 through 100 are all jubilant happy-clappy songs,composed to make a royal racket at splendid occasions like a coronation of one of Israel’s
kings, with umpteen trumpeters decked out in red and gold,
bulbous cheeks blasting high notes of exaltation!     *(Slide: drawing)

Psalm 98 takes the cake though.
This is not a carefully orchestrated organ and
choir affair,
it’s more like an ancient Israelite garage band,
or better still, a jam session with every musician dragging their instruments, finding the
key (or not!) and joining in.
Just like our children did. Noisy, but fun!

But, there’s trouble in this text.
Trouble begins with God.
In this Psalm, God is praised for a mighty arm wielded in the cause of universal justice.
God supposedly has more power in his pinky
than can be found  in all the missiles, tanks, battleships ever invented.

God is also praised for creation of the starry sky,
the ocean depths and mountain heights,
all of which are then compelled by the composer
to add their din to the Song and Dance of Praise.

I’m probably expected to say
“And rightly so! All of the above.”
I should I suppose break out into a rendition of        (*slide: boy)
“My God is so big to great and so mighty there’s
nothing my God cannot do!”

Now, if you have trouble with that image
- because science tells you more about creation than the Bible ever can,
- or because politics tells you justice in the earth is a faint hope, not a divine reality,
- or because your  faith in God’s omnipotence is shaken by God’s apparent inability to hold
back the assaults of illness, or family strife, or death and dying upon you or your loved ones.
If you have that trouble, then you’d be forgiven for joining the very large club outside this building.

About 50 years ago, a “new song” was heard across the airwaves,
and went gold, then platinum.
And the New Song was not “God is great,”
but “God is Dead.” ⁱ
The “Almighty Ancient of Days” was declared redundant,
defunct, dead.
Humans had pretty much figured out the birthing,
living, earning thing without God.
We’d worked out that the planet was like a superstore,
a one-stop shop for everything we need for the good life.
People looked around and discovered gods far more potent, attractive, seductive,
and they drove their cars, not to the church parking lot,
but to Chez Cora, or the Mall, or the ball park.
Guilt and forgiveness, along with honesty and ethics,
lay forgotten like empty pizza boxes in the dugout.

This phenomenon, the pundits tell us, is unique to the 21st century, an inevitable
consequence
both of modernity, and of postmodernity.

Mais, non. That ain’t so.
Because, this ancient psalm of Praise, # 98 by name, isn’t quite what it seems.
We’d be forgiven for assuming, given the content,
that it was written for the most spectacular
celebration of Stanley Cup, Summer Olympic proportions.
But you need to imagine instead,
a rather ragged, motley, malnourished remnant
of a once proud people reduced to refugee status in their own land.
Not one of them living has known true freedom,
or seen a military or a political or an economic victory in their favour.
They were slaves, the underclass of the Babylonian empire,
tossed out onto the garbage heap,
and left to wander barefoot back to a devastated,
forgotten homeland, with its burned out houses,
trampled vines, and lemons rotting in the sun.ⁱⁱ

They were surrounded on all sides by the peoples
of the great god Osiris, or Marduk,
gods who had whole cities and armies at their disposal,
whereas these Israelites didn’t have a king anymore,
nor much of a temple
(just a hastily put up tinpot structure to keep off the worst of the rain and sun)

‘Twas this puny people that composed our Psalm, of jubilation!

Were they nuts? Deluded?

Well, probably no more nuts than we are,
the bedraggled remnant, the less than 11% who will attend Church in Quebec today.
We are also surrounded by gods seemingly more successful, powerful, influential and life
changing than the God praised in this psalm.
We know all about Cora’s, the mall, the golf course.

But, we’re here.
As they were, there.

Singing.

Singing,  because despite all the apparent evidence to the contrary,
we see, in this “God is Dead” landscape,
evidence of God’s handiwork, God’s upside down victories,
occurring now, not just ‘way back then, in ancient Israel,
or in the home of Cornelius, but also in our own day.

Those who once trumpeted the death of God are now rushing copy to the editor
with news about the persistent increase in the  numbers of North Americans who have
had a mystical, personal experience, of God, the Divine, a miracle.

These folk may not all be here;
many left religion out with the recycling long ago.
But it seems, this New Song singing God
isn’t too bothered by that.

