Joanna Manning is going to be ordained a priest. The author of Is the Pope Catholic: A Woman Confronts her Church and Take Back the Truth: Papal Power and the Religious Right is going to be a priest.

Obviously, not a Roman Catholic priest.

No, our dear sister was ordained to the ministry of the deaconate in the Anglican Church last May and will be ordained priest this Sunday. And when someone from the Wine Before Breakfast community receives the laying-on-of-hands from a bishop, it is our practice to get our hands in there first.

So that is what we are going to do at Wine Before Breakfast. We are going to send Joanna on her retreat and towards her ordination with our blessings and with our prayers.

Now it is an interesting thing that Joanna, of all people, is going to be a priest. It is going to be her responsibility to attend to the liturgies of the church, to make sure that the Eucharist and the high holy days of the liturgical calendars are duly observed. And yet no one knows better than Joanna that God is sick of liturgy with blood-stained hands.

The prophet Isaiah says that God can’t endure this shit anymore – offerings, incense, Sabbaths, solemn assemblies, appointed festivals. God hates it all, these rich and finely performed liturgies are a burden to God. I mean, we believe that God is ‘omnipotent’ and all, but Isaiah says that these liturgies make God weary, they sap the divine strength!

Isn’t that curious?

The only thing that can strip God of divine power is the liturgy of God’s people!

And then the prophet comes to a devastating conclusion. Speaking in the voice of God, Isaiah says,

When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.

I will not listen. I will not look.

The divine eyes and ears are closed to a people who pray fervently, who present wonderful liturgies, but whose hands are full of blood.

No one knows this better than Joanna Manning.

Isaiah has a solution to this problem, however. It is a covenantal solution. It isn’t rocket science, it isn’t complicated. It is profoundly simple, deeply healing, and radically true. But it isn’t easy:

Cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Six verbs: cease, learn, seek, rescue, defend, plead.

One negative, five positive.

Cease, repent, turn away from evil, and then direct your life to the good, justice, the oppressed, the orphan and the widow.

It’s actually the only way to get the blood off of our hands.

And so as a community we lay our own blood-stained hands on our sister, consecrating her to continue a ministry of justice, indeed, a ministry that just might occasion the renewal of liturgies and worship that is worthy of our God.

Come and pray.
Pray for Joanna.
Pray for the church.
Pray for justice.
Pray for healing.
Pray for forgiveness.

Joanna Manning’s ordination details:
November 27 at 4.30 pm
All Saints Kingsway Anglican Church
2850 Bloor St West | Toronto, ON

All are welcome. Members of the WBB community will be participating in the service.

by Stephen Edwards

Let us pray,
we stand before you, Lord
in the midst of our city, suffering
with wickedness,
…we are well acquainted

We are naked, Lord
Our shame is revealed

Our sister Sodom
…who sought to know your angels
Our sister Sodom
…in whom not 10 righteous could be found
Our sister Sodom
…on whom you rained down fire
Our sister Sodom
…a byword in our mouths
Our sister Sodom
…who is not so different from us
Our sister Sodom
…who is not so far from us
Our sister Sodom
…who shines beside our sin and disgrace

She was overthrown
…We could not look away
…We cannot look away

We don’t want to flee to the mountains
…We want the city!
We fear your disaster there
…We want the city!
Where else will we hoard our wealth?
…We want the city!
Where else will we lure our lovers?
…We want the city!
How else could we ignore the poor?
…We want the city!
How else could we build our pride?
…We want the city!
It is only a little one
…but we still want the city!

[silent and spoken confession and repentance for the sin of the city and prayers for its salvation]

We have not the strength to flee
We have not the strength to stay
“Seal our hearts and break our pride
For we’ve no where to stand and no where to hide”

[silent and spoken prayers for spiritual discipline, relationships, stewardship, and unity]

Help us to remember your covenant
Help us to bear our shame
“Seal our hearts and break our pride
For we’ve no where to stand and no where to hide”

[silent and spoken prayers for God’s in-breaking into our lives with strength, and for those whom we know especially need this]

We want your city!
…Strength to bear our shame
We want your city!
…Strength to get up
We want your city!
…Strength to share our wealth
We want your city!
…Strength to host the stranger
We want your city!
…Strength to shelter the poor
We want your city!
…Strength for delivery from evil
May it rain down upon us!
…The greatest of all cities

A reflection on Matthew 16:13-28 delivered March 15, 2011 at Wine Before Breakfast

It may be true that “much depends on dinner”, but in the world of housing, everything depends on location, location, location.