God, her sustenance, her healing touch,
his consolation, his spatter painted sunsets,
her magnification of human prayer, his energizing of young people to free the children,
her solace and capacity to love beyond pain or anger,
his propulsion to peace and justice;
all these new signs of a lively, death resistant, irrepressible God are popping up like dandelions on a May lawn.

What we’re seeing here at Cedar Park right now,
is nothing short of a miracle.
The statisticians tell us we’re supposed to be dwindling to nothing.
We’re not supposed to have 25+ children spending time getting to know God in Jesus,
We are not supposed to be sharing our testimonies of ‘resurrection’ happening  in our own lives.

70 Voices for Hope shouldn’t be here, in this supposedly empty husk of a dead religion.
We’re here, I believe,  and we’re singing, because each in our own way,
knows or hopes that God is “up to”ⁱⁱⁱ something healing,
restoring, energizing, life-giving
among us, between us, for us,
and with us for the sake of the world.

While this “up to something” of God in our day
carries echoes of the ancient Song of Israel,
we can hear new notes, new melodic lines, new lyrics,
new rhythms, new musical frontiers being broached and breached by God’s New Song.

For example, we’re discovering that people feed their spirit,
find a welcome, and fulfill their purpose in life,
seven days a week in this place, not just on Sunday morning,
if then at all.

And we’re also discovering that the new song we’re learning
is being sung  by the strangest of companions.
God’s up to inclusion, again!
Singing with us, (or are we singing with them?)
are diverse movements of the little people,
the ragged remnant people,
singing the God-song of honesty,
of sustainability, of ethical commerce, of wellbeing,
of holistic healing,
of equity and justice with peace.

When you start to listen,
it’s not so hard then to hear
that all over the earth,
now, as when that Psalm was first written,
a new Song, God’s Song,
is ringing out, making  a royal racket,
a din to deafen all that defeats life
with the jubilant song of God-given hope.

And we, that’s why we’re here.
If God is up to something,
If there’s a new song to be sung,
we want to join in.

(VU 245, Praise the Lord with the Sound of Trumpet, follows)

©Elisabeth. R. Jones,   May 2012.

¹“Death of God” theologians, e.g. J.A.T. Robinson, T. Altizer, Van Buren et. al, used the famous maxim by Nietzche (1882) as a springboard to explore notions that human society had outgrown (or no longer deserved) the need for ‘transcendence’ or ‘providence’, major characteristics of the Judeo-Christian theological heritage. See J.W. Robbins, ed. After the Death of God, (Columbia UP, 2007).

²While the dating for this psalm is still contested, many scholars suggest a late exilic or post-exilic date for its composition, with deliberate inclusion of ‘notes’ of older enthronement psalms. This is the tack I take here.

³YHWH the ancients’ name for God (Exodus 3), can be translated “I am what I am doing” or “I am what I am up to.” (see Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology.

This weekly series recommences on May 23 with Rev Elisabeth introducing and facilitating discussion on several books looking at the future of the Church in a world where increasing numbers report have spiritual experiences and encountering God but fewer in the Western world are participating in organized religion.  These include:

John A Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker: A House for Hope – The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century

Diana Butler Bass: Christianity After Religion

Harvey Cox: The Future of Faith

A House for Hope – Reading and Discussion Series

Cedar Park Youth in Action group invites you to a Spaghetti Dinner as they focus on giving practical help to a community in Haiti.  Come and have fun, good food, learn about the needs in Haiti and raise funds for relief all at the same time….

Tickets are $10 each.  Doors open at 5.30 pm

Come and enjoy Broadway, pops and cinema songs and arrangements while supporting the Cedar Park Youth In Action group as they take tangible action for projects in Africa and Haiti.

It takes a village to unite the most divided people on earth.

An action-packed film about a Palestinian community organizer and his 15 year old daughter who unite local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters to save their village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier.  Side by side, father and daughter unleash an inspiring movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Poster Budrus film June 2012

A fantastic time was had by some 45 people on Friday, May 11 at Cedar Park United. The weather lent itself to an outdoor hamburger BBQ followed by a delicious gourmet fruit selection…and Dumbo on the big screen! Pictures say a thousand words… Thanks go out to our cooks, our setup and cleanup crew as well as all those who brought along their smiles and good-time vibes!

The last F4 of the season will be taking place on June 22 when the movie will be Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (84 min.) and the meal will be BBQ chicken with potato salad and ice cream for dessert.

In God’s Name Why Not?
(Acts 8: 26-40)

by Rev Elisabeth R Jones

“Once upon a time, long ago and far away”…..
We know from the first 4 words we’re about to hear
a bedtime Fairy Story snuggled with a sleepy toddler!
We know that when we hear
“Did you hear the one about the …..?”
there’s a joke on the tip of the tongue.

But what about this one?
“Just then an Angel of the Lord appeared….”
Knowing it’s Scripture doesn’t guarantee a uniform response;
- some of us are steeling ourselves for the likelihood of an unbelievable miracle,
- others are openly intrigued, curious
- many are just plain discombobulated:
how am I supposed to react to
“An angel of the lord appeared”?

Neither a joke, nor a fairy story, though it has elements of both,
this ‘apparating’ Angel is what we have today,
getting us ready for another Easter story,
where God again gate-crashes barriers
to grace the world with new possibility, new life, hope.
And, as best we can on a hard pew,
we’re invited to snuggle in for a tale of deep wonder,
and timeless truths, seasoned with holy humour.

The Divine comedy begins with Philip.
Philip was one of those bright-as-a-button, shiny young people
whose vim and vitality and enthusiasm for Life in the Lord
makes those of us in our later decades tired to watch!

Philip had risen fast. He started out waiting tables
and mopping floors as a deacon in the new church
in the back alley of wrong-side Jerusalem.
A few short months later,
he has top-billing on the preaching circuit in Samaria.
The blogosphere is touting him as the successor to
old Fisherman Peter.

Where next for this young firebrand preacher,
will it be Athens, Rome?….

A potholed dirt track to Gaza? The one no-one travels unless they’re high-tailing out of Dodge in search of scorpions, swamps and sunstroke.

His story, later, was “An Angel told me to go.”
And given what happened, let’s hope he’s right because he broke every rule in the book that day.
(God be thanked)

He says he saw a chariot and ran up to – after it.
People in chariots are not Jews, they’re soldiers, or politicians,
they belong to the oppressive classes, the other side, the side that kills Messiahs,
and you want to stay away from both.

But no, according to Philip, the Freewheeling Spirit of God
told him to chase that consular car, with its flags waving in the desert breeze, down.
He scampers up to it like a monkey in a safari park, taps on the shaded bulletproof window.

The joke’s not done yet…
Philip sees white teeth smiling against ebony skin.
Greetings are exchanged, the dark man’s voice betrays, put delicately, his sexually compromised condition – the occupational hazard of working for the Queen of Ethiopia.
The chariot slows to a horse walk, Philip trotting alongside,
a scroll is examined,
words in a common language are exchanged in this bicultural encounter,
and Philip hops in.

For a man known for his preaching skills,
Philip gives precious few details.
No name.
Next to nothing of the conversation they had.

My guess is that it was one of those
holy encounters, pray God we all get,
at least once in our lifetime:
because they change our lives.
Where soul meets soul,
seekers after truth find common purpose, common song.
Discovery, insight, pregnant hope, mystery, mystical experience
season a conversation where time is irrelevant, and hours pass in an instant.

And for the life of us, we cannot retell a word of it!
Except the crucial detail:
“My life was changed by that encounter!”
“The world will never look the same from here on in.”

From the distance of two thousand years we can be forgiven if we don’t quite see that the reading of a few verses of Isaiah,and a splattering of puddle-water are enough to change a world, but they were, and they are.

The unnamed Eunuch was reading a text that could have been about him — and about so many other people then and since — a text about a scarred, humiliated victim,
justice denied, wounded by open and hidden hurts,
until callously removed from the earth.
How many people struggle
with hidden brokenness that longs for healing,
with the lies that beg for truth,
unfairness that gasps to be understood?
Worldwide is the classism, ageism, racism, sexism, egotism,
that disbars too many from the bare essentials,
let alone the abundance of life God Dreams for us.

Philip of course, saw in that text not only his chariot mate, but his Lord, Jesus.
Weaving the story of the man from Nazareth with the man from Ethiopia, with our own stories,
the truth dawns: on them, on us.
God walks this vale of tears with us,
healing it with resurrection.
In all the “heartaches and the natural shocks that human flesh is heir to” (Hamlet III.i)
God is with us, we are not alone.
Thanks be to God!