Real estate figures prominently in today’s gospel passage. Jesus and the disciples are just outside Caesarea Philippi, a complex that today would be called a “prime waterfront location” for the monster homes and temples of the Herodian family. The Herodians are the puppet rulers of Palestine installed by the Roman Empire to create the illusion of local self-rule. They got to develop the waterfront properties as a reward for pandering to Roman interests while thousands were homeless and dispossessed. And like the exclusive real estate of our own time, these properties have guards . . . and gates.

It is near the gates of the Herodian family compound that Jesus chooses to reveal something to the disciples. The Greek word for reveal is “apocalypto” and for centuries people have been so mesmerized by Jesus that they look for a revelation about his personal identity and overlook the importance of the location. The disciples turn Jesus’ question about the Son of Man into a guessing game of titles and “name-that-prophet”, concerned only with who the Son of Man is – not what the Son of Man will do with enclaves like Caesarea Philippi.

In fact, people have been playing this game throughout Matthew’s gospel. Herod identifies Jesus as the avenging ghost of John the Baptist (Matthew 14). And in Matthew 11, John the Baptist asks Jesus whether he is “the one to come” – or will it be someone else.

Jesus’ reply to John the Baptist sheds some light on today’s passage. Tell John that miracles are being worked, but then he adds: “Blessed are those who don’t stumble because of me”. In other words, blessed are those who aren’t distracted by wonders and titles, but who are ready to follow the Way to a new world – a world without guards or gates.

Maybe too much has been made of Peter’s messianic recognition. After all, Jesus has already been recognized by the Canaanite woman as the “Son of David” in the previous chapter. And when Peter does use the “M” word, notice how quickly Jesus shifts the focus from messianic identity to the keys and building blocks of a new society where what is loosed and bound in heaven will be loosed and bound on earth.

To obsess about identity is to stumble and overlook the significance of what the gates of exclusion represent in the first century – and the twenty-first century. Jesus has chosen this location to underscore the struggle to smash such gates once and for all. Like most struggles, there will be casualties, and for the first time, Jesus reveals that he will be one of those casualties. Talk of gate crashing and casualties disconcerts Peter and turns him from being a building block into a stumbling block.

But truthfully, most of us would rather follow Peter than follow Jesus. It’s easier to speculate about Jesus’ identity than to breach the gates of privilege. It’s easier to colour-code Jesus’ sayings to uncover the “real man”, and more fun to hypothesize about his relationship with Mary Magdalene – than it is to pass an Affordable Housing Act in the Parliament of Canada.

So the gates remain standing. In some cities, the gates of exclusive property stand next to homeless shelters. The gates stay up while Toronto public housing is governed by a Herod-like puppet – and thousands have no housing at all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Because Jesus also says that for those committed to God’s justice, another world is possible. And not only is another world possible, it’s possible in the lifetime of a generation.

Think about it. The women who launched the first International Women’s Day in 1911, they struggled, there were casualties, but they did not “taste of death” till they won the right to vote. Think of the labour movement in 1911, they struggled, there were many casualties, but they did not “taste of death” till they won the right to collective bargaining. And this generation can testify to the courage of those who have taken up the cross of justice and changed the world in a single lifetime.

And so the real question isn’t who-is-Jesus, but who is willing to take up a cross.

The real question isn’t who-is-Jesus, but who is willing to defy the Herods and say to the Caesars: “Do your worst, we’re not afraid to speak out”.

The real question isn’t who-is-Jesus, but who is willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with the angels and storm the gates of hell.

The real question isn’t who-is-Jesus . . . it’s who are you?

A reflection on Matthew 12:22-37, Van Morrison’s “The Healing Game” and a poem by Rilke delivered on February 8, 2011 at Wine Before Breakfast

My favourite poem goes like this:

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks

Somewhere there must be storehouses
Where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

All paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

I love this poem for its truth, even while I hope that it’s a lie.

I hope that when the poet observes that no one is living their life, that everyone is wearing a mask, while their real selves are lying empty and uninhabited in storehouses and abandoned barns, I hope that he’s lamenting something we’re in danger of, but not totally resigned to.

I hope my real life isn’t hanging limply on a wall, a cast off shell…even if I often feel, as he says, haphazardly assembled, fitted together by bits and pieces of man-made façade.

I hope that it doesn’t have to be the way the poet says that it is.

In today’s passage, I think we find Jesus showing the way back to the place where real lives were laid away, to the repository of unlived things. He’s reminding his crowd of listeners that they are not two selves but one; they are not masks and hidden faces, no coveralls, no make-up, no faking.