What happens next, hilarious though it was, is no joke.
Philip took the book of human religiosity and threw it out the chariot window.
For when the unnamed, foreign eunuch,
carrying in his flesh all the barriers to inclusion
that are possible for humans to impose when we set limits
to God’s grace unlimited,
when he asked
“ What is to prevent me from being baptized?
What is to prevent me from living my life
with God-in-Christ by my side?
What is to prevent me from coming to God
in the depth of my need?
What is to prevent me finding my heart’s desiring,
finding my home, my purpose,
my belonging within God’s Dream?
the expected, humanly constructed,
religiously faithful answer was
“Everything.”

But for the life of him,
Philip, for the first time,
knew different.
In God’s name, in God’s Dream,
in God’s way, shown in Jesus,
the true answer, appearing as suddenly as an Angel,
escaped from his lips and changed the world.
“Nothing”
Absolutely nothing!
Nothing can separate you from the Love of God? –
except maybe some water?”

And lo, and behold, there in the wilderness, water!
A puddle, perhaps, maybe brackish marsh water,
but why can’t we join in the joke, and imagine enough water
for Philip and this Eunuch to leap out of the chariot,
kick off sandals and clothes
and run like 8 year olds into fresh, sweet, running water?!

“Baptize me Philip, let me be part of God’s Story, God’s people, God’s Dream!”
And Philip said,
“In God’s Name, why not?!”

So he did!

To which we can all say, THANKS BE TO GOD!!

© Rev Elisabeth R Jones Fifth Sunday of Easter May 6, 2012

“The Far Side Singers”
Haven’t heard them yet?  You don’t know what you’re missing.  Be sure to catch this vibrant group.  They’ll make you stomp your feet and sing every number with them.  It’s almost become a traditional end to the Coffee House season!

Being Found, Being Known, Being Enough.
John 10: (10),11-18

by Rev Elisabeth R Jones

As I wrote on the blog this week, no matter which year of the Lectionary we’re in, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is littered with sheep on every side! Those lectionary compilers must have really liked this image of God and Jesus as Shepherd to us sheep. It’s a church musician’s dream, and a preacher’s nightmare.
It’s the perfect opportunity to sing again the much-loved Crimond version of the 23^rd Psalm, organists can riff on Bach’s or Beethoven’s or anybody else’s “Pastoral Symphony.” There are gazillions of anthems to choose from, including the lovely one we sang a few moments ago. But how many years in a row are people willing to listen to a preacher say “Jesus loves us like a shepherd loves his dumb, ornery ungulates with weird eyes?” That “We, like sheep, have a recurrent habit of getting caught in thickets, and a propensity to block the highways, run round in circles and stamp our feet at anyone attempting to herd us in the right direction.” ?
I thought not!

After preaching last week about the blessings hidden in the discipline of “hosting a text long enough for it…. to begin to ask us questions, that open up new possibilities”ⁱ for the way we see God at work in the world,
I thought I’d better practice what I preach, and host these blessed texts.
I’m glad I did, but I have now to make a public confession:

I thought I knew this passage well.
I’ve preached it, taught it, and I’ve even written an article on the meaning of the verse that immediately precedes it.ⁱⁱ
But until last week and this, while hosting this text,
reading it forwards, backwards, and in context,
I’d never made the connection between this famous
“I am the Good Shepherd” passage in John’s Gospel,
and the story that happens just before it.

I was tempted to have Martha read the 9^th chapter as well as the 10^th, but she’d still be reading now, so perhaps it’s best I didn’t.
So, let me fill you in….

….. But before I do, let me remind you,
John was not a videographer following Jesus around
recording his every word and move.
John is more like a movie editor, cutting and pasting clippings of Jesus’ actions and sayings, and adding a voice-over theological commentary to create a particular portrayal of Jesus as Christ, God’s anointed.
Therefore, what John chooses to insert before the Good Shepherd speech matters.

What he’s chosen to insert is this:
Jesus, plus his followers are “walking along”
and a man born blind sits beside the road,
holding out his Tim’s cup, begging for a nickel…..
You’d think Jesus would not only throw him a quarter, but heal him on the spot, and move on.
But no! First we have to witness a theological debate
between students and their professor…
“Erm, Jesus, sir, before you do anything,
we have this question:
was it the fault of the blind man or his parents that he’s been born blind?”