Only fruit.

Fruit that grows naturally out of a tree.

Fruit that fits its source.

An outside that matches its inside.

Jesus is pretty clear at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, and again here in chapter 12, that what comes out of you matters. That whatever and whoever you are is made known by what comes out of you. That whatever is in your heart is bound to come tumbling out of your mouth sooner or later. That, in fact, your true face always speaks, whether you like it to or not. That your body is a storehouse for good or evil and your fruit will allow those around you to know which.

Is it ironic then, or only more tragic, that this story begins with a man who cannot see or speak? A man so possessed by the devil that very little can get into him, and even less can get out. If what comes out of your mouth matters, then the fact that this man has no words shows how completely he is consumed and inhabited by Satan. Satan has sealed him up. He is locked up in Satan’s house, as it were. The tree being so bad that fruit cannot grow.

When Jesus heals the man, the crowd is divided: some of them are amazed. Some others blaspheme. The usual suspects. The Pharisees. Jesus knows what they’re thinking before they say a word… He can see the truth of what’s in them even before they open their mouths.

They call him a son of Satan.

There is, of course, no shortage of reckless interpretation on Jesus’ strong reaction — Especially this business about blasphemy against the Spirit being the unpardonable sin. After a rather cursory read, it seems to me that a great deal of these interpretations break the cardinal rule of New Testament studies, the first lesson and maybe the only thing I remember from my one and only class in biblical literature: the importance of CONTEXT.

There is a lot going on in this passage…

A sick person healed.

A demon exorcised.

A kingdom divided.

A strong man robbed.

A spirit blasphemed.

Some trees bearing fruit.

Some tongues being tamed.

…all in preparation for the day of judgment.

When some people will be permanently condemned.

We might be tempted to follow any one of these stories as the main event. Tracking them to other places in the scriptures where more is said on each subject, and sometimes in very different rhetorical and social settings.

But Matthew puts them together. And I think he means for them to hang that way. To cohere. They’re not so disconnected as they might first appear. The warning about blasphemy against the Spirit is not easily unmoored from the rest of this story, to be branded about like a dangerous sword condemning all manner of carelessness. When Jesus warns the Pharisees of the gravity of their error, he is talking specifically about their illogical conclusion that his healing must be the work of Satan.

The Pharisees have been watching Jesus heal people all along. They’ve have had time to think about this particular miracle, in between hearing about it and then confronting Jesus. But they still resolve that Jesus must be in league with the devil.

Blasphemy is as simple as that: calling the work of the Spirit the work of Satan. A simple, not flippant, but persistent misapprehension about who the Spirit is and what the Spirit is capable of.

It’s simply preposterous to watch a man, once blind and mute, restored to wholeness, and to call that the work of the devil. It’s plainly ridiculous, that demons would cast out demons. That Satan might evict himself from a body, vacate his power, and weaken his kingdom.

It would be as if the strongman left his house unguarded. His doors unlocked, even wide open. Vulnerable, susceptible, and defenseless against the thief who was coming to rob him.

At first it seems strange that Jesus calls Satan the strongman. But there’s a certain irony in calling him this, since Jesus knows that strongman is going to be tied and bound, his house ransacked and plundered. The thief is stronger, if only by his wit. The robber subdues the strongman, now weak, and steals his possessions – those people he had literally possessed.

Jesus is the stronger man.

Even so, he doesn’t seem surprised that some people will doubt him. Jesus is willing to forgive those who don’t believe that he’s the Son of God. He’s human. He’s flesh and blood and standing in front of them. There’s room for confusion. He doesn’t look like much – all that redemption he has to offer hidden underneath his dirty clothes. People are apt to be mistaken about who he is and what he’s up to. But the work of the Spirit should be obvious; even instantly recognizable…

Here she is again.
Back on the corner again.
Back where she belongs
Where she’s always been
Everything the same
It doesn’t ever change
She’s never been away
from the healing game.

That kind of magic can only come from God. God’s in the healing game. God heals because it’s in God to heal. It’s the outpouring of who God is. We might even say that healing is the fruit of God’s tree. Maybe it will be something like those trees that will grow in the New Jerusalem in the end, and bring the healing of the nations.

Somewhere in the middle of his tirade, Jesus offers his listeners–and by extension you and I—a choice:

Gather with me. Or be Scattered.

And if this passage is about one thing instead of many.

And if God and Jesus and the Spirit are one, while Satan is Legion.

And if the fruit of their essence, is to heal people, to restore wholeness, while Satan’s impulse is to break people apart.

And if Jesus is teaching us about making our outsides match our insides, about the unity of our being.

THEN there’s something remarkable about this choice:

Gather with me. Gather yourselves up. All those pieces of you. All of your disguises. Your brokenness. Your assembled voices and fears and little pleasures. Those seemingly ill-matched threads of your existence. Gather them up. And become one. One tree. Bearing one kind of fruit. One with me.

Or else be scattered. A house divided. A brood of vipers, slithering in knotted, hissing chaos. A broken set of senses and abilities. Knicknacks and bric-a-brac in Satan’s crowded house.

Gather with me. Or be scattered.

So there is some logic to this passage, after all. It hinges on cohesion.

It’s about oneness.

About the truth that is in you being visible outside of you.

About wholeness. Whether its wholeness after healing. Or the wholeness of acting out of the deep truth that is within you.

About being either good or bad, but not both. Because to do two things at once is to do neither.

About whatever is in you saving you or condemning you.

When we’re more apt to live in masks and costumes, among smoke and mirrors, Jesus tells us there are no hypocrites. Hypocrisy is only bad fruit.

Back in Matthew, right after all of this, the Pharisees ask Jesus for some proof that he is who he says he is. Their blasphemy deepens. The tree is standing in front of them, and they can’t see its fruit for the leaves. Their challenge to him shows their own fruit, tiny, wrinkled and bruised. Their words, whatever they are, they matter. Our words, whatever they are, they matter too.

I’ve been gnawing on the Luke 7:17-35 passage over the last month. Especially verse 22.

John is in Herod’s dungeon wondering when Jesus will depose Herod and establish a Godly kingship on earth. He remembers the Isaiah 61 prophecy but doesn’t get the bigger picture.

John has in mind unfortunates like himself, jailed because those in authority don’t like what he is saying. “Brood of vipers!” indeed. We’ll throw him in the pit until he pays us a little more respect.

Jesus has another sort of prison and prisoners in mind – those prisoners of sin and death, from all times and places. Which includes John and us. But he has to go to the cross to accomplish that and, as John the Apostle so aptly puts it, his time has not yet come at this point in the gospel narrative.

But come it does. And those who were expecting a coronation got a crucifixion instead. Good Friday thrusts a sword through the heart of Mary and many. It’s not supposed to end like this.

As Frederick Buechner puts it “the miracle of Good Friday was that there were no miracles”. God doesn’t pull a sleight of hand. No last minute rescue by angels. No coming down off the cross lke the mockers had requested. Just “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Then silence. And the immanence of death.

And a little later, a spear thrust in the side – just to make sure the death sentence had been carried out. Blood and water – clot and serum – confirm the worst.

Jesus’ reference to Jonah’s “three days” has come into play in a manner no one could have guessed.

It’s not supposed to end like this. How often have we said or thought that when our expectations of God lie shattered on the ground. When our loved one surrenders their final breath to cancer. When a phone call delivers the most devastating news one can hear. When all hope is gone in an instant.

But the dawn of the third day comes – and with it resurrection. God is alive! – and so are we, more alive than we can imagine. And to our open mouth looked of astonishment and joy He says “Peace my child. With God all things are possible. I’m bigger than you can imagine.”

I think of Jesse Jackson, tears rolling down his face, standing in a crowd of people celebrating Obama’s victory. He was the last person Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken to that fateful April 4, 1968, just after 6 PM. King, standing on the balcony of the motel, had asked Jesse, standing below in
the parking lot, to join him for dinner – and added, jokingly, for Jesse not to wear blue jeans.

Then the crack of a high powered rifle. Then Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young cradling King as he lay dying. Young sobbing “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over” and Abernathy rebuking him “No it’s not over. Don’t you ever say that!”. Then the journey to the hospital and the inevitable pronouncement of death at 7:05 PM.

Even if King had survived, his brain had been starved for oxygen and his spine fractured. There was no way back or out. King was dead. His concluding words of his last sermon “I’ve seen the promised land” now took on prophetic import!

And here, 40 years later, it seemed as though they were being fulfilled. Barack Obama is not the Promised One, nor is his presidency the coming of the Promised Land, however much people might like to think they are. Yet still God has made a way out of no way and Ralph Abernathy’s “No, it’s not
over.” has been proven right.

African Americans and White Americans have together taken a big, bold step towards King’s dream, which is nothing less than Jesus aspirations for us all. I wonder how many thought of Psalm 126 that evening. The Kingdom has not come, but this’ll do until it does; hope
for the journey ahead. Water at a well.