People still ask that question don’t they?
“What did that nice person do to deserve cancer?”
“Why do only the good die young?”
“Lung cancer, eh? Well, he/she is a smoker….”
“Isn’t HIV a judgment of God?”
Despite everything we know in the 21^st century about the origins of disease, we still attach moral cause and effect to it.
It seems this habit is as old as the hills,
and that two thousand years later,
we still have trouble with Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ question.

“Neither! It has nothing to do with punishment for sin, past, present or future. The man is not blind because he sinned, nor because his parents did.”
That’s sermon enough right there.
But not the sermon for today…
Jesus doesn’t stop there, or John doesn’t let him.
[Remember, John’s portrayal of Jesus is as an all-knowing wise sage whose every word and action is a deliberate “sign” of God’s work in the world, and of Jesus’ relationship to God as divine power made flesh.]
So Jesus carries on and says
“But, let me show you what happens when God’s power and love are unleashed.”
……You guessed it, the incurably blind man can now see!

Humans have trouble with miracles;
if we can’t dismiss them with science or logic,
we apparently dismiss the recipient of the miracle.
This man born blind is now accused of fraud.
Jesus is hauled out for ‘working’ on the Sabbath to cure the man
(even though they refuse to believe a miracle happened). A lot of effort is made to squash the story
before it makes the evening newsreels,
before it trends on Twitter.
Jesus is told to cease and desist,
and the poor “blind-but-now-I-see” man,
through no fault of his own, is driven out of town, banished!
Cut off from his family, community, and livelihood!
Jesus of course, does not cease and desist;
he preaches loudly and not particularly gently
about spiritual blindness,
and promptly goes off,
into the seedy wasteland beyond the gates of town, seeking, calling out for,
and eventually finding the banished outcast.

The encounter between them is beyond words:
a moment of mutual recognition,
the lost and the found,
the healer and healed,
the broken and whole,
and neither knows who is which, and it doesn’t matter!
Being known, being found, is enough.

Coming back to the gathering crowd,
— with the now sighted, newly minted disciple in tow—
Jesus resumes and ends his sermon with
“For pity’s sake, I was sent by God into this world
so that all people can have life,
and have it abundantly!”

“Don’t y’all see? I am the good shepherd.”
Words that now take on substance, flesh and bone,
not merely as an abstracted ancient middle-eastern pastoral metaphor ,
but words grounded in this action,
of healing, defending,
seeking and finding one to whom he has given
an abundance of life undreamed of,
and un-hoped for.

“Do you see, I am the Good Shepherd”
– who goes looking for those sheep of God’s fold,
those too often lost and left behind by bad shepherds and hired hands of soulless religion and society,
and who brings them, giggling,
into the community of God’s abundance.

“I am the Good Shepherd”
- who lays down his life for this flock of God’s beloving. Words of truth we cannot hear without filtering them through the noise of crucifixion.
We know he would, and did, and does,
and knowing that we begin to see, even in ourselves, both how hard, and how easy it is
to act on a bone-deep belief that God’s promises
of abundant life are to be trusted,
not only for ourselves, but for all people.
God’s abundant life of community, of healing,
of growth in wisdom and compassion,
of freedom through care
this abundant life community is worth living for,
laying one’s life on the line for.

I confess that it’s only been by hosting this text
that I’ve realized that John’s often ‘wordy’ Jesus
is not just all talk,
not just all theological theory,
not a proponent of a ‘spiritualized’ faith divorced from human reality,
but one who walks this talk.

I will never now read this text of the Good Shepherd without seeing,
superimposed on the traditional icon of Jesus
holding a lamb about his neck,
this deeper icon,
this window into the Dream of God,
of Jesus, his arm around the shoulders
of a once-blind, once outcast man,
who is rubbing his sainted, sighted eyes,
above a grin broader than that of a Cheshire cat.

That’s a shepherd I’d follow. Wouldn’t you?
………
Amen!
 
 
©Rev. Elisabeth R. Jones    Easter 4    2012

¹Quoting last week’s sermon

²“Abundant Life: implications for the full ministry of people with disabilities” WARC working paper, 2003.