Meanwhile, Jesus, having accomplished all things for our salvation and seated at the right hand of the Father looks at His church and asks “Are you the ones who come after me or do I look for another?” then answers His own question “No, there is no other. No Plan B. You’re it. Now get to work – and remember – I am with you always.”

Yes we can – through Christ who strengthens us. Let’s begin…

Frederick Harrison works at Crux Books in Toronto and is a member of the Wine Before Breakfast community.

For this event Brian chose to reflect on the nature of worship that has emerged in the Wine Before Breakfast community, specifically the role of lament in our life together. So he crafted a talk that integrated music and spoken word and asked members of the Wine Before Breakfast band to help in the presentation.

We make that talk available in our resources section. An audio CD of the presentation is available from Wycliffe College, less the concluding performance of Emmylou Harris’s “The Pearl.”

A reflection on Romans 13:1-7
Wine Before Breakfast
Originally Delivered February 6, 2007

Let me put my cards on the table right from the outset. I am sick and tired of hearing Christians who have something at stake in the status quo of economic, social and political systems of injustice appealing to Romans 13 to legitimate unswerving obedience to oppressive and deceitful regimes.

I speak a fair bit in the US and whenever I am addressing the question of the meaning of the gospel for our political lives someone invariably asks, “yes, but what about Romans 13?”

What about it? I reply.

“Well, how can you use language of subverting the empire when Paul says that we are to submit to the governing authorities?”

And for years I have attempted to be patient in my response. My patience has run out. In the light of Guantanamo Bay, the deceit of the administration in leading America into war in Iraq, the refusal of that state to submit to almost any significant international treaty, and the idolatrous protection of the revered “American Way of Life.”

In the face of undeniable evidence of the human impact on global warming, I’ve lost it. I’ve got no more patience for this appeal to Romans 13 to justify idolatry, deceit, violence, repression and imperialism.

To hell with the Romans 13 of the Religious Right! To hell with the Romans 13 of lackeys of imperialism! To hell with the Romans 13 of those who are comfortable in Babylon!

Indeed, to hell with the Romans 13 of those who somehow think that an American Revolution in 1776 was divinely sanctioned but no such revolution should happen in 2007 because we must submit to the governing authorities.

And while we are at it, to hell with the Romans 13 of those who say that we should not criticize the Canadian government for leading us into a military intervention in Afghanistan that had more to do with paying debts to our powerful neighbours to the South than any concern for either international terrorism or the well-being and democratization of the Afghani people.

Or to make my point more biblically clear – to hell with Romans 13 read out of context of Romans 12, the rest of Paul’s letter to the Romans, the life of Jesus, and the whole prophetic testimony of the Hebrew prophets.

Let’s limit ourselves to the text we have been living with all year at Wine Before Breakfast – the letter to the Romans. And let’s assume that Paul is not an idiot and that he doesn’t go about blatantly contradicting himself.

Here he has been writing a letter to a community at the very heart of the empire and from the get-go it has been clear that this is a counter-imperial gospel that he proclaims. It is the gospel of Christ, not the gospel of Caesar that these Christians are called to submit to.

It is the gospel of Christ, not the gospel of Caesar that is to shape their lives together as a unified community of Gentiles and Jews. And it is in Jesus Christ our Lord that we are more than conquerors when that false Lord Caesar imposes on us hardship, distress, persecution, nakedness, peril and the sword.

“For we are convinced,” the apostle writes, that “neither death…nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers…will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Let the rulers and powers throw at us what they will, we have the victory in Christ Jesus our Lord.

No, says Paul, we are not to be conformed to the imperial realities of the present age, because we live in anticipation of the age to come. Our passage today starts at Romans 12.2 – do not be conformed to this age – and really ends at 13.12 – “the night is far gone, the day is near.

Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” And the question that Paul addresses in these verses at the beginning of Romans 13 is, “how do we live wisely as children of light in the midst of an age of darkness?

If we are not conformed to this age, to the rulers and authorities that are the cause of our persecution, then how do we relate to these authorities in the present, before the full dawning of the day of our Lord’s coming?”

Again going back to Romans 12 we could say that the question is, “how does a community that is itself a transformed body-politic relate to the powerful body-politic of the empire?” If the Christian community is called to be…

• a body-politic that is rooted in the offering of our very bodies as living sacrifices to God, instead of participating in the pagan sacrifices of the empire
• a body-politic that is rooted in shared gifts for mutual upbuilding, not a hierarchy of imposed duty
• a body-politic which undermines the status system of honour in the empire by deliberately associating with the lowly and exercising hospitality to the outsider
• a body-politic that rejects the violence that is the very foundation of the imperial regime because it insists on blessing those who persecute them, feeding their enemies and refusing to overcome evil with evil

…then how does that community relate to a regime that lives out of a diametrically opposed vision of life, subject to a “Lord Caesar” who is the embodied opposite of the Lord Christ?

Obey these imperial authorities, of course. Limit the reign of Christ in your lives to personal life, and how we do things in the context of our little community, but let Caesar have his legitimate authority over pretty much everything else in your life. Right? Wrong!

Notice that Paul does three things in this passage. First, he undermines the self-appointed divine authority of Rome. It is not Rome’s virtue, nor is it Rome’s gods that allows Rome to have authority.

All authority is rooted in the God of Jesus Christ – the very God that Rome rejects in its persecution of Jews and Christians alike. This is not providing divine sanction for Rome’s rule, it is a relativization of Rome’s rule.

Second, he makes it clear in his very description of this state that it is diametrically different from both the body-politic of the Christian community and from its own self-perception.

You see, it is one thing for Paul to contrast a political regime of fear, wrath, violence and bloodshed with a community of love, blessing, care and non-violence rooted in Jesus Christ.

But you also need to know that Nero took pride in the fact that he had not won his empire by the sword, and that under his rule the golden age of Augustus had been renewed and that his was a time of unprecedented peace.

Paul, the Jews of Rome, and the Christian community know differently. The imperial sword is not idle, it continues to pierce the bodies of those who will not submit to Nero’s body-politic.

And third, Paul’s rhetoric here is certainly less than enthusiastic in his call for submission to the state. Live in fear, and be afraid, he says. And well we should live in fear of a regime that bears the sword.

And yes, give taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due. Why? Because you are also wise to give fear to whom fear is due and “honour” to whom “honour is due.” My hunch is that he says that we should have our eyes wide open and be fearful of the state that wields such violent authority.

And when he says “honour” I think that that word should be in quotation marks. Give imperial “honour” to those demand such honour, while you are diligent in associating with the lowly – with those who have no honour in this regime.

If I were to summarize what I think Paul is up to here, I would say that he is calling us to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. The slave says, “yes Master, no Master, whatever you say Master,” obeying his Master in everything, bringing no attention to himself, as he quietly plans the escape of his fellow slaves along the underground railroad.

And that slave then sings about how his God is “a-going to trouble the water” and the Master has no idea that that troubled water is the water of liberation. And then 20th century African Americans sing “precious Lord take my hand” and the authorities are happy that these people love Jesus, but they have no idea that this is a Jesus who will take oppressed people to freedom.

Don’t be naïve about the violence of the state, Paul tells these Christians. Handle the state with care, he counsels. Some authorities really should be feared. But don’t allow such fear to be the last word on the way you comport yourself in this world.

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

And sometimes, such love – even of the enemy, even of the persecutor – will require disobedience, because you are subject to the very same God that the authorities are subject to.

And when they inhibit your freedom to obey this God of liberation, then you are subjects of the kingdom of this God, not slaves of any regime – duly authorized or not.

A reflection on Romans 3:9-31
Wine Before Breakfast
Originally Delivered October 10, 2006

It was all over the news when the gunman entered the one-room Amish schoolhouse killing five girls and wounding several more. This was evil. I remember clearly when I was told that four men had grabbed my 14 yr. old friend on her way home and dragged her to a deserted field to assault her.

This was evil. When we think about events like this which seem all too frequent in our world, evil is easy to identify and easy to become angered at. We look at those who commit these horrible things and quote along with Paul,

Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery are in their paths,
and the way of peace they have not known.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.

And, at the time Paul wrote this letter, many of the Jews were quite happy to affirm these things about the Gentiles in general. For them too, evil was something that could be easily identified and condemned. “The wicked” which are being referred to in most of the psalms Paul is quoting here in vs. 10-18 were of course Gentile pagans.

But by including a quote from Isaiah 59, Paul turns things on their heads just as he has been doing so carefully since the first chapter. He joins the prophets and insists that Israel itself was caught right in the middle of the mess.

Isaiah 59 is the only quote here that originally referred to the chosen people, but Paul lumps these quotes all together and applies them all right across the board. There is no one righteous, not even one. Evil is not just something “out there” which we can point to, but we are all caught up in it, every last one of us.

When The Times invited well-known authors to write essays on the theme, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Christian journalist GK Chesterton’s response was the shortest of all. He wrote

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,

GK Chesterton

But we seem to find this evil so much harder to identify. It is much easier to locate the problem outside ourselves, in another person, another group, another religion, another system, another nation.

Now, Paul is not locating sin purely in individual guilt here. The brokenness of the world affects all of creation; it affects our structures and institutions as well. But he wants it to be perfectly clear that there is no one who is not complicit in this. There is no one righteous, not even one.

How do we respond to this?

Is it one more religious guilt mechanism to manipulate us and hold us captive? Or, rather, should we be thankful that we are all in this broken mess together?

It can be liberating to realize that the way things are is not the way they are supposed to be—not in our lives or our communities or the structures and powers that hold us in bondage.

Jews and Gentiles, us and them, Canadians and Afghans, you and me – we’re all in this together! But, thankfully, we are not only in the sin thing together.

Not only have we all fallen short of the glory of God – the glory we were meant to display as God’s image-bearers on this earth – not only are we all broken and sinful and complicit in violence and injustice.

But the good news in this passage is that we are all in the justification thing together too. We are all justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. We are all dependent on God to set things right.

As powerful as our unfaithfulness is, and Paul has not shrunk from describing that in detail the last few chapters, God’s faithfulness is more powerful still. And Jew and Gentile alike are in this together.

There is no distinction – all have sinned and all are justified freely by his grace.

So, this is primarily about the faithfulness of God, not about us. And this faithfulness is located in Jesus Christ. We failed to bear God’s image, we fell short of his glory, but Jesus lived as faithful humanity. Israel also fell short in its mission to the world, but Jesus lived as faithful Israel. And God presented him, this Jesus, as a sacrifice of atonement.

Verse 25 says it was because of God’s “forbearance” that he passed over the previous sins. God was patient with people. Nonetheless, if God had only passed over sins, and had not arrived to “demonstrate his justice”, this patience might just as well have been abandonment.

Because of the depth of our brokenness, because of how messed up Paul has shown that we are, being left to ourselves would have been our destruction. But God did not leave us to destroy ourselves and others and his creation. He has come to set things right.

In order to be righteous to us who are not righteous it meant suffering. In order for him to be faithful to us whose feet are swift to shed blood, it meant we would shed his blood. In order to be with us who are broken and dying, he would be broken and die.

This is the faithfulness of Jesus Christ; this is the justice of God.

God has not left us but has come to us. God has come to set things right. The way things are is not the way things will always be.

But is Paul saying something else to us here as well?

If we focus on the faithfulness of Jesus, are we not also called to embody that faithfulness in our lives and in our communities? We are called to have this faith too. And that means unity.

If Jews and Gentiles are in the sin thing together and the justification thing together, what could be important enough to keep them apart? They are both justified by the same faith. While Jews had often used Torah and circumcision as boundary markers, to separate and define themselves over and against the other nations, Paul will have none of this boasting. It is excluded. Justification by faith is the basis for a profound sense of unity.

Sadly, as God’s people, we have often taken what was meant for inclusion and used it to exclude. How often has justification by faith replaced the law as our own boundary-marker, to mark who’s in and who’s out?

How many times have we used it for division instead of for unity? Although there are some very healthy signs in the church today, I think we’d all agree that we have a long way to go.

To those who are on the outside, God’s faithful “I love you” draws them in. To us who are, perhaps smugly, on the inside, God’s faithful “I love you” should compel us to respond to others in the same way.

Maybe we too, could use this passage as the rally call for inclusion and unity.

Paul asks the question, Is God not the God of Gentiles too? Of course, of Gentiles too. Perhaps this is a good question for us to practice as well. Is God not the God of that person, that group, that denomination, that nationality? Of course. And we are all justified by the same faith.

Do we then negate “justification” by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold it.

A reflection on Romans 8:18-39
Wine Before Breakfast
Originally Delivered November 21, 2006

Dishes clanging, water splashing, people yelling up and down the hallway. As the floor is finally mopped clean, the instruments put away and the water let out the drain, the chaos is suddenly intruded upon by a mournful silence.

Silence is never to be found in this city, and yet today silence has found us here. Patients gather ’round the bed, prayers are lifted like incense to heaven as tears roll drearily down our cheeks. A father. A son.

Now Spirit.

From the centre of the semi-circular crowd, a young man leads in a prayer of thanksgiving. He leads us in a prayer of lament, for this our dearly departed. Lying in our midst, body covered in hand-woven linens, flies circling and spirit fleeting, we remember who he was to us. We recall the few things we were able to do for him while he breathed his last breaths in this place.

My throat chokes up. A tear traces my cheek like so many others. I did not know this man, and yet at the time of his last rites, I recognise in him, myself. I too am frail. I too will die. Whether indistinctly in a hospice bed or in a blaze of glory, my life, too, shall pass.

In the face of death, persecution, and futility, our correspondent declares that these sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory about to revealed. A glory will be revealed, he tells us.

And yet what could he know? Paul’s ideal is not our reality. The reality of The Way in first century Rome was this: hardship, peril and sword. It is in the midst of these hostile surroundings that the best minds of a generation were being destroyed, left starving, hysterical, naked.

What place is there for glory in the midst of this oppression? Why call for celebration when what’s at hand is cause for lament? If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – there is nothing new under the sun.

Do you remember the disciples?

The disciples had been waiting. Watching and waiting and endlessly praying. Praying for the one to come. The one to set them free. To break them out of tyranny. The one who would overthrow, let them know that they were chosen, they were saved, and that they would rise in triumphant victory.

Even then, all their master wanted, was to make blind men see.

The disciples were waiting on something and someone to overcome, to outlive, to outlast to outplay the imperial hand, to finally conquer the band of thieves who were killing, cursing, crushing them at every turn. They wait and they long. They long for the dawn of a new age, a new page, for Jesus’ fire and rage against the Roman machine swallowing them whole.

And where are we now? I hate to say it, but it looks like nothing much has changed.

A poet of this generation puts it something like this: Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief. The seasons turn, bringing no sweet relief. And time, it’s a brutal thief, time takes our lot and leaves us with nothing but grief.

It’s hard to hope when you’re assaulted from all sides. When abuse is the norm and your street corner a marketplace for crack; when homelessness abounds and your murdered neighbour’s just another stat. Smog fills the air, fish stocks deplete, ice caps melt, and farmers’ fields are traded for a field of broken suburban dreams. Yet, in the midst of it all, we hear Paul say:

“For in hope we were saved.”

“In hope we were saved.”

“We were saved.”

“Saved.”

Saved through the salvific work of Christ, saved from our sufferings, and saved for the life of the entire world. It’s almost as if he wants us to believe that such salvation is possible even as we stare death in the eye.

And looking death in the eye, recalling the state from which we were delivered, it’s almost as if he wants us to remember those ancient words of a story once told: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

In a new Egypt, under a new Pharaoh, Paul’s words talk of a new exodus. In hope we were saved. Hoping for what we do not see, we wait with patience.

In patience, we remember that all things work together for those who love God and who are called according to his purpose. Recalling exodus, we remember echoes of a promise:

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are Mine!

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
And through the rivers, they will not overflow you
When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you.

We remember these words in the midst of our weakness. We groan for resolution, as all creation groans in desperation.

Creation groans, and we look to Christ – the new Moses. In Christ, the one in whose image we are created, to whose image we are conformed, we are called to living sacrifice. In Christ we find our hope, and through Christ, we embody hope, as we, his church are conformed to his image.

As we celebrate the Eucharist today, we acknowledge our own implication in God’s mission of reconciliation on earth. We stand in wonder, us martyr Christians, before the specter of our wretched cities. We see their soot, their desolate parks, their crumbling bridges, and hear their groaning in travail.

And if we have ears to hear, we have no choice but to act. The Eucharist itself re-enacts the story of Creation’s salvation, and we, with Christ are the actors. In the Eucharist, we acknowledge this story’s cosmic scope. We must seek peace, and no longer war – with all of creation. And in the final reckoning, we must recognize that peace is achieved through nothing but the broken body and the spilled blood of Christ and his Church on the Cross.

The tears flood my eyes, for while I did not know this man, I recognise myself in him. I too am frail. I too will die. My life, too, shall pass.

And yet, in this, there is hope. In life and in death, we have opportunity to care for God’s creation – all of it gift. We were planted, once, in a garden, and given responsibility over it. In the beginning, so the story goes, God created the heavens and the earth. And in the beginning, God trusted us to keep creation in our care.

Is it strange that all along while we’ve been awaiting a saviour, Creation has been waiting for the same thing? The words of Jeremiah ring true, whether in the city, or in the forest, and we do well to consider them here today, in the face of our frail humanity:

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.’

In the chaotic city streets and meadow roads. On mountain tops and in valleys below. Wherever we are, wherever God has called us, creation groans, and we must listen, until our final breath.

His eyes are made to be closed. The linen bedclothes raised over his head, flowers placed lovingly, one by one upon his chest as we pay our last respects to one like us. A human being. A member of God’s good creation. One of our kindred. And as the last of us walk by, as we prepare to leave this silence for the chaos outside, we commit his spirit unto Your care…

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.